The kitchen garden must have been a marvelous place before the ogre had let everything go to seed, but now the great yellow squash and swollen cucumbers were overripe and rotten; the creepers had run riot. What had been a strawberry bed was just a mass of moldy straw with a few red splotches where the berries had fallen to the ground.
“All the same the soil is excellent,” said the Hag. “If one had the labor one could grow anything.”
They set to work, digging up those vegetables that one could still eat, wheelbarrowing the rotten ones away to the compost heap. Along a wall of old bricks grew peaches and apricots — some were mildewed but some could be used — and the children found a stepladder in the toolshed and started to pick them.
They worked for a couple of hours. The sun was hot on their backs, but there was a tap in the wall where they could drink when they got thirsty.
“I’m going to go and look in the orchard,” said the Hag when she had squirted water over her shoes. “I’m sure there will be some windfalls we can use.”
The troll followed her but the children stayed, picking blackberries from a bush which grew over the cold frames.
“Look, here’s another door,” said Mirella, pushing back a creeper which covered the wall.
They pushed it open and found they were in a second garden which now grew mostly long grass. There was a trellis covered in rambler roses along one wall and a few rosebushes with dark red blooms in a border. An old greenhouse stood in the corner; two of the windows were broken and the roof looked as though it would collapse at any minute. They were about to go back when a volley of excited barks from Charlie made them turn. He was standing at the door of the greenhouse, his coat bristling, his nose quivering with excitement.
“What’s the matter, Charlie?” asked Ivo.
Charlie’s barks grew louder. The children hushed him and went to look in at the open door.
Lying on a heap of sacking, lifting his great head sleepily, was an enormous creature like an outsize antelope. Two curved horns came from the sides of his head; large yellow eyes stared at them. A tufted beard hung down from his face, and he did not seem to be at all pleased to be disturbed.
“What is it?” whispered Ivo.
“It’s a gnu,” breathed Mirella. “A kind of wildebeest. There was one in the zoo at home.”
For a moment the children just stared. Gnus are strange-looking beasts at the best of times. They belong on the African savanna, moving in herds between their watering holes. To see one a few feet away, lying on the floor of an old greenhouse, was incredible.
The gnu gazed at them in silence. Then he rose and stalked away over the grass.
Two days later the children were in the orchard picking the last of the apples. Ivo was holding the ladder, Mirella was reaching up for the ripe fruit. The Hag had taken a wheelbarrow of windfalls up to the kitchen.
“They’ll make excellent jam,” she’d said contentedly. She had lived through the war when everyone grew their own food and knew there is nothing better than that.
The children went on working. It was very peaceful; wasps droned over the fallen fruit, the sun shone. They were moving the ladder to another tree when there was a sudden eerie cry — a wail of fear it sounded like, high- pitched and shrill — and looking up they saw a dark creature, about the size of a small cat, bounding along one of the branches. For a second it turned and looked at them, then it fled, leaping away toward a stand of tall oaks which sheltered the orchard. They only had time to make out two enormous yellow eyes with black rings around them, a pair of naked ears, and a long bushy tail.
“Is it a lemur?” wondered Ivo.
Mirella shook her head. “The tail’s wrong. Lemurs’ tails are striped. I think it’s an aye-aye,” she said excitedly. “They come from the rain forests of Madagascar — usually you only see them at night. Oh this is so amazing — I’ve always wanted to live among animals — it’s like being in Paradise.”
Over lunch in the big kitchen, Dr. Brainsweller told them more about these mysterious little beasts.
“The people who live in the rain forest are very superstitious about them — there are all sorts of legends. Some of the tribes believe they carry the souls of the dead up to heaven,” he said. “We’re very lucky to have one here. I knew a wizard who’d have given his right arm for a hair from an aye-aye’s head — he wanted it for a spell to raise his dead grandmother from her grave. Not at all the thing to do, of course, but he had set his heart on it.”
Though they were working harder than they had ever done in their lives, the children had never been so happy. Ivo was right when he’d thought that he and Mirella might become friends; already they seemed to read each other’s minds. It was great to be doing really useful things — picking fruit, digging, clearing ditches — instead of sitting at their desks learning stuff they would probably never need. The adults, too, loved working out of doors — but they had their work cut out looking after the ogre.
“Are you making my mound bigger?” he wanted to know. “Must be able to get in comfortably beside Germania.”
He had decided against wearing the mauve pajamas for the funeral.
“Say what you like, mauve is a sad color. Melancholy. I think the striped pajamas would be best.”
And he’d changed his mind about which aunt he was going to leave the castle to.
“I think the Aunt-with-the-Eyes should have it,” he said. “She’s the oldest, so I think it would be fair. I shall expect you to witness my will when I’ve written it. And I shall need a hearse.”
“A hearse takes people to the graveyard for burial, doesn’t it?” asked Ivo. “And you’re only going to go as far as the mound.”
“All the same, I want everything to be done properly. There’s a cart in the shed. You only have to build it up and paint it black and put my name on it. And a skull and crossbones perhaps.”
So that was another job for the rescuers to do.
They saw the gnu several times; he did not seem at all bothered by their presence — but the aye-aye was dreadfully shy. They heard its thin eerie screech, and a couple of times they were close enough to see its strange fingers, thin and long like the fingers of a witch, as it dug in the bark looking for grubs, but it never came down from the trees.
But the aye-aye was not the last of their discoveries.
The glimmer of blue they had seen when they first crossed the drawbridge turned out to be a beautiful lake, large and silent, with water lilies covering the surface. In the middle of the lake was a flat rock, the kind that mermaids used to sit on and comb their hair.
Then one day, after a hard morning’s weeding and digging, Ivo and Mirella went down to the water to cool off. They sat under an overhanging willow and dabbled their feet in the water, and they were just wondering whether to plunge in and have a proper swim, when there was a great swirl on the surface of the lake, and then slowly a head came above the surface. In the head were two round piggy eyes and a huge mouth, which opened to show vast pink gums.
As they watched, the animal pulled itself slowly and laboriously out of the water and heaved itself onto the rock, where it stood for a moment — yawning and shaking itself and looking about.
It was a hippopotamus. Not a full-size beast but a pygmy hippo about the size of a small cow, but with all the characteristics of its bigger brethren. Its hide was smooth and shiny in the sunlight, and it looked very clean and appetizing. A piece of waterweed hung from the side of its mouth, and it gazed at the children for a long moment before it slid into the water once again.
CHAPTER 14
The Hag Finds Her Dribble
