Talina in the Tower Read online

  Talina could distinctly feel the hairs rise on the nape of her neck.

  ‘It’s just the moonlight making it look so big,’ she told herself. But she was wrong. As he proceeded into the room she saw that the Ravageur was – impossibly – bigger than his shadow.

  ‘Baddened magic,’ she thought, ‘must be doing that. But he reminds me of something …’

  The creature moved towards her, his bitter breath preceding him. She hastened to lower her eyelids and to feign a deep, even breathing. A second set of paws clopped into the room.

  ‘Frimousse,’ grumbled the first creature, ‘where is ze petit garçon? The hommelette what we ’as come for to get? I don’t lak zis maison. Eet’s poor. Eet stink of cabbage.’

  ‘Shut your meat-trap, Rouquin, or I shall kick you in ze schafflouse!’ snarled Frimousse, lifting the counterpane. ‘Voila! Une petite fille.’

  Talina thought, ‘I can understand them! It must be the Spell Steam.’

  But even Talina – Mademoiselle Chouette would have been surprised to hear – was disgusted by the creatures’ exaggerated and yet incompetent French accents. She risked a quick look from under her lashes, and saw the red-furred Rouquin use his teeth to draw a list out of his swag. Close up, his fur was rippled through with nasty mange scabs. Scratching his right leg with his left one, he complained, ‘But eet says ’ere that we should get un garçon at thees maison. Tommaso d’Este.’

  ‘Boy, girl – all look ze same to me,’ said Frimousse. ‘C’est chic, not big, not ’eavy. Sleepin’ lak a baby. No trouble. Tie ’er up.’ He leant towards Talina so she struggled not to choke on his corrupt breath. With enormous effort, she kept her eyelashes lowered and her face motionless.

  ‘La peine! I am allergique to ze females,’ Frimousse sneezed wetly and then wiped his nose on Talina’s hair.

  Rouquin poked his head into his swag, producing a sack with thick handles. Frimousse flipped Talina into it, pulling it up to her neck so that only her head jutted out. Then Rouquin nudged the sack so its handle looped over Frimousse’s neck and tossed Talina onto his friend’s back. The Ravageur, Talina aboard, loped towards the door.

  ‘I am riding a Ravageur!’ Talina thought of her parents. Were they too taken like this, from the Archives? Strapped to stinking Ravageurs, slipping through the streets in the dark?

  An unpleasant sweetish smell too close to her nose made her wonder, ‘Is mange contagious?’

  ‘I still smell garçon,’ mumbled Rouquin. Talina heard the boy under the bed breathe in as if preparing to scream. To distract the beasts, she extracted one hand from her sack, reached down and pulled Frimousse’s tail, hard.

  ‘Aggh!’ screamed the Ravageur. ‘You do that again, ma fille, and I shall chew off your hand right up to your leg.’

  Rouquin lashed his wiry tail at Talina’s shoulder so hard that it winded her. She sobbed with pain, curling up inside the rough hessian.

  The Ravageurs trotted downstairs and out into the street. Through the coarse weave, Talina could see a gondola waiting in the canal at the end of the calle. The Ravageurs lowered themselves in, and the rower-rats set themselves to pull at their miniature oars without any instructions, their paws clenched over the wood. From her position on Frimousse’s back, Talina could see a complicated mechanism of tiny oar-holes just above the water level. The rats bent over their work with their eyes lowered. A sour grainy smell of rat sweat flowed back over the deck.

  ‘Now, to the Ravageur palace!’ hoped Talina, nursing her aching shoulder.

  But Frimousse and Rouquin had other errands: looting errands. The gondola moored by the poles of various jetties snugly clad in vivid green stockings of moss. They stopped at butchers’, fishmongers’ and fruit shops. The rats were despatched inside, returning with swags dragged in their teeth. They emptied the contents on the paving stones. The Ravageurs pawed disdainfully through the loot. At each place, only one or two things proved good enough: a single peach or a handsome sausage. The rats stowed the chosen goods carefully in the boat.

  ‘Now, ze sweeties!’ snarled Rouquin. ‘Rats – row!’

  ‘Which confectioner do you desire?’ a rat asked humbly, eyes still downcast.

  ‘Golosi’s, of course, imbecile!’

  The rat nodded to his companions. At Rialto, eight of them leapt out of the gondola and disappeared. They returned, dragging a sack from which floated the delicious perfume of lemon peel and candied violet. The Ravageurs poked the bottles and packets, settling on Barberry Drops, Pistachio Pralines, Marsh Mallow Syrup, Angelica Comfits, Neapolitan Wafers and Jujube Paste.

  ‘Zat’ll keep ’em quiet for a while anyways,’ Frimousse laughed coarsely.

  ‘Keep whom quiet?’ wondered Talina. ‘The humans they’ve kidnapped? But why give them treats?’

  Finally, the gondola departed from its last mooring and nosed into the Grand Canal, following the path of a silvery moon into the lagoon. As they left the island of San Giorgio behind them, Frimousse tipped Talina from her sack. He reached into his swag and brought out a red scarf.

  ‘We don’t want ze petite fille to see where we are going,’ he told Rouquin.

  ‘C’est vrai. Blindfold the prisoner,’ Rouquin ordered a pair of rats, who hastened to take one end of the scarf each. They ran around Talina’s shoulders with the ends until her head was bandaged like a mummy’s. The rats were careful, however, to leave holes for her nose and mouth.

  The last thing she saw before the rats covered her eyes was Frimousse scratching himself furiously, while Rouquin gnawed at a large scab on his leg.

  ‘You revolting mangy murdering monsters!’ she screamed. At the back of her mind, she heard Professor Marìn’s voice warning her, ‘You must stay sweet, serene and reasonable or—’

  Rouquin said, surprised, ‘Mais zis one speak lak us! But is not good what she say.’

  He cuffed her head so hard that it fell back against the planks.

  Frimousse shouted, ‘Too hard, Rouquin! “Alive,” he always says. “Alive.” You know he likes to play with zem first.’

  Talina heard nothing more, and felt nothing more.

  an unknown corner of the Venetian lagoon,

  an unknown number of hours later, as far as Talina

  is concerned. For all she knows, it could be days.

  But in fact, it is the morning of May 5th, 1867

  ‘WERE ’ERE.’

  Frimousse tore the scarf off Talina’s head, cuffing her ear for good measure.

  ‘Ouch!’ she cried.

  ‘I told you she was still breathing,’ Rouquin said triumphantly. ‘She was just ’aving a leetle sleep.’

  Talina kept silent, contemplating the approaching shore: a wild, seemingly barren place with a few tousled shrubs. When she looked behind, she could see nothing but a ring of glowering grey fog.

  The island of the Ravageurs, Talina thought, looked just the way Venice – or Luprio – must have looked when the original creatures fled there thousands of years before: just a few clumps of land, cut through by channels of swift water, and covered with heaps of muddy clay. As the rats rowed her closer, she saw that the clay was crudely decorated with five-stroked swirls.

  The jetty’s wooden legs were like totem poles. At the top of each pole were pairs of wolf paws holding severed human heads, all carved from oak and wearing horrified expressions. The rickety wooden path to the shore was lined with what at first glance appeared to be lamp-posts. But Talina soon realized that the iron poles held gibbet-cages full of protesting, hungry-looking cats. Frimousse and Rouquin climbed out, dragging their sacks of food, leaving Talina and the rats in the boat. The rats set to scrubbing the oar-locks with Manitoba Gargling Oil.

  ‘Stay,’ warned Frimousse, his mouth full of sacking. ‘No, better to make ’er.’

  He dropped his sack, leapt up to open an empty gibbet-cage and yanked Talina out of the boat by the scruff of her pinafore. Then Frimousse knelt, and Rouquin nudged Talina onto his back and up to the gibbet-cage.


  ‘It’s too small,’ she protested.

  ‘Shall I bite off a leg and an arm?’ offered Frimousse. ‘Then you’ll fit naissly.’

  Talina hastily folded herself into a sitting position, her arms wrapped around her knees.

  ‘Voilà!’ Rouquin clanged the door behind her and nosed a bolt through a black latch behind her head.

  ‘That’ll teach ’er!’ muttered Frimousse. ‘Tail-puller! Which reminds me …’

  He leapt up to Talina’s head, wrenching out a clump of corn-husk hair through the slats of the cage.

  ‘Stop it!’ spluttered Talina, tears sprouting from her eyes. A drop of blood fell on her pinafore. The side of her head burned as if someone were holding a torch to it.

  ‘Why my hair, you brute?’ she wept.

  ‘Grignan’s instructions,’ he said mysteriously, trotting off with the thick hank trailing from between his teeth.

  Struts of cold metal pressed against Talina’s forehead, legs and knees. The piteous mewing of the gibbeted cats broke her heart. She felt like mewing herself.

  ‘Why do they keep the poor things out here?’ she mused.

  Down in the boat, a rat mumbled to his companions, ‘Foolish human maid. Don’t she know as how they’ll snack on a cat if there ain’t nothing else to hand?’

  Another chimed in, ‘And they jest loves cat bacon.’

  ‘You can speak?’ exclaimed Talina.

  ‘And you can understand Ratsch?’ squeaked the first rat in alarm.

  ‘I … am under a spell,’ explained Talina. ‘I was briefly a kind of cat. Then—’

  ‘Not,’ trembled a third rat, ‘the not-quite-cat? In person! Her very self?’

  ‘Yes! That’s me. Talina. From the song.’

  ‘Ssssh,’ urged his companion. ‘We don’t want the Ravageurs hearing that.’

  The third rat whispered, ‘Then Doctor Raruso found you!’

  ‘Yes, he came to the Ostello delle Gattemiagole in San Marcuola—’

  The first rat began to chant the song that Talina had heard at the ostello:

  There shall be a little cat

  A cat who wasn’t always that

  A cat who’s lost what she loves best,

  whose tongue is fierce; whose heart no less …

  Talina who was in the tower

  Talina who—

  ‘Dear Doctor Raruso!’ he stopped to smile. ‘No braver nor wiser fellow to be found in all the rat-runs of Venice—’

  ‘I am very sorry to tell you that Doctor Raruso is dead,’ said Talina. ‘He seemed a very pleasant gentleman. I am afraid he was tortured before he died. So the song may not be a secret any more.’

  Each of the rats put a single paw across his breast, and then saluted, whispering, ‘Rest his rodent soul.’

  ‘So,’ Talina felt rude dragging their attention back to the problem in hand. ‘I came here deliberately, because it’s obvious that’s no nursery rhyme. I am meant to be something to do with putting an end to all this bullying and kidnapping.’

  ‘Oh you are, are you, ma petite?’ Frimousse had crept back to the jetty unseen.

  ‘Yes,’ said Talina stoutly, though her whole body trembled. ‘So what have you done with the Venetians? The men, women and babies? Did you … eat them?’

  ‘We tried a few,’ answered Frimousse, wrinkling his nose. ‘But there are no good recipes for correct saucing and spicing of ’uman beings, at least none zat we could find. So in the end eet was better to give zem something to do.’

  ‘What something to do? And how many was that few,’ Talina quavered, ‘that you … tried?’

  Grinning horribly, Frimousse nudged the gibbet-cage lock with his nose till Talina tumbled down onto the jetty. For just a moment, the Ravageur seized Talina’s leg in his jaws, letting his fangs graze her flesh through her wool stockings. Then he shook himself, shouting, ‘Échalas! Croquemort! Escort ’er.’

  Two more Ravageurs stepped up.

  ‘You too,’ Frimousse growled at the rats. ‘You’re needed in the Great Hall and the Sala del Sangue. You know what for.’

  The rats scampered off.

  ‘The Sala del Sangue … The Blood Chamber?’ thought Talina.

  Talina was astonished to discover that those swarthy lumps of mud enclosed a palatial building, like a jewel inside a grubby fist. The interior walls were lined with tapestries of hunting scenes – but not the usual ones. Ravageurs were shown hunting humans. In tiny, precise stitches, captured humans were seen tied to stakes or being carried towards steaming black cauldrons.

  There were no windows. Daylight faded as they walked deeper into the building. Golden sconces smoked with beefy tallow candles at every corner. Talina descended a dozen massive stairs, a Ravageur at either side of her. The last step opened into a Great Hall.

  A fireplace yawned at the far end, belching black smoke and blue flame. Dangling from the ceiling were awkward chandeliers made of bones tied in bunches with leather strips. They dripped wax onto the thick fur of the beasts below.

  Ravageurs stood in ranks, their red tongues lolling out of their mouths. Many wore emerald or ruby earrings, or golden rings around their tails. Some were liveried in striped scarves or diamond-patterned capes. Many were guzzling a dark liquid from great bowls strapped to iron stakes anchored on big stones.

  ‘What’s that?’ Talina worried aloud. ‘Blood?’

  ‘Devilsdrench,’ whispered a rat, rushing past her towards a tiered stool. ‘They say it’s made from boiled baby blood but actually that’s rather disagreeable in taste, so they just pretend. Really, Devilsdrench is just jujube juice and molasses.’

  The rat scampered up the five-tiered stool, beside which stood a harp. Ten rats stood in pairs on their back legs and began to play the high and low notes according to the height of their tier. Their nails were enamelled a shimmering blue. Behind them, a mirror doubled the whole scene. The effect, musically and visually, was delicately pretty.

  Some Ravageurs growled along with the rats’ careful tune. Others wiggled their heads appreciatively in time to the music. A few stared curiously at Talina. She stared right back, defiantly, with her arms crossed over her chest.

  Her eye fell on a tank hewn from sparkling rock crystal. It was set into the wall like a jewel. Something was moving inside it; rather, dozens of somethings were scuttling along the floor and all over the crystal walls of the tank.

  ‘Not scorpions! Anything but that!’ Talina recoiled. She hated insects. She would even admit to being afraid of spiders. And scorpions, with their arched tails full of poison, were the worst kind of creeping beast. She watched with fascinated repulsion as lines of the scorpions swung up curtains of silky threads in gold, black and brown. Then she recognized a hank of dark-gold hair beset with black, wriggling forms. She gasped, ‘That’s mine! They gave my hair to the scorpions!’

  That, she recalled, had been on the instructions of Grignan. ‘So where is the Ravageur Lord?’ wondered Talina. ‘None of these look one bit lordly. Except perhaps him.’

  She was gazing at a tall and unusually well-groomed Ravageur. Frimousse bowed to him, and kicked her forward, murmuring, ‘Magisterulus, Sir Vizier, I present ze prisoner, Tommaso d’Este, as ordered.’

  ‘Does not look like a “Tommaso” to me,’ said the Vizier. ‘The human males have short fur. You donkeys! We are looking for boys because of that drawing. Boys! Boys who might be friends with the perpetrator of … Boys!’

  He pointed to Talina’s long corn-husk hair in disgust.

  Talina interrupted, ‘Of course I’m not Tommaso d’Este. I am Talina Molin, daughter of Marco and Lucia Molin – you took them already– ’

  A trumpet squawked. All eyes were drawn to a door that opened directly onto a dais at the end of the Great Hall.

  ‘Behold!’ intoned the Vizier, ‘Lord Grignan forsakes his Growlery to come among us!’

  Rouquin and Frimousse cowered.

  The door swung open. First the tail, and then the hindquarters of a
huge Ravageur became visible. The creature walked backwards onto the stage, his looped tail sweeping the floor. As his head became visible, he was seen to be smoking a large cigar, the fumes of which rolled across the room and made Talina cough. The sound she made was drowned by all the rats clapping loudly and cheering, though their faces were tense. The Ravageurs bayed approval at the appearance of their leader.

  Two monstrous fellows in red capes approached the back end of their ruler. Reverently, they lowered their muzzles and kissed the air above his tail.

  Magisterulus announced, ‘Is there any other who today deserves the honour of saluting Lord Grignan’s hindparts?’

  There ensued some whispering among the Ravageurs. Croquemort and Échalas were pushed forward by their friends. Bashfully, they mounted the dais and kissed the air above the rear end of their Lord, their heads lowered and their tails tucked in between their legs.

  ‘Oh my! How very, very rude and silly,’ thought Talina. ‘But then, these Ravageurs are all boys! So I suppose that they must have these stupid games. No wonder they took my father from the Archives – he’s researched much better Abominable Rites than that! But where is he? Where are all the Venetians?’

  There was not a human being to be seen in the Great Hall. Unless, Talina shuddered, those were human bones in the grisly chandeliers.

  Finally, when all the kissing and grovelling was done, the Ravageur Lord swung round and glared the length of the Great Hall. As his eyes slid over the rats, they prostrated themselves, trembling. Finally his eye found Talina. At the sight of her, he spat out his cigar and drawled, ‘So what does this little Venetian have to say for itself? A little begging in its quaint little language? Some screaming? Are you going to offer me your favourite toy? I do so love it when they weep!’

  Talina felt a knot in her throat. The skin thrummed at the back of her knees. She opened her mouth but nothing came out.

  ‘Nothing to say? Not even your name?’ taunted the Ravageur Lord, strutting backwards and forwards across his stage. ‘I shall give you a name. Voilà! Your name is Ratfood, as you’re obviously too scrawny for me to eat.’