Fleeced (13 page)

Dogs?

Dingoes?

Coyotes and wolves?

The local butcher with his special offer on mint sauce and a glint in his eye?

Good answers, but all completely wrong, because sheep’s worst enemies are, in fact:

1. Fauns
   
2. Cyclopes
   

All right, harpies too, on account of their talons, beaks and penchant for lamb chops, but we’re not including them here, since the only harpy we’ve come across on Earth is now an ex-harpy, recently turned back into a tooth and gathering fluff in Medea’s pocket.

Pandemic, being a faun, was a relative of Pan,
the shepherd-god who loved nothing better than terrifying flocks into frenzies by tooting his panpipes until, woolly doolally, they leaped off cliffs and dived into rivers. And Fred was the great-nephew of Polyphemus, the Cyclops from whom Odysseus and his sailors famously escaped by strapping themselves beneath the bellies of the Cyclops’s sheep when he released the flock from his cave. This meant no sailors for tea that night and a whole race of Greek monsters that forever hated sheep.

Consequently, Pandemic and Fred represented the top of the line hoof-curling, wool-frazzling nightmare for any sheep and, more precisely, one particular ram.

“But I—” Pandemic began.

“Ram, ram!” blurted Fred.

“If you don’t mind,” interrupted Pandemic.

“Ram, ram! Ram, ram!” Fred continued happily.

“I have always,” Pandemic tried again, raising his voice, “felt that brains are of far more use than—”

Fred poked Pandemic in the chest with a
banana-sized
finger. “Ram, ram!”

Pandemic bristled. “Mistress? Must I really take this oaf with me?”

Medea pursed her lips. “That ‘oaf’ is the brawn you’ll need, if that feather-brained harpy was right.
I can’t risk another mess-up. So, sort your differences quickly.” Her eyes shone like wet slate. “Need I remind you that failure by either one of you will mean punishment for both.” She plucked the tooth from her pocket and turned it slowly in front of them. “Understood?”

“Understood,” muttered Pandemic.

“Huh?” said Fred.

Medea turned away from them and looked out of the window into the long walled garden, its coppery bricks bathed in sunlight.

“Ms De Mentor said the girl’s mother worked at the museum. Find out where she lives.” She looked over her shoulder, glancing at the walkie-talkie on the table beside her chair. “Then wait for my instructions.”

XV

U
PTOWN
R
AM

“Oh dear, oh dear,” flustered the Scroll. “I’m sorry about that!”

“About what?” said Rose.

“The ‘yer’. It’s hardly proper English and I do have my standards. However, ‘you’ wouldn’t rhyme with ‘Belgravia’ and ‘yer’ would.”

“Get on with it,” muttered Aries.

The Scroll sniffed and went on:

“Bald sheepy?” spluttered Aries.

The Scroll blew what sounded like a papery raspberry. “Rhymed with weepy!” it said and snapped shut.

“I wasn’t too keen on the bit about mournful cries,” said Alex.

“Or the lamenting,” added Rose. She leaned forwards, frowning at the others. “I wonder what it means by a patch of Greece. And olive groves? Here in London? As directions go, they’re pretty woolly, aren’t they?”

“Do you mind?” muttered Aries.

“Sorry,” smiled Rose and rubbed his forehead.

Aries stretched towards the Scroll, put his mouth around its end, rather like playing a bugle, and boomed down its middle.

“That answer was fit for the rubbish pits of Attica! Please elaborate!”

The Scroll quivered angrily. “I am a Scroll of godly assistance, the gift of Athena. Consequently do not expect me to function like a common
or garden London A to Z.”

“But an address could really add to your last answer,” coaxed Rose.

“Let me see,” replied the Scroll and wobbled over to Rose. “As a matter of fact I do feel a secondary vibration coming through on this point,” it murmured, unfurling.

“No way!” Rose scrambled to her feet. “It can’t be!”

“Can’t be what?” said Alex, confused.

“I know her!”

“You know Medea?” said Alex incredulously.

“Well, sort of,” Rose nodded, running her fingers through her hair. “I mean, everyone knows her. She’s only the most fabulous dress designer on the planet.”

“Dress designer?” said Alex.

Rose sat back, blinking. “She makes amazing clothes for people. I can’t believe that she kept the same name…” Rose paced across the kitchen,
counting on her fingers. “She’s in the papers, she’s on the covers of glossy magazines, she’s all over the web.”

“The Web?” said Aries. “We know about that!”

“You do?” said Rose.

“It’s made of ropes,” said Aries confidently.

“Actually,” Rose said gently. “It’s something on a computer. More like a magical library where you can find things out. Hang on, I’ll show you!”

She hurried upstairs and returned with her mother’s laptop, flipped it open and began searching ‘Medea’.

Alex and Aries watched, wide-eyed, as Rose clicked on a picture and the sorceress began walking across a red carpet on the screen in front of them.

“She goes to celebrity parties, she meets presidents. She’s, like, everywhere!” gabbled Rose. “All over the world, posing outside grand hotels and theatres, standing next to famous people who wear the clothes she creates.” She turned to face them. “The Scroll must be wrong in its answer,” she said finally.

“No,” said Alex, his voice little more than a whisper. “That’s her.”

“But she seems so nice on the telly,” protested Rose. “You know, all fun and giggly. And she’s
really pretty and everything. It’s just crazy – like finding out that one of your teachers is actually a member of the royal family or something.”

Aries nudged Alex. “Why’s she so surprised?”

“Don’t know,” said Alex. “Deceiving people is what Medea does best.”

“Yes,” said Aries. “And she’s not very honest either.”

Rose thought back. “The Scroll said something about sewing skirts of harsh regret—”

“In sequins, silk and pearls,” repeated Alex. “Whatever sequins are.”

“They’re round sparkly things,” muttered Rose, distracted, “like stars, but made of plastic.” She began pacing again. “Harsh regret? I wonder what the Scroll’s trying to tell us.”

“Who knows,” grumbled Aries.

“What it told us was to seek answers in her shop,” said Alex. “Which sounded much safer than going to her house in Belgravia.”

“I didn’t like the sound of that place,” said Aries quietly.

“Nor me,” said Rose, rubbing his neck gently. “Besides, the good news is that I happen to know where her shop is.”

Alex brightened. “You do?”

“Sure,” said Rose. “Bond Street’s not far from here.”

“It’s in London?” said Alex.

Rose nodded.

“Ooooooh,” squealed Aries. “I’ll be back in my fleece in time for dinner! What are we waiting for?”

“Hold on,” said Rose, looking into his eyes. “If you’re going uptown, there’s something we need to do first.”

And now for a soupçon of geography.

Do you like that word? I do, so I shall say it again: soupçon. It’s French, you know, and means ‘a little bit’.

Now, the soupçon of geography that concerns us, and more importantly Alex, Aries and Rose, is the soupçon that tells us that Bond Street lies off Oxford Street, one of the busiest thoroughfares in London. Probably the world. Busy, that is, in terms of shoppers, tourists and workers. Not busy in terms of rams. In fact, you hardly ever see one there at all, which is why it left Alex and Rose with a problem.

“I look a complete idiot,” muttered Aries, half an hour later, catching sight of his reflection in one of Selfridges’ windows. On either side of him shoppers
and tourists surged past, businessmen barked into mobile phones.

“Not at all!” said Rose, stroking his neck. “You blend in perfectly.”

And she was right.

You see, Rose had strapped a couple of lightweight boards either side of Aries’ body, fixing them so that they tented over his back like a rooftop, and had painted on a slogan –

– so that now he looked like a walking advertisement.

Clever, eh?

Having already passed a woman dressed as a frog who was advertising beer and a couple in a purple pantomime cow costume complete with a ringing bell who were advertising Swiss chocolate, everyone simply strode past Aries and the children, believing a bald ram to be yet another wacky advertisement walking down the street.

Not that Aries saw it that way.

Well, he wouldn’t, would he?

However, he wasn’t the only one in disguise.
Rose, having rifled through her mother’s wardrobe, was now wearing a floppy sun hat, blue floral dress and green flip-flops. Alex was wearing a pair of Dr Pottersby-Weir’s sunglasses, an ancient pair with round circles of black glass with tomato red frames from her hippie days, and a baseball cap backwards. After all, it’s hardly wise to walk into a sorceress’ shop looking exactly the same way you did when she sent a harpy to attack you a few hours earlier, is it?

“I still don’t like it,” grumbled Aries. “I mean, could you imagine Achilles riding into Troy like this? Looking down from his horse, with a, ‘Hello, Hector. Nice day for a fight! Thought I’d wear my best wooden tent for the occasion!’”

“Only because Achilles wasn’t as bold as you,” Alex told him.

Aries looked at him suspiciously.

“Well,” Alex began. “Who’d believe that the world’s most important ram would ever be dressed like this?”

“Most important ram?” said Aries, brightening.

“That’s right,” added Rose, exchanging a knowing glance with Alex. “Only someone as truly noble as you are could carry it off with such flair.”

Aries drew himself up taller. “Well, I suppose when you put it like that, I am being rather clever.”

And so all three walked on, content and relaxed in the knowledge that, for the first time in public in London, Aries wasn’t the centre of attention. Tourists and street cleaners, buskers and backpackers all bustled past without a second glance. And I expect that you might be sitting back, too, taking a deep breath and thinking,
Thank goodness for that.

Well, don’t.

Because when I say
everyone
, I’m not being strictly truthful since I’m not including the tall figure in the unseasonable trilby hat and his squat, lumbering companion, who hadn’t taken their eyes off Aries and the children from the moment they’d stepped out of Rose’s house and had been following them ever since. And whilst we know who they were, Aries, Rose and Alex didn’t, which meant that they weren’t the least bit troubled by them.

Yet.

Medea’s shop shone like a pearl.

Framed by lavishly carved pillars that were topped with gold-painted leaves, its sign, picked out in gold and turquoise mosaic, twinkled in the sunlight. On either side luxury shops stretched away: jewellery shops glittered with conker-sized sapphires, cafés served Hawaiian coffee, auction houses groaned
under the weight of portraits of Georgian ladies in marshmallow-pink dresses.

But of course all this swagger together with the shop’s ENORMOUS price tags meant two important things:

1. You’d never find a children’s writer shopping there – unless it was that really good one who wrote about the boy wizard – and,
   
2. They are simply not the sort of establishments to welcome rams through their doors, no matter how famous, noble or important to ancient myths they are.
   

And so Rose, Alex and Aries had had no other choice than to split up.

“You will be careful?” said Alex for about the fifteenth time.

They were standing in a small public park, just around the corner from Bond Street. Black railings and froths of fiery red rhododendrons bound its clipped lawn. Two wooden benches faced each other over a green-looking pond, noisy with frogs burping in the shade.

“Of course,” said Rose, pushing back the brim of her hat again. “I’m only going to walk in there—”

“Checking Medea isn’t around first,” interrupted Alex.

Rose nodded impatiently. “And have a mooch round to see what I can find.”

“I’m not sure,” said Alex. “It feels too dangerous.”

Which, frankly, it was.

But Rose was adamant.

Of course, as she’d explained, she was the only one of them who could walk into Medea’s boutique without raising suspicion or, in Aries’ case, the police. But what she didn’t explain, because she’d have felt far too silly, was how much she wanted to walk in there and help them. Not because they were the most amazing friends she’d ever made (although they were) or the only ones to rescue her from a Greek monster (ditto) or even because of that last question on the Scroll (although thinking about that felt like fireworks exploding behind her ribs). But because, whilst they couldn’t have been more different from her, she hadn’t felt as much in common with anyone for years. She understood how Aries felt on losing the most precious thing he’d ever known, because she had too. She understood Alex’s loyalty, how he’d come to Earth with Aries even though he was clever enough to know it was probably hopeless and certainly dangerous, because
she’d risk just as much to find her father again.

Consequently she wasn’t about to let her new friends down. (And, let’s face it, if you’re not prepared to stand up to an immortal sorceress for your mates, what sort of friend are you? What’s that? One who isn’t snatched up by a harpy and cracked like a nut? Okay… I suppose you might have a point.)

Rose unfastened her watch and handed it to Alex. “Look, if I’m not back in ten minutes, come and find me. Okay?”

Alex turned the watch around in his palm, staring blankly.

“It’s a watch,” said Rose patiently. “You use it to tell the time.”

Alex and Aries exchanged blank looks.

Rose smiled and took the watch back. “Just count up to five hundred,” she said. “Then come looking.”

Rose shivered.

She’d walked this street loads of times, and in the past it had felt magical too, but in quite a different and much nicer way. Now it felt strange and unfriendly and, standing in the shadow cast by Medea’s shop, her heart thumped against her ribs. Worse, she felt that eerie sensation of being watched, you know, that prickly feeling on the back of your
neck when someone is standing close behind you.

Being a sensible girl, she put it down to the trio of mannequins standing in the window. Petulant as prom queens, posed with their hands on their hips, the way they seemed to glare down their long noses was frosty enough to make anyone feel uncomfortable. Each wore a black wig and a simple black dress, brightened by belts in different colours: one red, one silver and one green. Three jackets, one red, one silver and one green were laid along the bottom of the window, together with a blue one, each threaded onto wire around the mannequins’ feet, so that they rose like petals of jungle flowers. The sort of jungle flowers that poisonous toads make their homes in, thought Rose with a shudder.