Lionboy (31 page)

The snow and ice made the light in the bathroom curiously pale and greenish, like underwater light. Cold light. He could still make out the tops of icy trees on either side, painted in frost. What had looked swirling and beautiful was now starting to look crisp and evil. He put his face up to the window: Hailstones rattled against it and gave him a shock. He shivered. We must be quite high up in the mountains, he thought.

The next thing that happened was that the Chef du Train—who was not a chef but the train’s boss—came to the door of King Boris’s cars. Charlie could hear him clearly, talking first to the first guard, then to someone else, then walking past the bathroom door and addressing the second guard. Very politely, but very firmly, he was insisting on speaking to the king.

In the end the king was informed, after much use of phrases such as “impossible” and “I’m afraid, monsieur” and “I think you will find”; and “with every respect” and “as a matter of security” and “for any lesser reason we would not dream of discommoding . . .” (Discommoding again! Charlie very much hoped that he and the lions were not about to be discommoded, i.e., turned out of the bathroom, in front of the Chef du Train.)

The Chef du Train was ushered into the king’s sitting room, and Charlie, having instructed the young lion to lie behind the door in his absence to prevent it opening, quietly slunk to a position behind the door of the king’s car, where he could eavesdrop. The bodyguard guy had gone in with the Chef du Train, so the coast was clear. Charlie wasn’t being sneaky—he was desperate. He needed to know why the train had stopped so he could plan accordingly.

“Majesty,” the Chef du Train was saying, “please forgive this unseemly bursting in on your esteemed privacy. I come bearing the apologies of the company, directors, and staff of the Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer for disturbing you in the seclusion of your own august car, the very purpose of which is to prevent the likelihood of such disruptions . . .”

“If the matter is so important, just tell me what it is,” said the king kindly.

“Your Majesty will have noticed that the train has stopped,” said the Chef du Train.

“Indeed I have,” said the king. “Why?”

“The reason we have offered the majority of the passengers is indeed the truth, though not the whole truth, Your Majesty: The unseasonable bad weather has produced an avalanche on the tracks ahead, and short of drive into it we have no choice but to stop for the duration. We had not expected such a thing so late in the year, and the snowplows we use in winter have already been removed. No other snowplow is conveniently near, though we are trying to locate one. We have positioned braziers along the tracks to stop the switchgears from freezing, but in the meantime unfortunately our valves have frozen up, so the brakes are frozen into position, and even if we could move, we cannot.”

“Oh, dear,” said the king. “And?” Charlie could imagine from his voice the friendly look in his eye as he inquired what “the whole truth” was.

There was a pause before the Chef du Train’s voice came again, and when it did, he sounded like a worried man pretending not to be worried.

“There was a report from Paris, Your Majesty . . .”

“Really?” said the king, sounding interested. “What report?”

Another pause.

“Wild animals, Your Majesty.”

“Wolves?”

“Not as such . . .”

“On the train?”

“On the roof, Your Majesty.”

“While the train was going along?”

“Well . . .”

“Before it had stopped?”

“Yes.”

“How on earth could they have got there? The train goes quite fast.” The train went at least a hundred miles an hour.

“Well, in Paris, Your Majesty . . . A young man said . . .”

“Well, where are they now?”

Silence again. Charlie tried not to breathe.

“We don’t know, Your Majesty. They disappeared from a circus, apparently, and—”

“Wolves in a circus? Unusual.”

“Well—lions, Your Majesty.”

“Lions!”

“Yes, sir, from the circus. They ran away, and . . .”

“And decided to take the train to Istanbul? Marvelous. So, the question remains, where are they now?”

“There have been no sightings and no footprints, Your Majesty.”

“The snow would have covered them up, I suppose. Or perhaps they missed their train. It happens.”

“No doubt, Your Majesty, or else—”

“Or else what?”

“They might have boarded the train, from the roof, Your Majesty.”

“How would they do that? Beasts can’t open doors, can they? And I imagine most people had their windows shut this morning . . .”

A flurry of icy snow hurled itself against the windowpane, rattling wildly and proving the king’s point.

“There may have been a person with them, Your Majesty,” said the Chef du Train in quite a small voice. Charlie felt that he was a little embarrassed to offer such an absurd story, and to a king of all people.

“What kind of person?” said the king.

“A small one,” said the Chef du Train. “I believe you were informed earlier . . . A . . . small one.”

Charlie was thinking fast. He could get to the bathroom and get the lions out now—they could go through the window. It would be a squeeze and a leap, which was difficult but perfectly possible, then—then what? Lost in a snowstorm somewhere in the Alps? When it’s cold enough to freeze brakes? Sick and weak as they were?

Best to stay on board. Best to hide—but was the bathroom the best hiding place? Maybe go back on the roof . . . ?

Rats rats rats. Was there any alternative?

The king was speaking again. “Let me help you out, monsieur,” he was saying in an amused voice. “You have received a report about some wild animals on the roof of a speeding train in a howling storm, you have put this together with some tale about a disappearing boy who is either on the train or not, and you fear they may all be hiding in my coffeepot, and you are embarrassed to ask me to have it searched. Is that it?”

“Yes,” said the Chef du Train, in a tiny voice this time. “The boy was put on the train in your car.”

“Tut, tut,” said the king. “That wasn’t very security-minded of your people, was it?”

“No, Your Majesty,” said the Chef du Train.

“He could have been a tiny assassin,” said the king.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“My dear fellow,” said King Boris. “You are quite absurd. Go and have a glass of brandy, and wait for the snowplow to arrive. It is hard to be the person in charge when there is nothing to be done, but really, we are just stuck in a storm and there
is
nothing to be done. Don’t worry about a thing. Good-bye!”

Charlie, fascinated and terrified, only just remembered to leap away from the door and conceal himself before the Chef du Train came out, looking bemused and confused, on his way back to the rest of the train. Charlie ducked behind a coatrack, holding his breath as the man passed, his boots squeaking a little on the polished floor. In a second, Charlie was back in the bathroom, shoving the young lion out of the way to let himself in, and thinking furiously.

“Edward!” he heard the king call. “Where is our young friend?”

He couldn’t make out the reply.

Go out the window, or stay here?

Aaaargh! Decide!

The young lion looked quizzically at him. Charlie gave him a grin, which he hoped was convincing. The others, thank goodness, were all still asleep.

There was no time to decide.

A knock came at the door.

“His Majesty would like to see you,” came Edward’s voice from outside, as calm and polite as always.

Charlie wiped the steam off the little mirror and took a look at his sooty, pale, and frightened face. White people go even whiter when they are scared, or perhaps scarlet. Charlie went a sort of greenish yellow.

“One moment!” he called, as if he were just finishing on the toilet and washing his hands, rather than trying to gather himself together having been up on a train roof in a storm with a gang of half-frozen lions only to find himself—and them—in danger of either arrest or a snowbound attempt at flight. He washed his face and his hands, dried himself off, rubbed at his growing-in hair, and tried his best to look respectable.

Here goes, he thought, and stepped out of the door, closing it swiftly and tightly behind him.

He smiled brightly at Edward.

“Your friends can stay in the bathroom,” Edward said politely.

Charlie gulped. What did he mean?

Edward bowed and gestured him along the corridor. It was a chastened and nervous Charlie who went in to explain himself to the King of Bulgaria.

CHAPTER 21

I
n the great freeze of 1929,” said King Boris, sitting on a velvet cushion in his high-backed, elegant chair, “the Danube froze solid from Budapest to Belgrade, Yugoslavia was thirty degrees below freezing day and night, and there were thousands of cases of frostbite throughout the East. Frost and snow closed roads as far south as Beirut and Damascus—the palm trees had snow on them, in the desert. Can you imagine? The Orient Express was snowed in for seven days. No news could get through from the Balkans to Western Europe, so nobody knew where it was . . .”

Charlie stood silently in front of him, his head cast down, like a naughty boy in the principal’s office.

“They didn’t know how long they would be stuck there, so food was rationed, three-course meals instead of five. The wolves howled all around them in the night, and nobody knew for sure that they wouldn’t get into the train and eat the passengers. Nobody knew where they were, or how close. Then late at night would come sounds like pistol shots, as the ice cracked . . .”

Charlie shivered. It was impossible now to see out the windows: The layer of ice made them opaque and greenish like a frozen river, and let only dim light come in.

“The train ran on coal then, and the coal soon froze . . . it made a tremendous hissing sound. Soon enough it ran out and the train grew gradually colder, the floors and the walls . . . the heating pipes froze. The train was in an enormous snowdrift, with nothing but brandy and crackers to eat. The lines were down; they could only wait. In the end they soaked rags in kerosene, wrapped them around the brakes, and set fire to them to thaw the brakes out. The walls of snow towered higher than the train itself on either side.”

“Were you there?” asked Charlie. He couldn’t not.

“Of course not, it was years ago,” said the king. “But you know it wouldn’t have been made any easier by having a pride of lions asleep in one’s bathroom.”

Charlie gasped.

“Small boys do not deceive the Bulgarian security police,” he said. “Edward is the most efficient security officer in Eastern Europe. Now what on earth are you up to, and what do you intend to do?”

“They’re good lions!” cried Charlie. “Please don’t turn them over to the Chef du Train, please don’t be scared of them!”

The king looked at him in some amazement.

“Do I look like the kind of king who would hand stowaway lions over to a railway functionary?” he said. “You insult me.”

“No no, Your Majesty,” cried Charlie in horror. “I don’t mean to, it’s just I am very scared for them, and I am responsible for them, and if anything were to happen to them, I don’t know what I would do. They’re my friends . . . They’re my friends,” he finished up. That said it all, really.

“Just tell me your story,” said the king. “Edward! Hot chocolate! With cream and curly chocolate shavings on top!”

So while the hailstones rattled the window, in the green icy light, the king drank coffee laced with brandy, and Charlie drank hot chocolate and told him the whole story. Well—almost all.

 

When he had finished, the king’s eyes were shining and his mouth was curved in a smile, but there was a wariness in his face as well, as if he could foresee some danger.

“You are a very brave and foolish child,” he said.

Charlie could not disagree.

“And why do they obey you? Why don’t they try to eat you, and run off?”

One detail Charlie had kept from the king: the talking to cats bit. He was always reluctant to speak of it—fearful, to be honest, that people would want to exploit it, to use him in some way, and perhaps make him do things that he didn’t want to do.

But he could trust this kind king, surely? Couldn’t he?

“They are circus lions,” said Charlie after a moment. “They’re used to me, and they’re used to doing what they’re told.” In his head he apologized to the lions for this bit of misrepresentation. Used to doing what they’re told, indeed! He was glad they weren’t there to hear him say it.

“I’d like to meet them,” said King Boris. “Can I?”

“Um,” said Charlie.

“Later,” said the king. “First—what do you intend to do with the lions in Venice?”