The Tiger's Egg (7 page)

M
iles Wednesday, sleep-wrapped and goose-pimpled, sat up suddenly in his foldaway bed, the remains of a dream clinging to him like a cobweb. The night was as black as a crow's eye, and a bullying wind rocked the trailer on its springs. Stranski had been in his dream, his mouth opening and closing mutely as he tried to tell him something of great urgency. Miles was sure that the tiger had also passed silently through his sleep, just out of sight as always. He could hear horses whinnying, and the loud banging of their hooves on the doors of their mobile stable, and he realized that this was not a part of his receding dream. He pulled aside
the curtain and looked out into the night, where he could just make out the tops of the trees lashing back and forth against the blue-black sky.

The Zipplethorpes' horses had taken fright, and it seemed to Miles as though they would soon kick their trailer to matchwood. He saw Darius Zipplethorpe and his son, Dulac, tumbling from their stately wagon in dressing gowns and slippers. Dulac was around the same age as Miles and a miniature copy of his father, short and stocky with a thatch of straw-colored hair and pale eyebrows that made his face hard to read. He could do a handstand on the back of a cantering horse, but Miles had never seen him smile.

Dulac and his father ran to the trailer to calm the frightened horses. The lamp that usually glowed under its eaves had been blown out, and the brass wind chimes rang a crazy alarm. Miles strained his eyes to see. His breath was fogging the window, and as he wiped a clear arc with his sleeve he saw Delia Zipplethorpe emerging from the trailer too, holding a lantern, which she tried to shade with her shawl from the gusting wind.

As the Zipplethorpes unbolted the half doors of the trailer in the fluttering light, Miles was distracted by a movement behind them. A piece of the
wagon's shadow broke away, then another, and a third. The hairy shapes of three tiny figures scurried off, stooping to run beneath the trailers that stood between them and the woods bordering the field, until moments later they had joined the shadows beneath the tossing trees and disappeared from sight.

Miles stared after the tiny figures, holding his breath as if that might somehow draw them back into the open where he could see them. He recognized the quick little movements from the raiders of Doctor Tau-Tau's wagon, and he had no doubt that these were the same creatures, or their close cousins at least. He wondered if he was still dreaming.

A shout brought his attention back to the Zipplethorpes and their horses. One of the stable doors had flown open, and the piebald mare leaped out as though from the starting gate of a steeplechase. She was bucking like a rodeo horse, and as Dulac fought to calm her she reared and kicked out, sending him sprawling in the grass. His mother gave a cry and ran toward him, the lantern falling from her hand. The light flickered once and died. Miles leaped from his bed and pulled on his old overcoat, stumbling across the darkened wagon.
The door whipped open before he reached it and a gust of wind barged in as Fabio Bolsillo slipped out into the night.

Together they ran toward the place where Dulac Zipplethorpe lay motionless on the ground, his mother bending over him in the darkness. Her shawl stood out sideways, cracking like a whip in the breeze.

“Is he all right?” shouted Miles. The wind whipped the words from his throat and left him gasping for breath.

Delia Zipplethorpe turned. There were tears streaking her cheek. “Help him,” she said to Fabio. The little man bent to examine the gash on the forehead of the unconscious boy. A dark patch of blood matted his straw-colored hair. Darius joined them, having returned the frightened mare to her stall. “I'll go for a doctor,” he bellowed, and he disappeared into the night.

“Your coat, Master Miles!” shouted Fabio. “I'll get some brandy.”

Miles slipped Tangerine from his pocket and tucked him away inside his pajamas, then he struggled out of the heavy coat and laid it over Dulac, pulling the collar up to his chin. The boy's face was deathly pale. Delia Zipplethorpe began to moan
softly, grasping her son's limp hand and rocking back and forth as though the wind had taken her over, and for the first time Miles realized that the boy might die. A panicky feeling spread from his stomach, and he wondered if he should run to get Little. He doubted there was anything she could do.

“Wipe the blood from his eye, boy,” said a voice from behind him. He turned in surprise and saw Doctor Tau-Tau, wrapped in a dressing gown and staring at Miles with his bulging eyes as though he, and not Dulac, were the center of attention. “The blood!” repeated Tau-Tau. “Wipe it away.”

Miles turned, puzzled, to Delia Zipplethorpe, but she seemed aware of nothing but her son's fading spirit. He saw the trickle of blood that had made its way down Dulac's pale forehead and into the corner of his eye, and reached out to wipe it away. The wind that had been gusting in his face dropped suddenly and the night became strangely still. Miles took a deep breath. He felt dizzy and light, as though he would blow away when the wind returned. His lungs seemed to have expanded to fill his entire body, and the cold clear air went right down into his fingertips. Dulac's forehead felt surprisingly hot, and as Miles wiped the sticky blood away he thought he might faint. He closed his eyes
and sat back suddenly in the cold grass, waiting for the weight to pour slowly back into his body.

When he opened his eyes he was surprised to see that Dulac was sitting up, supported by his mother. Some of the color had come back to his face, and Fabio was kneeling in front of him, tipping a small glass to the boy's lips. His eyes were open and he pulled a face as the brandy burned his throat.

Dulac Zipplethorpe got shakily to his feet, helped by his mother and leaning on Fabio's shoulder. As they turned toward the Zipplethorpes' wagon, Fabio looked back at Miles. “Well done, Master Miles,” he said. He glanced over Miles's head, and said, “Take him to the wagon, Tau-Tau. Umor will make him something hot to drink.”

“No need, no need,” said Doctor Tau-Tau. “I have a pot already brewing. On your feet, lad.” He reached out a hand and beamed proudly at Miles, as though he had just knitted him from a ball of leftover wool.

 

Miles Wednesday, breeze-blown and pajama-striped, sank gratefully into a beanbag in Doctor Tau-Tau's warm wagon. His legs felt weak, and the short walk was as much as he could manage. Now the wind was shut outside and his shivering began to subside. A cup of hot masala tea was pressed into
his hand by the still-beaming Tau-Tau, who stared and smiled, and smiled and stared as he bustled around amidst his clutter until Miles felt distinctly uncomfortable.

“You feel disorientated, but it will pass,” said the fortune-teller, lighting a fistful of incense and placing it in a brass burner by the sink. “You have had a bit of a shock.”

Miles nodded. “I thought he was going to die,” he said.

“Nonsense,” said Doctor Tau-Tau. “It wasn't his time. I would have seen it in the cards.” He picked up the stack of red and gold envelopes and shuffled them absentmindedly. Miles felt irritated by his certainty. He thought about the card that the bird had picked out after Tau-Tau's wagon had been ransacked, and how the fortune-teller had refused to tell him what it said. A smile began to spread across his face, and he hid it with a yawn. “It's all just for show though, isn't it?” he said.

Tau-Tau paused in his shuffling and frowned down at Miles. “What is?” he said.

“All that stuff with the cards and the bird,” said Miles casually. “You just make it up as you go along, don't you?”

“Make it up?” spluttered Tau-Tau, his face darkening.
“Certainly not! Clairvoyance is a rare gift, and it's brought to a fine focus only by years of study and practice.”

“Then the cards must have shown you that Barty Fumble was my father,” said Miles.

Doctor Tau-Tau looked at him blankly for a moment. “You? Barty Fumble's son?” His eyes bulged and he cleared his throat hastily. “Of course, boy. I spotted that right away. The cards can hide nothing from me. Nothing except my own future, of course.” He lifted the birdcage down from a high shelf in the corner. “Try me,” he said. “Just ask me anything at all.”

“What happened to Barty Fumble?” Miles asked.

“What happened to . . .” A nervous look passed over Tau-Tau's face for a moment. He busied himself spreading the cards in front of the birdcage. “We will have the answer for you in no time,” he said. “In no time at all, we will have an answer for you. Is that not so, my little feathered prognosticator?” Tau-Tau was mumbling to himself now, glancing at Miles from time to time as if he might disappear at any moment. “Now we shall see,” he muttered, “what our little oracle can tell us.” He opened the door of the birdcage. The little red-beaked bird hopped out onto the row of envelopes laid out in front of her,
bent down and tugged one of them free. Tau-Tau took the envelope from the bird and slid the card out from inside it. His bushy eyebrows crept upward, and he glanced at Miles, and back at the card. “Then it's true,” he muttered. He stroked his goatee in silence, while Miles watched him with growing curiosity.

“Can I see the card?” he asked finally.

Doctor Tau-Tau looked as though he was weighing this request carefully, then he held the creased card out between his thumb and forefinger for Miles to see. It was covered with a close pattern of little squiggles that looked like they had been painted with a brush. Miles was not sure what he had expected to see, but he felt slightly disappointed. “I can't make anything out of that,” he said.

“Of course not, my boy, and for two reasons,” said Tau-Tau. He slipped the card back into its envelope. “There are two reasons,” he repeated, “for that. First, the cards are written in Chinese, an ancient language with which you are unlikely to be familiar. And second, only someone with extraordinary skills such as mine can hope to divine their true meaning.”

“What does it say?” asked Miles. “Is it the same card she drew the other night?”

“It is, my boy,” said Tau-Tau, pulling a small stool over to the beanbag where Miles sat, and settling down on it with a sigh. “And it does indeed concern your father, Barty Fumble.”

Miles felt his heart miss a beat. The hope that someday he might find his father alive was never far from his thoughts, and he feared that the little bird might drown that hope forever. He forced himself to meet Doctor Tau-Tau's eyes. “What does it say?” he asked.

The fortune-teller poured another cup of masala tea for himself, and one for Miles. “I was a fool not to trust the card the first time it was drawn,” he said, lowering his voice as though there were conspirators listening from behind every drape. “It seems that the old fraud has been alive all along!”

Miles looked at him in astonishment. “Are you sure?” he whispered.

“The oracle is sure, my boy,” said Doctor Tau-Tau. “And that is good enough for me. What's more, I think I know where we could start to look for him.”

Miles struggled out of the beanbag and leaped to his feet. The dizziness had left him completely, and in his excitement he barely noticed the less-than-flattering way in which Tau-Tau spoke of his father. “Where?” he asked. “Can we go now?”

To his surprise, Doctor Tau-Tau also sprang to his feet. “Indeed we had better!” he beamed, “but we shall have to find you something more fitting than pajamas to wear if we are going to be mixing with royalty. To mix with royalty,” he said, looking around his cluttered wagon in a distracted fashion, “you will need something more fitting, my boy, than pajamas.”

D
octor Tau-Tau, fez-topped and sparrow-led, huffed through the night at a considerable pace, and Miles had to trot to keep up. He was still in his pajamas despite his appointment with royalty, but wrapped around with an embroidered dressing gown that the fortune-teller had lent him to give the boy, as he put it, some semblance of dignity. Tau-Tau had insisted that they leave at once, without a word to anyone. He would not let Miles return to his wagon for clothes, nor would he hear of him retrieving his overcoat from the Zipplethorpes' trailer.

“I still don't see why we couldn't bring Little,”
Miles panted. “She wouldn't say a word to anyone, and she's very useful in a tricky situation.”

“Out of the question,” called Tau-Tau over his shoulder. “The people we are going to see don't make a habit of welcoming visitors. My great negotiating skills will be stretched to their fullest to get the information we need, and one more hanger-on would make it ten times harder.”

“Who are they, the people we're going to see?” asked Miles.

Doctor Tau-Tau stopped to unsnag his own dressing gown from a bramble. “Don't bother me now with questions, boy,” he said tetchily. “It's a good few years since I've been this way, and if you continue to pester me we may end up going in circles.”

They marched on in silence for a while. The wind still gusted strongly, and at times it was as much as Miles could do to keep moving forward at all. It was a moonless night, and the faint light of the stars was all they had to guide them. Miles could make out the dark bulk of the mountains to their right, but most of his attention was focused on the ground before his feet. The countryside was hilly and dotted with small trees whose knobbled roots were well suited for tripping the unwary, and now and then they would stumble as they stepped suddenly into a
hidden rabbit hole. Despite the cold wind Miles began to sweat in the heavy dressing gown, and his throat was as dry as sand. The fat doctor's labored breathing came back to him on the breeze.

“Is it much farther?” called Miles when they seemed to have been walking forever.

Doctor Tau-Tau said nothing, but a minute later he stopped in the shelter of a tall pinnacle of rock that rose from the side of a hill. “This will do,” he said in a hoarse whisper, when Miles had caught up with him. “We'll take a short rest here.”

Miles flopped gratefully down in the long grass, checking for Tangerine in the dressing-gown pocket where he had put him when Tau-Tau wasn't looking. The bear seemed to be shivering slightly, and Miles kept his hand in the pocket to warm him. “Are we nearly there?” he asked.

Doctor Tau-Tau put a long finger to his lips. “Shhhh,” he said. “You don't want to be hollering around here like a schoolboy on an outing.”

“But we're in the middle of nowhere,” said Miles, whispering nonetheless. “There's no one for miles around.”

“Don't be so sure,” said Tau-Tau. His bulging eyes shone faintly in the darkness. He produced a thermos flask from inside his dressing gown, and
poured himself an inevitable cup of spiced tea. When he had emptied it he poured another and handed it to Miles. The cold had begun to bite again now that they had stopped, and Miles gulped it down gratefully.

“You said we were going to see royalty,” he whispered.

“Well, in a manner of speaking,” said Tau-Tau, pouring himself another cup. He slurped noisily, presumably forgetting about the need for stealth. “The people who live in these parts have been here for countless years, since before your ancestors or mine ever set foot here. Your ancestors, that is, not mine,” he corrected himself. “I come from a distant country that you will never have heard of.”

“That depends,” said Miles, “on what letter of the alphabet it starts with.”

The fortune-teller snorted, and promptly began to choke noisily on the tea that had shot up the back of his nose.

“It's true,” said Miles. “I've got all my education from Lady Partridge's encyclopedia. I'm up to the letter ‘Q.'”

“My hometown begins with ‘Z,'” coughed Doctor Tau-Tau.

“Maybe I'll know the country,” said Miles, who
had always been fascinated by the pictures of far-off places in Lady Partridge's richly illustrated encyclopedia.

“Also ‘Z,'” said Tau-Tau sharply. “Now if we don't press on, the sun will come up and the path may no longer be available to us.”

Miles scrambled to his feet. The night was still dark, but away on the eastern horizon he could see the sky beginning to lighten. They were entering a strange landscape of small hollows and steep hills, out of which there grew more and more of the tall jagged rocks like the one that had sheltered them while they rested. In the darkness they looked like giant stone teeth, some tilted at a crazy angle, and the faint path wound among them and dipped into the empty sockets in between. The wind whipped around them, shredded by the stone teeth into gusts and eddies that ambushed them from every direction and dropped just as suddenly. Doctor Tau-Tau moved more slowly now, and every now and then he stopped and squinted at a battered notebook that he produced from the pocket of his dressing gown. Miles kept close behind him.

“What is this place?” asked Miles, as loudly as he dared.

“The locals call it Hell's Teeth,” whispered Tau-
Tau. “It's been mined for thousands of years, which accounts for the holes, to an extent, but the wind and the rain have made most of it.”

“It's not the kind of place where I'd expect to find royalty,” said Miles.

Doctor Tau-Tau stopped so abruptly that Miles almost ran into him. He turned slowly and bent down until his face was inches away from Miles's nose. “We are only here for your benefit, my boy,” he whispered hoarsely, “and we are getting very close, so you will oblige me by keeping your ceaseless chatter to yourself.” He straightened up and began to creep forward with all the stealth of a buffalo.

If you have ever stood at the sink cleaning your teeth and become convinced that someone is staring at you from behind, you will be familiar with the feeling that came over Miles as he began once again to follow Doctor Tau-Tau through the forest of giant teeth. Perhaps it was the pajamas and dressing gown that did it, but he slowly became convinced that if he were to look around he would see a pair of eyes staring at him from somewhere in the shadows. The more the feeling grew, the more determined he was not to give in to it and look around. He was beginning to wonder if this midnight trip had been such a good idea, and he had to
remind himself that it was his determination to find his father, or at least to discover his fate, that had brought him to this eerie place.

They came to a hollow that seemed to dip steeply into blackness on its far side. They descended carefully, their feet slipping on the damp grass. At the bottom of the hollow Doctor Tau-Tau paused and put his finger to his lips. He produced his notebook and peered at it for a minute, then he took out a small flashlight. It gave off a feeble yellow light, which flickered and died within seconds. Tau-Tau muttered something ugly, and tried to shake the flashlight back to life.

Strangely enough it was this attempt to pierce the darkness that made Miles finally lose his nerve and look behind him. Before his eyes had time to make sense of the shadows they had begun to move and break up, and a swarm of little figures was slithering down the steep sides of the hollow toward them, like the hairy outcasts of a hundred forgotten dreams.

“Doctor Tau-Tau!” said Miles in an urgent whisper, tugging at his sleeve.

“Not now, boy,” said Tau-Tau, still squinting at his notebook, but as he fumbled once again with the switch on his flashlight, one of the hairy little men
appeared at his elbow, reached up in an instant and snatched it from his hand. Doctor Tau-Tau's jaw dropped in astonishment, and at that moment a second little man jumped up nimbly and wedged a large clod of grass into his open mouth before the fortune-teller could utter a word.