The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

It had begun in a faraway country, in the Kingdom of Barama, with a small, unhealthy prince who could not sleep.

Barama is in South America and it is very beautiful. It lies between Venezuela to the east and Guyana to the west and many people have not even heard of it, although the man who rules it is possibly the richest person in the world.

Barama is very beautiful; it has a palm-fringed coastline and mountains covered in green-blue trees and meadows filled with flowers. But what makes Barama special is one thing and one thing only: oil.

Oil gushes and bursts and erupts out of the sandy desert, and the more it is dug up and barrelled and sold to oil-hungry countries, the more seems to come out of the ground.

Before the oil was found, the princes of Barama led busy and active lives. They were strong men with big moustaches and they hunted and shot and fought their neighbours and each other.

But as they became richer and richer all this changed. They built themselves enormous palaces and filled them with priceless furniture. They bought themselves cars and aeroplanes and yachts and they covered their wives and daughters with fabulous jewels. They bought hundreds of suits and pairs of shoes and sumptuous ceremonial robes, and ate larger and larger meals and got more and more servants to wait on them.

The result of all this was exactly what you would expect. They became bored and miserable. Their muscles got flabby because they never walked anywhere but were always driven in cars and their stomachs boiled and bubbled with indigestion from all the rich food that they ate. So while their palaces got bigger and bigger, the rulers of Barama got smaller and sadder and feebler, and the present ruler of Barama, King Carlos, was a very little man indeed.

Carlos had not been a healthy child. His muscles were so weak that a servant used to go upstairs behind him and help to push his leg up to the next tread, and he had mostly been fed on slops — semolina pudding and lentil soups and things of that sort, because solid food gave him a stomach ache.

Prince Carlos’s mother had died when he was a baby, and after that his father had married five more times, choosing women from all over the world. Having five stepmothers had made little Carlos very worried and unhappy — there wasn’t one among them who had loved him or been kind — and when Carlos’s father had divorced them they had gone off in a huff, with their jewels and their money, and the little boy had never seen them again.

But there was one person in the child’s life who never went away, and that was his nurse, Nadia.

Nadia had come to Barama from a long way away — from the border of Russia and China. By the time she came to Barama the little prince was so unhealthy and spoilt and sad that he couldn’t get to sleep at night and lay in his canopied bed in his vast bedroom, staring at the ceiling and imagining devils and ghouls armed to the teeth who would fly down and cut his throat.

Nadia was sorry for the frightened little boy whom nobody loved, and she sat by his bed, night after night, and told him stories.

The stories Nadia told were the ones she had been told in her own faraway country. They were stories about mythical beasts — good kind beasts who helped travellers and comforted wayfarers. She told him about griffins and dragons and horses with wings. She told him about dogs that could speak and golden cockerels and kindly snakes that wound themselves round children and kept them from harm — and she told him about one beast in particular, a beast which her people loved more than any other in the world. And when she sat beside little Carlos and spoke in her soft, low voice, he could sleep.

Then came the day when Carlos’s father was drowned, diving off his latest yacht, and Carlos became the ruler of Barama.

He could now do anything he liked, but the trouble was he didn’t know what he did like. His five stepmothers had put him off women and his indigestion put him off food and there wasn’t really any work to do governing his country because his ministers did it perfectly well.

For a while he drifted sadly through his palaces, and sat gloomily in his Turkish baths and bought a large number of dressing gowns with gold tassels which he stumbled over.

But one day as he was staring miserably out of the window, he had a vision. He would make a great garden — a paradise garden — and he would fill it with rare trees and with beautiful flowers and animals that you could see nowhere else: with the animals that Nadia had told him about in her stories. And above all with the beast she had said was the most beautiful and gentle and powerful of all — the beast which her people had loved more than any other in the world.

If he could get this amazing, swift and gentle creature for his paradise garden he thought he would be a happy man. So he called together his advisors and his courtiers and his ministers and told them what he wanted.

‘Only I don’t just want one,’ he said. ‘The Kings of Barama never have one of anything. I want a whole herd.’

So his advisors began to look for somebody who could get the King what he wanted, and after a long search they found Dr Maurice Manners of the Blackscar Animal Centre in Great Britain.

When Dr Manners heard what the King of Barama wanted, he hesitated. It was the biggest order he had ever had and there were all sorts of technical difficulties — but when he learnt that the King was offering five million pounds, he stopped hesitating quite quickly and tried to think what could be done.

Manners had come to Blackscar after a series of unfortunate accidents to the ladies he had operated on so as to make them more beautiful. There was a tummy tuck which had gone septic and a nose job which had ended up behind the patient’s ears, and, instead of standing by him and protecting him, his fellow doctors had said he was a disgrace to the profession and he was not allowed to be a doctor any more.

Some people would have been so hurt that they would have given up, but not Dr Manners. He had met up with a brilliant vet called Dr Fangster, who was bored with simply making animals better and had worked out all sorts of interesting experiments, like joining one animal’s lungs to another animal’s heart and then to a third animal’s stomach, and together they had come up with the idea for the Blackscar Centre.

For, as Manners said, if people want animals that don’t exist and will pay a lot of money for them, we will simply make these creatures. Between us we know everything there is to know about implants and bone grafts and tissue transfers, so what’s to stop us turning a chicken into a dodo or an ostrich into an auk? What’s more, the people we supply will be so pleased to get their animal they’ll be certain they’re getting the real thing.

And Manners was right. The collectors believed what they wanted to believe and hid the rare beasts they had asked for in secret zoos and private parks all over the world.

Nevertheless, when the order came through from the King of Barama, they had at first been baffled. It would mean getting hold of a herd of pure white horses and that would take a long time and be very expensive. But when they started to look up what was written about the beasts they were supposed to be making they learned something very interesting. Their hooves had not been rounded and solid like the hooves of horses; they had been split in the centre. The beasts had been cloven-footed. Their feet had a cleft in them like the feet of cows or sheep or goats.

Not only that, but all the books which Manners and the vet consulted were agreed on one thing: the creatures came of absolutely pure bloodstock, and always bred true.

And when they heard about the Wild White Cattle of Clawstone Park, they knew that their search was over — and that the King of Barama would get his unicorns.