Lionboy Part 21

At first Charlie thought he was having no luck, but then, in the bathroom, he realized that the ornamental panel above the tiny bathtub was, in fact, on hinges, and that-yes!-those were bolts along the side. He clambered into the bath, and by standing carefully on the edges, he was able to reach. He pulled the bolts back-they slid easily-and pushed hard to lift the trapdoor, which was extremely heavy.

Trapdoors in train roofs are not designed to be opened while the train is racing along through a snowstorm. Charlie had to push hard, banging and straining. But he was a strong boy, made stronger by his time with the circus. Finally he managed to get the door to lift-then the wind rushed in through the gap, and violently, suddenly, lifted the trapdoor and slammed it open.

First, a pile of cold, wet snow fell in on Charlie's head. The wind hurtled around the bathroom like a tornado, flapping the curtains and throwing the towels on the floor. Charlie hissed through his teeth, put one hand on each side of the trapdoor's frame, and pulled himself up. In a moment he was lying half in and half out, his legs dangling and his face burning from the bite of the wind.

Outside was like a different world. The cold nearly took his head off. He had to lie as flat as he could because of the speed of the train. Holding on tight and sheltering his eyes, he could see that there was a sort of channel down the middle of the train's roof that was slightly sheltered. That's where the lions would be. But he couldn't see them.

Oh well, of course he couldn't see them! They weren't on this roof, they were on the next but one, the luggage car. He was going to have to go and fetch them-traveling against the wind rushing over the train. Narrowing his eyes, Charlie looked up ahead, and he didn't like the look of this challenge at all.

Pulling his jacket around him, trying to tuck his pants farther into his boots, he lay along the top of the train and wriggled himself into the channel. It was better in there-quieter for one thing, and with less wind against him for another-but it was still extremely uncomfortable. He'd heard tales of how flesh can stick to freezing metal. He hoped it wasn't that cold.

Flat on his stomach against the cold metal, Charlie shimmied himself along the train. As he went, he began to get scared. Physical discomfort can do that sometimes-the worse your body feels, the worse your mind feels. It's hard to be brave when you're cold or hungry or tired. But Charlie, though cold, had slept the previous night in a cozy bed, and he was full of toast and strawberry jam. So as he pushed through the wildly eddying snowflakes, working his way along, he was thinking only about his friends, and how to help them.

When he found them, he was horribly afraid it might be too late. They were lying in a pile, bedraggled and shivering. They were wet, and if a lion could look pale, they looked pale. Their ears were down flat, their whiskers limp. The snowflakes falling onto their golden sides weren't even melting. They looked terrible. Charlie was furious with himself, and his fury gave him energy.

How could he have left them out there all night? They relied on him and he had let them down. How stupid. How stupid of him.

One of them seemed to be better off than the others. It was the new creature who had joined them last night in Paris. He was talking to the lions in a low voice, and though Charlie couldn't work out what he was saying, it sounded comforting and strong. He was in the middle of them all, so that the smaller creatures were sharing the warmth of his bigger body.

Charlie crawled over to them, cursing himself, and gently called out to them, but they couldn't hear him over the sound of the train. He stretched out his arm and stroked the nearest flank-one of the lionesses, he thought.

"Lions, lions!" he called. "Come on! I'm here! Come with me, we'll warm you up, come on, we can go inside the train! Come on! Come on! Young lion! Elsina! Come on!"

He patted desperately at the flank, and even thought about taking hold of the beautiful paw, and pulling it, but he couldn't quite bring himself to. Instead he clambered farther along, and sort of lay among them, wriggling and stroking and patting and talking. "Come on, come on!" he said.

The new creature joined in, and gradually the lions came to themselves and realized that Charlie was with them. They began to move.

Getting the poor creatures back along the train's rooftop to safety and warmth was one of the worst experiences of Charlie's life. He was so scared that they had become too weak, that they might lose their footing and roll off the train to the speeding land below. He was scared they might stick to the metal or slip on the snow. He was terrified when they had to pa.s.s over the gap between one rattling car and another, scarier than the gap between the circus ship and the sh.o.r.e when they had fled the Circe Circe. He was scared as well that even if he got them back to the bathroom, they would be so ill that he might not be able to make them better. And even if he did make them better, how could he possibly keep them from the King of Bulgaria?

"One thing at a time," he said sensibly, and he repeated it over and over. "Just let's get them inside. Let's get you inside." He sounded like a mother. That idea cheered him up just a little bit, because it was so absurd: him being mother to all these lions. He laughed, and the laughter made him feel a tiny bit warmer. Jokes at the worst moment are good. Even feeble jokes like that.

The snow swirled and danced furiously around them, whooshing over their heads as the train snaked through the storm and the wind whistled past.

"One thing at a time," he murmured. At least they were going with the wind now.

There was the trapdoor ahead of him.

He almost pushed the lions through, and they landed in a big pile, filling up first the bathtub and then the whole room. Charlie clambered through last, pulling the trapdoor behind him-and that wasn't easy either. While he'd been out on the roof the bathroom had been filling up with cold, crunchy snow that had whistled in, and was now starting to melt in drips and lumps. Outside, the snow was beginning to cover the low slopes of the Alpine foothills.

Charlie was more relieved than he had ever been in his life to have everybody in out of the storm.

But there was work to be done. As quietly as he could, he swept the melting snow into the sink, and ran warm water on top of it so the steam would warm up the room even more. He rubbed the lions down with the towels, and checked their paws and ears for signs of frostbite.

"Don't go to sleep!" he said, and set them to examining each other to keep them busy. He'd read somewhere that if you go to sleep when you're that cold, you can die. "Keep moving around! Don't go to sleep till you're warm!" he hissed. "And keep quiet!"

He gave them some meat. That perked them up a bit. What else could he do for them?

Mum's Improve Everything Lotion! He still had it in his bag, from the day he had left home. During his time with the circus he hadn't ever had to use it. He knew it was just for emergencies-but this, for sure, was an emergency.

He gave them each a couple of drops: more than a person would have, because lions are much bigger than people. More for the huge new creature and the oldest lion, less for the young lion, the lionesses, and Elsina.

"That'll help," he murmured to himself. "They'll feel better soon." The strange new creature looked at Charlie with his large, sad eyes, as if taking him in.

They were all more or less all right-cold and tired, stiff and hungry, but they would be all right.

Oh lord, thought Charlie. What on earth am I going to do now?

What happened next was not up to Charlie.

The Orient Express suddenly stopped rattling. It drew to a halt. Charlie and the lions looked at one another, looked around, shrugged, and the lions continued to rasp at the meat with their hungry, sharp-surfaced tongues.

Charlie went to the window, clambering over the lions, and peered out. Snow everywhere-soft and white and beautiful, swirling and circling and filling up all the s.p.a.ce beyond the gla.s.s. How calm it looked in its silent dance. How different watching it through gla.s.s was to being out in it! After a while the lions began to snooze and Charlie, sitting in the steamy bathroom with their breath adding a musky scent to the steaminess, realized that the snow level was beginning to creep up the sides of the train. Ice half-covered the windows the way the water had half-covered the portholes on the middle deck of the Circe Circe. With the engine no longer chuntering and the wheels no longer rattling and singing beneath them, it was extraordinarily quiet. Snow m.u.f.fles sound, Charlie knew. And things always sound quieter when a loud noise has stopped. But even so-it was extraordinarily quiet.

He supposed they were stuck. Too much snow on the tracks or something.

How long could he keep the lions concealed? How much more of a problem was this going to be?

One of the lionesses snuffled. The young lion, piled in the tub with Elsina, opened an eye, and looked at Charlie.

"Thank you, friend," he said in a very low voice roughened by his hard cold night on the roof.

Charlie wondered for a moment if he was being sarcastic. He must have realized that Charlie had neglected them for hours and hours. But he wasn't-he was genuinely grateful.

"It turned cold very quickly," said the lion. "It is good that you came when you did. If it hadn't been for"-here he gestured at the creature-"I don't know what would have happened. Thank you for not forgetting us."

Charlie felt awful because he had forgotten them. Blinking, he flung his arms around the lion's neck. "I am so glad you're safe," he said. "Safe for now."

"Why only for now?" asked the young lion, fear coming into his eyes. "Is there more danger here? Should we-"

Charlie calmed him. "No immediate danger," he said. "But this bathroom belongs to somebody who may want to use it . . . We must be very quiet."

He had locked the door, but who knows how long it would be before Edward or one of the guards would want to use the room. Should he try to move the lions to the cabin where he had slept? No-he couldn't risk their being seen.

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 pa.s.sengers 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 embarra.s.sed 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 embarra.s.sed 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 a.s.sa.s.sin," said the king.

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"My dear fellow," said King Boris. "You are quite absurd. Go and have a gla.s.s 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 is nothing to be done. Don't worry about a thing. Good-bye!" 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 pa.s.sed, 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?