Groan…
puff…
sigh…
For those of you who’ve never shared your bedroom with half a ton of ram, these are the sort of sounds it makes when he’s too excited to sleep.
Snort…
scrunch (of half a biscuit discovered
in the bedding)…
“Hellooo…?”
Aries tried to sleep. He really did. But every time he closed his eyelids, images of lambs bounced across them, each carrying letters: an ‘N’, an ‘E’, an ‘A’ and an ‘R’ in their fleecy tails, gambolling over grass like woolly ballerinas, spelling the word out over and over again.
“Near!” announced Aries, clattering to his hooves and flinging off his share of the blanket. “Near!” he said to the odd-shaped parcels above his head, half-lit by the dim corridor lights spilling through the glass in the door. “Near!” he told the stuffed lizard whose glass eyes glinted at him from the gloom.
Then he trotted over to Alex and leaned down close to the boy’s ear. “Alex,” he whispered. “Are you asleep?”
“Yes,” said Alex.
That was a nuisance, thought Aries and clopped back to face the wall. Why didn’t Alex understand how difficult it was to sleep, knowing that Aries’ fleece was
NEAR!
And close added a little voice in his brain, not to mention proximate, not too far away, within a short distance, in the vicinity and quite possibly within spitting distance. His blood raced like fireflies, his heart pumped like a yearling.
“Near!” Aries announced to the darkened ceiling. He regarded the door and took a step closer to it. After all, as he would quickly have pointed out, he didn’t come back to Earth to practise camping in the British Museum under a rather scratchy – and for all he knew rather flea-bitten – old blanket.
He looked back and licked Alex’s ear.
“Get off!” Alex batted him away. “It’s the middle of the night!”
“Near!” said Aries in a low voice.
“What?” muttered Alex, noticing the rather mad-looking glint in Aries’ eyes. “Not again!”
Aries nodded wildly. “I’m going to look for it!”
“Now?” exclaimed Alex. He drew his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them. “What a brilliant idea! I mean, I wonder why I didn’t think of it? What with no talking Scroll, no idea where to start looking and, oh, the little matter of being in the middle of a museum in modern London full of guards who could arrest us and throw us into jail at any moment…”
“But apart from that?” Aries persisted.
Alex groaned and lay back down on the bed, pulling the blanket over his head.
Back in her tiny bedroom in Camden, Rose sat cross-legged on her bed, tapping away on her computer and humming along happily to her latest Hazel Praline CD.
And the reason she was so happy?
Because she’d discovered how to fix the Scroll.
As in really fix it.
Racking her brain for a way to fix the parchment, Rose had remembered the odd little map scrawled on its reverse side. She hadn’t paid much attention to it at the time but this evening it reminded her of last summer’s holiday hotspot: the Royal Geographic Society, where she and her mother had spent many happy hours (well, her mother, anyway, Rose having had no choice as usual) in the Cartography Laboratory. Cartography is a fancy word for maps, in case you’re wondering, and the lab was rather like a hospital for crumbly old ones.
The lab’s computers could scan in moth-eaten old maps, tattered with holes and rips, and work out where the missing contours, coastlines and paths would once have gone. Other machines analysed the age and density of the original scraps and, more importantly, gave directions to where, in the lab’s library, the same type of paper might be found to patch the maps perfectly. Since the lab stored thousands of types of paper Rose was confident they’d have a much closer match for the Scroll. Then all they had to do was feed it into the machine to produce perfect copies of all the missing pieces. With the right sort of paper, Rose reasoned, the Scroll would practically be back to normal and much more likely to give sensible answers to Aries’ questions about the fleece.
And to her own.
Meanwhile, up on the top floor of the British Museum, Aries shuffled through the deserted Egyptian Rooms, ducking the security beams and weaving between the red-eyed motion sensors. He’d already seen the cracked teapots of ancient China, the seal-fur underpants of the Viking invaders and a ghastly display of Amazonian shrunken heads with lolly-out tongues. Now he picked his way through cabinets stuffed with statues of blue hippos and green crocodiles and row upon row of mummification tools all silvery in the moonlight. He paused to peer at a line of wooden stobbers and hoikers for hooking out brains and shuddered before turning to yet another painted sarcophagus.
“Great Aken Poo Poo,” he muttered, staring at the mummy case, its big potato nose glinting in the moonlight. “Know you the way to the fleece?”
The mummy case remained silent. Just as well, I suppose, since if it had sprung open and a bandaged figure had leaped out, there’d have been a brand new exhibit of Greek-Ram-Poo-Poo on the floor and the curators would not have liked that. Nor the cleaners.
Aries sighed and looked around at the mummy’s rigid face. Of course it was wonderful knowing that the fleece was near, it was the best news he’d had in centuries, but really, what the Scroll had said was very puzzling. And not particularly helpful when you had three enormous floors to search, all with rooms the size of tennis courts and brimming with cabinets, cupboards and shadows.
Wearily, he meandered up to a nearby sign, which read:
TUDOR EXHIBITION
This gallery shows some of the clothes worn by Henry VIII’s six wives.
Aries walked up to the first dummy and considered it. With its bulging belly, beard and silk bloomers it was a funny looking wife, he decided, even allowing for the whims of fashion. Then he read the notice beside it, which said:
King Henry VIII – dancing costume
He might have smiled but for the frustration he felt. His hooves ached. His back ached. Worse, his heart ached because he had to admit to himself that Alex had been right: it would have been more sensible just to wait for Rose to repair the Scroll.
Shrugging, he glanced along the dresses on display. Beneath the night-lights their luxurious fabrics glowed. Extravagant damson and cream silks, swathes of emerald velvet and golden damask, braided with ribbons, their bodices picked out with tiny, glimmering seed pearls.
Except for the last one.
Intrigued, Aries clopped closer. This dress was made from heavy grey muslin, the colour of rain clouds. Pooling heavily around the dummy’s feet, it was plainer by far than the others, save for a glittering row of gold stitches around its square neckline.
Sighing, Aries sank down, feeling a wave of tiredness wash over him. Laying his muzzle on the soft fabric, he muttered contentedly and read the card by the dummy’s feet:
Dress worn by Anne Boleyn on first meeting Henry VIII.
Cut in the French style, its pewter colour is said to have caught the king’s eye and perhaps because of this, Anne chose to wear this dress to the Tower of London in 1536 at her execution by beheading.
Execution, thought Aries sleepily, feeling his worries disappear as he sank into a doze. Taking a deep breath he snuggled deeper into the dress’s skirts, paddling his hooves into its soft folds until it slid from the dummy’s shoulders and covered him completely. Then, cosy and warm, he fell into a deep sleep.