Be funny. Tell me a joke. Come on, make me laugh. Now! You can’t do it, can you? So imagine if your life depended on it. Imagine if somebody told you they were going to shoot the woman you loved unless you told a joke—now, right now! Or in five minutes or five hours or five days. The mind dries up in the face of something like that, shrivels like moth wings in a candle flame, so imagine how I felt. Find a way out, Otto, that’s all you’ve got to do. You’re locked in a room at the top of Rapunzel’s tower, armed with nothing more than a borrowed hatpin, the door is locked with giant iron bolts, there are armed men outside and, if you somehow manage to escape, they will shoot you and everybody you know and love but, on the other hand, if you don’t escape, they will shoot you and everybody you know and love. Answer on only one side of the paper. Time starts NOW!

And I couldn’t think of the answer. I couldn’t think of the answer. I couldn’t think of the answer. There was nothing in my head but that thumping, whistling beat over and over like an executioner taking endless practice swings of the ax.

“What the hell is that bloody noise?” but before anybody could answer me, we heard Varga running up the stairs, gasping out orders as he came: “Get out of my way. Move. Move. What is that stupid bastard doing? Make him stand off. He has to stand off. And they can’t tether to this tower.” He went running on up toward the roof, yelling as he went, “Not this tower! Not this tower! This is a verdammte prison. The other tower!”

And then I knew what to do. Not down, but up. Out of Rapunzel’s tower, into the Zeppelin and away on the clouds. All I had to do was get out of the room and get Sarah out of the room and her father and Kemali and Max and Arbuthnot, get them all out of the room and have them wait on the roof while I boarded a Zeppelin full of armed men, overpowered them and stole their airship. Then all I would have to do was haul my friends aboard and fly away to freedom. I’m sorry, I had no better idea.

“Max,” I said, “get me up to that window.”

That was a piece of cake for Max. He cupped his hands into a stirrup and bounced me up the wall.

“Down again. I should take my jacket off.”

Max put me on the floor, took my jacket, hung it in his teeth and cupped his hands again. He would have thrown me up and down that wall all day if I’d asked him. He was like that and, with Max holding my heels, I reached the gap under the window easily.

It was a sort of a square tunnel, about twice as long as me and not much broader than my shoulders, sloping up to a window, an ordinary little window with a wooden frame and no bars. The masons hadn’t bothered to finish it off too carefully. It was nice and rough and that made for an easy climb, but Max would never fit. I knew at once that Max would never fit. He’d get the rest of us up there. Max would stand there and lift me up, he’d lift Sarah and her father and Kemali and Arbuthnot, and then he’d sit down quietly and wait to be shot if I asked him, if I just explained that, “Sorry, mate, you’ll never squeeze in, but me and the others, we might have a chance.” He’d give us a hand up and say, “It’s no loss what a friend gets. Good luck!”

I wasn’t halfway up the tunnel when I knew we couldn’t do that. I’d rather be shot with Max a hundred times than let him be shot once alone and, anyway, Sarah wouldn’t go without him. She was down there in that room, as terrified as I was, being brave for my sake, for the sake of her father, clenching her teeth together to keep from screaming, and I knew very well that scared her more than the thought of a firing squad. She was scared to scream because she knew that, if she started to scream, she wouldn’t stop until they stopped her with a bullet. She was afraid of breaking like Zogolli. She was more afraid of that than of anything, and I knew because I was afraid of that too.

I reached the window. It was just a little thing, split into four panes, one of them cracked, and the wood was dried out and papery since it was so high up in the tower and so far away down an awkward tunnel that nobody had ever thought to give it a lick of paint or a rub of oil. It was old and done for all right, but I’m damned if I could get it open. Lying there in that stone shaft, facing up to the sky, I could see nothing but clouds passing by and I could touch the frame of the window, I could get my hands on it, but if I tried to push it open, I just ended up pushing myself back down the tunnel. I tried to hold on with the toes of my boots. I tried to brace myself against the walls with my elbows, but nothing worked. The harder I pushed, the further backward I fell, and the old window stayed stuck.

“What can you see, Otto?”

“Not much. I’m coming back down. Stand clear.”

I let go of the sides and slid down the tunnel. Falling out was even easier than climbing in. I even managed to keep my legs straight and my feet together when I landed. “There’s a window,” I said.

“So we can get out?” said the Professor.

“We need to talk about that.” I gave the knees of my trousers a good brush. “There’s one window in one side of the tower but I can’t see out of it. Well, I can see out, but I can’t see down so I don’t know what’s outside. I think I could get the window open, but we need to think about that carefully. There are four sides to the tower. Three of them look down into the castle courtyard and only one of them faces out to the town, so we need to consider—”

“Forgive me, but there is nothing to consider,” said Arbuthnot.

“We have no choice,” said Kemali.

The Professor shook his head. “If you attract their attention by breaking the window, they will shoot us.”

“But they’re going to shoot us anyway,” said Sarah. They were finishing one another’s sentences again.

I looked at Max.

“Whatever you think best, mate.” That was all he said. My mate Max.

I knew what I was going to do. There was no choice. They were right, even if Max had to stay. Even if I had to stay with him. “Max,” I said, “I need to go in again, backward this time.”

He stood there like a rock with his arms held out while I did a handstand on his upturned palms. By God he was strong, but so was I in my way. I stayed there, straight as a candle, as Max raised his arms up to shoulder height and then higher still until he was standing with his arms raised high over his head and me, upside down above him, as if he was reaching up to a mirror or I was reaching down to one. I found the lip of the passage with the toe of my boot. I tipped and tilted. I folded my body into the tunnel and I began to crawl backward. Max gave a relieved grunt as my weight came off his palms. He wouldn’t have done that five years before.

I crawled. I scraped my palms. I wished I’d brought my gloves. I scraped my knees. I crawled. I crawled backward and uphill until my boots bumped the window and then I kept on crawling, with my feet resting against the glass so my legs bent—as far as they could in that narrow place—and everything was tensed up and then I started to push. The glass cracked like a breaking bone. I kept on pressing. The glass broke—plink. Inside the tunnel the air was suddenly fresher. I felt for the break in the glass with the tip of my toe and tapped at it, over and over, a dozen tiny kicks, until it fell out. I poked my toe into the gap and carefully worked it round the edge. More tiny kicks. I knew I was going to have to kick that window right out of the frame and I wanted all the glass gone. What could have been sillier than to stick myself in the leg and bleed to death, upside down in that little shaft, with all my friends corked up inside? So I took my time. Four panes, each one carefully kicked out and cleared away and each one scattering a hundred sparkling, tinkling bits of glass out into the sky and down to the ground and yet nobody came. There was no shout of alarm, no sound of angry Austrian sailors running up the stairs to come and shoot me in my tunnel, and that made me feel good. They hadn’t seen. They hadn’t noticed.

All the glass was gone. I braced myself. I kicked backward—hard, again and again. The wood splintered and I kept kicking until there was nothing left to kick.

It was time to leave. I began to crawl backward again. My foot caught on what was left of the window. I dragged my toe over it. And the other one. Both my boots were sticking out into the air and the weight was pressing on my knees as I crept up the rough stone tunnel. Backward a little further. My knees came out. I kept on wriggling and pushing, working against the stone walls with my hands, flapping like a landed fish. A loose nail from the broken window frame caught in my trousers and I felt them rip but I kept on, bouncing my thighs out into empty space until at last I had my backside sticking out the window with the broken window frame and the edge of the stone wall digging into me. It wasn’t comfortable, but at least it meant I could bend my legs.

I lay there, half in and half out of the window, rough stone and bits of broken wood sticking into my guts, my ass hanging out into fresh air, kicking at the wall, trying to find a toehold, gradually sliding backward into nothing, with those jagged bits of timber clawing at me as I went. And there was nothing there. There was absolutely nothing to stand on but I kept on squirming my way backward out of the window, more out of desperation than hope, because if I couldn’t find a way to get Sarah out of there, then I might as well throw myself off the tower and pray that I hit Varga on the way down.

My shoulders were through the gap. There was nothing keeping me from falling into the air but my elbows and the flats of my hands and by now I was sliding, properly sliding, out the window. I caught hold of the bottom of the window frame with my fingertips and I wished like blazes that I’d worn my fancy gloves, but there was still nothing to stand on. So I did the only thing I could do.

I let go and I fell for about a hundred years or the time that it took to drop a hand’s breadth, where I clung to the window ledge and dangled, reaching out with my toes—and they found something solid. There was something there.

I pulled myself up again a little, put my feet flat against the wall and hung there, like a monkey, looking down between my legs to get the lie of the land, and there it was—one of those little, pointless bits of masonry they put into old buildings and, if anybody ever knew why, he’s long dead. It was only a tiny ribbon of stonework and it stuck out from the wall by about half the width of a shoe, those parts where it hadn’t already dropped off on to the heads of unsuspecting Albanoks, but half the width of a shoe is about three times the width of a slack rope. For a man like me that was as good as the king’s highway. I put my feet down on the ledge and tested my weight on it. It held, so I turned round. Hands together on the window ledge, I let go with my left, held my weight on my right and swung round so my toes, which were pointing in, were pointing out and my back, which had been facing thin air, was against the wall.

I hung there quite comfortably, with my heels on the ledge, supporting myself against the castle wall. It was nothing for a bloke like me. In fact, if anybody had bothered to organize the Albanian All-comers Standing-on-a-Ledge Championships, I reckon I could probably have reached the finals. That sort of thing is bread and butter for a circus acrobat. Anyway, I surveyed the situation.

Luckily I was on the one side of the tower that faced outside the castle. To my left I could see the other tower and, streaming out from it, high above and far away downwind, like a kite on a string, the glinting silver shape of the tethered Zeppelin.

The whole town was spread out in front of me: the mansions of the very finest families, the trees along the avenues, the palace that had been mine for a night, all the broken jumbled rooftops, all the little winding streets tumbling down the hill to the harbor and Varga’s yacht and the blue sea and the gulls, flying free, all the way to the edge of the world. And I could see how to get there. The wall beneath me was cracked and broken with odd stones missing here and others standing proud there. I could reach them. I could plan a route all the way down to the trees that crowded round the bottom of the tower, then branch to branch down to the bushes at the bottom and I could wait there until dark and I could get away. I could get away. But the others couldn’t. Maybe Arbuthnot could, but not Max or the Professor or Kemali and not Sarah. She couldn’t escape. I turned round and I climbed back up the wall. I climbed so high that I could stand on the broken window ledge and breathe, big breaths that filled my lungs while the salt wind blew in from the sea and shook my magnificent whiskers and the clouds raced past and the sun shone and the blood sang in my veins and the birds sang.

“Goodbye,” I said, and I swung my legs up and I dropped into the tunnel, down and back into the cell.

They were all gathered round the bottom of the shaft, waiting, hopefully and Max was there to catch me by the boots and lower me down to the floor.

And then they saw my face. “There’s no way out,” I said. “I’m sorry. I tried my best, but there is no way out. I’m sorry. We’ll think of something else.”