waviness of the flight.
It was, it has to be said, a chaotic and noisy scene. There was a moaning and a howling and a groaning and a growling, and that honking sound elephants (and ducks) make when they are in distress. Dog the bear kept saying that if bears had been meant to fly they would have grown wings, and he mentioned, too, that when bears sat on carpets it made them think of bearskin rugs, but mainly it was the flying thing that was the problem; and Bear the dog was babbling anxiously and without stopping as he rolled around the rug, and his monologue went something like this: I’m going to fall off, aren’t I? I am, don’t let me fall, am I going to fall off? I am, I can tell, I’m going to fall off, any second now, I’ll fall; even though in fact the carpet carefully curved itself upwards whenever any of the travellers lurched too close to an edge, and deposited them safely back at, or near, the centre.
As for the Elephant Birds, they kept asking each other why they were there at all. In the excitement of the departure from the Respectorate, they had somehow been swept aboard along with the Argo, but they couldn’t remember being asked if they would actually like to come. ‘And if we can’t remember it, it didn’t happen,’ said the Elephant Drake. They felt kidnapped, shanghaied, dragged along on an adventure that had nothing to do with them and was very probably extremely dangerous, and yes, they thought they might fall off the rug as well.
Of course the Insultana Soraya abused the lot of them roundly, as it was in her nature to do, calling them babies and girls and boobies and not-ducks-but-geese; she told them they were scaredy-cats and namby-pambies, sissies and yellow-bellies, milksops and Milquetoasts and candy-asses (a term with which Luka was not familiar, though he thought he could probably work out what it meant). She made chicken noises at them to call them cowards, and the worst part of all was when she squeaked at them contemptuously, which meant she was calling them mice.
Nobodaddy, naturally, handled the flying-carpet ride effortlessly, and stood coolly and with perfect assurance beside the Insultana, and that made Luka determined to find his ‘carpet legs’ as soon as possible. After a while he did, and stopped falling over; and after a further while the four animals found their twelve legs as well, and then, at last, the moaning and groaning stopped and things settled down, and nobody had actually been sick.
Once he could stand up and keep his balance on the flying carpet, Luka noticed that he was getting extremely cold. The carpet was beginning to fly higher and faster, and his teeth were beginning to chatter. The Insultana Soraya did not seem to be affected by the cold, even though she was wearing floaty garments that appeared to be constructed out of cobwebs and butterflies’ wings, and neither did Nobodaddy, who stood beside her in Rashid Khalifa’s short-sleeved vermilion bush shirt, looking quite unconcerned. Dog the bear seemed fine under all that hair, and the Elephant Drake and Duck had their downy feathers to keep them warm, but Bear the dog looked shivery and Luka was getting very cold indeed. ‘Who would have thought,’ Luka mused, ‘that this business of flying through the air would present so many practical problems?’ Inevitably the Insultana called him a whole set of new names when she saw that he was freezing to death. ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘that you expected this flying carpet to have central heating and whatnot. But this, my dear, is no modern softie’s suburban deep-shag-pile rug. This, I’ll have you know, is an antique.’
When Soraya had finished teasing Luka, however, she clapped her hands, and at once an old oak chest – which Luka had not noticed until that moment, but which had apparently been aboard the flying carpet the whole time – sprang open, and out flew two seemingly flimsy shawls. One shawl flew into Luka’s hands and the other wrapped itself around Bear. When Luka put the shawl around him he immediately began to feel as if he had been transported to somewhere in the tropics – almost too warm, almost as if he would prefer it to be a little cooler. ‘Some people are never satisfied,’ said the Insultana, reading his mind, and she turned away from him to hide her affectionate grin.
Now