26.
Summer had arrived. No cicadas yet, but definitely summer. Emily sailed in Olive, sometimes with Zeus, sometimes with Jesus or Azziz, sometimes just her and Negrita. She went surfing and hung out at the cafe, helping behind the bar. She looked after her garden, especially the lettuces. The lettuces seemed to just disappear, one day the garden was full of them, the next morning there was none, just a trail of slime around the garden and a few chewed stalks.
‘Darn slugs,’ she cursed, looking up at the moons and stomping her feet.
With so much happening on Camillo, Emily hadn’t been taking much notice of Planet Earth.
She was weeding between the sunflowers when she received an urgent call from Pollux.
‘Come quick!’ he said.
Emily snapped her fingers together and arrived in the cockpit of the sentry moon still holding her trowel and a handful of weeds.
‘Look,’ said Pollux, flashing up an image of Petra face down on the rocks with a spear sticking out of her back.
‘Oh no!’ gasped Emily. ‘Is she dead?’
‘No, she’ll probably live.’
Mario, Petra’s dad, carefully picked her up and carried her into the light housekeeper’s cottage and laid her on the kitchen table. He opened a big bottle of disinfectant and splashed it liberally around the wound and over the spear. He then gave the spear a shove, pushing it further until it came out the front of her left shoulder.
Yuck!
Emily came over all squeamish and had to sit down.
Unscrewing the spearhead and putting his foot on Petra’s back, Mario gave the spear a sharp jerk, pulling it out.
Double yuck!
Emily held her hands in front of her eyes and peeked through her fingers.
He let the blood flow for a few seconds then splashed disinfectant about and pushed some wads of gauze against the wound to stop the bleeding. After holding the gauze in place for a few minutes, he gave Petra a couple of injections, bandaged the wound and left her in the recovery position.
Emily tried to stand up, but was all shaky and had to sit down again.
‘Wa, wa, what happened?’ she asked Pollux.
The image on the screen quickly rewound to show Petra fishing off the rocks. She pulled her line in, flicked a silver fish into her bucket and turned around to break open a mussel and re-bait the hook. Emily could see a dark shape in the water. At first she thought it was a seal then the sharp point of a spear gun broke the surface.
Pissst!
With a hiss of gas, the spear shot out of the water and stuck into Petra’s back. She staggered and fell over then struggled back to her feet, turning to see a camouflaged diver coming out of the water, knife poised ready for the kill.
Suddenly big tentacles snaked out of the water and wrapped themselves around the diver’s ankle, pulling him down. Swinging his knife madly, he cut at the tentacles then stabbed the octopus in the head. As the tentacles lost their grip, he pulled his knife out and started towards Petra again. She screamed and tried to run but tripped and fell. Looking pleased with himself the diver raised his knife to finish her off, but his expression quickly changed as a throwing knife stuck in his neck and a volley of rifle shots jerked him sideways.
‘Wow, that was close,’ said Emily. ‘That octopus gave its life for her.’
‘She did him a favour once, she saved his life,’ said Pollux then looked thoughtful. ‘It’s funny how a little goodwill repays itself. I see it all the time.’
‘Is The Book okay?’
‘Yes, Petra has no idea of the power of it.’
‘Let’s look back over what has happened when she first opened it.’
The screen showed Petra coming out of the cottage. She’d had enough of her little brother and sister crying and stealing her mum’s time. She was mad jealous.
‘As you know,’ said Pollux, ‘The Book changes a mood to a passion.’
Removing her box of special things from its hiding place in the twisted roots of the old olive tree, Petra took out The Book. As she opened it, her expression changed, her mouth became thin and her look determined and focused. Taking a rusty old hand grenade out of her box she walked towards the house. Spot the Suez dog ran after her barking. Molly, the cagoon jumped on his back and clawed at his eyes. He shook her off and grabbed Petra’s ankle, tripping her up. The hand grenade rolled out of her hand and across the courtyard. The screen zoomed in to show the pin on Petra’s thumb. As she got back up, Brain the Lion pounced, covering her up just as the grenade exploded.
‘She caught a bit of shrapnel from that one,’ said Pollux.
‘It’s amazing,’ said Emily. ‘She’s such a sweetheart and yet she was going to kill her little brother and sister.’
‘The next time she opened The Book, she was in a good mood and did good,’ said Pollux, as his screen showed Petra disappearing from her special spot under the olive tree and reappearing on a little island with a church on it. A marmalade cat was stalking along the top of a tall stone wall, trying to catch a dove. Every time the cat tensed itself to pounce, the dove flapped a little way further along the wall. But the dove was not the only thing being stalked; seeing the cat, a toddler climbed through the railings of her roof top terrace and tottered along the wall after the cat.
‘Puss puss, come puss puss, puss puss come,’ she babbled, stretching her arms out to stroke the cat as she toddled towards it. The cat, still perusing the dove, crept along the wall staying just out of the toddlers grasp.
‘Puss puss, come puss puss.’
Petra was standing in the shade of a fig tree watching. She called to the toddler who stopped and teetered on the edge, then turned her attention back to the cat. Petra clambered up the wall, climbing the ivy vines and finding toeholds in the weathered rock. She reached the top and pussy footed along the wall, grabbing the toddler just as she was about to tumble over the edge.
Petra soothed the child and retraced her steps back along the wall, nimbly climbing onto the terrace of the house. Putting the wayward toddler down on the doorstep, she gave a brisk frap on the door and disappeared.
‘She’s smart. After that she realised that The Book makes her moods bigger and stronger, so uses it for good, taking her bad moods out elsewhere. Here she is throwing rocks at old bottles.’
‘She’s a good shot!’ said Emily.
Pollux ran through Petra’s adventures over the year since she’d found The Book, ending up with a shot of the octopus leaving a necklace with a spiral bone pennant on the rocks at Petra’s favourite fishing spot.
‘She’s wearing it now,’ said Emily.
‘She doesn’t know it, but it’s the key that unlocks the full power of The Book.’
‘This is Agnes,’ said Pollux, showing a photo of a thin-lipped woman with short cropped hair and beady eyes. She’s Petra’s correspondence teacher. She came to Mulo when Petra reached school age and befriended her. Petra sends her a letter every week with her school work and tells her all her secrets. What Petra and her foster parents don’t know is that Agnes is employed by Petra’s evil mother Ariella, to spy on her. Luckily Agnes has dismissed Petra’s stories about Theo, Brian and The Book, as fantasies; a lot of the lighthouse kids invent friends.’
Pollux paused for a moment then said, ‘This information is just coming in. We have a lot to shift through when we work back from an incident. When Agnes was called in to report to Ariella a week ago, she showed her the letters from Petra. Ariella realising that Petra had The Book, ordered Agnes to get it and to dispose of the child. She impressed upon Agnes how important The Book is and that she mustn’t open it under any circumstances. Here’s Agnes leaving Ariella’s castle in Porto Fino.’
The screen showed the middle aged but shapely Agnes stepping out of the studded front door of the castle wearing a conservative knee length skirt.
As the gates creaked shut behind Agnes, the guard who’d escorted her said to the gatekeeper, ‘What a lot of fuss about nothing; about a book! I can’t wait to
read it!’
Emily kept a close eye on Petra as the summer wore on. As soon as Petra was back on her feet again, Mario and Jasmina taught her how to defend herself. Oddly they taught her meditation and yoga first, then once she was able to relax, moved on to karate and boxing. She’d always been a good shot with a rifle, so they taught her how to use a pistol and automatic weapons, hand grenades and explosives.
Petra had to choose her weapons. She wanted a gun but Mario said that it was too dangerous and that she’d probably hurt someone with it, herself! So she chose throwing knives and a folding bow and arrow instead. The knives lived in little sheaths sewn into the back of her dress and trousers. Having learnt to throw knives from Jasmina when she was little, she was good with them. The bow and arrow took a bit of getting used to but after a few weeks she could fold it open and get a silent arrow off within a couple of seconds. It lived in a quiver slung across her back and she carried it everywhere, often firing off a couple of arrows at a piece of wood or a tree trunk to perfect her skills.
What fascinated Emily about Petra was that all the weird and wacky things that happened around her seemed so perfectly normal to her. It was the only life she knew and she took what ever came along in her stride. Petra was living such a different life to herself yet so similar.
Seeing Petra learning to defend herself, Emily practiced her karate moves but it was hard not having anyone to practice with.
Soon after Petra was harpooned, men started arriving on the rock, about a dozen of them in all. They were tough, good-humoured men that knew Mario, Jasmina and Petra well.
Pollux said that they were mercenary friends of Mario’s who’d got to know Petra when they’d built the fortifications on Mulo; the strong walls that protected the beautiful garden. They set up an amazing array of weapons that were cached on the rock: antimissile batteries and surface to air missiles, anti-aircraft guns and heavy machine guns, mounting them in strategic locations. They kept a sharp lookout; standing watches twenty-four hours a day to guard the rock.
By early September, Petra was a little fighting machine, and it was just as well because Agnes came to visit. Castor gave Emily a call and she arrived in the cockpit to find Zeus already there, his nose glued to the screen.
Agnes, wearing a brown skirt that came annoyingly just beyond her knees, was walking around with Petra being given a tour of the garden.
‘She’s got a gun,’ said Zeus. ‘She’s come to kill Petra.’
‘Let’s stop her,’ said Emily.
‘No,’ replied Zeus, ‘just watch.’
It was almost more than Emily could bear, Petra slowly escorting Agnes around the garden, enthusiastically talking about this and that, totally unaware that in a few minutes she would probably be dead; a bullet in her heart.
When they reached Petra’s special spot at the bottom of the garden, hidden from sight behind the bamboo thicket, Agnes pulled out the gun and pointed it at Petra.
‘Give me the book!’ she demanded.
Petra’s face dropped, her mouth agape, as she realised that her trust had been betrayed. She stood and stared at Agnes, then strength came back to her and her anger became focused.
‘No way Jose!’ she said.
Agnes raised the pistol, aiming it at Petra’s head, ‘I’ll find it anyway,’ she said, her face lighting up.
Woof, woof, woof, barked Spot and bit Agnes’s ankle.
As Agnes grimaced in pain and turned to shoot the dog, Petra moved like lightning, throwing a knife into Agnes’s neck, causing the shot to go wide. As the gun spun back around towards Petra, a second knife found its mark. Agnes staggered then raised the gun again.
Swoosh! Splat!
A mighty swipe of Brian the Lion’s paw took Agnes’s head off.
‘Yes!’ shouted God, jumping in the air as if his football team had just scored a goal.
‘Oooou,’ Emily made a funny sound, shocked by the violence as the head rolled away.
Two weeks later, on the day on the autumn equinox, Zeus and Emily were back up in Castor’s moon, again watching Mulo.
It had been an interesting couple of weeks in Europe. Zeus and Emily had spent a lot of time up in the moons, playing backgammon and watching events as they unfolded. Ariella, who was elected President of Europe earlier in the year, had been stirring up feeling against Croatia for some time, her propaganda reminding the public of the atrocities that Croatia committed during World War 2 and more recently during the breakup of Yugoslavia. She said that the Balkans was a powder keg and Europe must intervene before it exploded again. During the past couple of years, bombs had exploded in European cities and there had been two attempts on Ariella’s life. She gave evidence that Croatia was behind the attacks, planned to destabilise Europe. As a final straw, Croatia had kidnapped her daughter, Petra, and was using her as a human shield.
Ariella made a moving speech to the European Parliament. Dressed in black and looking strong and focused, she said, ‘Croatia has misjudged Europe. We will not give in to blackmail. It’s tough, but I must put duty before family and do what is right for Europe, even if it means that I will lose my only child. Europe will not be pushed around, we are strong, we are united, we will invade Croatia!’ her face then crumpled and, as the Parliament gave her a standing ovation, she was escorted back to her seat, head in hands.
Mulo was under attack from all sides. The Croatians desperately wanted to free Petra and hand her back to Europe to avoid war. European forces were set on taking Croatia, and if that meant quelling a little resistance on Mulo on the way past, so be it.
‘Mario’s brief,’ said Castor, ‘has been to protect Petra. Funds have always been available, so he has the best men and equipment. He doesn’t know who his employer is and has never asked any questions. The fact that him and Jasmina regard Petra as their own daughter, just gives him all the more reason to repel any attack on the rock.’
Since the first shots were fired at dawn, Mario’s men had sunk a Croatian gunboat and bought down a European fighter. As the day wore on, the fighting intensified. Jasmina had taken her twins and Petra to the safety of a secret bunker, reached by swimming down through the well.
The slugs’ high resonance radar couldn’t penetrate the bunker so they watched the action up top. The air was full of smoke, noise and flying rubble. A shell hit the lighthouse, sending the light toppling into the sea with a huge splash.
‘Look, it’s Petra,’ said Emily, as Petra climbed out of the well and ran through the smoke to her special spot. As Petra grabbed her box of special things, a siren sounded and the men abandoned their weapons and ran towards the well. As they dived in, a missile slammed into the island, destroying everything in a sheet of flame
‘Oh no!’ gasped Emily.
The breeze blew the smoke away to reveal the smouldering ruins of the island. The house and the beautiful garden were obliterated and the walls shattered and broken.
‘Got her!’ said Castor and the screen zoomed out from Mulo, panned across to North Africa and zoomed in a group of black mountains, then further in to a round crater filled with reddy yellow sand. Then in, in, in to show Petra sprawled in the sand. Brian was beside her, Spot the Suez dog in his jaws and Molly clinging to his back. Blood oozed from cuts in his fur. Theo, the owl was perched on a nearby rock, looking all ruffled; feathers gently floating down around him.
Petra got up painfully and looked around, then tended to Brian’s cuts. There was lots of blood but he looked like he’d survive. She sat on a rock and thought about Mulo. She hoped that Mario, Jasmina, the twins and the men were okay.
Zeus sent down some loud, ‘Yes they are,’ positive thoughts, but Petra didn’t look any happier.
Now that Emily was tuned into these things, she could see what Castor was on about when he complained about people thinking loudly. Petra was really upset and felt betrayed. She pictured what had happened in the bunker.
Jasmina said, ‘It’s time you knew the truth. Mario and me are not your real
mum and dad. We were contracted to look after and protect you. We’re not sure but from what’s been broadcast this week; it appears that Ariella, President of Europe, is your real mum.’
Petra burst into tears and yelled, ‘First Agnes, now you and Dad, I can’t trust no one no more,’ She started hitting Jasmina then ran from the bunker.
‘But we love you,’ Jasmina called after her, as Petra dived into the water to escape from the bunker.
The same conversation went round and round in Petra’s head, replaying over and over again.
‘She’s not having a good day,’ said Zeus. ‘Let’s take her mind off it.’
He shot a bolt of lightning down into the crater.
Crack!
The flash of lighting and crack of thunder overhead made Petra start.
She jumped up and in a second was in the prone position; an arrow pulled back in her bow. Suddenly alert to what was going on; looking around searching for a target.
A faint whistling noise filled the crater and dust devils swirled around the outside, converging on the centre where they formed a massive tornado of swirling dust and sand. Petra pulled her head back into her shirt like a tortoise, not sticking it back out until all was silent again.
She looked up in surprise to see a small pyramid in front of her. Two empty plinths stood either side of a stone stairway that lead up to a heavy door, half way up to the apex.
Two-wit, two-woo, called Theo quietly as he glided down and landed on one of the plinths, striking up a pose with his wings out and freezing like a statue. Brian slid down the slope then clambered stiffly up the steps onto the other plinth and let out a mighty roar that echoed around the crater. Then he stopped, frozen like a statue.
‘Oh you silly things,’ laughed Petra.
They moved a little then froze again. Petra laughed again, then carrying her box of special things, slid down the slope and climbed up the steps to the flat bit by the door. She struck up an Egyptian pose and froze. Brian and Theo changed poses. Petra followed suit. Molly and Spot look down on them with bemused expressions on their faces.
‘This is your home, isn’t it?’ said Petra. ‘This is where you come from; you’re magical mythical creatures from the desert. Let’s open the door.’
She stood in front of the heavy wooden door, looked at the hieroglyphics and scratched her head.
‘Let’s knock,’ she said.
Knock, knock, knock.
The door creaked open.
‘I’m getting that feeling of déjà-vu,’ said Emily.
Molly the cagoon was first in, arching her back and rubbing against the heavy door on the way past, Spot hot on her heels.
‘It’s your home too, isn’t it?’ Petra said to Spot.
Woof, woof, woof.
Once her eyes had got used to the darkness, Petra could see a little plinth just the right size for The Book.
‘And your home too,’ she said, placing The Book on it.
She went out the door, skipped down the steps, scrambled back up the slippery slope and sat on a rock and looked at the pyramid. She giggled to herself to see Theo and Brian still playing daft statues.
‘Zeus. Now’s your chance,’ said Emily.
‘She’s still wearing the key, but yes, now is my chance. It would make life very easy,’ then putting on his wise, God voice, he added. ‘The easy route is not always the best. Let’s let Petra decide.’
Sitting in the security moon they could clearly read Petra’s thoughts, ‘Shall I or shant I? Should I take that book or leave it and walk away.’
Castor put the Clash, ‘Shall I stay or shall I go now’ on the moon’s stereo.
‘Oh, can it!’ said Zeus. ‘This is a deciding moment in the history of Earth.’
If I stay there will be trouble, blared the loud speaker. If I go there will be double-
The music cut off abruptly.
‘I’ll miss you guys,’ said Petra, appearing to have made up her mind, then went quiet for a moment.
‘I’d miss you guys much too much!’
She ran down the sandy slope in giant strides, jumped up the stairs and grabbed The Book.
‘Maybe I can use it to help my Mum,’ said Petra, as she came out of the pyramid. ‘She seems to have a few issues.’
Zeus called to Theo, ‘Take good care of her and make sure she has plenty of adventures. She must grow strong and become streetwise. Keep her away from Ariella until she’s ready.’
Theo swivelled his head to the heavens and murmured, two-wit two-woo, and gave them a big owly wink.