The Beasts of Clawstone Castle

So the two brothers, Slavek and Izaak had taken their family – their old mother, Slavek’s wife and four male cousins – and trekked across Europe to look for a place where they could live in peace. And after months of hardship they had reached Great Britain, thinking they would find a welcome there and a home and a chance to work.

They were horribly wrong. The whole family was shut up in a squalid and overcrowded camp surrounded by barbed wire and told they had no right to work and no permits and no papers and would be sent back to Mundania.

Twice they had been shifted to other camps that were even more crowded and wretched than the first. Then the third time they were moved they managed to escape, and it was as they were trudging the roads that a man had come and offered them work at Blackscar. Not paid work of course (they were not allowed to be paid) and work that was harder than any that was ever done even by the humblest peasant in Mundania, but they knew that if they complained they would be sent back to the camp. They were really prisoners at Blackscar and each day they woke up so wretched and sad and homesick that they did not know how they would bear it. But they did bear it. They had no choice.

So now they finished their goat curd and while Slavek and Izaak went out to fetch the cargo from the whaling ship, the old woman with the gold tooth piled up the dirty dishes.

But before she started on the washing up, she turned on the ancient transistor radio which one of the workmen had given them.

On the whaler they had started unloading. There were four long canvas bags – not a big load but valuable, incredibly valuable; the sailors expected to be paid an enormous amount of money, and they had earned it. The risks they had taken to get their booty had been great; if they had been caught they wouldn’t just have been fined, they could have been imprisoned.

Although the boat flew the Norwegian flag, the men were not Norwegians. They were crooks and riffraff from several countries, but they had one thing in common: they were hunters who knew the sea and cared nothing for the creatures that lived in it if they could make a profit by killing them. To get the booty they were now unloading, they had harpooned close on thirty whales – and not those whales that it was legal to hunt, but rare and protected ones.

The whales they had killed were narwhals, those shy and gentle beasts which live in the icy waters of the Arctic and are rarely seen by man.

Narwhals are not large as whales go, they are seldom more than five metres long. The Vikings called them ‘corpse whales’, not because they ate corpses – they wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing – but because of the blue-grey colour of their skins.

But though they are small, there is one thing about male narwhals that is extraordinary. Growing out of their foreheads is an enormous, single, spiral horn.

Because they are so rare and so amazing, narwhal horns have been prized throughout history. Medieval princes believed they could detect poison which had been put in someone’s food by an enemy. In Asian countries, doctors ground them up for potions and medicines. Carved narwhal horns adorned the palaces of kings.

And just as poachers will hunt elephants for their tusks and leave them to rot once the ivory has been removed, so the sailors who had come now to Blackscar had cut the horns from the narwhals they had slaughtered and thrown the carcasses back into the sea.

Dr Manners too prized narwhal horns – but not to detect poison or to use for potions. He wanted them for quite a different reason. It was a reason that nobody but him and his assistant, Dr Fangster, knew anything about.

Slavek and Izaak had begun to wheel the canvas bags up to the office beside the main laboratory. The bags were padlocked; no one was allowed to open them; what was in them was a strict secret, but the Mundanians were used to shifting loads they knew nothing about. When they were safely stored, and Dr Manners had examined the contents, he would arrange for the sailors to be paid.

They stowed the bags and went back to the hut to fetch their tools for the day’s work.

‘Good heavens – what is it, what is the matter?’ asked Izaak as he threw open the door.

The old woman was sobbing in one corner; Slavek’s wife moaned in the other. The four cousins, who should already have been mucking out the animal houses, were huddled over the radio. Their faces too were streaked with tears.

‘What is it?’ repeated Izaak. ‘For goodness’ sake, what’s wrong?’

The cousins turned from the radio, and wiped their eyes.

‘It has happened,’ they cried, throwing their arms round the brothers. ‘Oh, Slavek, Izaak – it has happened at last! That we should live to see this day!’