Floods 9 Read online

  We will go to their yak farm, Aubergine wrote to his wife, and transplant Winchflat’s bug into one of their six-legged freaks and we will then take it across the Russian border and set it free in the most massively huge, mind-numbingly, boringly repetitive pine forest in the world where it will never be seen again.

  Is there any way you could make copies of the tracking bug? Chrysanthemum wrote back. If there is, we could put one in the yak, another in an eagle and one in each of the Kebab brothers.

  Brilliant! Aubergine wrote, falling in love with Chrysanthemum yet again, which meant he was now in love with his wife three times at once.

  He could just make out the slight bump the bug made underneath his lead head shield. He concentrated, summoning all his magic powers, and focused on the bump. He could feel it wriggling under his skin and suddenly there were two of them. He focused again and then there were four. He hoped that Winchflat would just think the distance the bug was transmitting over was causing some sort of shadow and not suspect that anyone had actually cloned the device.

  Sure, he is the cleverest wizard in the family of cleverest wizards, Aubergine thought, but he just thinks he’s so clever that no one else would ever be able to copy any of his wonderful devices.

  Sure enough, when the plane landed in Ulan Bator, one of the few places on earth that sounds as if it’s been spelt backwards, the two Floods cousins were waiting. Surge and Alexeye had disguised themselves as each other – which, considering they were identical twins, was a bit pointless – and were dressed as Belgian tourists. This had been a really stupid thing to do because Mongolia gets so few visitors that anyone who does go there for a holiday is instantly surrounded by newspaper reporters, opticians who assume they must need glasses, a very small crowd of screaming children and a very large crowd of screaming sheep.

  The chaos at the airport allowed Aubergine and Chrysanthemum to slip through Immigration virtually unnoticed, especially when Aubergine showed the officials his I-Am-From-An-International-Charity-That-Is-Thinking-Of-Giving-Your-Country-A-Huge-Amount-Of-Money-Card. Outside, the terminal was almost deserted apart from a three-legged yak tied to a broken-down old cart.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Chrysanthemum to the yak driver, ‘would you mind moving? You’re standing in the taxi rank.’

  ‘I am the taxi rank,’ said the driver. ‘Where do you want to go?’

  ‘Take us to a nice, quiet hotel, please,’ said Aubergine in a clear, steady voice so that Winchflat wouldn’t miss a word.

  ‘Hotel? What’s that?’

  ‘It’s the place where visitors stay.’

  ‘Ahh, you mean the pig sty,’ said the yak driver. ‘Bit of a problem there, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Why is that, then?’

  ‘Well, there is an international beetroot convention in town and all the beds are taken.’

  ‘International?’ said Aubergine.

  ‘Indeed, sir, people have come from far and wide,’ said the driver. ‘Some as far as right down the end of the road past the big rock, and they are all wide.’

  ‘Would this help?’ said Aubergine, pressing a fifty-tugrik note into the driver’s hand.54

  ‘Oh my,’ said the driver. ‘So the rumours are true. There is such a thing as a fifty-tugrik note.’

  ‘So can we get a room?’ said Chrysanthemum.

  ‘For such wealth I will sell you my house,’ said the yak driver. ‘My wife and fifteen children and I will move into my mother’s cave. Well, I call it a cave. It’s more of a hole in the roots of a big tree.’

  ‘We only need it for a few days,’ said Chrysanthemum. ‘You can have it back then.’

  The yak driver was speechless. He had been impressed when he had seen that the two visitors actually had all their teeth, but the idea that the two foreigners would pay fifty tugriks just to borrow his house for a few days was beyond belief.

  When they have gone, he thought, I will call the Guinness Book of Records (Mongolian Edition).Though I doubt they will be believing such wealth and extravagance.

  ‘And when we leave,’ Chrysanthemum added, ‘we will give you two more fifties. One for your inconvenience and one to forget you ever saw us.’

  This will probably get into the All of The Russias Edition, the yak driver thought before he fainted.

  When he regained consciousness, he drove them to his house and led them inside. He loaded his wife and children onto the cart and took them away. Fifteen minutes later the yak came back, pushed the door open and went to sleep in the kitchen. The driver had explained that this might happen as the creature was a Homing Yak.

  ‘But do not worry,’ he said. ‘He does not snore, though I would advise you to keep the windows open.’

  A strange bit of advice as the house did not so much have windows as holes in the wall through which the cold Mongolian wind whistled a sad, plaintive air, a seriously-cold-thirty-degrees-below-freezing plaintive air that made the two travellers grateful for the soft clouds of warm steam coming from the piles of yak dung that covered the kitchen floor.

  So we need to remove the four tracking bugs from your head, wrote Chrysanthemum.

  Can you do that sort of thing? Aubergine wrote.

  No problem, wrote Chrysanthemum. I was in the Girl Guides.

  So Aubergine drank seven bottles of Old Kremlin Ale, including the lumps, and passed out. When he came round he felt as if he had been kicked in the head by a yak, which he had because Chrysanthemum had done the operation on the kitchen table, right next to the sleeping yak, which was thrashing about in its sleep due to a nightmare involving a giant beetroot and a short-circuiting electric balalaika. Its thrashing had knocked the table over, which had hit Aubergine on the left side of his head, and then its flailing feet had hit him on the other side.

  ‘All done, my darling,’ said Chrysanthemum, wrapping Aubergine’s head in a bandage and mopping up the blood. ‘I’ve put the bugs inside the bandage so they will appear to be in the same place.’

  Aubergine Wealth was not an electronics expert. In fact, he found torches rather confusing. However, as every five-year-old knows, it doesn’t require much time or skill to build a wi-fi multi-channel transponding auto-tracking remote control, and in five minutes Aubergine had bodged together such a device out of a toilet roll tube, a bent hairpin and some lichen. The device allowed him to control which one of the four tracking bugs would be sending out a signal.55 He then deactivated three of them. Of course, Aubergine could have simply destroyed the original bug, but he had always resented Winchflat’s vastly superior brain and this way he could prove he was just as clever as any of the Floods.

  Back at the airport, Mordonna’s two distant cousins were clever enough to realise that spying on Aubergine by hiding behind a tree and watching him would not work.

  ‘He will see us,’ said Surge, who was the brain of the operation.

  ‘This is true, brother,’ said Alexeye, who left the difficult stuff like thinking to his brother. ‘And we will see him.’

  ‘We’re supposed to, stupid, but he is not supposed to see us.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But do not worry, for I have a foolproof plan,’ said Surge. ‘I have tied a ball of red wool to the taxi. All we have to do is follow it and we will know where they have gone.’

  Like all taxi drivers the world over, the yak man had taken a long and complicated route to reach his destination. He had taken so many turns and returns and fresh turns that the wool ran out right outside the kebab shop, long before he had delivered the travellers to his house. The wool had, however, woven itself into a rather nice bathmat.

  That evening Aubergine and Chrysanthemum disguised themselves as two peasant girls by rubbing yak dung in their hair and wrapping their feet in wet felt and went to The Jolly Gulag Yak Kebab Shoppe just as the two brothers were closing up for the night.

  ‘Hello, boys,’ Chrysanthemum said in a Mongolian peasant flirty voice that sounded like a rabbit being dragged through sharp gravel. ‘Fancy a beetr
oot?’

  She waved a bunch of beetroots at the brothers and lured them into a dark alley, where Aubergine was waiting to greet them with unconsciousness caused by a bang on the head with a gigantic world-record-winning beetroot he’d stolen from the international beetroot convention down the road.

  It only took a moment to implant the tracking bugs into their skulls and when they came round a few hours later, they assumed it had been the sight of the world’s largest beetroot that had made them faint.

  The eagle wasn’t quite so easy. For a start, eagles don’t like beetroots,56 but they do like rats, and as there were more rats in Ulan Bator than beetroots it didn’t take long to catch a couple. However, attracting an eagle’s attention is quite difficult. You can’t just wave a rat in the air and shout, ‘Here birdy, birdy.’

  Oh look, a human waving a rat about, the eagle will think.Now what shall I do, fly down and try and get it, or simply grab one of the ninety-six other rats I can see that haven’t got a human attached to them?

  Difficult choice, it will think. NOT.

  As luck would have it, however, there was one rather stupid and very shortsighted eagle floating above the town that day. It was very hungry on account of not being able to see the ninety-six rats running around below it, but it could see one rat that appeared to be waving at it.

  Ooh, dinner, thought the eagle and swooped down.

  Yum, yum, get off, ouch, yum yum, nice rat, it thought in that order as Aubergine grabbed its leg, Chrysanthemum tied the bug to its other leg then Aubergine stuffed the rat in its open beak.

  Then they gave the taxi driver not one, not two, but three fifty-tugrik notes57 and the three of them set off for Surge and Alexeye’s secret six-legged yak farm, making sure before they set off that the bug tied to Aubergine’s head was the only one that was activated. It was a slow journey because the taxi driver kept taking the three notes out of his pocket and counting them, and every time he did, he fainted with happiness.

  ‘We will go and hide out in the ever-so-vast endless pine forests of Russia,’ Aubergine said in a nice clear voice so Winchflat would catch every word. ‘No one will look for us there and if they do, it is so vast and endless they will never find us.’

  ‘Tell them we will work our way east until we reach the coast where we will settle down to enjoy our vast wealth,’ said Chrysanthemum.58

  ‘What’s that, my darling?’ Aubergine continued. ‘You would like to live in a small village on the far eastern coast of Russia? I would like that too.’

  ‘The money, mention the money,’ said Chrysanthemum.

  ‘With all this enormous wealth to carry, our journey may be slow, but just think, when we reach our destination we will probably be the richest people for five thousand miles.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Chrysanthemum, falling in love with Aubergine again, so they were now in love with each other a total of five times with an average of two and a half times each.

  ‘We will dine on caviar and champagne and that will just be breakfast,’ said Winchflat.

  When they reached the yak farm, they captured the biggest strongest six-legged yak, implanted the fourth bug under his skin and led him away to the Russian border.

  Ooh, that’s a big forest, the yak thought to himself. I bet it’s full of thousands of girl yaks and nice tender grass to eat and lovely sparkling mountain streams to drink from.

  When they got back to Ulan Bator, Aubergine gave the taxi driver a sedative before handing him their remaining Mongolian money, which included several legendary one-hundred-tugrik notes.59 The total value of tugriks they gave the taxi driver was more than fifty-seven Australian dollars, enough to buy a small place in the country called All Of It.

  Even though Winchflat was now tracking the yak and not Aubergine any more, the two runaways were still cautious. Rather than go directly to Transylvania Waters they flew via several places to Monte Carlo, where they spent a happy week fraudulently winning lots of millions at the Casino until they were politely asked to leave. The authorities knew they must be doing something illegal to keep on winning over and over again, but no matter how hard they tried, they could not work out what it was they were doing.60

  * * *

  48 Until he met Chrysanthemum, Aubergine’s best friend had been his pocket calculator and even that hadn’t liked him very much because Aubergine could do financial calculations a lot faster than it could. Adding two and two, he couldn’t do, but adding two billion and four thousand and nine he could do with his eyes shut. In fact, he could even do it with his eyes wide open just as long as the numbers he was adding were money and not vegetables or sheep.

  49 Forty-three.

  50 Twenty-three cubic centimetres.

  51 Of course, in some countries, the kings and queens do have to make sacrifices to get the job. In Britain, for example, they have to have their ears stretched so they stick out a really long way and have their chins removed and talk with a really stupid accent. (See The Dragons 1: Camelot for more information about talking posh.)

  52See the back of this book for some little-known Floods facts.

  53 Aubergine made a mental note not to buy a boat while they were there.

  54 About four Australian cents.

  55 The hardest thing was finding a toilet roll tube. Mongolian toilet paper is actually a small hedgehog wrapped in rhubarb leaves.

  56 Except for the Scottish Golden Beet Eagle, though that actually prefers artichokes.

  57 Twelve cents.

  58 Remember – Winchflat can hear everything Aubergine speaks, but nothing anyone else says.

  59 Eight cents. I keep reminding you of the Australian to Mongolian exchange rates because I’m assuming that many of you are as rubbish at maths as I am. So for the last time – four Australian cents is about the same as fifty Mongolian tugriks.

  60 I know, but I’m not telling you. I might go on holiday there myself one day and want to use the same system.

  ‘I know Aubergine Wealth said they were going east to the coast,’ said Winchflat, ‘but they are going in the opposite direction.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve discovered the tracking bug,’ said Mordonna, ‘and they’re trying to throw us off the scent.’

  ‘It’s possible, but I think it’s unlikely,’ said Winchflat. ‘We all know Mr Wealth is one of the greatest geniuses ever when it comes to money and all that sort of stuff, but I happen to know he’s useless with electronics. I gave him a torch once and he needed a user guide before he could turn it on.’

  ‘Maybe his girlfriend found it,’ said Mordonna. ‘And be very careful before you make your next statement.’

  She knew that Winchflat thought girls and computery stuff should not be, could not be and hardly ever were in the same place at the same time. Just to make sure he didn’t say so, she clicked her fingers and all the red knobs on his control panels turned blue and all the blue ones also turned blue. Winchflat got the point.

  ‘There’s something wrong,’ he said. ‘They were travelling west through the Russian forests making strange grunting noises and now they are lying in a gutter in Ulan Bator with a hangover and seeing double.’

  Aubergine had switched the yak tracker off and both the Flood cousins on. He counted to fifty, then switched them back.

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ said Winchflat. ‘Must have been some electrical interference.’

  Then Aubergine did the same with the eagle tracker for fifty seconds.

  ‘It’ll make Winchflat think there’s some technical problem with his equipment,’ he said as he switched between the cousins, the eagle and yak again.

  ‘What did you just do, Mother?’ said Winchflat staring at all the blue knobs. ‘My machine’s gone haywire.’

  ‘I just changed the colour of the knobs. That’s all.’

  ‘Well, something’s not right,’ said Winchflat, more than a little annoyed.61

  ‘Maybe it’s gone wrong,’ Betty suggested.

  ‘My machines never go wrong,’
said Winchflat. ‘I mean, they’ve all got secondary backup systems and special robot self-repairing thingies with spare screwdrivers and gaffer tape. They simply cannot go wrong.’

  He buried his head in his hands. ‘But I think it has,’ he added.

  ‘Have you tried re-booting the whole system?’ Festival suggested.

  ‘Both boots and fresh socks too,’ said Winchflat. ‘But it’s still telling me that one minute Mr Wealth is heading west through the Russian forest, then a minute later he’s seeing double in a Mongolian gutter before tearing a rat to pieces in a small pet shop on the edge of Ulan Bator.’

  Aubergine Wealth switched back the yak and left it at that.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Winchflat with a sigh of relief. ‘It seems to have stabilised. Must have been electrical interference. I’ve built filters in to allow for that, but there must have been a really big solar flare or something. They are still travelling west through Russia and it looks as if they heading towards Kazakhstan.’

  ‘What are they talking about?’ said Mordonna. ‘Maybe that’ll give us a clue.’

  ‘I think the audio has gone faulty,’ said Winchflat. ‘Since the solar flare interfered with the signal the audio has sent nothing but strange grunting sounds. I fed the sound into my computer and it says it’s the noise of a yak eating grass. So I think we’ll just have to rely on the GPS bit.’

  ‘Unless it is a yak eating grass?’ Betty suggested.

  ‘Well, little sister, how on earth could it . . . Oh,’ said Winchflat.

  ‘Wait!’ said Chrysanthemum. ‘I know it was a brilliant plan and everything, but I think there’s something we overlooked.’