Year of the Griffin. Diana Wynne Jones
also,” said Felim.
Lukin and Ruskin were writing down “Policant, Phil. of Mag.” in their notebooks. Ruskin looked up under his tufty red brows. “What other old books?”
Derk told them a few. All the others fetched out paper and scribbled, looking up expectantly after each title for more. Derk concealed a smile as he met Ruskin’s fierce blue glare and then Felim’s glowing black one, and then found Claudia’s green eyes raised to his, like deep living lamps. You could see she was half Marshfolk, he thought, looking on into Olga’s long, keen grey eyes, and then Lukin’s, rather similar, and both pairs gleaming with excitement. He seemed, he thought quite unrepentantly, to have started something. Then he looked upwards at Elda, feeling slightly ashamed that Elda trusted him so devotedly.
But he met one of those grown-up orange twinkles which Elda had been surprising him with lately. “Aren’t you being rather naughty?” Elda asked.
“Subversive is the word, Elda,” Derk said. “Oh yes. Your mother reminded me how beastly the food used to be here. We didn’t think it could have changed. Filbert!”
Filbert obediently moved his hind legs round in a half-circle, until he was facing the statue and sideways on to Derk. There was a large hamper standing on his saddle. Derk heaved it down and opened it in a gush of piercing, fruity scent.
“Oranges!” squawked Elda as the lid came creaking back. “My favourite fruit!”
Everyone else but Claudia was asking, “What are they?”
“Offworld fruit,” Derk said, heaving down a second hamper. “Don’t give them away too freely, Elda. I’ve only got one grove so far. This one’s lunch. Mara seems to have put in everything Lydda cooked and left in stasis for this last year. She reckoned the food might even be worse now the University’s so short of money. Help yourselves.”
The smells from the second hamper were so delicious that five hands and a taloned paw plunged in immediately. Murmurs of joy arose. Filbert fidgeted and made plaintive noises, until Derk thoughtfully turned over buns, pies, pasties, flans and found Filbert some carrot cake, then a pork pie for himself. For a while, everyone ate peacefully.
“Is the University short of money?” Olga asked as they munched.
“Badly so, to judge by the plaintive but stately begging letter they’ve just sent me,” Derk said. “They tell me they’re forced to ask for donations from the parents of all students.”
He was a little perplexed at the consternation this produced. Claudia choked on an éclair. Lukin went deep red, Olga white. Ruskin glared round the courtyard as if he expected to be attacked, while Felim, looking ready to faint, asked, “All students?”
“I believe so,” Derk said. But before he could ask what was worrying them all so, the courtyard echoed to heavy, striding feet. A peremptory voice called out, “You there! You with the horse!”
“Wermacht,” said Olga. “This was all we needed!”
They turned round from the hamper. The refectory steps were now empty, since it was lunchtime. Wermacht was standing alone, with all the folds of his robe ruler-straight, halfway between the steps and the statue, outrage all over him. “It is illegal to bring a horse inside this University courtyard,” he said. “Take it to the stables at once!”
Derk stood up. “If you insist.”
“I do insist!” Wermacht said. “As a member of the Governing Body of this University, I demand you get that filthy brute out of here!”
“I am not a filthy brute!” Filbert wheeled round and trotted towards Wermacht, quite as outraged as the wizard was. “I’m not even exactly a horse. Look.” He spread his great auburn wings with a clap.
To everyone’s surprise, Wermacht cringed away backwards with one arm over his head. “Get it out of here!”
“Oh gods! He’s scared of horses!” Elda said, jigging about. “He’s probably scared of me too. Somebody else do something before he puts a spell on Filbert!”
Lukin had his legs braced ready to charge over there. Ruskin was already down from the plinth and running. Derk forestalled both of them by swiftly translocating himself to Filbert’s flank and taking hold of the bridle. “I’m extremely sorry,” he said to Wermacht. “I wasn’t aware that horses were illegal here. It wasn’t a rule in my day.”
“Ignorance is no excuse!” Wermacht raged. He was mauve with fear and anger. “You should have thought of the disruption it would cause, bringing a monster like this into a place of study!”
“He’s still calling me names!” Filbert objected.
Derk pulled downwards hard on Filbert’s bit. “Shut up. I can only repeat that I’m sorry, Wizard. And I don’t think there’s been any disruption—”
“What do you know about it?” Wermacht interrupted. “I don’t know who you are, but I can see from the look of you that you haven’t a clue about the dignity of education. Just go. Take your monster and go, before I start using magic.” He shot an unloving look at Elda. “We’ve one monster too many here already!”
At this, Derk’s shoulders humped and his head bowed in a way Elda knew meant trouble.
But here, Corkoran came rushing across the courtyard from the Spellman Building with his palm-tree tie streaming over his left shoulder. One of his senior students had seen trouble brewing from the refectory windows and sent him a warn spell. “Oh, Wizard Derk,” Corkoran panted cordially. “I am so very pleased to meet you again. You may not remember me. Corkoran. We met during the last tour.” He held out a hand that quivered with his hurry.
Wermacht’s reaction would have been comic if, as Olga said, it had not been so disgusting. He bowed and more or less wrung his hands with servile welcome. “Wizard Derk!” he said. “The famous Wizard Derk, doing us the honour to come here! Corkoran, we were just discussing, Wizard Derk and I—”
Derk shook hands with Corkoran. “Thank you for intervening,” he said. “I remember you had the tour after Finn’s. I was just leaving, I’m afraid. I had been thinking of discussing a donation with you – though my funds are always rather tied up in pigs and oranges and things – but as things turn out, I don’t feel like it today. Perhaps later. Unless, of course,” he added, putting his foot into Filbert’s stirrup, ready to mount, “my daughter has any further reason to complain of being treated as a monster. In that case, I shall remove her at once.”
He swung himself into the saddle. Filbert’s great wings spread and clapped. Wermacht ducked as horse and rider plunged up into the air, leaving Corkoran staring upwards in consternation.
“Wermacht,” Corkoran said with his teeth clenched, and too quietly, he hoped, for the students around the statue to hear, “Wermacht, you have just lost us at least a thousand gold pieces. I don’t know how you did it, but if you do anything like that again, you lose your job. Is that clear?”
Griffins’ ears are exceptionally keen. Elda’s had picked up what Corkoran said to Wermacht. Ruskin had heard too. His large, hair-filled ears had evolved to guide dwarfs underground in pitch dark by picking up the movement of air in differently shaped spaces, and they were as keen as Elda’s. He and Elda told the others.
“How marvellous!” Olga stretched like a great blonde cat. “Then we can get Wermacht sacked any time we need to.”
“But is that marvellous?” Elda asked, worried. “I think I ought to stand on my own four feet – I think we all