Three Bags Full (25 page)

Othello glared at the bespectacled man. Zora flapped her ears, and Mopple swallowed. The remark about lamb specialities had left a nasty taste behind.

Fosco winked at them. “He says that every time. Take a look at me. Would you say I look like a lamb speciality?”

“Off we go,” announced the bespectacled man. “Let’s hear it for Jim O’Connor and Smartie.”

“Oh wow!” chuckled Fosco. “He’s going first! Just watch this!”

The sheep craned their necks. The red-faced farmer had stood up and was leading the dappled ram to the platform by his halter. Gradually the audience fell silent.

The farmer bowed to them. “Smartie, the only footballing sheep in the world,” he said. He put a mottled black-and-white ball down on the floor in front of Smartie.

Fosco turned to George’s sheep. “He’s supposed to nudge the ball along with his hoof. I’m only telling you because you’d never guess it from his act.”

Smartie conscientiously sniffed the ball all over. Then he rubbed his head on one foreleg. The farmer looked at him with an expression showing that he was perfectly confident of victory. Now Smartie swung his foreleg back and forth, and stared at the ball again as if he’d just seen it for the first time. He was in no hurry. A few whistles could be heard from the audience. The farmer was getting impatient. He went over to Smartie and pushed the ball a little too hard with his own foot, sending it rolling over the platform. Smartie trotted after it and tried to bite it. In doing so he only pushed the ball farther on. The ball bounced off the platform, and without a moment’s hesitation Smartie jumped off after it, landing on top of the first of the tables where spectators were sitting. Glasses clinked, and the humans at the table bleated in protest.

The sheep rolled their eyes at such nonsense.

“Look at him!” chuckled Fosco. “He’s been doing the same silly trick here for years. The only bigger fool in his flock is the farmer himself.”

Smartie, the only footballing sheep in the world, earned only halfhearted applause. The bespectacled man smiled apologetically as he climbed up onstage again. “Simon Foster and Einstein, defending his title,” he announced.

“That’s me,” said Fosco. “They think my name is Einstein.” There was a conspiratorial twinkle in his little eyes, as if being called by the wrong name was a particularly clever move on his part.

Fosco’s farmer was tall and strong and even stouter than Fosco. He was holding a bag in one hand, and his other hand was in his pocket. The two of them walked calmly out onstage. For his girth, Fosco was surprisingly light on his hooves.

The farmer didn’t say a single word. He took a bottle of Guinness and a glass out of his bag, poured the Guinness into the glass, and put it down on the floor in front of Fosco. Fosco took the glass in his teeth and raised it. Next he tipped his head back and gulped down the contents of the glass. Applause. Fosco put the glass neatly back on the floor again. The farmer took a second bottle out of the bag. He still hadn’t taken his other hand out of his trouser pocket. A third bottle followed. The humans roared their approval. At the fourth bottle, they rose from the benches chanting, “Einstein, Einstein,” over and over again, in chorus. The farmer himself—still working one-handed—drank the fifth bottle. Then he took his other hand out of his pocket and waved to the audience with both hands. Amid thunderous applause, sheep and shepherd marched back into the corner. The other shepherds looked enviously at them. Fosco was tethered next to George’s sheep, and the farmer sat down again.

“So that’s how you win?” asked Miss Maple. “By
drinking
?”

“Wrong,” said Fosco. “By drinking
Guinness
. From a glass. That’s what they all do themselves. So of course they’re convinced it’s the cleverest thing anyone can do. That’s why I win. Every time.”

“But it’s not a difficult thing to do,” said Zora.

Fosco was unmoved. “That just shows how smart I am. Why would I do something difficult when I can win with something easy?”

“And why do you want to win?” asked Mopple, convinced by now that they could really learn a lot from Fosco.

“For the Guinness, of course,” said Fosco. “Didn’t you hear, the winner gets a Guinness? And then he does his trick again in the other pubs. And he gets more Guinness. And then of course there are the weeks of training before the contest.” His eyes were shining.

Next came Jeremy Tipp and Wild Rose. George’s sheep craned their necks again curiously, but Fosco shook his head. “Nothing worth mentioning,” he said. “They put the good turns on first this time. You can forget the rest of it. You might as well not watch anymore.”

But the sheep did watch. Wild Rose ran around in circles and changed direction when the shepherd whistled. Another sheep jumped clumsily over small obstacles. A massive ram kept nodding his head when his shepherd gave him a signal. At another signal he bleated. His shepherd talked to him all the time. Surprisingly, this act went down well. Saddest of all was the performance of the brown ewe, who didn’t even have a name. Once onstage, she was so frightened that she lost her sense of direction and couldn’t run through the little obstacle course that her shepherd had set up. She stood still in the middle of the platform. When the shepherd hit her with a stick, the brown ewe raced across the stage in panic and fell off the other side. A few people clapped even at this.

Fosco remained grimly silent.

The bespectacled man came up on the platform again. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, our surprise guests: Peggy, Polly, Samson, and Black Satan.”

“He’s gone and thought up wrong names for us,” bleated Zora indignantly.

Othello snorted too. “Do I
look
like a donkey?”

“Never mind,” said Miss Maple. “Here we go! Just do everything the way we discussed it, and remember what Melmoth taught us.”

And now George Glenn’s sheep had trotted up onto the platform, into that dazzling light, to ensure that justice got out at last.

The people in the hall were looking expectantly at them. The babble of voices slowly subsided into a muted murmur. At last it was quiet enough in the room for the sheep to hear their own breathing again. Then—suddenly—there was a loud bang. A chair had fallen over. Next moment a door slammed. The humans turned their heads in surprise.

A murmur ran through the hall. “What was that, then?”

“Father William,” someone replied. “No idea what’s the matter. He just shot out of the door as if the Devil himself were after him.”

Although the others hadn’t noticed, a queasy feeling was spreading between Othello’s horns. Was it the audience? He sensed all eyes on him like ticks in his fleece, just the way he had felt them the first time Lucifer Smithley dragged him into a circus ring. Othello waited for the voice in his head. It would say something soothing or something provocative or something to make him think. Anyway, the voice would send the queasy feeling away.

But Othello heard nothing. He listened to his front right horn. He listened to his front left horn. He listened to his back left horn and finally to his back right horn. Nothing at all. Othello was so surprised that he stopped still. The voice had gone away! For the first time he was alone. Shivers ran through his fleece. Somewhere among all those spectators, panic lay in wait for him. But just as it was about to leap on Othello, he felt a gentle nudge against his hindquarters. It was Zora’s velvety nose reminding him to go on walking as he pulled himself together. After all, he had defeated the dog in the end. He had defeated many dogs. He had faced God, and God had run away from him. He was now the lead ram. And today, on this special day, he was death.

Sometimes being alone is an advantage, Othello thought, and he set his black hooves firmly on the platform.

Zora was relieved. After that moment’s hesitation, Othello had started moving again. At last. The long wait had started her thinking, and today, onstage at the Smartest Sheep in Glennkill contest, Zora wanted, just for once, to think as little as possible. But it was too late. Zora thought of what the man with the glasses had said. Lamb specialities. She thought of the strange ram. All flesh was grass. They grazed sheep’s flesh like grass. Meat was right. That was why they’d laughed. That was why there was the butcher. Zora looked at all the faces of humans who wanted to win the lamb specialities. She saw an abyss that had always been there, right in front of her, although she had never guessed at its existence. The seagulls were silent. For the first time in her life Zora felt dizzy.

She peered in all directions. Then she saw a small, perfect cloud sheep floating in the air a few paces away from her. It had risen from the pipe being smoked by a young man in the second row. Zora knew that it wasn’t really a cloud sheep, but it reminded her of what the abyss was there for: the abyss was there to be overcome. Sure-footed, she climbed upon the platform behind Othello. Zora was the shepherd today.

Miss Maple trotted along behind Zora and Othello, in good spirits but feeling the tension to the tip of every hair in her fleece. It was her plan. Would the human beings understand the show they were putting on for them? The sheep had understood it, all of them, the whole flock. Some had even galloped up the hill in a fright during rehearsals, because the act thought up by Miss Maple and the others had seemed so real. Maple thought optimistically that human beings, on their good days, weren’t much dimmer than sheep. Or at least, not much dimmer than
dim
sheep. But would the humans believe them? And if so, then what would happen? Miss Maple looked forward to seeing what justice looked like. She stepped up onto the wooden boards and blinked fearlessly down at the spectators. Miss Maple was the wolf.

Mopple the Whale trotted after the others, with the rag between his teeth again and taking rather short breaths. The smell of the rag was the reason they had to be short, quick breaths. Apart from that, Mopple was feeling surprisingly good. He knew what he had to do. He had remembered everything. When he made his entrance, even the dimmest sheep in the meadow had realized what part Maple was playing, who the murderer was. Horns held confidently high, hooves treading carefully, Mopple stepped up onstage—and froze.

For there in the front row, only a few paces away and with his hands clamped on the arms of his wheelchair, sat the butcher.

22

Mopple Is Important

Tom O’Malley was inspecting his Guinness. These last few days hadn’t been so bad: people had wanted to talk to him because he had a story to tell. What a difference it made when people wanted to talk to you.

If anyone had asked him what he liked best about Guinness, the colors would have occurred to him first. Black that could often be a dark red or a brown too. Tom had once seen a horse that was brown like that Guinness brown. And the luscious sweet, white, creamy head on top was irresistible. Although he hadn’t drunk quite so much of it these last few days. Suddenly everyone wanted something from him, even though he could hardly remember anything. Just his foot meeting something soft, and a nasty fright.

Odd that now, just when people had stopped asking him so much about it, he was beginning to remember again. It had taken him a long time to understand that the spade really went right through George.
Right through him!
No wonder he was back in the Mad Boar now tipping Guinness down his throat.

At least I never saw his eyes, he thought. If you don’t see the eyes you’re still okay.

For the third time in his life Mopple was at very close quarters with the butcher, staring into his eyes. The butcher stared menacingly back. Without a glass pane between them now, without any mist—just a little smoke. Mopple turned and trotted back toward the ramp. Justice was all very well, but the butcher was the butcher.

Silently, Othello barred Mopple’s way.

“The butcher,” panted Mopple. “He’ll kill us all. Me first.”

Othello shook his head. “He’s one of the audience too. The audience never does anything.”

Mopple squinted uneasily down at the butcher, but Othello seemed to be right. The butcher wasn’t moving. Only his big hands opened and closed around the arms of his wheelchair. Heart thudding, Mopple went back to the side of the stage where Maple and Othello were waiting to make their entrance, while Zora had already trotted to the middle of the platform.

First she had to get the humans to understand what it was all about. George. Zora began by imitating George’s position at the time. She lay down on her side and made her legs go rigid.

A few of the audience applauded, but no one was really scared.

Imperceptibly, Miss Maple shook her head. They still didn’t get the idea. Zora stood up and tried again, this time with a much more spectacular death scene.

As Zora’s forelegs slowly gave way under her, while she bleated dramatically, Mopple curiously inspected the humans. So those were the audience. And indeed, they weren’t doing anything. But what was going on at their tables was far from uninteresting. He saw any amount of glasses of Guinness, small dishes of human fodder, and strange bowls full of ash. Automatically, Mopple sniffed the scent of the human fodder. Most of it smelled inedible, but over there in the middle of the first table a sweet, promising scent thread wafted through the smoke. Mopple looked round at Zora, who was now lying on her side with her legs twitching. Plenty of time before he made his own entrance.

Mopple the Whale took a step toward the ramp. Those were the audience. If even the butcher wasn’t doing anything, just think how harmless all the others must be! While all eyes were turned on Zora, who was just drawing her last breath, Mopple put his rag down at the side of the stage and stole down the ramp, stopping right in front of the table with the delicious smell.

Up onstage, Zora leaped to her feet again. This time they must have understood. Now it was time for the murder itself.

With long, straight, George-like steps Zora stalked across the meadow, an expression on her face that said: get to work, you idle animals. Then she pricked up her ears: an idea. George left the steps of the shepherd’s caravan to pay Beth a visit. Maple was standing on the other side of the platform, calm as a wolf, waiting.

They greeted each other. Maple looked friendly. She nuzzled Zora with her nose: Beth wanted to make George do something. But George didn’t want to. He shook his head impatiently. At this point Zora’s eyes flashed with amusement, as George’s had done so often. By now an idea had occurred to Beth. Maple uttered a friendly bleat, inviting Zora to take some refreshment. Unsuspectingly, Zora dipped her nose in the invisible, unwholesome puddle and drank her fill.

As she did so, she squinted surreptitiously at the audience. The humans were sitting there, blank-faced, and only Ham seemed to be really upset. Had they seen through Beth’s plan? At home in the flock, there had been alarmed bleats of “Don’t do it, George!” at this point. But it was already too late. George had drunk the poisoned water. For the third time that day, Zora performed a dramatic death scene onstage.

There it was. A little piece of cake with a fork sticking into it. Mopple had had good experiences with cake, not quite such good experiences with forks. He hesitated.

That was a mistake. The human on the other side of the piece of cake had noticed him.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Shoo, shoo!” And he made sudden movements with his hands that would normally have frightened Mopple.

You’re the audience, thought Mopple the Whale, and he stretched his neck out to the cake.

The human snatched it back from in front of Mopple’s nose with a surprisingly quick movement, and held it high above his head, where Mopple couldn’t reach it.

At the same moment Zora’s legs twitched in the air for the last time, and then she lay still.

Also at the same moment, Tom O’Malley looked up from his Guinness for the first time in quite a number of minutes, saw the shadowy outline of a long shape with a metal implement sticking in it, saw a sheep behind it—dead?—wasn’t that the black-faced sheep he’d seen sitting right above the abyss?—and beside that one a black four-horned ram—George’s sheep—his foot struck something soft…

“George!” howled Tom. Under the table Cuchulainn, Josh’s old sheepdog, whom he had kicked in the side by mistake, howled too.

George’s name hung in the air for a long time, while the other sounds gradually died down. Something changed in the atmosphere of the hall. It was as if the wind had blown cold air into the Mad Boar and extinguished a few of the lights.

“You sit down, Tom,” said Josh in the silence. It sounded stern. “You’re pissed. Just you sit down again.”

But Tom had no intention of sitting down. He pointed to the stage.

“The—the sheep! They’re…they’re trying to tell us something about the murder!”

“That’s not funny,” growled a second voice.

“Sit down,” Josh repeated.

His face pale, his nose bright red, Tom looked round the hall.

“You sit down again,” said Josh’s stern voice for the third time. “You’ve had one too many.”

He was right. Tom had certainly had one too many. He dropped back on the bench and patted Cuchulainn’s head comfortingly. Pissed again. The hall was going round and round. Yet only a second ago everything had been perfectly clear. The sheep—it had to mean something. But probably it just meant he was pissed. Yet again. Hopelessly.

By now death itself, in the shape of a black ram, had appeared onstage. Othello’s entrance was not strictly necessary. No one who had seen Zora die could doubt that she was dead. But Mopple, Maple, and Zora had insisted that Othello must go to the Mad Boar too. Othello knew the world, he knew the zoo. They wouldn’t have dared to go there without him.

So now Othello and Beth were watching the body, both of them greedy for George’s human soul. The time came when Beth didn’t want to wait around anymore. Miss Maple pushed Zora back to the meadow on the other side of the platform. It was the only part of her scene that didn’t look deceptively genuine: for Beth to be able to move the body at all, Zora herself had to help, using her powerful leg muscles. (At this point they had been interrupted during rehearsals by excited cries of “He’s alive! He’s alive!”)

But George Glenn was dead when the sheep launched into their grand finale. Once she was in the meadow again, Zora lay there on her back, rigid. For want of a spade, Maple stamped on her chest with one front hoof. It was a breathtaking effect that had given Zora a few bruises in rehearsals. Death in the shape of a black ram with demonically sparkling eyes was still prowling around the body.

Down in the audience, Mopple the Whale let his piece of cake go and scurried back to the stage. Suddenly he was glad he hadn’t eaten it. His stomach felt peculiar, shallow and queasy. Mopple was important. Now came the third and most difficult part of their performance, the scene about Beth. Mopple dutifully picked the smelly rag up in his teeth again and positioned himself close to Miss Maple, just in time.

They had thought hard about the best way to depict the murderer. Finally Mopple the Whale had come up with the idea of the scent. Of course there had been discussions, more particularly between Mopple and Maude, about the size of souls, about Things, and about the ability of humans to pick up any scent at all. But Mopple had won the day. “Humans have noses,” he said, “large noses, right in the middle of their faces. They must pick up some kind of scent with them. And Beth—well, anyone is bound to pick up
her
scent! Anyone with a nose!”

So they had set to work. Maude discovered a very faint, sourish smell on the rag in the toolshed which was not unlike Beth’s scent. To make it stronger, they had buried the rag overnight in dirt, they had covered it with chewed sorrel next day (as senior lead ram, Sir Ritchfield had taken on the arduous task of chewing the sorrel) and then they had wrapped it around a recently deceased shrew found by Heather, and left it there for some time. The result was breathtaking. Of course, it didn’t smell exactly like Beth, but the similarity was close enough for the sheep to identify her without any doubt. It must be good enough even for human beings with their poor sense of smell.

Mopple dramatically shook the rag, and clouds of sharp, pungent murderer scent wafted through the room. That was the most difficult part. They had the scent, and they had the Thing. It was a chain with a glittery pendant on it, just like Beth’s. The most lifelike idea would have been for Miss Maple to hang the Thing round her neck. They’d tried that, but every time they tried it the cross and the chain instantly disappeared into Maple’s thick fleece and couldn’t be seen at all. So now Miss Maple took the Thing between her teeth—it had been hidden inside her mouth up to this point—and went to the front of the stage with it. She carried the little cross up and down in front of the audience. Mopple kept close behind her with his smelly rag.

Down in the audience, something stirred. A murmured curse. A clatter. A glass clinked as it fell to the floor.

The butcher came thundering up the ramp, with the wheels of his chair flashing in the spotlights.

Once up on the platform he hesitated for a moment. His eyes wandered back and forth between Mopple and the thing in Maple’s mouth. Then he shot toward Mopple the Whale. Mopple didn’t waste a second. He turned and galloped down the ramp at the back of the stage, the rag still held tightly in his teeth. The butcher was hard on his heels. He could move with amazing speed in that wheelchair. The other sheep watched from the platform as the butcher chased Mopple through the hall, down one aisle, and up the other aisle again.

None of the sheep could say whether it was sheer desperation or a brain wave that finally led Mopple to turn into a narrow pathway left free between two rows of tables. As might have been expected, the butcher thundered after him. But it now turned out that although Mopple the Whale was a fat sheep, he was still thinner than the butcher in his wheelchair. While Mopple raced on along the pathway unimpeded, the butcher got stuck after going a few sheep’s lengths. The sheep prepared to hear bloodcurdling curses, but in astonishment Ham just watched Mopple go and silently laid his hands in his lap.

Mopple the Whale, weak at the knees, returned to the platform, where he felt safer among the other sheep. He had lost the rag somewhere in his flight.

Mopple cast a nasty glance at Othello. “The audience!” he snorted. “They never do anything! Huh!”

Othello looked embarrassed.

They studied each other in silence: the villagers of Glennkill and George Glenn’s sheep. No one applauded. Mopple, who was feeling brave again, was disappointed: he had been secretly hoping for applause. Perhaps for even more than applause. During the show, and under the attentive gaze of human eyes, he had started to wonder what one of those Guinnesses tasted like.

The sheep blinked through the tobacco smoke. Zora looked uneasily all round. Smoke filled the hall like an unpleasant fog, and somewhere in that fog a beast of prey was preparing to pounce.

But no beast of prey pounced. At first a few voices were heard in the back rows, where the tourists were sitting. Questions, quiet laughter. Someone stood up and pushed Ham back to his place. Soon the whole hall was humming like a beehive. The moment when everyone’s attention was on the sheep had passed, and still justice hadn’t put in an appearance.