Der Fluch der Aurelia Chapters 11-12: High over the Sea; A Shadow from the Past

The next chapter continues the experiences of the Wiesengrund family in America, but from Fliegenbein’s point of view, as he wakes early the next morning.  Good.  I love Fliegenbein, and I love the friendship between him and Ben, and this is the first time in this book that they have had the chance to spend time together as just the two of them, while everyone else is still asleep.  Characteristically, as they go out into the pre-dawn, Fliegenbein is worrying about how many creatures here could eat him (practically everything except the rabbits), while Ben is cheerful and optimistic.

Of course, Fliegenbein has real reason to worry – quite apart from whether mundane predators like coyotes or raccoons might eat him, the Aurelia is not only big enough to pull down a ship, but powerful enough to cause him and all fantastic beings to cease to exist.  Ben senses his anxiety and tries to cheer him up, pointing out that they don’t achieve anything by worrying about this, and that it’s better to look forward to the wondrous creatures that the Aurelia might bring.  He wonders whether, instead of creating new species, she might bring back some of those who have become extinct, such as unicorns, flying whales, or elf-horses…

Hold on!  It was mentioned in Die Feder eines Greifs that unicorns are extinct (Ben wears a locket with a picture of a unicorn as a reminder of how many species have already been lost, just as the symbol of the Durrell Wildlife ConservationTrust is a dodo).  However, they apparently haven’t been extinct for very long, since in Drachenreiter, Barnabas mentions that he and Vita had found unicorn tracks a few years earlier. We learnt in Chapter Three of the current book that Cadoc Aalstrom had personally killed the last unicorn in order to find out whether its pulverised hoof bestowed invulnerability.  (Which shows that Cadoc is not only evil but also too stupid to realise that it would be more logical to befriend a unicorn and ask it to let him pare its hooves when they grew overlong, if he wants to have a ready supply of hoof.)

However, Die Feder eines Greifs also tells us how Guinever, when she was ten, had saved three elf-horses from a swarm of wasps, and there was no mention then of their having become extinct in the past four years.  Clearly, the situation is worse than we thought, if magical species are disappearing so fast even before the Aurelia’s intervention.

At any rate, personally I would think it more likely that the Aurelia brings completely new species.  Nature doesn’t often do precisely the same thing twice – though then again, sometimes convergent evolution produces similar creatures.  After all, an allosaurus

looks superficially similar to a tyrannosaurus rex –

large, bipedal dinosaur with a massive head with ferocious teeth, long heavy tail, and small forelegs – even though they lived 80 million years apart, and we are nearer in time to tyrannousauruses than they were to allosauruses.

As Ben and Fliegenbein continue their conversation, we see another copper-coin spider.  If this were a picture-book for young children, rather than a novel with illustrations, I suspect that there would be one of these concealed on nearly every page – evidently Aalstrom’s spies.  For now, however, Fliegenbein is mostly just relieved that it isn’t a black widow.

By now, more people are waking up: Freddie (out adventuring, fighting off snakes and scorpions with a fork), and then Hothbrodd, and the humans.  Hothbrodd points out that the rocks around them look like a petrified dragon – which creates a mystery in itself.  We know that in the first book, all the Himalayan colony of dragons apart from Maja had been turned to stone by lack of moonlight because they were too frightened of Nesselbrand to leave their cave (and thus both metaphorically and literally petrified – I’ve checked the dictionary, and yes, the pun does work in German, with versteinert meaning ‘petrified’ in both senses).  But how would this happen to a dragon who was resting out on a mountaintop rather than in a cave?  And is it possible to free him?  Alfonso explains that a row of stones are called the Stone Warriors, and are supposed to be a group of people who were turned to stone by a monster that awakens at full moon.

By the end of the chapter, Lola has arrived, and Guinever has finally called her father out on keeping secrets: they already know that the villain is someone called Cadoc Aalstrom, and why is Barnabas afraid of speaking his name, as if speaking of him could turn them to stone?

Even though Barnabas has a lot more respect for children (and for nonhumans) than a lot of adults, this is still a difficult lesson for him to learn.  Just as, in the first book, he didn’t take seriously Guinever’s reports of having seen Nesselbrand, and, in the second, he wanted to protect Lung by not letting him know of the dangerous mission that he and Ben were going on (which, of course, meant that Lung found out that Ben was in danger and needed rescuing, with no way of knowing what sort of danger), so, here, he wanted to keep his children safe from the horror of knowing about Cadoc.  But he is always willing to admit that he is wrong, so – it’s time to come clean.

Fliegenbein, it turns out, already knew a bit about Cadoc Aalstrom, murderer of innumerable fabulous beings and at least one human, Lizzie Persimmon.  He had learnt about Cadoc by listening at doors one day when Barnabas, usually so gentle and friendly to everyone, was raging about Cadoc’s latest atrocity to Vita.  Fliegenbein may consider himself more civilised and respectful than his unashamedly larcenous brother, but he and all the homunculi were, after all, created to be spies, and therefore given ultra-sharp hearing.  Whether their creator intended to program them to be highly intelligent and infinitely curious about everything is debatable, but it was certainly the result.

At any rate, he had overheard Barnabas lamenting that when he was younger, he used to keep notebooks collecting stories about fabulous beings, and that Cadoc had stolen them and found information in them about which creatures he could kill for the magical properties of their bodies.

The way it is described here makes it sound as though writing down information in notebooks was something that Barnabas used to do a long time ago, yet we know that he was still doing this at the time of Drachenreiter, only two years earlier, filling notebooks with drawings and photographs of the fabulous beings he had met, including a photograph that he had taken of Lung.  It seems not to have been until Fliegenbein discovered modern technology that he transferred Barnabas’s handwritten records onto a computer database.

Barnabas (still in this flashback scene) exclaims that humans are a horrible species and that he wishes he wasn’t a human, to which Vita, quite reasonably, replies that humans are not the only cruel and selfish creatures around, as it’s not as though parasitoid wasps, for example, feel any sympathy for their victims.

This is an important point.  A lot of fiction, especially children’s fiction pushes the message that humans are uniquely evil, and people often quote Mark Twain’s line ‘Man is the only animal that blushes.  Or needs to,’ as though this means that it is a contemptible thing to be a human.  But in real life (as opposed to fantasy fiction), humans are the only species we know of who are capable of thinking about the morality of their actions and of other humans’ actions, and thinking, ‘We ought to be better than this,’ and trying to find better ways of doing things.  Most animals and plants just do whatever is useful to survive and reproduce their genes, whether kind or cruel.  And of course, humans are also the only creatures with a taboo about nudity and public defecation and procreation, which isn’t about our being good or bad, but just weird.