The castle guards pushed them along the stairs while the king had descended from his pedestal. The steps were lower than those to which they were accustomed, so that they could be climbed on one's hands. They emerged into a large hall furnished with many couches, like in a Roman house.
"This must be the dining room," Inata remarked to her brother. "It doesn't surprise me that they eat lying down. That's the most comfortable position for them, and I can't really see how they could sit."
The twins settled onto a couch and waited. They remained alone in that great room for a long while, closely watched by about twenty sentries. The windows were opaque and let light through only with difficulty. The walls, the floor, the furniture, as well as the doors and windows, everything had been made clumsily. The angles were not square, the lines were not straight, and the finishing touches left a great deal to be desired.
The king arrived a few minutes later, lying on a kind of litter that his servants were carrying with their feet. He was the only one who did not have to endure the permanent handstand he imposed on his subjects.
"I am famished!" he declared. "Bring us roast pullets and roast boars! We shall eat and drink in abundance in honour of our young guests."
The sovereign and his retinue settled opposite the children while servants brought them earthenware amphorae and enormous joints of meat cooked on a spit. This little land was plainly rich in game. Melio slipped from Hichy's arms and sprang toward a piece of meat, trying to snatch a bite. Though it really was amusing, the inverted humans seemed as though they were choking from laughter. Either they had never seen a cat misbehave, or they truly did laugh easily.
"I have never seen anything so funny in my life!" the king exclaimed. "None of my jesters has ever managed such a magic trick. Now, enough laughter, and let us eat! You may be afraid of catching diseases or whatnot, but you'll have to remove those ridiculous masks if you want to be able to eat."
"What does he mean?" Inata asked in a whisper to her brother.
"I'm afraid I understand, but it horrifies me just to think of it."
"Do you think they eat through their..."
"I'm afraid so."
The natives' digestive tract was indeed inverted, which means it was inverted relative to their inverted bodies, that is to say in the correct direction with respect to gravity, but in the wrong direction relative to the entrance and exit the twins were used to.
"Well then, don't you like it?" the king asked, stuffing a huge juicy piece of meat into his backside.
Horrified by that revolting sight, Hichy and Inata were in no danger of being hungry. They were seized by retching and spasms, shocked by that abomination. It was the boy who vomited first, filling his mask with bile. He was followed at once by his sister, who could not hold back and tore away the piece of cloth covering her mouth so as not to choke to death.
The same stupefaction was written across the faces of the members of the royal court. Many of them began to reject their food through the same hole by which they had swallowed it. The servants doubled over and emptied their guts onto the floor. Total incomprehension reigned between the two parties, between the twins who were the right way up relative to the ground and those who were not.
"What an affront! What an insult to me!" the king shouted, mad with rage. "You are abominations of the human race, putrid sub-beings who do not even deserve to live. Guards! Take them away at once while I decide their fate."
Three soldiers, who had managed to keep the contents of their meal in the proper place, seized the twins and shoved them violently along, avoiding crashing into the servants who were hurrying to the scene of the crime with mops. Hichy and Inata were dragged with no gentleness at all into the lower depths of the fortress, to the deepest part of the damp dungeons. They were locked in a dark, cold cell, its floor covered with a meagre layer of mouldy straw. The iron door slammed shut behind them after Melio had been thrown in with them by the scruff of the neck.
"Just our luck!" the boy lamented. "They think we're filthy, but they're the ones who are absolutely disgusting. It's not just their bodies but their brains that are upside down. They're total lunatics!"
"With our powers, we won't stay locked up here for long," his sister reassured him. "It can't be very hard to pop that ridiculous lock."
"Yes, but after that?"
"After that, we run as far away from here as possible. If this route is the right one, as the dwarf told us, then there's no question of turning back and climbing those upside-down stairs again. We have to keep going."
"In what direction?"
"Down, of course. There has to be a nice round planet down there, and we'll find it eventually by jumping from slab to slab."
The lock, crude in design, did not resist them for even a minute. Doors were hardly going to stop them. The two children crept away from their cell, whose comfort they had not even had time to test. Melio slipped ahead of them, sniffing the air with his little nose.
The smell of the guards' sweat blocking the entrance to the dungeons reached their nostrils long before they heard their coarse laughter. Smell was both the most powerful sense and the one that failed humans most grievously if they did not possess cat powers like theirs. To scent one's prey and one's enemy from miles away was to see without being seen, to perceive while remaining perfectly invisible. Unless they meant to dig a tunnel and pierce the rock, that considerable advantage unfortunately did not spare them from having to pass right in front of the jailers guarding the one and only exit.
"Let's surround ourselves with a bubble of air," Hichy suggested. "The surprise will do the rest."
When they presented themselves before the soldiers, the latter rushed at them and tried to grab hold of them with their feet. They bounced back in bewilderment from an invisible wall that prevented them from getting any closer than a metre away.
"Well then, bye!" Hichy said as he walked past them and waved. "This hotel room isn't really to our taste, even if the price is indeed unbeatable."
Wild with fury, one of the two soldiers raised his crossbow and shot a bolt into the boy's back. Hichy barely had time to parry the blow by concentrating the air around him in front of the point of impact. He had been able to fend off the attack, but they remained vulnerable in the face of numerous repeated assaults. The children pushed the jailers back onto the stairs and stifled their screams beneath a powerful current of air. Then they herded them into the cell and locked it twice over.
"Let's not linger here. We need to run before they alert everyone."
Hichy picked up his cat and hugged him to his chest as he ran at full speed. It was impossible to be discreet; the orientation of their bodies betrayed from miles away their belonging to an alternative world. The superior speed of their legs and huge leaps over the walls were far more effective than attempting any kind of trickery. As for reasoning with the king or one of his subjects, the gap separating their systems of thought and ways of functioning was far too wide.
"And yet they didn't seem mean at first," Inata pointed out. "Why did they become so hostile?"
"It's not their fault. They just don't understand. They would have liked us to be like them, but it's impossible. I can see another slab a little farther away. A few more jumps and we're out of this cursed island."
"Look, children!"
"Yes, so what? Why should I care? Let's just forget these people, that's all."
"No, look more closely. Don't you find their position odd?"
"No, they look completely normal to me."
"Exactly! It's because they look normal that they're not. Let's go talk to them."
"Oh no! I'm never setting foot here again!"
"Come on! We're not risking anything. They're only children."
The twins landed discreetly a little farther off and joined the group of local children.
"Are you the right way up?" Inata asked by way of introduction.
"What are you talking about?" a girl asked. "We're doing handstands. Whoever falls first loses. But you two look super strong."
"Rubbish! I'm the strongest," protested another boy. "I've been holding it like this for at least two hours."
"Do you practise often?" Hichy asked.
"Every day," another girl replied. "It annoys our parents a lot, but you get used to having your head in the air after a while."
"Can I show you something?" the twin asked.
"Of course."
Hichy removed the high collar that covered his mouth and started singing a cheerful tune. The children listened to him with laughter, but without mockery.
"I can do that too!" one of the inverted boys cried. "My mother says it's disgusting and that I'm a fart-lover, but it makes me laugh. Iiiiiii'm a mooooonster," he managed to say with his mouth.
"Good grief, you're really too good. And don't you find it more practical to be on your feet than on your hands? Look how fast I can go," Hichy said, bursting into a sprint.
The inverted children no longer knew what to say, so taboo was the twin's suggestion. Of course they liked putting their bottoms down, but only to provoke and shock their parents. To go so far as to make that position a full way of life, however, seemed deeply subversive.
Hichy and Inata said goodbye to their new playmates and moved away, still doing handstands, that is to say, on their feet. If those little natives had thought they had reached an acceptable level, they had just met their absolute masters.
"Do you think we convinced them?" Hichy asked his sister.
"We shall certainly never know, but the seed has been planted, and they will never be able to forget the few moments we spent together."
"I just hope they don't get thrown in prison. They're rebels now."