Fire Star

by Chris D'Lacey

  Hrrr, went Gwillan, as politely as he could, for the writing dragon seemed deep in thought and might not take kindly to any interruption from a lowly puffler.

  Gadzooks nodded to show he understood. He was busy using the tip of a claw to make a pattern of dots on the misty glass. Turning a page of his writing pad, he copied down the arrangement of the dots. A lower page of the pad fell open. It, too, was speckled with a similar pattern. It was none of Gwillan’s business, of course, to ask what the fabled dragon was doing, but it worried him to see a fellow being frowning the way Gadzooks was now. So he bothered to ask, was everything all right? Gadzooks tucked his pencil behind his ear and said he was puzzled by the movements of the stars. Gwillan returned him a look of great awe. He could see no stars in the morning sky, but who was he to doubt Gadzooks? He blew a smoke ring and led the way upstairs.

  “About time,” Lucy chided as Gwillan settled neatly on her shoulder.

  Gadzooks landed by the potter’s wheel. He glimpsed along the shelves of waiting dragons and settled his gaze on one in particular. Gretel, the headstrong potions dragon, had come to the front of the small wooden cage in which she’d been imprisoned for the past two weeks. He looked at her anxiously, noting the bitterness clouding her eyes. It pained him to see her caged like this. Surely it was dangerous to breed resentment in a clever and powerful potions dragon, even if her quiver of flowers had been removed? He glanced to the near side of the bench. In a basket filled with tissues and straw lay the stationary figure of the stone dragon, Grockle, the cause of Gretel’s detention. Why was it wrong, Gadzooks had often wondered, to take pity on a creature born without fire? Why should this dragon not be revived, as Gretel had only been trying to do? If his master, the David, was here today, would he approve of Gretel’s punishment? And worse, if Zanna, the mistress of Gretel, herself away in the Arctic lands, could see her dragon clutching at bars, what terrible outcomes might result?

  “Pay attention, everyone, here we go.” Liz flicked the first page and started to read.“Dear Liz, Lucy, Bonnington, and dragons. How are you? How’s the weather in Scrubbley? We’re frying eggs on the sidewalk up here.”

  “How?” Lucy queried, turning up her nose. “I thought it was really cold in the Arctic?”

  “He’s teasing,” said Liz. “Listen, he says so: I’m teasing, of course … there are no sidewalks in the Arctic! OK, here’s the truth: It’s cold enough to freeze the feathers off a penguin, not that you’d see any penguins here, but you get my gist. I have to sleep in socks and a woolly hat if I don’t want frostbite on my extremities —”

  “What does that mean?” asked Lucy.

  “His toes and ears,” said Liz. She gave a quick cough and continued:“Zanna was moaning the other day because it was so cold her best black nail polish cracked. Oops, she’s just read that over my shoulder. Now she’s giving me one of her Gothic looks. I’ll change the subject.

  “We are having a fantastic time. The polar research station is a bit basic, but we get by. The food is good. We eat WARM, thick oatmeal for breakfast every morning and have steaks the size of Lucy’s flip-flops for dinner.”

  “Yuck,” went Lucy.

  Her mother read on: “The base is a sprawling single story building, right on the edge of Hudson Bay. It’s about ten miles south of the town of Chamberlain, a place we are dying to visit. Polar bears come to Chamberlain sometimes! They congregate out on the scraggy tundra and raid the trash dumps. Imagine that? A squirrel in your garden is one thing, but a real live polar bear? Wow! Dr. Bergstrom, our instructor, says we will fly out and see them soon, before the sea in the bay completely freezes over and the bears head north to hunt for seals. We would have done it a week ago but he was called away to some important meeting, so we are stuck for the moment working in the lab.

  “We spend our days analyzing ice samples. Some of them date back hundreds of years. Zanna is checking for increases in toxic chemicals called PCBs, which can poison bears and other forms of wildlife, and I am melting ice cores down and making the tea — I mean, making interesting graphs to monitor the levels of something called beryllium 10. This is to do with global warming. Dr. Bergstrom thinks that changes in the levels of beryllium 10 coincide with an increase in sunspots or flares, which might be warming the Earth and making the polar ice cap melt. That’s scary, especially for bears. Every year, the ice in Hudson Bay melts earlier but takes a little longer to refreeze. This means that bears are fasting more and more and will reach a point, maybe in the next fifty years, when they will not be able to survive their time ashore and will die of starvation out on the tundra. It’s hard to believe that the natural world we take so much for granted is constantly under threat from climatic change and that creatures like polar bears could so easily become extinct. No one here wants to see that happen. So we are busy searching for long-term answers, feeding the data into our computers to try to predict how long the polar ice will last. The weird thing is, the best model we’ve created, based on the sampled information we have, indicates that the Earth is about to enter a meteorological phase that mimics a period four and a half BILLION years ago when the planet was first created….”

  There was a clink.

  Liz stopped reading. “What was that?”

  “Gadzooks has dropped his pencil,” said Lucy.

  Gwillan flew to the floor and retrieved it for him.

  The writing dragon hurred in embarrassment and made gestures to Liz to carry on reading. He glanced lightly at Gretel, who tilted her head to look at his pad. Gadzooks gathered it under his arm, keeping his star patterns carefully hidden. Gretel shuffled her scales, but didn’t make a sound. She had not spoken now for several days.

  Liz read on:“If I’m honest, the work is slightly boring, but we all feel proud to be doing something positive for the northern ‘biome’ as people tend to call it — or Gaia, the Earth goddess, as Zanna tells everyone, including our Inuit colleague, Tootega. He’s a strange character. His face is as wrinkled as an old leather boot and he smells of fish, and seal, and worse! He works, among other things, as a guide for Dr. Bergstrom and says he will take me out on a sled and let me drive his dog team one day.”

  “Wow,” went Lucy, very bright-eyed.

  “Zanna is totally miffed about this because he hasn’t said he’ll take her as well. Tootega and Zanna don’t get along. He seems to be a bit wary of her, probably because she never stops pestering him about Inuit mythology. She mentioned dragons the other day and he gabbled some words in his native tongue, made a strange sign, and walked away.”

  “That’s not very nice,” said Lucy.

  “No,” Liz muttered. “Nor is this: Oh, by the way, if you’re wondering what this red spot is I’ve arrowed, it’s a drop of Zanna’s blood —”

  Lucy and a host of dragons leaned forward. Gretel raised her scales and sniffed.

  “The scratch on her arm hasn’t healed,” said Liz, reading a few lines ahead.

  Lucy sat back looking concerned. “The scratch that Gwilanna made? The one that looked like the dribbles of ink on David’s book contract?”

  “Yes,” said Liz. She interchanged the pages, deep in thought.

  Gretel ran her claws down the bars of her cage.

  G’reth, on the windowsill, shuddered uncomfortably.

  “He goes on to say that the other students in their party are all doing fine and that Zanna and one of the other girls are making eyes at a handsome helicopter pilot named Russ —”

  “She’s David’s girlfriend, she can’t do that.”

  “I’m not worried, he writes, ‘cause she tells me she loves me about ten times a day, in front of anyone who’ll listen; she hasn’t changed much. She says hi to you all and please will someone give Gretel a hug because she misses her and wonders if she’s feeling OK. Zanna’s been having trouble sleeping. When she wakes, Gretel is always on her mind.”

  “Oh,” said Lucy, glancing at the cage. “Do you think she knows?” Her face began to redden.

&nb
sp; “I doubt it,” said Liz. “She’s not attuned enough yet. But Gretel’s giving out a powerful auma. It would be strange if Zanna wasn’t picking up something.”

  Lucy bit her lip. “What are we going to do when she comes home, Mom?”

  “Tell her the truth, that Grockle will suffer if he’s brought into this world, and therefore Gretel had to be restrained. She understands that, don’t you, Gretel?”

  Gretel pulled back into the shadows so that no one could see her violet eyes blazing.

  “Last paragraph,” said Liz. “Please give Gadzooks a tickle as well. I haven’t heard from him in ages; I hope his pencil hasn’t gone blunt. I’ve been writing a bit of my Arctic saga, but it’s not coming out quite the way I predicted. I suppose I shouldn’t expect too much when my inspirational dragon is thousands of miles away. Oh well, another three weeks and I’ll be there to wipe the mist off the windowpane for him. OK, we’re going outside to watch the sunset now. This is one of the highlights of our day. It’s beautiful to see the inlets and waterways turning a deep dark orange and to listen to the geese as they flap across the bay. If my camera batteries last (they turn gooey in the cold) I’ll be bringing you lots of pictures. The other night, Zanna and I took a walk around the base in our thermal clothing, watching the northern stars coming out. You wouldn’t believe how clear they are up here. They look like sparkling Christmas ornaments. You want to reach out and pluck them and put them in your pocket. That’s how close they seem. There’s one that’s low and beautifully yellow. I don’t know what it’s called — I’ll ask Dr. Bergstrom when he comes back, but every time I look at it I feel as though it’s lighting up a candle in my heart. I love this place. I could stay here forever, but I’d miss you all too much and that would never do. Oops, I’ve gone all sentimental. On that note, I’ll go! Love to everyone. See you soon, David xxx. P.S. Hrrr! P.P.S. If my money has arrived from Apple Tree, please will you deposit the check for me?”

  Liz folded the letter and put it back into the envelope. “Well, he seems happy enough.”

  “I’m going to write back now,” Lucy chirped.

  “Good idea. I’m sure he’d love to hear from you.”

  “I won’t say about Gretel.”

  “No, I wouldn’t.”

  “What should I say about his money for Snigger?”

  Oddly, Liz seemed flustered by this. She pushed her red hair behind one ear and put the letter from David away in a drawer. “Well, nothing. It hasn’t come yet.”

  “OK,” said Lucy, with a breezy shrug. “I’ll say it might arrive by the time he reads my letter.”

  “All right,” Liz agreed. But in her heart she knew that the money would not come. How could it, when the publishing contract David had signed and she had promised to mail on his behalf was hidden in her drawer, along with the letter he had just sent home, and the one from his editor, Dilys Whutton?

  3 A STRANGE COMPANION

  He had been walking alone for six whole days when the old bear came to join him. Ingavar had paused to slake his thirst when the air behind him rippled with the clammy scents of another male. Lazily, he turned his head. There was rarely any sense of impending threat to an adult bear of his size and age, and though his foreleg was wounded, his nose was still sharp; the scent would be coming from many paces back.

  Or so he thought.

  As he turned, he immediately saw that the animal was half as close as he’d expected, almost as if it had landed from the sky. He swung around to face it, taking care not to show any hint of pain or impaired movement. But the old bear displayed no signs of aggression, and continued to pad belatedly forward, following Ingavar’s tracks in the snow.

  To the younger bear’s amazement, it stopped within easy reach of a charge. Then it, too, bent down and slaked its thirst. “You have walked a long way,” it said, snow falling out of the side of its mouth.

  Ingavar squinted darkly at the bear and raised his head in a threatening stance. After what he had seen six days before, he was not prepared to take risks with strangers. “Move on,” he growled, and flicked his snout in a bearing south of his chosen tracks.

  The old bear dipped its head to acknowledge Ingavar’s physical dominance. Then it grunted and ate more snow. “Why would I want to walk that way when it would bring me into the clutches of men?”

  This, of course, made Ingavar twitch. It was many years since he had visited the dump town and his pathway there was admittedly unclear. And now here was this potbellied, straggle-haired lump giving him rough directions to it. He stood, paralyzed by indecision. If this bear was right, how could he think of changing course without invoking meddlesome questions?

  The old bear settled down, tucking its hind paws under its belly. It yawned and turned a paw, raking its tongue between the outstretched claws. “You seem confused, Nanuk.”

  Ingavar ground his teeth. This visitor was bold, he had to give it that. He had not been spoken to as “Nanuk” in years. Although it was a word which described all bears, it was only ever used when an adult spoke down to a younger one, usually in a scornful manner. This bear had used it in a friendlier sense, and that made Ingavar strangely unsettled. “Why were you following me?” he asked, letting the words rumble out of his throat.

  “I was curious,” the old one said. “The pattern of your tracks suggested you were limping. Now I see your wounds and I understand why. What I don’t understand, when the sea ice is freezing and the seal grounds will soon be full, is why a bear so strong in tooth and claw is heading toward land when every other bear will be eager to leave it.”

  “Who are you?” said Ingavar, swiping the ice, his ego now as ruffled as the fur on his back.

  The old bear continued to groom in peace. “My name is Thoran,” he said.

  Ingavar turned his snout away and gave a swift, derisive snort. He might have guessed this bear would carry the name of the first white bear to walk the ice. Some mothers would never understand the ridicule they put their offspring through. He swung his head again, north this time. “Move on, old bear. Go to the seal grounds, while you still have the strength to catch one.”

  Thoran shook his head and yawned. “I am tired. We should rest awhile.”

  “We?” Ingavar barreled his chest.

  “There is a blizzard approaching. What point would there be in battling the wind on three good legs and a scratching limp? If you have sense as well as strength, you will lay your injured shoulder against me and let me protect you from the cold.”

  Blizzard? Ingavar pricked his ears. From the north came the faint but definite whistle of an angry wind. Not only that, a few loose crystals were racing across the surface of the ice. The visitor was right, a blizzard was coming. Ingavar blew a throaty sigh and forced his canines into his lip. Once again, this heap of old fur had surprised him. “Why?” he said to Thoran. “Why would you protect me?”

  Thoran laid his head down flat. “In Ragnar’s time, bears thought nothing of sleeping in packs. You are a son of Ragnar, are you not?”

  Ingavar narrowed his gaze.

  “Lie down, Nanuk. You need to rest.”

  The wind moaned and clipped the tips of Ingavar’s ears. What could he do but give in and accept the older bear’s wisdom? Blowing the pride from his overworked lungs, he buckled his knees and let himself flop, pressing his injured, aching shoulder into Thoran’s warm, dry flank. And as the grazing edge of the blizzard came upon them and the snowflakes began to number and stick, he drew himself up in a bulging heap and pushed his long snout deep into the pit between Thoran’s open foreleg and belly. He was exhausted and had no wish to speak, but as his eyes grew heavy with the prospect of sleep, he used his throat to rasp four words. “My name is Ingavar,” he said.

  And then he slept.

  4 LUCY WRITES BACK

  True to her word, on the same day that David’s letter arrived, Lucy sat down at the kitchen table and spent the next few hours penning a reply. There was much sighing and clucking and frantic crossings out,
coupled with balls of crumpled paper flying hither and thither around the room. Bonnington had to paw one out of his dinner bowl, Liz closed the washing machine door on another (Lucy’s white school ankle socks came out a shade of gray as a result), and the listening dragon on top of the fridge narrowly escaped being clouted by a bundle that also contained a lot of pencil shavings (Lucy liked to write her letters out in pencil first).

  But eventually she settled with a bright blue pen and a notepad with a picture of two red squirrels. In her neatest, most confident handwriting she put: This is Hermione. Her friend’s name is Crispin. They are the king and queen of the pine forest. They used to be gray and nobody liked them until a magic owl turned them red. I think you could do a good story about them. Then she got on with the proper business of reporting all the news from Wayward Crescent.

  She mentioned first how quiet things were, mainly due to the fact that their annoying neighbor, Mr. Bacon, had decided to go on a three-week cruise to somewhere called the Gulf of Mexico. He says he will bring me some jumping beans, she wrote, but I would rather have a stick of rock from you. I told Mom you promised to bring home some rock with ARCTIC written all the way through it. Do not let me down!

  And so it went on. By midafternoon she was starting the fourth and last quarter of the notepad when Liz announced she was going shopping and did Lucy want to come? Lucy was deeply engrossed in telling David about the colors of the trees in the library gardens, and how she had gathered a variety of leaves and pressed them in her copy of Snigger and the Nutbeast, and here was a small horse chestnut leaf she had found right over Conker’s grave, which she was sending to him to remind him of Scrubbley. No, she didn’t want to go shopping, thank you, but was it OK if she ran to the post office just up the road and delivered her letter before they closed?

  Liz said she could, as long as she was careful and came straight back. Oh, and would she mail the letters on the bench in the den?