Twigleg noted exactly where the great desert lay. Then he walked deeper and deeper into the ravine, far from the lair of the blue djinn, far from the sleeping dragon.
Leaning over the waters of the river, the manikin reported back to his master.
22. The Vanishing Moon
Three days and three long nights later, Firedrake was standing on the shores of the Arabian Sea waiting for night to fall. His scales were dusty with yellow sand. It was a long time since he had set out from his northern valley in search of the Rim of Heaven. His cave at home seemed infinitely far away, and the dark sea ahead of him looked like an infinite expanse, too.
Firedrake looked up at the sky. The last of the light vanished as if the waves had swallowed it up, and only the round moon, bright as silver, shone over the water. There was still quite a long while to go before the dark time of the moon and the new moon’s rising, but would he have found the Rim of Heaven by then?
“Ten more days,” said Ben.
He was standing beside the dragon on the sand and, like Firedrake, looking toward the horizon where sky and sea merged. There lay their journey’s end, hidden beyond the waves and mountains. “We ought to reach the palace I saw in Asif’s eye in ten days’ time at the latest. It can’t be much farther after that.”
Firedrake nodded. He looked at the boy. “Are you homesick?”
Ben shook his head and leaned against the dragon’s warm scales. “No,” he said. “I could go on flying like this forever.”
“I’m not homesick, either,” said Firedrake. “But I wish I knew how the others are doing back at home. I’d like to know how close the humans have come, and whether the sound of their machines is already echoing over the dark mountains. But unfortunately,” he sighed, looking out to sea again where patches of silver moonlight floated on the waves, “unfortunately, I don’t have a thousand eyes like Asif. Who knows, by the time I reach the Rim of Heaven it may be too late for the others.”
“Oh, come on!” Ben patted the dragon’s silver flank affectionately. “You’ve made it this far. Once we cross the sea we’re almost there.”
“That’s right,” said Sorrel. She had been off to fill the water bottles. “Smell this,” she added, holding a pawful of prickly leaves under Ben’s nose. They had a heavy, spicy fragrance. “These things prickle your tongue, but they taste almost as good as they smell. Where are the backpacks?”
“Here.” Ben handed them over to her. “But be careful you don’t squash Twigleg. He’s asleep in among my clothes.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t snap his little legs off,” muttered Sorrel, stowing the aromatic leaves away in her backpack. As she bent over Ben’s pack Twigleg stretched his arms out of it, yawning. He looked around, then hastily tucked his head back inside.
“What’s the matter?” asked Ben in surprise.
“Water!” replied the manikin, wriggling down among Ben’s now sandy clothes till only the tip of his nose was showing. “All that water makes me nervous.”
“Just for once we feel the same way,” said Sorrel, putting her backpack over her furry shoulder. “I’m not too keen on water, either. But we have to get across it.”
“You never know who can see you when you’re over water,” muttered Twigleg.
Ben glanced down at him in surprise. “What on earth do you mean? Who’d be looking at you? The fish?”
“Yes, yes, that’s what I mean!” Twigleg giggled nervously. “The fish.”
Shaking her head, Sorrel climbed on Firedrake’s back.
“What utter rubbish he talks!” she growled. “Even the elves aren’t that stupid, and they can chatter on all night.”
Twigleg stuck out his pointed tongue at her.
Ben couldn’t conceal a grin. “Want me to leave the backpack open?” he asked the homunculus.
“No, no,” said Twigleg, “strap it up, by all means, young master. I’m used to the dark.”
“If you say so.” Ben closed his backpack, climbed onto the dragon’s back with it, and strapped himself to Firedrake’s spines. Then he took the compass out of his pocket. If they weren’t going to rely on Sorrel’s instincts, they’d be needing it over the next few days and nights. Hundreds of kilometers of seawater lay ahead of them. There would be no coastline to help them find their way, only the sky above, and none of them knew much about navigating by the stars.
“Ready?” called Firedrake, shaking the desert sand from his scales for the last time and spreading his wings.
“Ready!” Sorrel called.
Firedrake rose into the dark sky and flew toward the moon.
It was a fine, warm, starlit night.
They had soon left the mountainous coast behind. Darkness swallowed up the land, and ahead of them, behind them, to the left and to the right of them stretched nothing but water. Now and then the lights of a ship winked on the waves. Seabirds flew by, squawking in alarm at the sight of Firedrake.
Just after midnight, Sorrel suddenly gave a terrified shriek and bent over the dragon’s neck.
“Firedrake!” she called. “Firedrake! Have you seen the moon?”
“What about it?” asked the dragon.
All this time his eyes had been fixed on the waves below, but now he looked up. What he saw made his wings feel as heavy as lead.
“What is it?” Ben leaned over Sorrel’s shoulder in alarm.
“The moon,” she cried frantically. “It’s turning red.”
Now Ben saw it, too. The moon was indeed taking on a tinge of coppery red.
“What does it mean?” he asked, baffled.
“It means it’ll disappear any moment now!” cried Sorrel. “There’s going to be an eclipse — a moldy old eclipse of the moon! Now, of all times!” She gazed down at the crashing, foaming waves in terror.
Firedrake was flying more and more slowly, his wings beating as sluggishly as if invisible weights hung from them.
“You’re flying too low, Firedrake!” called Sorrel.
“I can’t help it!” the dragon called back to her wearily. “I’m as weak as a duckling, Sorrel!”
Ben looked up at the sky, where the moon now hung like a rusty coin among the stars.
“We’ve seen eclipses before,” babbled Sorrel, “but we were always above solid land at the time. What are we going to do now?”
Firedrake dropped lower and lower. Ben could already taste the salty sea spray on his lips. And then, in the last red glow of light cast on the waves by the fading moon, he suddenly saw a chain of small islands rising from the sea in the distance. Strange islands they were, rising humpbacked from the water like half-submerged hills.
“Firedrake!” shouted Ben as loud as he could.
The pounding of the waves tore the words from his lips, but the dragon had keen ears.
“Look there, ahead of us!” yelled Ben. “I can see islands. Try to land on one of them.”
At that very moment the earth’s dark shadow engulfed the moon.
Firedrake plummeted from the sky like a bird winged by a shot, but the first of the strange islands was already below him. To Ben and Sorrel, it looked almost as if the island chain were rising toward them from the foaming sea. The dragon fell rather than landed on the island. His riders were almost wrenched from their straps. Ben realized he was trembling all over, and Sorrel wasn’t doing much better. But Firedrake let himself sink to the ground with a sigh, folded his wings, and licked the salt water off his paws.
“Lawyer’s wig and hedgehog fungus!” Weak at the knees, Sorrel slid off Firedrake’s back. “This journey’s going to shorten my life by a hundred years — no, more like five hundred or a thousand! Ugh!” Giving herself a shake, she looked down the steep slope of the hilly island to the black waves breaking on its shore. “We almost took a very nasty dip in the sea!”
“I can’t make it out.” Ben slung the backpacks over his shoulders and climbed down Firedrake’s tail. “There weren’t any islands marked on the map.”
Narrowing his ey
es, he peered into the darkness, where one steep little hill after another rose from the sea.
“That just proves what I keep telling you,” said Sorrel. “The rat’s map is useless.” She looked around her, snuffling. “There’s something fishy about this.”
“Well?” Ben shrugged his shoulders. “We’re in the middle of the sea. There’s bound to be fish around.”
“No.” Sorrel shook her head. “I mean there’s something wrong about this island — and it smells of fish.”
Firedrake got to his feet and looked more closely at the ground. “Look at that!” he said. “The island’s covered with fish scales. It’s like a —”
“Yes, like a giant fish!” whispered Ben.
“Get on my back!” cried Firedrake. “Quick!”
At that moment the island quivered.
“Run!” shouted Sorrel, pushing Ben toward the dragon. They scuttled over the damp and scaly mound. Firedrake stretched out his neck, and as the island rose higher and higher from the waves the two of them hauled themselves up by his horns. Clutching his spines, they scrambled onto his back and strapped themselves in place with trembling fingers.
“But the moon!” cried Ben desperately. “The moon is dark. How are you going to fly, Firedrake?”
He was right. There was nothing but a black gaping hole in the sky where the moon should have been.
“I must try anyway!” cried the dragon, spreading his wings. But whatever he did, his body wouldn’t rise a finger’s breadth into the air. Ben and Sorrel exchanged horrified glances.
Suddenly, with a loud snort, a mighty head shot out of the sea in front of them. It had large fins like decorative feathers growing on it. Slanted eyes flashed at them mockingly beneath heavy lids, and a forked tongue flickered between the two sharp, needlelike fangs that emerged from the creature’s narrow jaws.
“A sea serpent!” cried Ben. “We’ve landed on a sea serpent!”
The serpent’s long, long neck rose from the water until its head was hovering directly above Firedrake, who stood on the scaly hump of the creature’s back as if he’d taken root there.
“Well, well, look at this!” hissed the serpent in a soft, singsong voice. “Such strange visitors to the realm of salt and water where my twin sister and I reign supreme. What brings a fiery dragon, a small human, and a shaggy brownie girl out to sea, so far from solid ground? Not just an appetite for a supper of slippery shiny fish, I suppose?” Her tongue flickered like a hungry wild beast in the air above Firedrake’s head.
“Get down!” the dragon whispered to Ben and Sorrel. “Get right down behind my spines.”
Sorrel obeyed at once, but Ben stayed where he was, his mouth wide open, staring at the sea serpent. She was a beautiful sight, an astonishing and enchanting creature. In the absence of the moon, the only light came from the stars, yet every one of her millions of scales shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow. Observing Ben’s amazement, the serpent looked down at him with an ironic smile. He was not much bigger than the flickering tip of her tongue.
“Ben, get your head down!” whispered Sorrel. “Unless you want it bitten off!”
But Ben wasn’t listening to her. He felt all Firedrake’s muscles tensing as if he were preparing to fight.
“We’re not after anything of yours, serpent,” called the dragon, and his voice sounded as it had when he rescued Ben from the men in the old factory building. “We’re searching for a place that lies beyond the sea.”
A quiver ran through the sea serpent’s body. To Ben’s great relief, he realized that she was laughing.
“Are you indeed?” hissed the serpent. “Well, if I know your fiery kind you’ll need moonlight before you can rise into the air. So until the moon shows its face again, you’ll have to stay with me. But don’t worry. I’m here purely out of curiosity, sheer insatiable curiosity. I wanted to find out why my scales have been itching ever since sunset, in a way they haven’t itched for more than a hundred years. I expect you know the rule: One fabulous creature attracts another, correct?”
“Yes, and a thorough nuisance it is,” replied Firedrake, but Ben felt the dragon’s muscles beginning to relax again.
“A nuisance?” The sea serpent’s slender body rocked to and fro. “That rule is what saved you and your two friends from drowning when the moon went dark.” She lowered her pointed muzzle until her face was level with Firedrake’s. “So where have you come from and where are you going? I haven’t seen anyone like you since the day your silver relations were disturbed as they bathed in the sea and vanished from my realm.”
Firedrake straightened up. “You know that story?” he asked.
The serpent smiled, stretching her huge body in the waves. “Of course. In fact, I was there at the time.”
“You were there?” Firedrake took a step back. A growl emerged from his chest. “Then you were the sea monster who chased them away!”
Terrified, Sorrel flung her arms around Ben. “Oh, no, no!” she moaned. “Careful, it’s going to eat us up!”
But the serpent merely looked down at Firedrake with an amused smile. “Me? Nonsense!” she hissed. “I only chase ships. The monster was a dragon. A dragon like you, only much, much bigger, with armor made of golden scales.”
Firedrake looked at the creature incredulously.
The serpent nodded. “His eyes were red like the dying moon, full of murderous greed.” The memory wiped the smile off her face. “That night,” she said as the sea rocked her great body, “that night your relations came down from the mountains to the sea, as they always did when the moon was round and full in the sky. My sister and I swam close to the coast, so close that we could see the faces of the people sitting outside their huts waiting for the dragons. We submerged our bodies in the water so as not to alarm them, for human beings fear what they don’t know, especially when it’s bigger than they are. Moreover,” said the creature, smiling, “we serpents are not popular among them.”
Feeling embarrassed, Ben bowed his head.
“The dragons,” continued the serpent, “plunged into the foaming waves, looking as if they were made of moonlight.” She looked at Firedrake. “The people on the shore smiled. Creatures of your kind calm the anger that human beings always carry with them. Dragons banish their sorrow. That’s why they believe you bring good luck. But that night, yes, that night,” hissed the serpent softly, “another dragon came to chase the good luck away. The water boiled around his great muzzle as he surfaced in the sea. Dead fish floated on the waves. The silver dragons spread their wet wings in fear, but then, all of a sudden, the light of the moon was hidden by flocks of black birds. No cloud, however dark and heavy, can rob the moon of its power, but the birds did. Their dark feathers quenched the moonlight, and hard as the dragons tried to beat their wings, they couldn’t fly. They all would have been lost had my sister and I not been there to attack the monster.”
The sea serpent fell silent for a moment.
“You killed him?” asked Firedrake.
“We tried to,” replied the serpent. “We wound our coils around his armor and kept his jaws shut with our bodies. But his golden scales were cold as ice and burned us. Before long, we had to let him go, but our attack made the black birds disperse, and the moonlight gave the dragons enough strength to escape. The humans, stricken by grief and terror, stood on the shore watching them go as they flew up the river Indus and disappeared into the darkness. The monster plunged beneath the waves, and no matter how hard my sister and I searched the deepest depths of the sea we could find no trace of it. The black birds flew away, cawing. But the silver dragons never returned, although for long afterward people stood waiting on the seashore on nights when the moon was full.”
When the sea serpent had finished her story, no one said a word.
At last, Firedrake looked up at the black sky. “Did you never hear of them again?” he asked.
The serpent swayed back and forth. “Oh, there are many stories. The mermen and mermai
ds who swim up the Indus from time to time tell tales of a valley far, far away in the mountains, and they say that the shadow of a flying dragon sometimes falls on the valley floor. They believe that brownies have helped the dragons hide. And looking at your companion here,” she added, glancing at Sorrel, “I’d say the story is not improbable.”
Firedrake did not reply but stood there sunk deep in thought.
“I really wish we knew where that monster went,” growled Sorrel. “I don’t like the way he can appear and disappear, just like that.”
The serpent bent her head until her tongue was tickling Sorrel’s pointed ears.
“The monster is in league with the powers of the water, brownie,” she hissed. “All dragons can swim, although they are creatures of fire, but this one is lord of the water. Water is his servant even more than it is mine. I never saw that monster again, but sometimes, when I feel a cold current passing through the depths of the sea, I know that the dragon with golden armor is out hunting.”
Firedrake was still silent. “Golden,” he murmured at last. “He was golden. Sorrel, does that remind you of anything?”
The brownie looked at him in surprise. “No, why should it? Oh, wait a minute —”
“The old dragon at home in the north!” said Firedrake. “He warned us against the Golden One before we set out. Strange, don’t you think?”
Ben suddenly clapped a hand to his forehead.
“Golden!” he cried. “That’s it! Golden scales!” He quickly opened his backpack “Sorry, Twigleg,” he said, as the homunculus sleepily put his head out from Ben’s things. “Just looking for my bag with the scale in it.”
“The scale?” All at once the homunculus was wide-awake.
“Yes, I want to show it to the serpent.” Ben carefully fished out the golden scale from among his other treasures.
Twigleg emerged anxiously from his warm hiding place.
Dragon Rider Page 16
