Dragon Moon

by Carole Wilkinson

  She found tubers to eat and some of the tasteless wild melons. She hollowed out one of the gourds so that she could carry water in it. The water tasted of rotten melon, but it quenched her thirst. When she came to a patch of long, coarse grass, she picked some of the grass blades and wove a misshapen hat. She caught a pigeon with a loop of cord. The cord was made of strands of hemp pulled from the fraying hem of her trousers and braided together. Ping made a fire that night and roasted the pigeon and the melon. She ate watercress leaves and berries. She found a sheltered place, made a bed of dried moss and slept well for the first time in many nights.

  Day after day she walked. Each day she grew stronger and her mind became clearer. The invisible thread felt less likely to break, more like string now than thread. She was getting closer, but she knew that Kai was still hundreds of li away.

  Every day she was confronted by a new peak, the same as the previous one, only higher. It was as if she were endlessly climbing the same mountain, struggling to the top, scrabbling down the other side, only to find herself back at the bottom again. When she stopped to catch her breath, she looked around and there were nothing but mountain peaks in all directions. She felt like she was climbing to the top of the world. Although it was summer, she noticed patches of dirty snow still hiding in shadowy corners of rock.

  The mountains were covered with small, mossy plants that had a reddish tinge to them. They looked rusty brown from a distance. She watched a white eagle glide high above her in search of food and wished she had wings. If she could fly it would take no time to travel from peak to peak. But she had to crawl along the ground like an insect. Whether she chose to walk around a peak or clamber over it, she was always walking many times the distance that the eagle flew.

  Some mornings, after a particularly steep climb the previous day, she found it difficult to wake. When she stood up, the mountains spun around her and she had to sit down again. Her head throbbed and she had no appetite. Every step took a great effort. All she wanted to do was sleep, but when she lay down, sleep wouldn’t come. She found that if she rested for a day, she felt better. She didn’t want to rest, but she made more progress if she waited for the sickness to pass than if she stumbled on while she was feeling ill.

  One day she struggled to the top of a slope and found a mountain plateau stretching perfectly flat in front of her. She hadn’t walked along a flat surface for such a long time it seemed strange. It was effortless after so much climbing, she almost felt as if she were gliding a few inches above the earth. But on the other side of the plateau was another mountain range, soaring ever higher and topped by snow-capped peaks. Impatience overwhelmed her. She wanted to find Kai now.

  And then there was the weather. How would she survive in the mountains once summer passed and winter approached? How would she stop herself from freezing? What would she eat? She inspected her food supply which consisted of a few roots and some large snails that tasted quite good when roasted in ashes. She had only enough for one meal. She looked at the height of the sun in the sky and tried to work out how long it would be before winter came. But in the mountains, it would come earlier than she was used to. She remembered the freezing winters on Huangling Mountain. She was much higher now. She didn’t know if she could survive the winter.

  As she crossed the plateau she saw some people in the far distance. They were nomads, like the Ma Ren. They didn’t have a permanent home. They followed the sun and the grass to feed their yaks. If those people could survive winter, then she could too. She would try to buy furs from them. She would find out what food they ate. If that was what she had to do, she would do it. But she no longer had the gold pieces. She had nothing else to offer them, so she watched the nomads disappear from sight.

  A quiet, slow-moving stream meandered across the plateau, in no hurry to reach the other side, enjoying the flatlands, just as she was, before it had to hurry on its way down the mountain slopes. Ping rested on the bank of the stream, sipping the icy water, wondering if there were any fish that she could catch.

  A shadow fell over her. Ping hadn’t seen a cloud for months. She looked up. Something hit her across the back of the head. She was knocked to the ground face-down, her head ringing. She didn’t know who or what her attacker was. Was it a wild animal, a leopard perhaps, or was it one of the nomads she’d seen earlier? She tried to twist round to see who had hit her, but drops of liquid sprayed over her face. Some got into her eyes. It stung. She blinked and rubbed her burning eyes. She opened them again, and found she couldn’t see at all.

  Her body was picked up and thrown on top of something hard and spiky. She felt rough rope crisscross her back, binding her tight. She struggled but it made no difference. Her hands were bound, her eyes were blind. She had no idea what was happening to her.

  There was a smell that she recognised but couldn’t place. It was a strong smell, fishy but with a hint of plums just about to rot. Then a cold wind started to whistle past her ears. The spiky thing beneath her rocked and swayed. That was familiar too. There was another sound above the rush and whistle of the wind. It sounded like dust being shaken from a large carpet. Suddenly Ping’s mind put all these things together—the spiky shape, the sounds, the smell. The spikes beneath her were dorsal spines. The sound was the flap of large wings. The smell was that of a dragon. She was flying on the back of a dragon.

  Ping felt the wind rush past. While she had been creeping along the ground, she had longed to skim above the world on a dragon. Her wish had come true. She could imagine the mountain peaks marching beneath her. And the thread was getting stronger by the moment. She could hear something in her mind—not words, not sounds, but an emotion—just as she had before Kai was born, when he was still inside the dragon stone. What she heard was a mixture of pleasure and fear. The dragon was taking her to Kai.

  They flew for hours. The air grew colder so she knew they were getting higher. At last the wing beats slowed, the wind stopped rushing by. They were hovering. Then they were descending.

  The air suddenly became warmer and more moist. And there was a new smell, a bad smell like when you break open an egg that’s rotten inside. With a thud, they were on the ground again. Ping could hear the scratching of talons on stone. Her bonds were loosened and she tumbled to the ground, landing on hard rock. She heard a wonderful sound in her head—the tinkling of wind chimes.

  “Ping, Ping, Ping.”

  She held out her arms in the direction of the sound, but Kai didn’t come to her.

  “Are you all right?” She didn’t speak the words aloud.

  “Yes, yes. Kai is all right.”

  “I can’t see,” Ping said. “The dragon sprayed something in my face. I don’t know what it was.”

  “Spit,” Kai said. “Dragon saliva makes human eyes blind.”

  “The dragon spat in my eyes?” Ping exclaimed.

  “It won’t last. In a while Ping will be able to see again.”

  Her sight was returning. She could make out dim shapes now.

  “Where are you?”

  She peered at the blurred shapes. They were starting to take on a more solid form. She thought she was standing in the centre of a circle of large, jagged rocks, different coloured rocks.

  “They are holding me,” Kai said.

  “They?”

  Had she been captured by a tribe of people who had enslaved a dragon? Were the blurred shapes tall, cloaked men?

  Something rushed towards her. It was Kai. He had broken away from whoever or whatever was holding him. He nearly knocked Ping over. She threw her arms around him, feeling his familiar scales and spines beneath her fingers. She touched his nose, fondled his ears.

  “I thought I’d lost you.”

  “Kai is not lost.”

  The tears that began to flow soothed her sore eyes. She heard his happy wind-chime sounds. She could see him now, though he was blurred. He was safe.

  The jagged shapes around her came into focus. Ping turned in a slow circle. She wasn’t
surrounded by rocks or men. She was surrounded by dragons.

  • chapter sixteen •

  HAVEN

  The yellow dragons were the colour of sand,

  like the yellow of the Yellow River.

  There were seven dragons—two red, three white, two yellow. The white ones were the smallest, not much bigger than Kai, but two of them had fully developed wings. All three were females. Ping could tell because of their undulating noses and thicker tails. The yellow dragons were medium sized. One was male, the other female. They were both winged.

  Danzi had told Ping that a dragon’s horns didn’t start to grow until it reached 500 years of age, which meant that even the youngest white dragon, whose horns hadn’t finished growing, had to be older than that. The two red dragons were the biggest. They were bigger than Danzi, and both were female. The younger one had full-sized horns, but no wings. A dragon’s wings didn’t form until it was a thousand years old. The other red one was huge and ancient. Her eyes were dim, and one wing hung unfurled at her side, ragged and criss-crossed with old scars.

  Ping stared at the seven dragons and they stared back, as if she were the uncommon creature. Their colours weren’t bright like fruit or flowers. The yellow dragons were the colour of sand, like the yellow of the Yellow River. The white dragons weren’t bright white like snow, but a very pale grey. The reds were rusty orange, a similar colour to a fox. The old one’s scales had faded almost to brown. She was two or maybe even three thousand years old. Kai was the only green dragon. He was so young compared to these dragons, not even two years old. His baby scales had all gone now and his fresh, new ones were jade green. He looked like a polished jewel among them.

  Ping finally dragged her eyes away from the dragons and looked at her surroundings. They were on a high plateau with the deep blue sky surrounding them on all sides. This plateau was very different to the one she’d been plucked from. The earth was almost white. At first she thought it was snow, but it was white clay pitted and pocked with holes and craters, dotted with mounds, as if someone had dug holes all over the ground. Steam rose from the holes. Some of the craters were filled with water, but they weren’t ordinary pools. They were all steaming and the water within them was brightly coloured. The largest pool was orange. There were two bright green ones, another was luminous pink, while others were white, yellow and purple. Elsewhere there were pools, not of water, but of mud which bubbled like boiling gruel.

  There were caverns whose dark mouths were lined with small yellow crystals. They led deep into the earth. The sulphurous smell overwhelmed everything. Ping wanted to cover her nose, but thought it would be impolite. Water surged out of the earth in places, only to disappear back into it again through other holes. There was little vegetation and not a single tree. Ping had never seen a landscape like it.

  None of the dragons attempted to communicate with her. She had no idea what they thought about having a human in their midst.

  Ping spoke to them in her mind.

  “Hello,” she said. “I am Kai’s keeper. My name is Ping.”

  None of the dragons responded.

  “Don’t they understand me, Kai?” Ping said. “Can I only speak to you?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Do they speak to you?”

  “Yes, but not like Ping. Only with dragon sounds.”

  The old red dragon leaned her huge head closer to Ping as if she wanted to get a better look. Ping could feel the old dragon’s warm breath on her face. She was a formidable beast. Her horns branched many times and were at least three feet long. She had a long shaggy beard beneath her chin and the whiskers hanging on either side of her mouth were blue. Her eyes were cloudy and Ping guessed that her dragon sight was fading.

  The old dragon made a metallic sound that reminded Ping of someone chinking coins together in cupped hands. It wasn’t like any of the sounds Kai or Danzi had made. Ping waited for words to form in her head, but none did.

  “What did she say?” Ping asked Kai.

  “She wants to know how long you have lived with dragons.”

  Kai replied to the ancient dragon with the same sounds.

  The red dragon snorted through her nose. They were all so old, no doubt she was unimpressed by the fact that Ping had been a Dragonkeeper for less than three years. Ping reached into her pocket and pulled out her mirror. She was young and her time as a Dragonkeeper had been short, but she had cared for two dragons.

  “My first dragon gave me this,” she said, holding the mirror out to the old red dragon.

  As the red dragon reached out to take the mirror, her stiff talons reminded Ping of Lao Longzi’s fingers. The dragon held the mirror close to her eyes, peered at it, turned it over and nodded.

  “Did she know Danzi?” Ping asked.

  “They all knew Father,” Kai replied.

  Ping would have danced for joy if her legs hadn’t been so stiff. Danzi’s wishes had been fulfilled. And Kai wasn’t going to spend his life as a solitary dragon, he had other dragons to live with. She might not have brought him directly to them herself, but here he was in the dragon haven.

  Ping looked around the plateau in the dying light. It wasn’t the sort of place that pleased humans, nothing like the green pleasantness of Long Gao Yuan. But Ping remembered how Danzi had once bathed in a hot spring pool and enjoyed it immensely. It was a dragon’s world. If Kai liked it, she would just have to learn to like it too.

  With all the hot pools and boiling mud, at least she would never be cold. The smell would be the hardest thing to get used to. Beyond the pools and caverns, the plateau sloped down gradually before it ended in a sheer cliff on all sides. There was no way she could get down without the aid of a dragon. That didn’t matter. She didn’t want to leave anyway.

  The sun had disappeared beneath the jagged mountains, leaving an orange stain on the horizon. The dragons stopped staring at Ping and moved away, returning to their dragon business.

  Ping examined Kai from head to toe.

  “Are you sure you’re all right? Have the dragons been looking after you? Have you been eating well?”

  “Kai was worried about Ping, but is very happy now.”

  “Is the water safe for me to drink?”

  “Some of the pools are poisonous to humans.”

  Ping knew the white pool contained arsenic and would be poisonous to humans, although dragons loved to bathe in it and could even drink the white water.

  Kai spoke to the other dragons and then showed her to a small pool which they had said was safe for her to drink from. Ping wasn’t so sure. It was no bigger than a puddle and it was cloudy and brown. She cupped some of the water in her hands and drank. It had an unpleasant sulphur taste, but Ping had drunk worse tasting water from neglected wells. A warm bath would have been very pleasant. She was longing to wash the sweat and grime from her body.

  “Kai, ask if any of the coloured pools are safe for me to bathe in.”

  Kai spoke to the old red dragon in the chinking voice that Ping couldn’t understand.

  “Gu Hong says the pools are only for dragons to bathe in.”

  “Is that her name, Ancient Red?”

  “Yes,” Kai replied.

  “Did you ask them to look for me, Kai?”

  “Yes. They refused at first, but the white dragons saw Ping when they were out scouting. Every day Ping got closer. They thought that Ping would eventually find the dragon haven and didn’t want other humans led here.”

  “So they’re not exactly pleased to see me.”

  Kai shook his head.

  The dragons hadn’t picked her up because they were worried about her wellbeing, not even because they were concerned that Kai was missing her. They had just been afraid that she would give away their hiding place.

  It was almost dark. Ping wasn’t sure if she was a prisoner or not. Her stomach was rumbling, but she didn’t want to ask the dragons for food.

  Without warning a jet of steaming water spurted out of the grou
nd nearby, high into the air. It startled Ping, but the dragons didn’t seem at all surprised. They all walked towards the orange pool. The only male, the yellow dragon who had carried Ping, squatted on the rocks surrounding the pool, while the females waded in. The pool was wide and shallow. When the dragons sat down, the water came up to their haunches. They made low chinking sounds to each other.

  “Are they having a bath?” Ping asked.

  “Not a bath, a moon gathering,” Kai replied. “When the moon is in the night sky, the dragons gather in the orange pool after the fire dragon has spurted.”

  “What fire dragon?”

  “The one that lives beneath the earth. Every evening, he spurts water into the air.”

  Ping wanted to ask more questions, but Kai was moving towards the orange pool.

  “Kai must go to the gathering, and listen to the dragons.”

  Kai sat on the rocks next to the yellow male, listening to the females. In the light of a waning half moon, the dragons all glowed slightly. Kai’s scales had the brightest glow.

  The moon gathering didn’t last long. Then the dragons slowly made their way to the caverns to sleep, all except for one of the white dragons who flew up to the highest point of the plateau to keep watch. The two yellow dragons had a cavern of their own. The others all slept together in the largest cavern. As she approached, Ping could see glints of colour moving around inside. The dragons’ scales retained their moon glow. It made the dark cavern look cheerful. The younger red dragon barred Ping’s way when she tried to follow Kai inside.

  “Tell them I have to be with you, Kai.”

  Ping watched from the mouth of the cavern as the little dragon went up to where Gu Hong was settling down for the night. He looked very small standing in front of the enormous red dragon, but he must have put his request well, because Gu Hong allowed Ping to enter the cave.

  Once she was in the cavern, Ping wished she’d stayed outside.

  “Smells,” observed Kai cheerfully.

  The cavern stank. Judging by the smell, the dragons weren’t housetrained. Their bedding straw was old and stained. There were half-chewed animal bones lying around. Ping had spent the night in some very unpleasant places before, but the dragon cavern had to be the worst. The ox shed at Huangling Palace, where she’d slept all through her childhood, seemed clean and tidy by comparison. It was cooler in the cavern than out near the steaming pools. The younger red dragon brought her an animal skin. Ping’s heart started to thud. It was her bearskin, the one she’d left with Jun at the bottom of the Serpent’s Tail. She knew it was hers because she could see where she’d cut a piece off to make the ball for Kai.