The others chattered in agreement. Except for the gibbon. His coat was almost black; only the fur around his face was reddish, like the skin of a deer. He hadn’t taken his eyes off Barnabas all this time. Now he straightened up and tripped delicately over to him, using the hands at the ends of his long woolly arms as well as his feet. His name was TerTaWa, and his experience of human beings had been as bad as Patah’s. He had stolen the jacket he wore from a man who took him around from village to village on a chain for years, and had trained him to be a thief. The gibbon had escaped only when, one night, he stole the key to the padlock that the man used to chain him up. Then he had hidden in the birdcatchers’ boat, and so he came to Pulau Bulu. The boat had left the island again, loaded up with captured birds – for which the catchers had paid the griffins – but TerTaWa had stayed behind.
‘Your name is Greenbloom?’ The words came out of his lips like song. Not for nothing are gibbons known as the singing apes.
‘Yes,’ said Barnabas, ‘and I once had the honour of calling a gibbon like you my friend. His name was E-Mas.’
TerTaWa looked up at the griffin.
‘This man is not a spy, Shrii,’ he said firmly. ‘He is a friend. He saved the life of the Golden Gibbon!’
Ben shot Barnabas a glance of enquiry.
‘A story from my younger days,’ whispered Barnabas. ‘I’ll tell you about it if we get out of here safe and sound. Just for your information: the gibbon saved my life as much as I saved his! And Ben,’ he added almost inaudibly, ‘don’t look at Patah too hard.’
That was a lot to ask. The macaque had lost interest in the ballpoint pen, but now he was trying to open the locket.
Give it back to me, Ben wanted to say. I’m the dragon rider, not you! But of course Barnabas was right. Patah mustn’t notice how much the locket meant to him. Maybe the macaque would throw it away when he wasn’t interested in it any longer. But for now his annoyance at what the gibbon had said was distracting him from the stubborn silver thing.
‘Huh, tcha tcha, you’re a hopeless dreamer, TerTaWa!’ he chattered. ‘You ought to know better. After all, you’ve lived on a humans’ island! Don’t trust any of them, that’s the only rule that will keep you alive. Don’t trust a single human! Either that, or you must be in league with them, like Kraa!’
Shrii hadn’t taken his eyes off Barnabas since the gibbon had asked him his name. ‘What brings you to this island if you are neither poachers nor Kraa’s spies?’ he asked, taking no notice of Patah’s chatter of disapproval.
‘We need one of your sun-feathers. Of course we are prepared to pay the proper price for it!’ replied Barnabas. Shrii seemed to be an unusual griffin, but Barnabas decided not to mention the Pegasi all the same. For all he knew, the griffins’ contempt for horses might be inborn, like their desire for treasure.
‘We brought this,’ said Ben, coming to his aid and pointing to the bag containing Bağdagül’s bangle, ‘as payment for the feather.’
TerTaWa reached for the bag and took out the golden bangle. Kupo smacked her lips, impressed. But Shrii’s gaze became noticeably cooler.
‘Gold, of course. All griffins love gold.’ He fluffed up his feathers in annoyance. ‘Which I suppose can also be said of human beings, am I right? Maybe that’s why your species has always understood mine so extremely well. But I am not interested in your treasures, and even if I wanted your gold – only one griffin on this island has a sun-feather in his plumage, and that griffin is Kraa.’
‘Hear that, Patah?’ mocked one of the other macaques. ‘We don’t have to go to the trouble of killing them. Kraa will take their gold and bite their heads off!’
Once again the hollow tree was full of amused screeching. Only Kupo kept silent.
‘A sun-feather?’ she twittered, still sitting on Shrii’s shoulder. ‘Why would human beings need a sun-feather?’
Barnabas avoided answering. Suddenly TerTaWa put a finger to his lips in warning.
The scream that echoed through the hollow tree was the one that Ben had heard on their first night on Pulau Bulu. It sounded like death. Like hungry lions and hunting eagles.
‘It’s Tchraee!’ screeched one of the lorises. ‘Tchraee the ape-murderer!’
‘I warned you, didn’t I?’ cried Patah. ‘They were bait! Kraa’s bait! How else did they find us?’
Two macaques seized Barnabas, and two more made menacingly for Ben. But they all scattered when a winged figure darkened the opening from outside.
Crowds of monkeys surged into the hollow tree. Shrii lashed out at them, defending himself with his claws and lion’s paws, but even he retreated when another griffin made his way into the tree trunk. His beak and claws were black as ebony, but the centuries had bleached his coat and feathers to a dusty grey.
‘Surrender, Shrii!’ snarled Tchraee through the battle cries of the monkeys. ‘Kraa wants me to bring you to him alive.’
Shrii shook off a dozen monkeys, and rid himself of two more who were thrusting at him with sharpened sticks.
‘I’ll surrender if you let the others go,’ he cried.
Tchraee looked scornfully around the now empty hollow tree, while one of his monkeys threw a liana around Patah’s neck. ‘Is that how you see our future? A miserable hollow tree as a dwelling for the lions of the air? I’ll leave your treacherous servants alive for the time being, which is more than they deserve for their rebellion. But Kraa himself will punish them – and they will certainly not die a quick death.’
He looked at the prisoners his monkeys had taken, and leaned over Kupo. His terrible beak came so close to the loris that it almost touched her fur.
‘Well, well, who have we here?’ he cooed. ‘Kraa misses your clever fingers, Kupo! The other lorises are bunglers compared to you. How can you waste your talents on a griffin who can’t even build himself a proper nest?’
Kupo was trembling so much that she couldn’t say a word. But Patah bared his yellow teeth aggressively.
‘We had a wonderful nest, O terrible Tchraee!’ he said. ‘And if I remember correctly, you destroyed it yourself. So much for Kraa’s appreciation of Kupo’s art! You also killed Manis, who was just as talented herself. You—’
Tchraee silenced him by raising one front claw menacingly.
‘What do we do with the humans, O terrible Tchraee?’ asked one of his monkeys. They were as mixed a bunch as Shrii’s followers.
As Tchraee’s pale yellow eyes inspected him, Ben felt he was nothing but a tasty piece of meat.
‘Take them with us,’ ordered the griffin. ‘Maybe we can sell them as slaves. There are many mines on the surrounding islands. The humans there don’t ask where workers come from. And they pay well.’
‘So Kraa sells his own spies?’ Shrii’s beak snapped at a macaque thrusting its stick into TerTaWa’s stomach. ‘I thought he still had a remnant of honour left. But I suppose not even that remnant is safe from his greed for gold.’
‘Spies?’ Tchraee uttered a disparaging croak. ‘We don’t need human spies to find traitors! I’ve never seen these two-legged beings before. And how about that green-skinned Something? Did a tree give birth to it?’
Hothbrodd was calling the griffin a cowardly moorhen as Tchraee’s monkeys dragged him outside. Five more griffins were waiting there in the branches of the nearby trees, three of them sandy brown or grey like Tchraee, two almost as colourful as Shrii. Ben had to admit that all of them together were a magnificent sight. Their wing-beats were like the wind rushing in the trees, and the jungle echoed to the sound of their triumphant cries as they took Shrii into their midst. In spite of the enormous span of their wings, they glided through the trees as easily as if the branches were respectfully making way for them. Ben wondered how long it had been since the oldest of them left the wide desert landscapes of their youth and moved to this moist jungle. How many of them had they been when they came here? Were Shrii and the other two griffins with brightly coloured feathers the only younger ones? Perhaps Tchra
ee’s monkeys, carrying Barnabas, Hothbrodd and Ben through the treetops after their feathered masters, knew the answer as little as he did. They threw the prisoners to one another, or seemed to drop them only to catch them again high above the ground. Sometimes they acted so wildly that Ben forgot not only to think but also to breathe. They were rather more cautious with Hothbrodd. The troll was too heavy for their games, but Ben was the perfect victim, and he had never before wanted more to be on Firedrake’s back.
Lola and Twigleg will find us, he thought as the furry kidnappers took them further and further into the mountains that they had seen from the beach. But how? Both Lola and Twigleg were excellent scouts when it came to following a trail, but their abductors left no trail, apart from a few broken branches.
‘Griffin against griffin! Seems to me that we’ve arrived on this island at a very bad moment,’ Barnabas whispered to Ben as the kidnappers put them down side by side in the fork of a tree in order to pick some temptingly ripe fruit. ‘Maybe I should have persuaded you not to come after all!’
‘You wouldn’t have been able to,’ Ben whispered back.
The monkeys carrying Patah and Kupo had not stopped to rest. Had they taken the locket away from Patah? Would they keep the shiny thing inside it, or throw Firedrake’s scale away, not knowing what it was? Ben felt despair and relief at the same time. Despair because he had lost his only link with Firedrake, relief because he wasn’t sure whether, in view of the terrible danger they were all in, he might not have called the dragon to his aid after all.
Their kidnappers blindfolded them before going on. The dirty strips of cloth came from a T-shirt. Ben tried not to wonder what had become of its owner. But at least it was a good sign that the abductors didn’t want to let them see where they were being taken. Why go to that kind of trouble if their winged masters were going to eat the prisoners? Yes, thought Ben, as damp leaves brushed his face, and he felt the furry fingers of the monkeys at the back of his neck. It was a good thing that the scale was gone.
But it wasn’t.
Patah had managed to open the locket. He had just taken the scale out when Tchraee’s screech was heard outside the tree – and he hastily put it back in the locket. He even snapped it shut, intending to keep the treasure anyway. But when Tchraee’s monkeys dragged him out of the hollow tree, he naturally tried to defend himself, and the locket slipped out of his hand. It fell and fell – down and down, through leaves and twigs, with the scale inside it, sticky with Patah’s sweat of fear. A flying squirrel tried in vain to catch the shiny thing. A treasure-hunting snake almost dug its fangs into the silver, and a jenglot reached its clawed hands out so greedily that it fell head first off its branch. But the locket went on falling. Until at last it landed in the warm waters of a river that carried it past the muzzle of a sleepy crocodile, and on towards the sea.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Linked Together
The world is so empty if we think only of the mountains,
rivers, and cities in it; but knowing that now and then
someone agrees with us, and although distant is close to us
in spirit, is what makes this earth our inhabited garden.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels
Firedrake was just bringing Maia some of the flowers that were her substitute for moonlight in the cave, when he felt a sharp pain where his scale was missing – as sharp as if a knife were stabbing him in the breast. His heart began to race; he felt fear, great fear. It was not Ben’s fear, however, but Patah’s. Maybe that was why the feeling seemed to Firedrake so strange. As if Ben had lost his way! And there was all the anger mingled with the fear. Where did that come from?
‘Firedrake?’
His heart was beating so loudly that he could hardly hear Maia’s voice. The pale blue eggs that she was tending were still smaller than ostrich eggs, and would stay that way. Young dragons are not much bigger than their parents’ eyes when they hatch. Firedrake felt that they were spending a long time hidden away in eggshells before emerging.
‘I think Ben needs help!’ he said. ‘I can sense fear! And anger!’
‘Then off you go to find him! What are you waiting for?’ said Maia.
She was so fearless. Firedrake loved her for that. Fearless and strong. She could so easily have said, ‘Please stay here,’ but Maia knew how fond of the boy he was. And she hadn’t forgotten that without Ben he would never have found his way to the Rim of Heaven – and would never have met her.
‘But who’s going to look after you?’ he asked anxiously.
‘One of the she-dragons who aren’t expecting young! Or Shimmertail can do it.’
Shimmertail was her cousin, and he either sat out in the sun with the brownies or flew races with the other dragons. But yes – he certainly wouldn’t let Maia go hungry. And she had several she-dragon friends who didn’t have to make themselves nests just now.
‘I have only one condition,’ said Maia. ‘Of course I’d like best to go with you myself, but as I can’t’ – and she gently nudged one of the eggs with her nose – ‘do me a favour and take someone else with you. You say you sense fear and anger. That doesn’t sound good, and you have no idea what kind of danger Ben is in. You owe it to your children not to fly into it alone.’
Firedrake wasn’t sure what he thought of that idea. Presumably it was a foretaste of what Barnabas called paternal duties.
‘Alone? You know I never fly alone!’ he protested. ‘Sorrel will complain that we’re off to another new place, but of course she’s not going to miss her chance to come along.’ Sorrel… Firedrake looked around for her, but in the valley of the Rim of Heaven she went out mushroom-hunting even more often than in her old home. She would certainly have said, ‘Are you surprised, when there are so few mushrooms here? Quite apart from the fact that most of them growing in all this stony gravel don’t taste good.’
‘I’m not talking about Sorrel,’ said Maia. ‘I’m talking about another dragon.’
‘But it’s my friend in danger!’ retorted Firedrake. ‘I can’t ask one of the others to go travelling on that account. Especially not now, when most of them are expecting young!’
The dragon who had raised his head at the word travelling and was now looking curiously in their direction had not come from Scotland with Firedrake. Tattoo had been born in the Rim of Heaven, and was one of the dragons awoken from their moonless sleep by the stone-dwarves. His real name was Lhag Pa, which meant Wind in the language of these mountains. But everyone just called him Tattoo, because all those years under a shell of stone had left patterns on his scales as if someone had painted artistic designs on him. The stone-dwarves thought a plant growing in the dark that often left its traces on cave walls was responsible, although they couldn’t explain why only Tattoo had its patterns on his scales. Whatever the reason, the design of flowers, tendrils and leaves that covered him from his head to the tip of his tail made him look like the dragons you saw on precious Chinese porcelain. Firedrake thought that he looked fantastic, but Tattoo had to put up with a certain amount of mockery. It didn’t make his life easier that he was the youngest dragon in the valley of the Rim of Heaven (if you subtracted the years he had spent asleep under his coat of stone). Perhaps that was why he was looking forward to the arrival of dragon young even more than their parents were. Tattoo reminded Firedrake very much of himself: his restlessness, his hunger for change and adventure, his longing for what was distant and unknown, while the older dragons dreamed only of peace and safety…
Of course Maia had noticed which dragon he was looking at.
‘Yes, Tattoo would be a good companion,’ she whispered. ‘He has no nest to protect, no young to feed, and he is fast and clever. I’ve seen him several times even defeating Ryak and Bruk in their play-fights.’
Ryak and Bruk were two of the younger dragons who had come from Scotland with Firedrake, and they were always keen to show how strong and fearle
ss they were.
‘Are those two still playing battle-games, although I banned them?’ Firedrake suddenly felt very old. Maybe he had in fact grown up.
‘Don’t act as if that seriously surprises you. And it’s a good thing for Tattoo to show the others how strong and fast he is now and then. You know how often they tease him about his scales.’
Firedrake looked over at the younger dragon. Tattoo pretended not to notice, but Firedrake saw him prick up his ears. Dragon ears could give their owners away. And yes, Maia was right: Tattoo was not just fast, he was also clever, and he had patience when necessary, which was very unusual in such a young dragon, even if Tattoo didn’t yet know how important that quality was. In addition he wasn’t interested in being the most popular dragon around. Or the one who talked loudest. Or the leader. And he was not cruel to weaker people – a characteristic that Firedrake prized more highly than any other.
All the same… if Ben was really in danger, he himself wouldn’t have time to keep an eye on a young dragon.
‘Please, Firedrake!’ whispered Maia. ‘Who knows what Barnabas has dug up this time? You say he’s looking for a phoenix, but maybe he stumbled upon a less peaceful fabulous creature in the process! It wouldn’t be the first time!’
No, it certainly wouldn’t. Sometimes Firedrake thought that Barnabas attracted fabulous beings just as he himself did.
He glanced at Tattoo again. ‘He can be thoughtless.’
Maia smiled. ‘Oh, yes. You two really have a lot in common.’
Tattoo was still pretending to take not the slightest notice of what they were saying to each other. He was not a good actor! Finally he stood up and went to the mouth of the cave. Obviously he felt embarrassed about his own curiosity, and Firedrake liked that too.
He sighed.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘So far I’ve always regretted it when I didn’t take your advice.’
Maia let her head sink to the edge of the nest. ‘Really?’ she said quietly.
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