by Lari Don
Helen crouched behind the rusty metal as the dragon scraped and grunted towards her. She had an ointment for burns in her first aid kit, but she didn’t think it would be enough to save her if this dragon hit her directly with a flame. Should she call out again and say she was a friend? But if the dragon couldn’t understand her, or was in too much pain to listen, then a shout would just give her position away.
Then she heard a clatter of stones, and saw Rona roll out of the hole in the wall a few feet away, pushing the green rucksack out in front of her. There was another roar and another jet of misdirected flame.
Rona yelled, “Oh cool down, Sapphire! It’s Rona and Lavender, and the healer’s child. We’ve come to help.”
Helen heard a crash and another grating sob. She peered cautiously round the pile of metal. The dragon had slumped on the floor of the cave just a couple of clawed footsteps away.
Lavender flew out of the hole and darted round the cave, leaving floating balls of light in a circle round their heads.
Now Helen could see that the dragon’s eyes were purple, puffy and oozing pus. She also saw that the tangled pile of metal she’d hidden behind was a heap of rusty armour. Perhaps the knights of long ago had indeed waded through that pool.
Rona was standing by the dragon, stroking her head and singing gently. Helen stepped nearer, feeling safer now that her friends were here, but the dragon raised its blind head and roared. Helen stumbled back again.
Rona explained, “She doesn’t like humans. She says that all humans ever want from dragons is their treasure. She won’t let you near her trove.”
Rona soothed the dragon with her hands and voice. “Sapphire, my friend, she is here to help. She healed Yann’s leg and she can heal you too.”
The dragon roared again and blew a small jet of smoke in Helen’s direction.
Lavender flew down, having flicked lights all round the cave.
“Oi!” she snapped. “We came all the way here to help you, Sapphire, and I know you’re scared and sore, but remember your manners, and let this healer’s child have a look at you.”
The dragon roared once more. Sparks danced across the floor.
“I have a gift for Sapphire,” Helen said quietly. “I have some treasure to add to her trove.” She took a glittering string of beads from round her neck. It was a necklace she had made with Kirsty one rainy weekend, made of plastic pearls and rainbow-coloured teardrops, but it sparkled in the magical light.
“It’s beautiful,” said Lavender firmly. “And it will fit nicely on your front leg.”
It was threaded on strong elastic, so it did indeed stretch over the dragon’s claws, to fit round her front left leg.
The dragon stopped roaring. She grunted and whistled creakily. Rona knelt by her head to listen.
Then the selkie turned to Helen. “Sapphire thanks you for the gift, but she cannot see it, as she has been blinded by the Master’s creatures. Can you help her?”
“How was she blinded?” asked Helen, picking up her rucksack and trying to concentrate on the dragon’s eyes, rather than her teeth and hot breath.
“She was collecting the Book’s riddle from the walled garden, and someone knocked a tower of stones down onto her. Her scales protected her body, but chips of rock and slate got into her eyes. Catesby had to guide her home because her vision was blurred. Since he left, her eyes have got worse, and now she can’t see at all. She is very frightened.”
Helen opened the first aid kit, and pulled out the exotic animals book. She found lizards’ eyes in the index, and studied that page before noticing pictures of snakes’ eyes on the opposite page. She looked up at the dragon’s eyes, and frowned. Sapphire’s eyes looked more like snakes’ eyes than lizards’ eyes.
She then put the book down and spoke directly to the dragon.
“Do you shed your skin?”
Sapphire’s throat rumbled and she nodded.
“Do you shed the scales over your eyes?”
Sapphire nodded again.
“Hmmmmm.” Helen studied the snake pages again.
“Right,” she muttered. “If you had eyelids and tear ducts I could just wash the bits of grit out, but instead you have see-through scales that cover your eyes, and the grit is trapped underneath. If I don’t clear it out, it will stay there until the next time you shed your skin, and by then you might be blinded for ever.”
The dragon groaned.
Helen hunted in her bag and got out an eyedropper the length of her littlest finger. She looked up at the dragon, whose eyes were the size of bicycle wheels. Helen sighed and put the eyedropper back. She dug out the biggest syringe in the bag. Then she broke the seal on a bottle of sterile saline, filled the syringe, and walked right up to the dragon. “Stay still,” she said calmly.
Using a sterile swab to clear the pus and dust away, Helen could see gravel-sized bits of sharp, grey rock in the dragon’s eyes. She gently eased the see-through scale away just enough to skoosh saline in and dislodge the stones.
She tried not to flinch at the gusts of hot breath on her legs, but at least they were drying her boots and jeans, and warming the rest of her up.
She finished the left eye, then moved round to the dragon’s right one. She used the last of the salty liquid to shift the very last bit of grit, then found a length of bandage to dry the dragon’s eyes.
She stepped back a little, and saw two huge, red-rimmed, silver eyes, now clear and shining, looking straight at her.
The dragon roared softly.
Rona explained, “Sapphire says thank you. She can see again, and she will forever be in your debt.”
“My pleasure,” said Helen, and she couldn’t help grinning as she tidied all her equipment back into the bag.
“What’s the book?” asked Lavender. “Is it your book?”
“No, it’s my Mum’s …”
Helen was interrupted by a familiar clip clop clip clop, and she turned to see Yann trot into the cave through an opening in the far corner. Then Catesby swooped in, frightening more bats into a flurry of leathery wings.
Catesby fluttered anxiously round the dragon, peering at her eyes. Slightly out of breath, Yann asked, “Sapphire! Are you alright? Catesby said you were going blind!”
Sapphire grunted a couple of low notes and Lavender chirped, “She healed her! The human girl healed her … with her book and her green bag!” But Yann didn’t even look at Helen, he just kept questioning the blue dragon. “Do you have the clue? Catesby says you managed to bring it with you.”
Sapphire roared in triumph and flapped her wings, sending Lavender’s balls of light crashing into each other.
Yann yelled, “Yes!” His boy hands punched the air, while his horse hooves pirouetted round the cave. “Let’s see it, you fabulous fire breather!”
Rona said, “Wait. Let us do everything in its proper order. First tell us if there are watchers outside the cave.”
“There were, but they were only weasels. Catesby picked a couple of them up in his talons and dropped them in a stream, then the rest were quite keen to leave. We waited until the wet weasels had slunk away and then we came in.”
“So the Master is using weasels?” Lavender flew down to the long bandage on Yann’s leg. “Might it have been a weasel that bit you, Yann?”
“A weasel?” He snorted. “Well, it was either a very big weasel, or a whole army of them.”
Lavender laughed lightly. “So you say. Perhaps it was just one wee baby weasel. Poor you.”
Helen said, “Whatever bit Yann, whether it was a weasel or a wolf, it was a vicious bite and it’s a bad wound. I will need to look at it again tonight.”
Rona tapped her bare foot on the floor and announced, “Now we must tell our healer the rest of the story, then we’ll see if she can help with the clue. She is used to books and their ways. She gave Sapphire back her sight by looking at no more than three pages in her book of healing. She knows the words books use.”
“I just used the
index,” Helen murmured. But she wanted to hear the rest of the story, so she didn’t protest too much. She was starting to hurt all over, from galloping, tunnelling and rolling about on hard rock. She needed to sit down.
In the glow of Lavender’s flickering light balls, she could see a rounder, less jaggy rock against the wall of the cave so she headed towards it. She started to scramble up it, and was surprised when her foot sank in. She jerked her foot out, and fell backwards.
Yann laughed loudly. “That’s not a stone, it’s a mound of bat droppings!”
Lavender waved some light balls nearer, and Helen saw the rounded rock was a pile of grey ooze, covered in creatures with too many legs, or none at all. She hadn’t smelt it earlier because of the smoke in her nostrils, but now she coughed, and moved away from the stinking heap. Yann was still laughing.
Helen suddenly felt completely alone. She was in a cold, damp, smelly cave, with unlikely beings who didn’t entirely trust her and whom she didn’t completely believe in. She hadn’t had her tea, she was wet, bruised and smelt of smoke, and now she had bat jobby on one foot. She didn’t really want to hear any more stories, she just wanted to go home.
Then the dragon, her chest rumbling softly, nudged a box towards Helen.
Lavender explained, “You can sit here, on this casket. Sapphire says she can trust you.”
Helen looked at Rona with her deep brown eyes, Lavender with her cheeky smile, and Sapphire, glowing a beautiful seaside blue now she wasn’t scared and sore. She might as well hear the next chapter of the story. She sat on the wooden casket with a padlock digging into her thigh, while the others settled down on shields or the rocky floor.
Yann had stopped laughing, and he stood straight and tall in front of Helen.
“You know so many of our secrets. So I will tell you some more.”
Chapter 7
Yann filled the glimmering cave with his voice. “I will tell you what has happened since we took the Book two nights ago. The Book flew from us in fear, but Catesby and Sapphire fly faster than pages can, so they followed the Book under the clouds and over the hills to its first refuge.
“The Book flew into an old walled garden, at the base of a tall tower with no door. Young centaurs are told that long ago the garden belonged to a witch who imprisoned a human girl in the tower, but the girl escaped using her long golden pleat.”
“Rapunzel!” exclaimed Helen.
“Yes, that’s her name in our tales too. The witch, the girl and the prince are all gone now, but the witch’s enchantments live on, and no one can enter the garden without permission. The Book knows all the answers, so it flew in easily. But none of us could follow.
“However, even her aunts admit that Lavender is a clever fairy. She spent all of the next day working on a spell, and last night she soothed the herbs in the garden and sent the enchantment to sleep.
“Last night, we thought that all we had to do was to find the Book, say we were sorry and take it back home. We didn’t know that the dark creatures were trying to get the Book, so once Lavender had spoken to the herbs and checked the spell had worked, she went home, leaving me on my own.”
Lavender swooped down to his right ear. “I’m so sorry. I wish I hadn’t left you, Yann, but I did have to be back for a rehearsal of the Solstice dance. I would have been missed by my aunts if I had been late.”
Yann held out his hand for the fairy and smiled at her. “You did your best, my friend. You let me in, that was all I asked you to do.”
Yann spoke to Helen again. “Once she had gone, I leapt the wall myself.
“I started to look amongst the herbs and flowerbeds and bushes, and amongst the stones fallen over the years from the tower, hoping to find the Book. Then I saw a stone with words carved into it. But before I could read them, I heard hissing and growling, and a gang of creatures leapt on me from behind.
“To my shame, I did not wait to read the clue or try to lift the stone. I just fled. And as I leapt over the wall, I was bitten and ripped my own flesh by kicking the creature off.
“That is when I came to you, healer’s child. I came for your help because I could not admit to my own healers how I had been injured, and I could not face my friends with my failure.” His voice was quiet, not ringing round the cave as it was when he laughed or told the brave parts of tales.
Rona stroked Yann’s side. “It was not a failure. You found out lots we did not know. You discovered that the Master was also hunting the Book, that the Book had left us a riddle on a stone and that the stone was at the base of the tower. And if you hadn’t been injured, we would never have met the healer’s child.” Rona turned to Helen.
“So tonight, we sent the largest and strongest amongst us, Sapphire, to pick up the stone riddle. But the Master must have sent more creatures, ones with more sense than teeth, and they waited until she was below the old tower, then knocked the loose stones and slates from the roof.
“But Sapphire carried the clue back with her, even when she could hardly see to fly. And now we shall read the riddle. Go and get your greatest treasure, Sapphire.”
Sapphire went to her trove of glitter and sparkle, and picked up a brick-shaped grey stone. Helen saw that it had rough edges, and was about the size of a cat basket. On one of its largest sides, there were words chipped out in elegant straight lines. Sapphire brought the stone to Helen, and laid it at her feet.
Helen looked round at her companions, all waiting anxiously beside her. Then she read:
I come from a gap-toothed grin in the ground, with no beginning and no end.
She looked back up. “What on earth does that mean?”
“It must be the clue from the Book. Can you help us unriddle it?” Rona pleaded.
“I haven’t ever really done riddles. Is it another place you have to look?”
“It must be a clue leading to the place where the Book is now.”
“But it seems to be about where it came from.” Helen thought for a moment. “Did the Book come from the ground? From something that is like a grin in the ground?”
Rona said, “No, I don’t think so. The Book has been with the fabled beasts since before humans moved from castles and farms to towns and cities. We learn from our elders that once upon a time, a wizard boasted that he knew everything in the world, and a tiny fairy challenged him to a duel, where they threw unanswerable questions at each other.”
“Questions like what?” asked Helen.
“Questions like: Why is the sea salty when the rivers that fill it are sweet? How does a dragon brought up by eagles learn to breathe fire? Why is there no pink or brown in a rainbow? Where do midgies go when it rains? Why can you never be who your parents want you to be? What are wasps for? And, of course, why can’t you tickle yourself?
“Soon the wizard and fairy were having so much fun that instead of fighting, they made it their life’s work to collect all the questions in the world. They wrote them in shining gold ink in their Book; a Book bound in the bark from the very first silver birch tree and closed with a clasp made of pearls from the mermaids’ gardens. They travelled the world, getting questions from every people: werewolves and sea serpents; naiads and dryads; babies in cradles and hermits on poles … Then they wrote down the answers from their vast store of knowledge.
“Soon they had collected all the lore that helped our peoples survive and thrive. All the wisdom that kept us safe. They realized that the Book could be a tool to bind us together, but it could also be a weapon to destroy us.
“So when the wizard and fairy reached the end of their Book and the end of their lives, they gave the Book to all the fabled beasts together to keep safe. But they said that no one being was ever to be allowed to read the whole Book. That is why our ancestors drew up the rules of questioning. And that is why we should not have broken the rules.”
Rona turned suddenly pale and sat down, her head in her hands.
Helen moved over to her and asked gently, “What kind of questions do you norm
ally ask it?”
Rona lifted her smooth head. “We may ask about the balance of good and evil, or how to solve disputes between tribes and peoples, or how to survive in this new world. It contains much knowledge that would otherwise be lost as our tribes grow smaller.”
Yann explained, “Long ago, when cities started to grow and railways started to cut up our world and humans seemed to be everywhere, the Book told us where we could live hidden and how we could travel concealed.
“And only in my grandfather’s time, when the last of the bronze generation of phoenixes died his last death too early after a lightning strike, the Book told us how to hatch the nest of copper phoenixes.” He held his arm out to Catesby, who swooped down in a blaze of copper feathers and perched on his wrist. They grinned at each other.
Lavender added, “But the fabled beasts of this land do not keep the Book to themselves. Our brothers and sisters journey from all over our world to seek the Book’s advice.
“Like when the sphinx sent a delegation from the desert, after she lost the answers to her riddles in a sandstorm. The Book advised her to close her eyes and let travellers through until she had woven new riddles.
“Or those English fairies whose nieces were turning their backs on the old magic and wishing to work only with rainbows. The Book said they would grow out of it, eventually.”
Yann broke in, “But the Master has never sent to ask just one question at a Solstice Gathering. He does not want one answer, he wants many.”
Helen frowned. “But what questions could he ask, that would have such terrible answers?”
Yann bent and stretched his bandaged leg. “He could ask for the potions to grow weasels the size of wolves and rats the size of cattle.”
Rona added, “He could ask for charms to force the elders of the tribes to do his bidding rather than the best for their people.”
Lavender whispered, “He could ask for the words to break through the magic protecting our sacred places.”
Catesby squawked a comment that caused Rona to gasp and Sapphire to send out a sudden hiccup of orange flame. Helen didn’t ask for a translation.
