The Dragon's Gate

by Barry Wolverton

  “These aren’t all the Netherlanders who came here to mine tin, are they?” said Sean. “The longhouse we were sleeping in . . . all those beds . . .”

  Bung Ananda smiled, but it was an expression of pure sadness. “They couldn’t see the forest for the trees, if you’ll pardon the cliché. We found Paradise on this island, and they wanted to destroy it. They wanted their precious tin so badly, so I left them to it. Simple enough after that to convince the company that our entire tin-seeking expedition had come to naught.”

  Bren thought of the sealed mineshaft and a chill went through him. This man buried his countrymen alive.

  “Now what?” said Sean, half turning to Barrett as he asked the question. Just where was that rescue boat?

  And then Bren noticed two things happening at once. First, he saw Barrett raise her sword again—the only weapon any of them had, save for perhaps a small knife here or there. Did she mean to take on this crazy man’s entire army single-handedly?

  He then saw Mouse put her white stone away and close her eyes, standing there motionless in the sand.

  Barrett began to move sidelong across the beach toward the jungle, her sword still raised high. The elephant followed her, despite Bung Ananda’s best efforts to stop it. “Castor, stay!” he bellowed, but the elephant seemed hypnotized by the sword.

  Which is when a third thing caught Bren’s eye: a ship coming into view around the island. A small ship, with two fin-shaped sails, listing badly in the wind.

  “Castor, give your master a hug,” said Barrett, at which point the elephant lifted its trunk and plucked Bung Ananda from his back, the end of his trunk cinched around the stunned man’s chest, pinning his arms.

  “Castor, release!” he pleaded, but the elephant just held him aloft. And then, quite suddenly, Castor slammed his master to the ground, cratering the sand.

  “Wait—don’t do that,” said Barrett, holding the sword with two hands now, pointing it directly at the elephant. Castor lifted the former governor up—he was still alive, groaning—and then slammed him down again.

  Bren and Barrett flinched.

  “Castor, no!” said Barrett, but suddenly there was a violent trumpeting sound from the jungle, followed by the thunder of footsteps. The other elephant charged onto the beach, the lieutenant governor barely clinging to its back.

  “Rogue!” cried one of the other Netherlanders, who all began to scatter. Sean and his crew did the same, but when Bren saw Mouse still standing there, eyes closed, he knew what was happening.

  “It’s okay!” he called to Sean. “Head for the water!”

  The ship was now almost to shore. The rogue elephant charged Castor, trampling what was left of Bung Ananda in the process, and a moment later the two elephants were locked in combat, their ivory tusks clashing, while the Utopians continued to panic and flee.

  Barrett was just as confused as the others, but when Bren grabbed her by the hand she put her sword away and started running toward the water.

  The ship wasn’t all the way to shore, so they waded out as far as they could until they could grab the rope ladder a deckhand had lowered. The small ship started turning out to sea even as the last few men were reaching for the ladder, but they all made it, and before long they were sailing away from the island, all the survivors of the Albatross but Bakker on board and accounted for.

  CHAPTER

  10

  THE MAGICIAN REVEALS HER TRICKS

  Not much was said that night. All Bren remembered before being ushered below was a strange man dressed nothing like a sailor helping him over the side of the ship while someone else navigated them away from shore. But the next morning, Bren could tell Sean was sizing up their new captain. What was left of the Albatross crew sat on the deck of the small ship, drinking terrible coffee and eating cold porridge, while this Jean Barrett—Lady Jean Barrett!—stood before them. She still sported the thin mustache, which in daylight definitely looked drawn on.

  Barrett couldn’t have been much older than Sean, maybe twenty-five or so. But there was an element of refinement to her—the neat clothes; the close-cropped hair; the expensive-looking sword; the title “Lady.” She must have been some privileged young woman playing at being an adventurer, thought Bren, and that’s what Sean seemed to be thinking as well.

  But she had rescued them, with a considerable amount of skill and calmness under pressure. And she could clearly wield that sword. Maybe she hadn’t learned everything the hard way, but she had learned, somewhere.

  Barrett walked up to Mouse.

  “I didn’t know the Dutch crimped young girls.”

  “You can tell she’s a girl?” said Bren.

  “I’ve had some practice telling the sexes apart,” said Barrett.

  “Mouse wasn’t crimped,” said Sean. “Bowman, our former admiral, rescued her from an orphanage in China.”

  Barrett arched a thin eyebrow that also looked penciled on. “Really? And your name is Mouse?”

  “That’s what I’m called,” she answered, her voice barely more than a whisper.

  “I’m Bren,” said Bren, holding out his hand to Lady Barrett. He’d never met anyone like her. She was like some character sprung from his adventure books. Barrett took his hand firmly and pumped his arm.

  “I know,” she said. “Bren Owen, of Map. I was sent to rescue you.”

  Bren’s jaw went slack.

  Barrett reached inside her tunic and pulled out a letter, handing it to Bren. As soon as he unfolded it, he thought his legs would go out from under him. It was as if he was standing on a ship for the very first time, conscious of every roll of the deck, feeling unsure and sick. He took the letter and skimmed it, recognizing the handwriting immediately but rushing through to find the scrawled signature, and then he read through it again, more carefully. Still, he was barely able to understand anything.

  “Don’t keep us in suspense, lad,” said Sean.

  Bren didn’t know what to say. He looked to Barrett for an explanation.

  “Archibald Black and I are old friends,” she began. “Or I should say, his family and mine are. I’m an antiquary, and when I would go out on assignments I would bring Archibald books and collectibles from all over the world. The prices he would pay for them helped fund my trips, so it was a mutually beneficial arrangement.”

  Bren couldn’t help but smile. Here was someone who had helped make Black’s Books the place he had been drawn to since he was a child, and the place that had become his sanctuary after his mother died.

  “I spent every day I could at Black’s,” he said. “I sometimes met the men—er, people—who brought him books. But I don’t recognize you.”

  “Ah, I was probably in disguise,” said Barrett, pointing to her upper lip. “Antiquarianism isn’t some dusty old professor’s line of work. There’s danger aplenty,” she added, grabbing the hilt of her sword, “and many places where it’s too risky to be seen as a woman.”

  Barrett held a small mirror up to her face, using her own spit to erase the fake mustache.

  “Word got back to Map that this Bowman had gone rogue,” said Barrett. “As you know, Rand McNally is the first to learn anything in our part of the world. The way Archibald explained it to me, you had found some secret map and had left him a drawing of it. He concluded, based on what your father told him—”

  “My father?”

  “Yes, your father is desperate to bring you home too,” said Barrett. “Anyway, all I know is that the smartest man I’ve ever met concluded you might have been taken to and perhaps abandoned on a vanished island, and as you can tell from that letter, he sent me to steal the only map he thought might narrow down your whereabouts.”

  “Who is Archibald?” said Sean.

  “He owns a bookstore in Map,” said Bren. “He’s like a father to me.” Even though his real father was nowhere in earshot, Bren still felt a stab of guilt as he said it.

  “What map?” said Mouse.

  “This map,” said Barret
t, reaching again into her tunic and producing the large map she’d stolen. “It was in something called Ptolemy’s Atlas, in Persia.”

  “In the House of Wisdom?” Bren asked, agog.

  “You know it?” said Barrett.

  “Know it? It’s the greatest library known to man, at least since the Library of Alexandria burned to the ground. Mr. Black would talk about it constantly. But how on earth did you manage to steal anything from there?”

  Barrett smiled. “Oh, well, that’s rather a good story,” she said. “Gather ’round.”

  Barrett stood before them, her hands behind her back, her eyes wide.

  “I knew if I made the slightest wrong move, I was a dead woman,” she said. “The Persian asp is one hundred times as venomous as the king cobra.”

  Bren and Mouse gasped.

  “A hundred times?” Sean protested. “Pull the other one.”

  “It is the deadliest snake on earth,” Bren assured him, though to be honest, he wasn’t certain about that.

  “So here I am, afraid to breathe, trying to think of something before this librarian takes advantage of me.”

  “What did you do?” said Mouse.

  “I sneezed.”

  “You what?” said Bren.

  “I sneezed,” she repeated. “Mouse, come up here, I want to show you something.”

  Barrett was standing on the third step leading to the quarterdeck, with her audience gathered in the ship’s waist. Mouse bounded up the steps to her.

  “Now, wrap this piece of rope around my wrists.” Mouse did so, and Barrett instructed Mouse to stand behind her. When she was in place, Barrett made a big production of needing to sneeze, throwing her head back, scrunching up every muscle in her face, forming a giant achoo with her mouth. And then she fake sneezed like a clap of thunder.

  Mouse couldn’t help it—she flinched, closed her eyes, and turned her head away for a second. When she looked again, the rope was tied around her own wrists, as Barrett stood there triumphantly. The whole crew oohed and aahed, except for Sean.

  “Just a trick, lads.”

  “Of course it’s a trick,” said Barrett. “Sleight of hand . . . misdirection . . . I sneezed like a banshee, and in that split second slipped the asp onto the wrist of my captor, who was bitten immediately. He felt no pain, I assure you, and died almost instantly. I quickly but carefully tore the map I needed from the Atlas, shed my disguise, beneath which was another disguise, and walked scot-free from the compound.”

  Bren realized he was staring at Lady Barrett with his jaw open. “You’re a magician antiquarian?”

  “I suppose that would be an accurate assessment, yes,” said Barrett. “Although I prefer the word antiquary. Antiquarian just makes me sound old.”

  “So what’s so special about this map you stole?” Sean asked. “How was it supposed to help you find Bren?”

  “Good question,” said Barrett. “I couldn’t even figure out how it was a map at all. Look . . .”

  She unfolded the large map and showed them how it was all text. “I couldn’t make heads or tails of it at first. But take a look at this.” She laid the map down on the deck and asked Bren and Mouse to hold it. She then pulled a handful of salt from her pocket and sprinkled it across the surface, gently brushing away the excess, to reveal the hidden map.

  “Wow!” said Bren and Mouse in unison. Sean tried to act unimpressed, but he wasn’t very convincing.

  “The Hidden Sea. As you saw in the letter, Bren, Black was convinced the Chinese had covered up all sorts of discoveries. My new friend Yaozu explained . . . this is Yaozu, by the way,” said Barrett, waving to the man in the black clothes who had just come up from below. Bren recognized him as the man who had helped them aboard last night, but in the confusion and darkness he hadn’t noticed that he was Chinese. “Yaozu explained that ancient rulers were forever in search of a mythical island where the Immortals lived, where they believed they could find the elixir of life. No luck, one assumes, but they did end up charting land that would have served as handy way stations as they explored the Indian Sea.”

  “And for exile,” said Bren, under his breath. But when he took a closer look at the map of the “Hidden Sea,” he didn’t see the Vanishing Island. It made him feel queasy to realize that if they hadn’t gotten off the island, Barrett never would have found them.

  “That’s incredible,” said Sean, looking more closely at the map. “Look at the locations of these islands. They would have been sailing the open ocean with nothing resembling modern navigation equipment.”

  “So did you just happen to look for us on New Amsterdam first?” said Bren.

  “It was the first place we looked,” she said, smiling at Yaozu. “Never hurts to be lucky.”

  “How did you escape Persia?” asked Sean.

  “On the horse I rode in on,” said Barrett. “Except of course I was dressed like a Persian, so no one took any notice, what with all the chaos back at the library. They were looking for Lord Winterbottom and his jangly blue coat. I rode west until I was on the old Silk Road, where I found shelter in an abandoned rest stop of sorts. It’s where I met Yaozu. He’s trying to get back to his home in the South China Sea and knew a spur off the Silk Road that took us south to the Arabian Sea, where we acquired this modest but seaworthy vessel.”

  Mouse turned to Yaozu. “How did you get so far away from home?”

  “I might ask you the same question. . . .”

  “Mouse,” she said.

  “Mouse,” Yaozu repeated.

  Bren wondered if the Chinese man’s story of leaving China was anywhere near as fantastical as the Chinese girl’s, but that would have to wait.

  “You know, I fought on the back of an elephant once,” said Barrett.

  Bren’s mood immediately improved. “You did?” he said, thinking of the stories of Hannibal’s mighty Carthaginian army, crossing the Alps on elephants during the Punic Wars with Rome.

  “This was India,” said Barrett. “The expansion of the Mogul Empire. I was a freelancer, along with a handful of Iberians and Italians and Britons, lending a hand and expertise to the great Akbar as he enlarged his empire to the south and east.”

  “Why?” said Bren.

  “Because as long as the Indian subcontinent was fractured,” said Barrett, “it was vulnerable to the Netherlanders. They already have their stronghold in Southeast Asia, and it was feared they would soon control everything east of the Ottoman Empire save China. But a unified India made that less likely—and gave Akbar’s benefactors a chance to perhaps open trade with the Moguls.”

  That was enough politics for Bren. “What about the elephants?”

  “Would you like to hear about the Battle of the Malabar Caves?” said Barrett.

  “Yes!” Bren almost shouted.

  “The Malabar Caves were carved centuries ago into the mountains that separate India from Nepal in the north. They were the work of religious zealots looking to live a cloistered life of suffering and prayer. At the beginning of the war, they were considered off-limits, out of respect for the believers.”

  “That never works out,” said Sean.

  “Indeed,” said Barrett, “and it didn’t there, either. The rebels either evicted the believers or forced them to share their caves . . . either way, the Malabar Caves became a rebel hive. That’s where the war elephants come in. We used them to flush the rebels out of hiding. We rode them up to the caves, each of the great beasts carrying a huge wooden tub filled with water. Have you ever seen an elephant bathe itself?”

  “No,” said Bren, at which point Barrett mimed plunging a trunk into water and then spraying it everywhere.

  “Blasted them right out of there,” she said. “You can’t believe how powerful an elephant’s trunk is. Every town should have one to put out fires.”

  “You rode elephants up the side of a mountain,” said Sean, his voice dripping with doubt.

  “Hannibal did it,” Bren blurted out, a bit more harshly than
he intended.

  Barrett touched his shoulder affectionately. “You did make good use of Black’s Books, didn’t you? Yes, Hannibal did it, and so did we. I captured the rebel leader and brought him to the emperor. Akbar always wore this long strand of pearls, and he stood there before the leader, twisting the strand with his finger. Then he passed sentence.”

  “And?”

  “Death by elephant. They made the poor chap kneel and put his head on a stump, and one of the war elephants was brought over to step on his head.”

  Bren flinched. He immediately thought of Map’s custom of dropping stones onto prisoners’ heads. “Lady Barrett, if you’re from Britannia, you must’ve been to the Explorers’ Club at Rand McNally’s.”

  She scoffed. “I haven’t, nor do I desire to. He’s an important map peddler, to be sure, but real explorers are out in the wilds, not sitting in posh chairs sipping brandy.”

  Bren smiled. He liked her even more. “I can’t wait to see the look on Mr. Black’s face when you walk into the store with me.”

  “Archibald will be over the moon to see you,” said Barrett. “Your father, too, I’m sure.”

  The broad smile on Bren’s face disappeared when he noticed Mouse scowling at him.

  “Lady Barrett, if I may make a suggestion,” said Sean, “I think we’d all have much better chances of getting home safely on a Dutch ship. Let us help you navigate to one of the East Netherlands ports, and I’ll make sure we get signed on with a Far Easter going back to Amsterdam. Old Amsterdam,” he added.

  “I think that’s a splendid idea,” said Barrett. “Now, since we spent most of the night on the run, why don’t we all try to get some rest.”

  CHAPTER

  11

  SECRETS AND STONES

  “Mouse, I know you’re mad at me.”

  Silence. They were lying side by side in hammocks belowdecks—the only deck of the small ship. Sean and half the other men were snoring across the way; the other half had agreed to work above, helping the one man Barrett and Yaozu had hired out to work the sails.