The Griffin's Feather Page 10

  He couldn’t even remember all their names these days! Spinner, Buzzer, Dragonfly, Waterskeeter, Bumble, Flea – no, stop it, Twigleg! Even their names won’t bring them back!

  The homunculus listened to the nocturnal sounds coming from the strange jungle, and thought of something that Me-Rah had said in the ruined temple, and that he had not translated for Ben. ‘When you are the only one of your kind, your heart withers in your breast.’

  Yes, it did. Even if it was an artificial heart, made by an alchemist who had never seen his creations as anything but experimental specimens and servants without any will of their own.

  Ben didn’t wake when Twigleg slipped out of the tent. Hothbrodd was still standing where he had been hours ago, and the beach was covered by tiny crabs that shone more brightly than the stars in the foreign sky above Twigleg’s head. Presumably the crabs were poisonous – how else could they have survived by night, lit up so clearly?

  One of them stopped in front of Twigleg and scrutinised him in astonishment, with its eyes on stalks. Twigleg knew that look only too well. It asked: What on earth are you?

  The crab scuttled on, and the homunculus surreptitiously wiped a tear that was trickling down his sharp nose. A couple of times before, he had been on the point of looking around for someone who could make him new brothers. He had pored over so many books of alchemy looking for the method that had brought him to life, but in vain! Sometimes he dreamed of going back to the castle where his creator’s laboratory had once stood. But that castle was an accursed place, and Twigleg had spent so many unhappy years there that he wouldn’t have ventured to set foot in it again without Ben. And how could he take his master to such a place? Quite apart from the fact that he didn’t even know exactly where the castle stood! He had almost never left it.

  A few months ago, he had actually felt bold enough to ask Ben’s teacher, Professor Spotiswode, whether he could imagine making a homunculus some day. James Spotiswode had often asked him about his origins and his creator, and for a moment Twigleg had seen a spark of temptation behind the thick lenses of the teacher’s glasses. But then he had to listen to a lecture about the dubious nature of such experiments, and Spotiswode had reminded him, in all seriousness, of the story of Frankenstein’s creation. As if you could compare a homunculus to a monster stitched together from body parts!

  But there the problem was again. None of them knew what he was. He hardly knew himself, after all. He couldn’t even say from what creature his maker had stolen the spark of life to get him breathing!

  Oh, Twigleg! He wiped another tear off the tip of his nose, and told himself off, as he so often did, for his selfishness. Who shed tears over his own fate when all his thoughts should be on the rescue of the three Pegasus foals?

  A shell splintering under someone’s tread made him spin around. He was expecting to see a homunculus-eating crab or a turtle with similar appetites, but it was Ben kneeling down behind him.

  ‘How long have you been awake?’ Ben stretched out on the sand beside Twigleg and propped his chin on his hand, so that they were on eye-level with each other.

  He loved the boy so much – so very much! Why was he worried about his own heart? That love would protect it, even if it was sure to break sometime. Every homunculus died with the human being on whom its heart was set. Love was a dangerous thing, especially for Twigleg’s kind.

  Ben picked a sand flea out of his hair. ‘Lola says you asked Professor Spotiswode if he fancied making a homunculus?’

  That rat aviator stuck her pointy nose into everything!

  ‘Lola Greytail!’ Twigleg spat her name into the night air as if it were a medieval curse, intended to bring plague into the world. ‘I just hope she’ll suppress her curiosity one of these days! Or maybe someone could cut off her grey ears for eavesdropping on things that are none of her business!’

  ‘That’s exactly what makes her our best scout.’ Ben let one of the glowing crabs run over his hand. Maybe they weren’t poisonous after all. The tiny legs left only a shimmering trail on Ben’s skin. ‘Sometime we’ll find another homunculus. I’m sure we will.’

  Ben meant well, but Twigleg could tell from his voice that his heart wasn’t really in what he said. He had something else on his mind.

  ‘Twigleg?’ Ben dug his fingers into the fine sand. ‘What… this is a purely hypothetical question… what would you do if I moved to the Rim of Heaven one day?’

  Hypothetical? In Twigleg’s experience, that was the way human beings described things that they were seriously considering.

  ‘What a question! I’d go with you.’

  ‘Good!’ There was no mistaking the relief in Ben’s voice. ‘And like I said, it’s only a hypothetical question.’

  ‘Of course, master.’ Twigleg gave him a knowing smile. ‘Can I say something else that’s purely hypothetical? It’s horrible being the only one of your kind around. Horrible. And there aren’t any human beings at the Rim of Heaven.’

  Ben rolled over on his back. One of the constellations in the sky above them was Pegasus.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know,’ he murmured. And sat up abruptly when a hoarse, long-drawn-out cry came from the forest. Ben had only once heard a similar sound: when he had mixed the voices of an eagle and a lion on his computer in

  MÍMAMEIĐR.

  ‘Did you hear that, Twigleg?’ he whispered to the homunculus. ‘Inua did a pretty good imitation, if you ask me! At least we know we’re on the right island.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Raskervint

  Man is a centaur, a tangle of flesh and

  mind, divine inspiration and dust.

  Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

  The fifth day since the arrival of the Pegasus eggs at MÍMAMEIĐR was dawning, and Guinevere was just coming out of the house to go over to the stable when she heard hoofbeats behind her. She turned, expecting to see Ànemos, weary after another sleepless night. But the figure coming out of the trees was both horse and woman, and pale grey as the mist drifting up from the fjord. Until that morning, Guinevere had to admit, she had always imagined centaurs as male, but Tyra Raskervint changed that for ever. Her grey hair was the same colour as her horse-tail, and so long and bushy that it was like a mane. The sweater she wore over her torso was woven from grass, and around her waist, where human skin and horse’s coat met, she wore an amber belt.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, in a voice that sounded like the wind blowing through tall grass. ‘I think you must be Guinevere, Vita’s daughter, right? Can you tell your mother that Raskervint is here?’

  But Vita was already standing in the doorway. The sight of the centaur removed the anxiety of the last few days from her face. Vita and Raskervint had first met over twenty years ago, by the shore of a cold, grey sea, and they had been through many adventures together, long before Vita had met Barnabas or Guinevere had been born.

  ‘I see you’ve already met my daughter!’ she said after embracing Raskervint. ‘How are your own children?’

  Raskervint smiled, and shrugged her shoulders. ‘You know us centaurs,’ she replied. ‘Only the wind knows. We’re now here, now there, restless as the clouds, and even my great-grandchildren went their own way long ago.’

  The centaur seemed as ageless as the Pegasus. There was knowledge in her eyes that no human life could understand. Raskervint looked as if she had lived for a long time already and would live on for ever, although Guinevere knew that even fabulous beings were not immortal.

  ‘I am very glad to meet you, Guinevere Vitasdaughter,’ said the centaur. ‘It’s wonderful to know someone still so young. I was no longer young myself when the Vikings set out plundering from here! But I hear that you have a guest who can remember even older times?’

  Ànemos was standing, as he did so often, on the bank of the fjord, where the water horses were coming up from the water to greet the day, as usual in the morning. The mist-ravens had told Vita that one of their mares reminded Ànemos of his lost companion, but when the wat
er horses saw the centaur they went down again to the depths where they lived, and the Pegasus turned around as if awoken from a dream.

  Raskervint had been speaking Norwegian to Vita and Guinevere, but when the centaur approached the Pegasus she used sounds that were more like the whinnying of a horse than human words.

  Ànemos pricked up his copper-coloured ears and replied in the same way.

  ‘Come along!’ Vita whispered to Guinevere. ‘We should leave them alone. Raskervint herself lost a companion years ago. She will understand the pain that Ànemos is feeling, and maybe she can tell us how to help him better. Meanwhile you and I will go and see to the eggs.’

  Two swans were keeping the nest warm that morning. They rose with some reluctance when Guinevere went over to take the temperature of the shells. By now all the inhabitants of MÍMAMEIĐR felt an almost parental responsibility for the three unhatched foals. Maybe they were also trying to make up for the way their father avoided the stable.

  The eggs were as warm as if you could feel the life that they protected, and when Guinevere tucked the largest egg back under the white breast of one of the female swans, she thought for a moment that she could feel a scraping inside it, like the movement of tiny hooves. How she longed to catch a glimpse of the foals! But the shells were still like polished silver, hiding what they protected.

  Vita fed the swans with water-grass and fresh grain, while Guinevere went over to the calendar on the stable door. Her heart beat a little faster as she wrote the result of the temperature she had taken in a new box, and she caught herself counting the number of days still to go, although she knew exactly how many there were.

  She had heard from Ben that a parrot had guided him and Barnabas to an island where they thought that griffins lived. But the line had been so bad that she’d had to make sense of a few fragmentary words. They’ll make it! Guinevere kept repeating that to herself. They’ll get the feather, the eggs will grow, and soon three tiny foals will be flying over the meadows out there. She just had to believe that firmly enough and it would come true.

  The mist-ravens were making their report to her and Vita (a weasel among the Tummetott houses, an owl attacking a swamp-impet child), when Raskervint came back from the fjord. Ànemos was not with her.

  ‘I don’t know that I’ve been much help, Vita,’ said the centaur. ‘I remember the pain that he is feeling. Only my children were able to dispel the black cloud in which in which he is shrouded now. If you want to help Ànemos, you must save those foals! You’re right, he dares not love them because he thinks he is going to lose them too… He says Barnabas has gone in search of a phoenix feather? But how will that help? I know of only one feather that will make things grow, and that’s the feather of a griffin.’

  Guinevere instinctively looked around in concern, but the Pegasus was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Barnabas is in fact looking for a griffin’s feather,’ said Vita, lowering her voice. ‘We lied to Ànemos so that he wouldn’t guess how risky the quest is and insist on going with them. I don’t have to tell you what griffins think of horses!’

  ‘No, you certainly don’t!’ replied Raskervint quietly. ‘But it’s dangerous medicine, Vita. I admire Barnabas for his courage. And I hope the griffins are not as terrible as people say. We have many songs about them, and none of them ends well.’

  And none of them ends well. Raskervint’s words followed Guinevere all that day, and kept her lying awake for a long time in the evening. Twigleg had once told her that he used to be able to speak to his old master even over great distances, when Nettlebrand appeared to him in the water of rivers or lakes. Guinevere wished she had as easy a way of communicating with Ben. But when she tried to get through to him after what Raskervint had said, she was answered only by a rushing noise, like the sound of the distant ocean that she had seen on Gilbert’s map.

  No, it really wasn’t easy to be the one left waiting at home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  All We Could Wish For

  Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me;

  I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

  Albert Camus

  Dragons fly in their dreams. But for the last few nights, when Firedrake was dreaming, his wings were made of iron. They weighed him down to the ground, and hard as he tried he could not raise them.

  It wasn’t difficult for Firedrake to interpret this dream. He missed the boy. But he couldn’t fly away to see him, because he was needed by the others. Not just Maia, for whom he was collecting moon-moss and fire-lichen in the surrounding mountains so that she would be strong enough to sit on the nest all those months, or the two young dragons now growing in their dull blue eggshells, kept warm by their mother. No, they all needed him: the dragons he had brought here from Scotland, as well as those woken from their moonless sleep by the stone-dwarves here in the valley of the Rim of Heaven. It had been possible to save them all: twenty-three dragons who had hidden away in their cave, afraid, for so long that in the end they were surrounded by a layer of stone.

  By now over fifty of them were living in the Rim of Heaven – in the same caves where, if the old stories were to be believed, the first dragons of all had been born. Firedrake had never appointed himself their leader, but without a word that was what the others had made him. They came to consult him about everything: Firedrake, the brownies aren’t finding enough mushrooms; Firedrake, the stone-dwarves are driving their tunnels too far into the cave walls; Firedrake, Moonscale has been arguing with Beowulf again.

  No, he really didn’t want to be the leader of anyone or anything. It was quite enough having to put up with Sorrel’s bad temper because she couldn’t find her favourite mushrooms in the Rim of Heaven. Firedrake hoped fervently that the arrival of young dragons would make her less homesick, and then this valley would be home for Sorrel too, because he had no intention of leaving it again. Firedrake had never loved any other place as much. The mountains that surrounded and protected them had a thousand tales to tell. The sky seemed so much wider, and there was no more hide and seek, no life lived only by night, like the life he had led in Scotland. Since their arrival a human being had twice wandered into this valley, but the humans who lived in these mountains were different. They bowed if they saw one of the dragons – and they went away again, just as they bowed to the mountains and were disconcerted by the foreigners who came to climb their stony sides and feel like conquerors of the peaks.

  No, Firedrake really did not want to leave the Rim of Heaven. Luckily Maia felt just the same. They both wanted to teach their children to fly over the slopes where dragon-flowers grew, and see them growing up free, without the fear of the world that Firedrake had known in his youth. If only he didn’t miss Ben so much… sometimes that made him so melancholy that even when he was awake, his wings felt like iron.

  Maia raised her head from the edge of the nest.

  ‘Did you hear that, Firedrake?’

  She touched one of the eggs that she was keeping warm under her body. Yes, Firedrake did hear it! A soft tapping sound, barely audible even by dragon ears.

  He looked anxiously at Maia. ‘It’s too soon!’

  She gave the soft growl that showed something amused her very much. ‘The shell is still so thick that they couldn’t get out even if they tried. And how stupid do you think our children are?’

  The eyes that looked mockingly at Firedrake were golden like his, but Maia’s eyes were rimmed by tiny copper-coloured scales that made them look larger. And her eyelashes were dark green, like the needles of the spruce trees that grew outside the cave. Firedrake fervently hoped that their children would inherit Maia’s eyes.

  ‘You know they take almost twelve weeks to hatch,’ she said. ‘And Ben is only a day’s flight away. You ought to take advantage of the opportunity.’

  Firedrake bowed his head. He was ashamed of the nostalgia that he felt. Everything that he had ever wanted was here. No, more than he had ever wanted.


  ‘We never have all we want, Firedrake,’ said Maia softly. ‘I dream of flying south, on and on, to places I have never seen before. Or to the moon!’

  ‘The moon?’

  ‘Yes, why not? There are stories of dragons who flew there.’

  ‘Right, then we’ll do it when we first take the children out flying!’

  Outside, the sun was setting. Three other pairs of dragons shared the cave where Firedrake and Maia had built their nest. By now more than twenty caves in the surrounding mountains were inhabited. The eighteen stone-dwarves who, like the thirty-four brownies who had come from Scotland with them, lived in some of those caves. Ten more dwarves from the nearby mountains had joined them in the course of time. Those dwarves had six arms each, like the local brownies, more and more of whom were moving from the Tian Shan mountains to live in the valley of the Rim of Heaven with the dragons, as they used to do. There was more than enough space and food in the valley for them all – even if the Scottish dwarves were always quarrelling with the Nepalese dwarves, because they were envious of the six arms that meant they could swing several pickaxes at once. It speeded up their search for gold and precious stones a good deal.

  Yes. Firedrake came out of the cave and breathed in the cool mountain air. His place was here. Ben didn’t need him; Barnabas looked after him so well.

  All the same, he couldn’t get Maia’s words out of his head. The boy is only a day’s flight away. You ought to take advantage of the opportunity.

  No.

  No, Firedrake.

  He spread his wings and rose into the clear, cold evening air. The lichens that Maia needed flowered on the other side of the lake – the lake over which he had flown long ago, with Ben on his back.

  Only a day’s flight away…