The Griffin's Feather Page 18

  ‘Don’t you touch him, you feathered kitty-cat!’ Lola’s yell travelled all the way up to Barnabas. ‘And as for you,’ she snapped at Nakal, aiming her tiny signal pistol at the proboscis monkey, ‘let go of my friend or you’ve drawn your last breath!’

  Lola was certainly one of the bravest people Ben knew, but she didn’t always stop to think. One of the jackal scorpions grabbed her with its pincers, and was obviously not impressed by the signal shot that the rat fired at its golden armour.

  Ben rattled the twig bars of his cage in helpless despair. Even Barnabas had turned pale, and Hothbrodd uttered a roar that would have done credit to any griffin. The troll was very fond of the flying rat, although he would certainly have denied it to his own kind.

  ‘Well, look at this!’ Kraa scrutinised Twigleg and Lola with such interest that his beak almost touched them. ‘Vermin in the form of a rodent, and a jenglot! Your choice of allies becomes more and more bizarre, Shrii!’

  ‘I am not a jenglot!’ cried Twigleg in a shaking but very determined voice. ‘I’m a hom—’

  ‘Oh yes, he is!’ Lola interrupted him shrilly. ‘A jenglot! That’s what he is, and what a jenglot! A very dangerous one, a downright poisonous jenglot! And this rat, you avaricious desert bird…’ her boot missed the nose of the jackal scorpion holding her only by millimetres, ‘this rat is about to show you who’s vermin around here!’

  Ben hardly dared to breathe as Kraa raised his head and looked down thoughtfully at the two tiny prisoners, as if wondering which to eat first.

  ‘What do you think, Nakal?’ he growled. ‘A rat in human clothing, and a jenglot with skin as white as ivory. Those two could fetch a good price.’

  ‘Indeed they could, Your Majesty,’ replied Nakal in a subservient voice. ‘Every collector of rare specimens would be keen to get hold of them. The lack of size could even be an advantage. After all, they’d both fit comfortably into a birdcage!’

  Lola was about to reply, but before she could say anything, Nakal removed her from the jackal scorpion’s pincers and put her and Twigleg into a bag together.

  ‘There goes our hope of rescue, I’m afraid,’ Barnabas whispered to Ben. ‘Still, we’ve often thought so before, and we’re still alive and well, right?’

  Ben nodded, although not with much conviction. He knew that if he had still been wearing Firedrake’s scale around his neck he’d have summoned the dragon now. To save Twigleg!

  With one bound, Kraa leaped off his throne, casting a last triumphant glance up at Shrii before striding to the edge of the platform. The jackal scorpions cleared the crowd out of his way by going ahead, clattering their pincers together threateningly. Then they climbed up Kraa’s mighty hind legs and disappeared under his wings.

  ‘Take the prisoners to the Beak Trees!’ called Nakal, as Kraa flew up to his palace nest with a few mighty wing-beats.

  The other griffins obeyed. They closed their front claws on the lianas from which the cages hung, and rose in the air with them. But when two of them raised Shrii’s basket, Kraa called them back with a cry that cut the ears like a knife.

  ‘No, no, he stays here!’ he called down from the gateway of his palace. ‘Didn’t you hear what I said? He will be the last to die. I’ll clip his claws and wings, and feed him on the gold I get for his servants until he chokes on it. And then I’ll tear his heart out of his colourful breast and eat it. Although it will probably taste as soft and sweet as an over-ripe melon.’

  Ben did not hear whether Shrii replied. If he did, his voice was lost in the screeching of the other griffins. Then Tchraee seized the basket in which Barnabas, Hothbrodd and Ben were imprisoned, and flew south with it ahead of the others.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Eight

  There are still some blue whales. There are still some

  krill in Antarctica. Half the coral reefs are in pretty good

  shape, a jewelled belt around the middle of the planet.

  There’s still time, but not a lot, to turn things around.

  Sylvia Earle

  Maia had been right. The tugging in Firedrake’s breast pointed the way as reliably as the needle of a compass. He and Tattoo flew all night. The younger dragon had as much stamina as Firedrake had hoped, and when the sun rose he still didn’t ask to stop for a rest. There were dangers in flying by day, even though the juice of the dragon-flowers was a good substitute for moonlight. But the memory of the fear that Firedrake had felt as clearly as his own made him forget caution. The sky was almost cloudless, and speed was their only camouflage. In that Tattoo proved to be the perfect companion. The younger dragon easily kept up with Firedrake. A sailor on a Chinese freighter who looked up at the sky at the wrong moment was only mocked by his companions when he talked about seeing two dragons, because they had gone before the rest of the crew reached the ship’s rail. And a child who took a photo of Tattoo on his cell-phone was very disappointed to find that it showed nothing but a shadowy blur.

  Faster, Firedrake, faster. He kept reassuring himself by thinking that he supposed he would hardly feel the tugging if Ben were not alive. But was that true? The stone-dwarves’ answers had been very vague when Firedrake asked them whether the scale would also make him feel fear that was past and forgotten. It was too long since a dragon had had a dragon rider. So much about the link between them was lost in oblivion, and there was no one who could have explained to Firedrake that his scale would go on calling until he found it again, like an emergency signal from a ship abandoned long ago.

  The first signs of dawn were showing in the sky when one of the countless islands in the sea below them attracted Firedrake to it like a magnet. The dragons saw a couple of fishing villages on the north coast of the island, but the scale seemed to Firedrake to be directing him to a beach at its southernmost point. Sorrel jumped down from Firedrake’s back into the hot sand, and looked around for Hothbrodd’s plane. She could see nothing, however, but birds, crabs and turtles.

  ‘This doesn’t look very promising,’ she said. ‘Are you sure about it, Firedrake?’

  Tattoo looked around as doubtfully as Sorrel.

  Firedrake didn’t know what to say. Everything in him whispered that he had reached his journey’s end, but it was difficult even for him to trust that whispering voice in view of the empty beach. Farther inland, the island was densely covered with jungle. It would take days to search it all for Ben and Barnabas.

  ‘Oh, mouldy mushrooms, how I hate beaches!’ said Sorrel, annoyed, as she shook sand off her furry feet. ‘The ground a brownie stands on ought to be damp and firm. Mushrooms don’t grow in sand! All it produces is sand-fleas!’

  The only sign of the human world was a plastic bottle, but that certainly had nothing to do with Ben or Barnabas. Plastic bottles were on MÍMAMEIĐR’s black list. Guinevere had even managed to persuade the nisses to give up their passion for plastic containers.

  ‘They must be here!’ said Firedrake. ‘The pull is as strong as if Ben were standing by the rocks over there!’

  Sorrel knew him too well not to believe him. She trudged towards the rocks – and stopped, as if rooted to the ground. Sorrel knew the locket lying among seashells and seaweed washed up by the tide; she had seen it on Barnabas Greenbloom’s study desk. But when she bent to pick it up, two red claws snapped at her fingers.

  ‘That,’ said a thin but very penetrating voice, ‘belongs to me!’

  Sorrel rubbed her fingers, which hurt, and looked incredulously at the tiny crab aggressively waving its pincers at her. It had four eyes on long, thin stalks on top of its head.

  ‘Liar!’ growled Sorrel. ‘In the first place, you don’t even have a neck to hang that around, and in the second place, this particular that belongs to Barnabas Greenbloom!’

  Neither of these statements seemed to impress the crab.

  ‘Flotsam and jetsam belong to the finder!’ he cried, rattling his pincers. ‘Unwritten law of the ocea—’

  He suddenly stopped, staring ov
er Sorrel’s shoulder.

  Firedrake was standing behind her. The crab, alarmed, scuttled first to the left and then to the right – he was remarkably quick on his ten thin legs. Then he closed all four eyes.

  ‘A dragon? No. No, no, Eugene!’ Firedrake and Sorrel heard him murmur. ‘You’ve obviously eaten too many coral-grass fleas. Although…’ Eugene opened first one eye, then the next, and finally all four of them. ‘Yes. Why not? A dragon? No, two dragons. Okay. And a… yes, a what?’ The four eyes examined Sorrel from head to foot. ‘Monkey. Yes. But what species?’

  Tattoo and Firedrake exchanged an amused glance. Sorrel, on the other hand, didn’t think that Eugene was at all funny.

  ‘Monkey?’ she snapped at him.

  Eugene inspected her again, very thoroughly. ‘Hmm, no, I take that back,’ he said. ‘So you’re a…?’

  ‘Spotted Scottish brownie,’ said Sorrel sharply. ‘And my sort don’t like anything with pincers on the ends of its arms. Especially when it steals from friends of ours!’

  Eugene closed his claws even more firmly on the chain of the locket, and planted two legs on its silver lid. ‘Right. Prove that it belongs to this so-called friend of yours. What’s inside it?’

  ‘One of my scales,’ said Firedrake. ‘Or so I assume.’

  Eugene looked very disappointed. With all four eyes.

  ‘Ah. I see,’ he murmured, and lowered his pincers. ‘A dragon’s scale. I’d been wondering why someone would keep such an insignificant metal thingy in a beautiful silver case like this. But any reasonable crab must admit that it looks very much like your other scales.’

  Eugene sighed, and his four eyes went to Firedrake’s breast, with the dark patch showing where the missing scale had been.

  ‘Was the locket lying exactly here when you found it?’ asked Firedrake. ‘I gave the scale to a friend, and I’m afraid he is in danger.’

  Eugene guiltily avoided the dragon’s glance.

  ‘Er, no,’ he murmured, while two of the eyes taking evasive action looked at the sky and another two looked at the sand. ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t really find it. I took the silver thing away from a lanternfish. Out there,’ he said, waving one pincer at the sea. Where the shipwrecks lie and the coral nixies live.’

  Sorrel tried very hard not to look too worried, but she could sense how heavy-hearted Firedrake was. Brownies don’t need any dragon scale to know what their own dragon is feeling.

  ‘Where the shipwrecks lie?’ repeated Firedrake. ‘When you were there –’ he hardly dared to ask – ‘did you see the wreck of an airplane among them? A flying machine made of wood?’

  Eugene looked at him with obvious sympathy (it gave the crab a slight violet tinge). ‘A flying machine? No. But Eight swears he saw something of that kind. A machine made of wood, with wings. I thought it was just one of his stories. He simply has too much imagination!’

  ‘Where?’ asked Tattoo. ‘Where did he see it?’

  Yes, he was a rather impatient young dragon.

  ‘On the beach of Pulau Bulu,’ replied Eugene. ‘You know: the island of the lion-birds.’

  ‘Lion-birds?’ Tattoo exchanged a quick glance with Firedrake and Sorrel.

  ‘Yes. There are all kinds of strange creatures around the place on Pulau Bulu,’ commented Eugene, with a dismissive wave of his pincers. ‘Though, mind you, Eight also says a green man climbed out of the flying thing. Oh no, I said to myself when he came out with that, he’s gone and found a barrel of rum among the wrecks again! When he does that he always talks sheer nonsense for days on end, and he ties knots in his own arms!’

  ‘Eight?’ Firedrake was trying hard not to lose patience with Eugene. After all, the crab could be their only hope of finding Ben in spite of everything. Lion-birds. That didn’t sound much like a phoenix!

  ‘Do you think your friend Eight could take us to this island?’

  ‘Sure! I don’t know exactly where he is at the moment, but I can call him,’ offered Eugene. ‘He’s probably painting a ship’s hull again. He doesn’t even leave the drilling rigs alone. “Eight.” I always tell him, “human beings don’t know how to appreciate your works of art!” And believe you me, his ink lasts a long time, even under water. One of these days they’ll make him into octopus salad, but he doesn’t even know what that is. My friend Eight is such a little innocent!’

  Eugene looked at his reflection in the silver of the locket. Then he picked it up by the chain – and dropped it in front of Sorrel’s paws.

  ‘I once heard that dragons bring out the best in every living being,’ he sighed. ‘But I’d never have thought, not in a hundred years, that it also applied to four-eyed crabs. What a nuisance.’

  Eugene tripped towards the surf breaking over the beach in shallow waves, and began rattling his pincers faster than a flamenco dancer rattling her castanets.

  At first it almost looked as if the entire Pacific Ocean was answering Eugene.

  Out in the open sea, a wave began to swell. It towered up and up, until Sorrel took shelter behind Firedrake’s legs. Then arms densely covered with suckers reached up out of the wave, and a gigantic head with eyes so large that Sorrel could have fitted comfortably into them.

  Eight. A good name for a Great Kraken.

  The long arms winding their way over the beach were in all the colours of the rainbow, while Eight’s body – or what could be seen of it – was dark green, like the uttermost depths of the ocean.

  ‘You see?’ Firedrake whispered to Sorrel. ‘It’s sensible to be polite even to tiny four-eyed crabs. You never know, they may have powerful friends.’

  One inky blue kraken arm wound over the sand to Eugene, while the others, to Sorrel’s relief, stayed in the water. The crab climbed up on the kraken’s arm, and pointed one of his claws at Firedrake and Tattoo.

  ‘Look at that, Eight!’ he called. ‘They really are dragons. Would you have thought there were still any around? No! So why wouldn’t there also be another nice Great Kraken somewhere or other?’

  ‘Oh, there definitely is,’ said Sorrel, who had quickly overcome her alarm at Eight’s size. ‘In fact, I’ve met him myself. Although I’m not so sure about the “nice” bit. Most of the time he acts…’

  Firedrake cast her a warning glance.

  ‘The friend I’m looking for knows the kraken she mentions very well!’ he called to Eight. ‘And I’m sure he will help you to find him.’

  The kraken’s huge eyes widened as if to take in the whole world. Eight raised two more arms out of the water, and passed them through the air as if he were writing invisible letters there.

  ‘Eight would like to know what ocean this kraken calls his home,’ Eugene translated. ‘The only one we know is a very bad-tempered one off the coast of New Zealand.’

  ‘This one lives off the north coast of Norway,’ replied Firedrake. ‘And the friend I’m looking for can certainly tell you more about his temper.’

  That was putting it very diplomatically, and Sorrel bit back the comment that Hafgufa, the name of the Norwegian kraken, certainly had a temper every bit as bad as the one from New Zealand.

  Eight’s arms wrote in the air again.

  ‘He will take you to the beach where he saw the wooden machine and the green man,’ Eugene translated. ‘But first Eight would like to know who painted your scales,’ he said, pointing to Tattoo. ‘He likes the pattern very much.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  Synnefo, Chara, Ouranos

  It takes a very long time to become young.

  Pablo Picasso

  Synnefo really was as white as her mother. Chara had his father’s copper-coloured coat, and Ouranos – yes, Ouranos was blue! Guinevere couldn’t have said which she liked best. All three were so beautiful! She and Vita spent every free minute in the stable, to catch a glimpse of the foals as often as they could, and Ànemos came too, to kneel beside the nest for hours, although his children’s feathered nursemaids were still very strict about visiting times. />
  Even in the moments, only too short, when the eggs were not hidden under the feathers that kept them warm, the foals were already giving away a good deal about their characters. Synnefo was the calmest of the three. She drifted inside her egg as dreamily as if she were hardly aware of the outside world. Chara, on the other hand, often pressed his nose against his eggshell, which was clear as glass now, and always seemed glad if he could see more than just feathers! And Ouranos – he was always moving, beating his tiny wings, kicking his legs as if his hooves were already trying to find solid ground, or throwing his little head back and blowing miniature bubbles as he whinnied.

  No, you could never tire of looking at them. Guinevere only wished they wouldn’t grow so fast.

  When she caught Ànemos looking at the remaining blank spaces on the calendar, she took it off the stable door and hid it in her room.

  Please, she thought as she hung the calendar over her bed. Ben! Dad! Hothbrodd! Twigleg! Lola! Tell us that you have the feather! Get in touch! But suppose they had bad news? Suppose they hadn’t found the griffins. Or suppose they’d found them, and… no! Guinevere wouldn’t think out that question to the end, even though she thought she saw it on every face in MÍMAMEIĐR.

  Synnefo.

  Chara.

  Ouranos.

  Their tiny mouths drank the shimmering liquid in which they swam. But it would soon be finished if the eggs didn’t grow.

  Guinevere looked at the sky as she went back to the stable. She caught herself staring intently at the clouds more and more often, as if that would bring Hothbrodd’s plane back.

  But the sky over MÍMAMEIĐR was still empty.

  They would get back in time. And the feather would help.

  It must!

  Synnefo… Chara… Ouranos.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Sold

  The sun, the moon and the stars would have

  disappeared long ago… had they happened to be

  within the reach of predatory human hands.