Dragon Rider (28 page)

Ben looked at the lama, who returned his glance and smiled. Then the lama whispered something into Twigleg’s ear.

“The lama says,” translated the homunculus, “that he understands a few words of our language and will by no means think it uncivil of you, dragon rider, to seek the company of the professor’s clever daughter instead of enjoying
tsampa
and buttered tea.”

“Th-thank you,” stammered Ben, returning the lama’s smile. “Twigleg, tell him I like it here very much, and say” — he added, looking at the mountains rising on the other side of the valley — “that I somehow feel at home here, even though it’s very different from where I come. Very, very different. Tell him that, would you? Only put it better, please.”

Twigleg nodded and turned back to translate Ben’s words for the lama, who listened attentively to the homunculus before replying with his customary slight smile.

“The lama says,” Twigleg told Ben, “that in his opinion, it is quite possible you have indeed been here before. In another life.”

“Come on, dragon rider,” said Barnabas Greenbloom, “I’ll take you to Guinevere before your head bursts with all this wisdom. And I’ll come back for you when breakfast is over.”

“What do you think Sorrel and I should do, Professor?” asked Firedrake, putting his muzzle gently over the man’s shoulder.

“Oh, these people will go along with anything you want, Firedrake,” replied Professor Greenbloom. “Why not have a nice sleep in the Dhu-Khang? No one will disturb you — in fact they’ll say so many prayers for you that you’ll be sure to find the Rim of Heaven.”

“And what about me?” asked Sorrel. “What do I do while Firedrake’s asleep and the rest of you are drinking buttered tea? I don’t like tea and I don’t like butter, so I’m hardly going to like tea with butter in it.”

“I’ll leave you with Guinevere, too,” said the professor. “There’s a nice soft bed in our room, and she brought some biscuits that I expect you
will
like.”

Then he led the two of them down the steps, through the crowd of monks standing respectfully in the courtyard, and
over to a small building nestling below the high wall of the Dhu-Khang.

As for Firedrake, he followed the lama into the great prayer hall, coiled up among the columns, and slept a deep, sound sleep while the monks sat around him quietly murmuring prayers, wishing all the good fortune of earth and sky to descend upon the dragon’s scales.

39. The Rat’s Report

 

 

S
orrel enjoyed Guinevere’s breakfast so much that she ate almost half of it all by herself. Ben didn’t mind. He wasn’t very hungry, anyway. All the excitement of the last few days and the thought of what still lay ahead had taken away his appetite. He never felt hungry when he was excited.

When Sorrel, having eaten to her heart’s content, curled up in a ball on Guinevere’s bed and started snoring loudly, Ben and Guinevere tiptoed out of the room, perched on one of the low monastery walls, and looked down at the river. Morning mist still clung to the mountainside, but as the sun rose over the snowy peaks the cold air slowly warmed.

“It’s lovely here, isn’t it?” said Guinevere.

Ben nodded. Twigleg was sitting on his knee, dozing off. People were working in the green fields down in the valley. They looked no bigger than beetles from up here.

“Where’s your mother?” asked Ben.

“In the Temple of the Angry Gods,” Guinevere told him.
She pointed to a red-painted building to the left of the Dhu-Khang. “Every monastery in this country has one. The building next to it is the Temple of the Kindly Gods, but the angry gods are considered particularly useful because they look so terrifying that they keep evil spirits away. The mountains around here are said to be full of evil spirits.”

“Goodness!” Ben looked admiringly at the girl. “You know a lot.”

“Oh, well,” said Guinevere dismissively, “that’s hardly surprising with parents like mine, is it? My mother’s copying the pictures on the temple walls at the moment. When we’re back home, she shows them to rich people and gets them to give money to have the pictures restored. The monks can’t afford that kind of thing, and the pictures are already very old, you see.”

“Goodness!” said Ben again, covering the sleeping Twigleg with his jacket. “You’re lucky to have parents like that.”

Guinevere cast him a questioning glance. “Dad says you don’t have any parents yourself.”

Ben picked a little stone off the wall and fiddled with it. “That’s right. I never did.”

Guinevere looked at him thoughtfully. “But you have Firedrake now,” she said. “Firedrake and Sorrel,” she added, smiling and pointing to the little homunculus, “and you have Twigleg.”

“So I do,” agreed Ben. “But that’s different.” Suddenly he narrowed his eyes and looked westward to where the river disappeared into the mountains. “Hey, I think Lola’s coming back! There, see?” He threw the stone over the wall and leaned forward.

“Lola?” asked Guinevere. “Is that the rat you were talking about?”

Ben nodded. A faint humming could be heard. It grew louder and louder until the little plane landed in expert style on the wall beside them. Lola Graytail opened the cockpit and got out.

“Nothing!” she announced, clambering up on one of the wings and making her way down to the top of the wall. “Nothing, absolutely no sign of anything. All clear, I’d say.”

Twigleg woke up, rubbed his eyes, and looked at the rat, confused. “Oh, it’s you, Lola,” he muttered drowsily.

“That’s right, humblecuss,” replied the rat and turned to Guinevere. “And who, may I ask, is this?”

“This is Guinevere,” said Ben, introducing her. “She’s the daughter of the professor who almost stepped on your plane, and she thinks she saw Nettlebrand.”

“I
know
I saw him,” said Guinevere. “I’m a squillion percent certain I did.”

“Could be.” Lola Graytail opened a flap under the wing
of her plane and took out a miniature lunch box. “But the creature’s disappeared now, anyway. I flew upstream and downstream, keeping so low over the river the fish thought I was a midge and water kept splashing into the cockpit. But I didn’t see any sign of a golden dragon with a dwarf. Not a thing. Not a single golden dragon scale.”

“Well, that’s good!” said Ben, sighing with relief. “I really thought we had him after us again. Thanks, Lola!”

“You’re welcome,” replied the rat. “Glad to be of service.”

She crammed a few bread crumbs into her mouth and stretched out on the wall. “Oh, I do like lazing about!” she sighed, raising her pointed nose to the sun. “Good thing Uncle Gilbert can’t see me. He’d really get his tail in a twist.”

Guinevere was still silent. Frowning, she looked down at the river. “All the same, I bet that monster’s down there somewhere, lying in wait for us,” she said.

“Oh, come off it, he’s buried in the sand,” said Ben. “We know he is. You should have heard that dwarf — I’m sure he wasn’t lying. Come on!” He nudged her with his elbow. “Tell me more about the temple.”

“What temple?” muttered Guinevere, without looking at him.

“The one your mother’s looking at,” replied Ben. “The Temple of the Angry Gods.”

“The Gon-Khang,” murmured Guinevere. “That’s its Tibetan name. Okay, if you really want to know….”

When Barnabas Greenbloom came down the steps of the great prayer hall with Firedrake and the lama, he found Ben and his daughter still on the wall. Between them were Lola Graytail and Twigleg, both snoring. The children were so deep in conversation that they hadn’t heard the others coming.

“I don’t like to disturb you two,” said Barnabas Greenbloom, coming up behind them, “but Ben could try breaking the moonlight now. The lama has brought him one of the sacred stones.”

The monk opened his hands to reveal the white stone. It had a radiant glow even in the daylight. Ben got off the wall and carefully took the moonstone.

“Where’s Sorrel?” asked Firedrake, looking around for her.

“In bed,” replied Guinevere. “Full of breakfast and snoring.”

“You astonish me!” Her father grinned. “And what has our friend the rat to report?”

“Not a sign of Nettlebrand,” replied Ben, looking at the moonstone, which he thought seemed darker in the sunlight.

“Well, that’s a relief.” Barnabas Greenbloom looked at his daughter. “Don’t you think so, Guinevere?”

Guinevere frowned. “I don’t know.”

“Oh, come on,” he said, taking his daughter and Ben by their arms. “Let’s go find Sorrel and Vita, and then our dragon rider can see about solving the puzzle the djinn gave him. I haven’t been in such suspense for ages. I wonder what sort of creature will appear when Ben breaks that stone?”

40. Work for Gravelbeard

 

 

B
ut Lola Graytail was wrong. Nettlebrand was lurking on the bed of the river Indus, sunk deep in the mud, just where the shadow of the monastery buildings fell on the water. The river ran so deep there that not the faintest reflection of Nettlebrand’s golden scales could reach the surface. He lay waiting patiently for his armor-cleaner to return.

Before Nettlebrand had dived deep into the river, Gravelbeard had jumped to the bank and hidden among some tufts of grass. And when, after a long day and half a night, Firedrake came flying out of the mountains to land behind the white walls of the monastery, the mountain dwarf set off. He trudged on, through fields and past huts, until at last he reached the mountain with the monastery on its slope.

Then Gravelbeard climbed.

The mountain was high, very high, but Gravelbeard was a mountain dwarf. He loved climbing almost as much as he loved gold. The solid rock of the mountain whispered and
spoke under Gravelbeard’s fingers as if it had been waiting for him, and him alone, all this time. It told him tales of vast caverns with columns made of precious stones and veins of gold ore, and caves where strange creatures lived. Gravelbeard chuckled with delight as he scaled the rocky slope. He could have climbed forever, but by the time day slowly dawned above the peaks, he was hauling himself over the top of the low wall surrounding the monastery. Cautiously he peered down into the courtyard.

Gravelbeard had arrived just in time to see Firedrake and his friends disappear into the Dhu-Khang. The dwarf even followed them up the steps, but the heavy door of the hall was already closed before he reached the top, and hard as he tried to open it just a crack with his short, strong fingers, it wouldn’t budge.

“Too bad,” muttered the dwarf, looking around, “but they’ll have to come out again sometime.” He looked around the courtyard for a hiding place where he could keep watch on the steps and the courtyard unobserved. It wasn’t difficult to find a suitable gap in the old walls.

“Just the place,” whispered Gravelbeard as he pushed in among the stones. “Could have been made for me.” And then he waited.

He had chosen his hiding place well. Admittedly, when Firedrake and the others came out of the prayer hall again,
Gravelbeard couldn’t see much apart from the feet of countless monks in their well-worn sandals. But when all the monks were up in the Dhu-Khang praying, Ben and Guinevere came and sat down on the wall only a stone’s throw away from him.

So now Gravelbeard learned that a flying rat had been out looking for his master but had failed to find him; and he discovered that the boy really did believe Nettlebrand had been buried in the desert sand. The dwarf saw the stone in the lama’s hand and heard about the djinn’s riddle. He saw Ben take the stone, and when Firedrake and his dragon riders went with the monk to try solving the riddle, Gravelbeard stole after them.

41. Burr-Burr-Chan

 

 

T
he lama led his guests to the other side of the monastery grounds and the place where the Gon-Khang and the Lha-Khang stood, one the Temple of the Angry Gods and the other the Temple of the Kindly Gods. And scurrying from wall to wall Gravelbeard, Nettlebrand’s spy, came after them.

As they were passing the red temple, the lama stopped. Vita Greenbloom had joined her husband.

“This,” she said, translating what the lama said, “is the Temple of the Angry Gods, who are said to keep all evil from the monastery and the village.”

“What sort of evil?” asked Sorrel, looking around uneasily.

“Evil spirits,” replied the lama, “and snowstorms, avalanches, rockfalls, disease —”

“Starvation?” added Sorrel.

The lama smiled. “Starvation, too.”

A strange shivery feeling came over Gravelbeard. Weak at the knees, he stole past the dark red walls. His breath was
coming faster, and he felt as if hands were reaching out to him from the temple, hands ready to seize him and drag him into the darkness.

Involuntarily he leaped forward with a little shriek and almost collided with Barnabas Greenbloom’s heels.

“What was that?” asked the professor, turning around. “Did you hear it, Vita?”

His wife nodded. “Sounded as if you stepped on some poor cat’s tail, Barnabas.”

The professor shook his head and looked around again, but by now Gravelbeard had hidden in a crevice in the wall.

 

“Perhaps it was the evil spirits,” said Guinevere.

“Very likely,” said her father. “Come on, I think the lama’s reached our destination.”

The old monk had stopped where the slope of the mountain met the monastery walls. The rock here was full of holes like Swiss cheese. Ben and Sorrel tilted their heads back. Yes, there were gaps everywhere in the rock, all of
them large enough for either the boy or the brownie to fit into comfortably.

“What’s that?” asked Ben, looking inquiringly at the lama. Twigleg interpreted for him.

“These are dwellings,” replied the lama, “the dwellings of those from whom you are about to seek help. They do not often show themselves. Very few of us have ever seen them face-to-face, but they are said to be friendly beings, and they were here long, long before we came.”

The lama went up to the rock wall, taking Ben with him. Ben hadn’t noticed them earlier, but he now saw the heads of two stone dragons jutting out from the rock.

“They look like Firedrake,” whispered Ben. “Just like Firedrake.” He felt the dragon’s warm breath on his back.

“They are the Dragon of the Beginning and the Dragon of the End,” the lama explained. “For what you have in mind, you should choose the Dragon of the Beginning.”

Ben nodded.

“Go on, dragon rider, hit it,” whispered Sorrel.

Raising the moonstone, Ben brought it down with all his might on the horns of the stone dragon.

The moonstone smashed into myriad splinters, and it seemed to them all that they heard a deep rumble slowly dying away in the heart of the mountain. Then all was still. Very still. They waited.

As the sun slowly rose behind the mountains, they cast their shadows on the monastery. A cold wind was blowing from the snowy peaks as a figure suddenly appeared in one of the holes in the rock, high above the heads of those waiting below.

It was a brownie. He looked almost like Sorrel, except that his coat was paler and thicker. And he had four arms. He was resting his paws on the rock where he stood.

“Twenty fingers, Twigleg,” whispered Ben. “He has twenty fingers, just as the djinn said.”

The homunculus could only nod.

The strange brownie looked down suspiciously, inspected the humans briefly, and then stared long and hard at the dragon.

“Well, fancy that!” he cried in the language of fabulous creatures, which can be understood at once by any other living creature, human or animal. “Thought better of it after all, have you? After so many years! I thought you’d all moldered away in your hiding place by now!” The strange brownie spat scornfully on the rock. “So, what’s happened for them to send you here all of a sudden to ask us for help? And what weird kind of brownie is that you have with you? What’s it done with its other arms?”

“I’ve only got two arms,” snapped Sorrel, looking up at him. “Which is quite enough for any self-respecting brownie,
you pathetic puffball. And no one sent us. We came of our own free will. The other dragons didn’t dare come, but they haven’t moldered away.”

“Ooh!” said the strange brownie, grinning. “Pathetic puffball, eh? At least you know your mushrooms. My name is Burr-Burr-Chan. What’s yours?”

 

“She’s Sorrel,” replied Firedrake, taking a step forward, “and you’re right about one thing: We’re here because we need help. We have come a long, long way to find the Rim of Heaven, and a djinn told us you could guide us there.”

“A long, long way?” Burr-Burr-Chan wrinkled his furry brow. “What do you mean by that?”

“We mean,” said Sorrel, “that we’ve flown halfway around the world just to listen to your smart-alecky remarks.”

“Calm down, Sorrel,” said Firedrake, nudging her aside with his nose. Then he looked up at Burr-Burr-Chan again.

“We come from a valley faraway to the northwest, a place where my kind went many hundreds of years ago when human beings were beginning to take over the world. Now they are reaching out their greedy hands to steal our valley, too, and we must find a new home. So I set out to seek the Rim of Heaven, the home of all dragons. I am here to ask if you know it.”

“Of course I know it!” replied Burr-Burr-Chan. “I know it as well as I know my own fur, although it’s been a long time since I was last there.”

Ben held his breath.

“Then it exists?” cried Sorrel. “The Rim of Heaven really exists?”

“What did you think?” Burr-Burr-Chan wrinkled his nose and looked distrustfully at Firedrake. “Are you sure you don’t come from the Rim of Heaven yourself? Are there really other dragons in the world?”

Firedrake nodded. “Will you guide us?” he asked. “Will you show us where to find the Rim of Heaven?”

For a few long moments the four-armed brownie did not answer. Sighing, he sat down in the hole in the rock where he had appeared and dangled his legs.

“Well, why not?” he said at last. “But I can tell you now, you won’t get much joy from your relations.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Sorrel.

Burr-Burr-Chan shrugged his shoulders and crossed his four arms over his chest. “It means they’ve turned into pathetic, sniveling, cowardly weaklings. It’s been more than fifty winters since I was there, but that’s how it was when last I saw them.” He bent down toward Sorrel. “Imagine, they don’t leave their cave anymore! Not even by night! When I last saw them, they were limp as withered leaves for want of moonlight. Their eyes were cloudy as puddles because of the darkness, their wings were dusty for lack of use, and they had fat bellies from eating lichen instead of drinking moonlight. Yes, you may well look shocked.” Burr-Burr-Chan nodded. “It’s very sad to see what’s become of the dragons.” The brownie leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Do you know who they’re hiding from? Not from human beings, no, they’re hiding from the golden dragon. They’ve been hiding ever since the night he came up out of the sea to hunt them.”

“We know that story,” said Ben, stepping up beside Firedrake. “But where are they hiding? In a cave, you said?”

Burr-Burr-Chan turned to him in surprise. “And what sort of creature are you? White as a milk-cap, and in the
company of a dragon. Don’t tell me you rode here on his back!”

“Yes, indeed he did,” replied Firedrake, nuzzling Ben.

Burr-Burr-Chan whistled through his teeth. “So you’re the dragon rider! It was you who broke the moonstone that summoned me?”

Ben nodded. The lama said something in a quiet voice.

“Yes, yes, I know.” Burr-Burr-Chan scratched his head. “That old story: Silver will be worth more than gold when the dragon rider returns.” The brownie narrowed his slanting eyes and looked Ben up and down. “Yes, the dragons are hiding in a cave,” he said slowly. “A wonderful cave deep within the mountain range known as the Rim of Heaven. We dug that cave for them — we, the Dubidai, the brownies of these mountains. But we never meant for them to bury themselves alive in it. When they hid there after the golden dragon had hunted them, we withdrew our friendship and came back here. As we left, we told them there was only one way to make up the quarrel: We would return to them on the day they summoned us with a moonstone to help them overcome the golden dragon.” He looked at Firedrake. “I will take you to them, but I will not stay, for they still haven’t summoned us.”

“The golden dragon is dead,” replied Firedrake. “Dead and buried in the sand of a distant desert. They needn’t hide anymore.”

“No, no, he isn’t dead!” cried Guinevere.

Everyone turned to look at her. Burr-Burr-Chan pricked up his furry ears.

“You have no proof of that, Guinevere!” said Barnabas Greenbloom.

“I tell you, I saw him!” Guinevere stuck out her chin obstinately. “With my own eyes. I didn’t imagine a single scale of him. And I don’t care what you all say, I didn’t dream up the dwarf perched on his head, either. The golden dragon is
not
buried in the sand. He followed us along the river. And I bet you my collection of fairy shoes he’s somewhere very close, waiting to see what we do next.”

“Interesting!” said Burr-Burr-Chan. With one bound, he jumped down from his hole in the rock and landed on the stone dragon’s head.

“Listen,” he said, raising all four paws, “I will take you to the Rim of Heaven. It’s closer than you may think. We have only to fly over this mountain,” he continued, tapping the rock, “and then ahead of you, just where the sun rises, you will see a chain of mountains as beautiful as white field mushrooms in the moon-dew. The dragons are hiding in the valley beyond those mountains. You wouldn’t spot the entrance to their cave even if your nose was right up against it. Only the dragons and the Dubidai know where it is, but I will show you. All of a sudden I have a very strange itch in
my fur. The kind of itch I get only when some great deed lies ahead, something adventurous and exciting.” Burr-Burr-Chan licked his lips and looked at the sky. “Right, we’ll set off as soon as the sun sets.”

Then he leaped into the nearest hole in the rock — and was gone.