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The startled raven retreated. “Yes, but that brownie,” he squawked in a small voice. “What about that brownie?”
“Get out, I said!” Nettlebrand roared.
Straightening up and growling, he lashed the sand with his tail. “That stinking flea! That spidery monstrosity! That sharp-nosed birdbrain! He actually dared to lie to me! Me!” Nettlebrand’s eyes were blazing. “I’ll trample him to death!” he snarled at the desert sands. “I’ll crack him like a nut. I’ll eat him alive the way I ate his brothers! Aaaargh!” Opening his jaws, he roared so loud that Gravelbeard threw himself onto the sand, trembling, and pulled his hat down over his ears.
“Up on my back, armor-cleaner!” snapped Nettlebrand.
“Yes, Your Goldness!” stammered the dwarf. Weak at the knees, he ran to his master’s tail and ran up it so fast that he almost lost his hat. “Are we going home at last, Your Goldness?” he asked.
“Going home?” Nettlebrand gave a hoarse laugh. “We’re going hunting. But first you’ll tell that treacherous spindly homunculus how I perished miserably in the desert.”
“You what?” asked Gravelbeard, bewildered.
“I rusted up, you fool,” Nettlebrand snapped. “I rusted, I got sand caught everywhere, I was buried alive, all blocked up — oh, invent any story you like. Only make it sound good, make it sound so convincing that the little traitor, suspecting nothing, will jump for joy and lead us to our prey.”
“But,” said Gravelbeard, gasping for breath as he hauled himself up on his master’s gigantic head, “how are you going to find him?”
“Leave that to me,” replied Nettlebrand. “I have a very good idea where the silver dragon was going. But now we need a nice big stretch of water for you to deliver your made-up story. And if you don’t manage to make him believe every word of it,” said Nettlebrand, his muzzle distorting into a terrible smile, “then I shall eat you alive, dwarf.”
Gravelbeard trembled nervously.
Nettlebrand dipped a black claw in the puddle of spit and disappeared like one of the ghostly apparitions of the Great Desert. Only the prints of his mighty paws, together with Gravelbeard’s feather duster, were left in the sand, but the desert wind soon covered them up forever.
31. Return of the Dragon Rider
It was dark inside the tomb of the dragon rider, although the noonday sun was blazing down on the land outside. Only a few dusty sunbeams made their way through the crumbling walls and fell on the strange carved patterns adorning the walls of the tomb. There was enough space under the stone dome for even Firedrake to turn around easily. A strange, heavy fragrance rose from some faded flowers lying on the floor around a stone sarcophagus.
“Look,” said Zubeida Ghalib, taking Ben over to it. The dry petals crackled under their feet. “Do you see this writing?” The dracologist put her hand on the stone slab covering the sarcophagus.
Ben nodded.
“It took me a long time to decipher it,” Zubeida went on. “Many of the characters had been eroded by the salty wind blowing in from the sea, and no one down in the village knew what they said. None of them remembered the old stories clearly. Only with the help of two very old women, whose grandmothers had told them tales of the dragon rider, did I manage to decipher the forgotten words — and, this morning, when I saw you and Sorrel riding into the village on Firedrake’s back, it was as if they had come to life.”
“Why, what do they say?” asked Ben. His heart had been thudding when Dr. Ghalib led him into the burial chamber. He didn’t like cemeteries. They frightened him, and now here he was inside a tomb. But the fragrance rising from the dry petals was reassuring.
“It says here,” replied Zubeida, passing her ringed fingers over the weather-worn characters, “that the dragon rider will return in the shape of a boy with skin as pale as the full moon, coming to save his friends the dragons from a terrible enemy.”
Incredulous, Ben examined the sarcophagus. “Is that really what it says? But …” Baffled, he looked at the professor.
“Did some soothsayer say so at the time, Zubeida?” asked Barnabas Greenbloom.
Zubeida Ghalib nodded. “Yes, a woman who was present at the dragon rider’s deathbed. Some even say now that those were his own words.”
“He said he’d return? But he was a human being, right?” asked Sorrel. She laughed. “Oh, come on! You humans don’t return from the World Beyond. You lose yourselves there. Either you lose yourselves or you forget the world you came from.”
“How do you know if that’s true of all human beings?” asked Zubeida Ghalib. “I know you can enter the other world whenever you like, Sorrel. All fabulous creatures can, except for those who die a violent death. But there are some humans beings who believe we, too, have only to become a little better acquainted with death to be able to return, if we want to. So who knows, perhaps there really is something of the old dragon rider in Ben.”
The boy looked down at his feet uncomfortably.
“Oh, come on!” Sorrel chuckled skeptically. “We found him in a pile of old packing cases. A stack of crates and cardboard cartons on the other side of the world, and he didn’t know a thing about dragons and brownies, not a single thing.”
“That’s true,” said Firedrake. He bent his neck over Ben’s shoulder. “But he has become a dragon rider now, Sorrel, a true dragon rider. There aren’t many of those in the world. There never were many, even when dragons could still roam freely and didn’t have to hide. In my view,” he said, raising his head and looking around, “whether or not there’s something of the old dragon rider in him, here he is, and perhaps he really can help us defeat Nettlebrand. One thing fits, anyway.” Firedrake nudged Ben and gently blew the hair back from his face. “He’s as pale as the moon. In fact, rather paler at the moment, I’d say.”
Feeling rather embarrassed, Ben grinned at the dragon.
“Huh!” Sorrel picked up one of the fragrant petals and held it under her nose. “I’m a dragon rider, too, you know! I’ve been a dragon rider ever since I can remember. But no one’s making a big fuss about me.”
“You’re not exactly as pale as the moon, are you?” said Twigleg, scrutinizing her furry face. “More the color of storm clouds, if you ask me.”
