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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 MÍMAMEIÐR’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.
