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“We know,” said Boy 412 shortly. He put down the lantern and sat on the ground. He felt tired and wished Nicko would be quiet. But Nicko was excited by the tunnel.
“It’s amazing down here,” he said, staring at the hieroglyphs that ran along the wall as far as they could see in the flickering light of the lantern.
“I know,” said Jenna. “Look, I really like this one. This circle thing with a dragon in it.” She ran her hand over the small blue and gold image inscribed on the marble wall. Suddenly she felt the ground begin to shake. Boy 412 jumped to his feet.
“What’s that?” he gulped.
A long, low rumble sent tremors up through their feet and reverberated through the air.
“It’s moving!” gasped Jenna. “The tunnel wall is moving.”
One side of the tunnel wall was parting, ponderously rolling back, leaving a wide-open space in front of them. Boy 412 held up the lantern. It flared into a brilliant white light and showed, to their astonishment, a vast subterranean Roman temple laid out before them. Beneath their feet was an intricate mosaic floor, and rising into the darkness were huge round marble columns. But that was not all.
“Oh.”
“Wow.”
“Phew.” Nicko whistled. Maxie sat down and breathed respectful clouds of dog breath into the chill air.
In the middle of the temple, resting on the mosaic floor, lay the most beautiful boat anyone had ever seen.
The golden Dragon Boat of Hotep-Ra.
The huge green and gold head of the dragon reared up from the prow, its neck arched gracefully like a giant swan’s. The body of the dragon was a broad open boat with a smooth hull of golden wood. Folded neatly back along the outside of the hull were the dragon’s wings; great iridescent green folds shimmered as the multitude of green scales caught the light of the lantern. And at the stern of the Dragon Boat the green tail arched far up into the darkness of the temple, its golden barbed end almost hidden in the gloom.
“How did that get here?” breathed Nicko.
“Shipwrecked,” said Boy 412.
Jenna and Nicko looked at Boy 412 in surprise. “How do you know?” they both asked.
“I read about it in A Hundred Strange and Curious Tales for Bored Boys. Aunt Zelda lent it to me. But I thought it was a legend. I never thought the Dragon Boat was real. Or that it was here.”
“So what is it?” asked Jenna, entranced by the boat and getting the strangest feeling she had seen it somewhere before.
“It’s the Dragon Boat of Hotep-Ra. Legend has it he was the Wizard who built Wizard Tower.”
“He did,” said Jenna. “Marcia told me.”
“Oh. Well, there you are, then. The story said Hotep-Ra was a powerful Wizard in a Far Country and he had a dragon. But something happened and he had to leave quickly. So the dragon offered to become his boat, and she carried him safely to a new land.”
“So that boat is—or was—a real dragon?” whispered Jenna, in case the boat could hear her.
“I suppose so,” said Boy 412.
“Half boat, half dragon,” muttered Nicko. “Weird. But why is she here?”
“She was wrecked off some rocks by the Port lighthouse,” said Boy 412. “Hotep-Ra towed her into the marshes and had her pulled out of the water into a Roman temple that he found on a sacred island. He started rebuilding her, but he couldn’t find any skilled craftsmen at the Port. It was a really rough place in those days.”
“Still is,” grunted Nicko, “and they’re still no good at building boats either. If you want a proper boatbuilder you come upriver to the Castle. Everyone knows that.”
“Well, that was what they told Hotep-Ra too,” said Boy 412. “But when this oddly dressed man turned up at the Castle claiming to be a Wizard, they all laughed at him and refused to believe his stories about his amazing Dragon Boat. Until one day the Queen’s daughter fell ill, and he saved her life. The Queen was so grateful that she helped him build the Wizard Tower. One summer he took her and her daughter out to the Marram Marshes to see the Dragon Boat. And they fell in love with it. After that Hotep-Ra had as many boatbuilders working on it as he wanted, and because the Queen loved the boat, and she liked Hotep-Ra too, she used to bring her daughter out every summer just to see how they were getting on. The story says the Queen still does that. Oh, er…well, not any more, of course.”
There was a silence.
“Sorry. I didn’t think,” muttered Boy 412.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Jenna a little too brightly.
Nicko went over to the boat and expertly ran his hand over the gleaming golden wood of the hull.
“Nice repair,” he said. “Someone knew what they were doing. Shame no one has sailed her since though. She’s so beautiful.”
He began to climb an old wooden ladder that was propped up against the hull.
“Well, don’t just stand there, you two. Come and have a look!”
The inside of the boat was like no other boat anyone had ever seen. It was painted a deep lapis lazuli blue with hundreds of hieroglyphs running along the deck inscribed in gold.
“That old chest in Marcia’s room at the Tower,” said Boy 412 as he wandered along the deck, trailing his fingers along the polished wood, “it had the same kind of writing on it.”
“Did it?” said Jenna doubtfully. As far as she remembered, Boy 412 had his eyes closed most of the time he was in the Wizard Tower.
“I saw it when the Assassin came in. I can still see it now in my head,” said Boy 412, who was often troubled with a photographic memory of the most unfortunate of times.
They wandered along the deck of the Dragon Boat, past coiled green ropes, golden cleats and shackles, silver blocks and halyards and endless hieroglyphs. They passed by a small cabin with its deep blue doors firmly closed and carrying the same dragon symbol enclosed in a flattened oval shape that they had seen on the door in the tunnel, but none of them felt quite brave enough to open the doors and see what was below. They tiptoed past and, at last, reached the stern of the boat.
The tail of the dragon.
The massive tail arched high above them, disappearing into the gloom and making them all feel very small and a little vulnerable. All the Dragon Boat had to do was swish its tail down at them, and that, thought Boy 412 with a shiver, would be that.
Maxie had become very subdued and was walking obediently behind Nicko, his tail between his legs. He still had the feeling he had done something very wrong, and being on the Dragon Boat had not made him feel any better.
Nicko was at the stern of the boat, casting an expert eye over the tiller. It met with his approval. It was an elegant, smoothly curved piece of mahogany, carved so expertly that it fit into the hand as if it had known you forever.
Nicko decided to show Boy 412 how to steer.
“Look, you hold it like this,” he said, taking hold of the tiller, “and then you push it to the right if you want the boat to go left, and you pull it to the left if you want the boat to go right. Easy.”
“Doesn’t sound very easy,” said Boy 412 doubtfully. “Sounds back to front to me.”
“See, like this.” Nicko pushed the tiller to the right. It moved smoothly, turning the huge rudder at the stern in the opposite direction.
Boy 412 looked over the side of the boat.
“Oh, that’s what it does,” he said. “I see now.”
“You try,” said Nicko. “It makes more sense when you’re holding it yourself.” Boy 412 took the tiller in his right hand and stood beside it as Nicko had shown him.
The dragon’s tail twitched.
Boy 412 jumped. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” said Nicko. “Look, just push it away from you, like this…”
While Nicko was doing what he liked to do best, telling someone about how boats worked, Jenna had wandered up to the prow to look at the handsome golden dragon head. She gazed at it and found herself wondering why its eyes were closed. If she had a wonderful boat like this, thought Jenna, she would give the dragon two huge emeralds for eyes. It was no more than the dragon deserved. And then, on impulse, she wrapped her arms around the dragon’s smooth green neck and laid her head against it. The neck felt smooth and surprisingly warm.
A shiver of recognition ran through the dragon at Jenna’s touch. Distant memories came flooding back to the Dragon Boat…
