Dragon Rescue (15 page)

“I’ve never seen a grown bird with such an
appalling
lack of feathers,” he heard a large, long-legged, snow white bird with a long, curved beak say. Tom smiled and nodded to the bird but made no rejoinder, realizing how strange he must appear sitting naked and soaking wet on the log.

“An exotic of some sort?” another voice asked with a laugh.

The second speaker was a three-foot lizard of dark green with white and bright yellow spots down his back and around his throat.

The reptile flicked out a vividly orange tongue, captured a bluebottle fly, and swallowed it with a quick gulp.

‘‘Where are you from and what flock?” asked the white heron, fixing the young man with one beady eye.

“Not from around here, at any rate,” Tom replied. “From the north.

A place called Overhall.”

“Never heard of it,” said the white heron with a haughty sniff.

“But that doesn’t mean anything,” put in the lizard with a lazy grin. “You’ve lived all your life right here on this hummock!”

“Well, so I have and my mother and grandmothers before me,”

said the heron defensively. “It’s the best place in the world to be, when it comes down to that.”

“Care for a dragonfly, fledgling?” the lizard asked Tom politely.

“No, thank you just the same,” Tom replied, shaking his head.

“I’ve already eaten. Why do you call me ‘fledgling’?”

“It’s obvious you aren’t yet feathered and ready to fly,” replied the lizard.

“Oh, come now!” cried the heron. “How else could he get here?

Unless he was brought by the strange water-poke.”

“Actually, I came by Dragon,” admitted Tom.

“By
what?”
squawked the bird.

She just did manage to keep from toppling off the log by a wild flapping of her long wings. “Dragons eat whole flocks of birds at a gulp! Mama told me so, so I know it’s true.”

“Some Dragons do, perhaps,” said the lizard, chuckling. “But not the one whose been over in the middle of Sinking Marsh these past few years. That one eats nothing but big rocks and cypress pilings, I’ve heard.”

“I wouldn’t trust a Dragon farther than I could spit,” said the heron with a shudder. “But you say one carried you here, youngster?

How? Why? Did you manage to escape?”

“Easily told,” Tom said, and he launched into the story of the Dragon gone bad and the kidnapping of young Prince Ednoll.

“The thing is, what can you tell me about this Dragon? Is he living on a hummock in the middle of Sinking Marsh, as we surmise?”

“Well, I can tell you that, for I’ve flown that way several times this week,” said the white heron, twisting her head right about to groom her tail feathers with her long, yellow beak. “Yes, there
is
a hummock there—quite large, in fact—and he’s added rocks and logs to it, making it even higher and larger and drier. Planted grasses, vines, and full-grown trees, also. For shade, I suppose, especially now he’s got the man-child for a visitor or guest.”

“They’re all afraid to go closer than that,” said the lizard with a slow wink at the Librarian. “Chickens, all of ‘em!”

“Sir, if you weren’t
my
best friend, I’d...I’d...” sputtered the heron angrily.

“But you’ve never really
overflown
the hummock, have you?” the lizard teased her.

“Well, not in so many...well, no! But I’ve seen the Dragon up closer than anyone else, haven’t I?”

“That much is true,” said the lizard to Tom, who was dressing himself as he listened. “The beast surprised her while she was fishing one evening.”

“No way to get closer to the Dragon but by wing, I suppose?” the Librarian asked the bird.

“Unless you’ve an insane desire to be a Dragon’s dinner, you’re safe enough. There isn’t any other way except flying...oh, maybe by swimming.”

Tom considered her words for a moment.

“I wonder if I could get you to do me a favor. Nothing dangerous and it won’t take long, I assure you. To help us save the little boy. He’s captive to the Dragon, you see...”

“I suspected it already! At your service,” twittered the bird, waving a wing. “I love an adventure! Children need our protection, ‘specially here.”

The lizard snorted in derision and slid off to find some tasty snails to top off the bluebottle flies he’d eaten for lunch.

“Fly as close to the Dragon’s hummock as you dare,” Tom explained. “Come back and tell us what they’re doing, the Dragon and the lad. Look especially carefully at the little boy. Has he been harmed?

We must send word to his mother, the Queen of Carolna. And rescue him, if we can, my Dragon and I.”

The white heron wanted to hear the whole story in detail. When Tom had finished the telling, she agreed without further questioning to take a look from aloft at the Dragon’s lair in the midst of Sinking Marsh.

“I’ll be back at the water-poker’s camp by sundown,” she promised, and, flapping her wonderfully long wings, ran across the shallows off the beach and launched herself into the midday sky.

Tom pulled on his boots, gathered a dozen of the ripest oranges and a bunch of yellow-green bananas, then retraced his steps to the other side of the hummock.

Furbetrance had arrived in his absence, and his brother was filling him in on the latest developments.

“The heron can tell us exactly what we’re up against, if she dares to go close enough,” Tom told them. “What’s for lunch?”

“Small-mouth bass,” announced Findles, proudly displaying his morning’s catch.

He set Tom to cleaning the fish while he built up the fire and chattered about current flow and water levels and taste and the fact that he’d figured it took a given volume of water several hundred years, at least, to seep from the northern mountains down to the marsh by way of the deep-buried aquifer layers under the Hiding Lands’ sand and the Cristol River’s stony bed itself.

There was little else the two Dragons and the Librarian could do at the moment, so they responded to Findles’s request for assistance, probing several places within the quicksand morass that he couldn’t otherwise reach in his boat.

“Out of sight of the other Dragon, of course,” said the scholar.

“Only sensible!”

Attaching his three ten-foot poles together end to end, Findles attempted to plumb the depths and determine the contours of the open marsh bottom under the watery sand and silt. From that he hoped to estimate the volume of water flowing into the reservoir from the north. Every fact he gained was carefully checked and jotted in a mildewed leather-bound notebook that never left his hands or pocket.

Despite their impatience to finish their mission, the Dragons and Tom found that the time flew by. Tom was especially interested in the estimates Findles had made as to where and how deep the aquifers lay under Hiding Lands.

“Pretty deep for man-made wells, however,” warned the young scientist. “A thousand feet? At least eight hundred!”

“I’m not sure how deep man-made wells can be dug with present technology here, but I know they go deeper than that at home,” said Tom thoughtfully. “I’ll have to check that out. You don’t know, do you, Retruance?”

“Not a bit of it!” cried the older Dragon. “We Dragons deal in fire, not water, my boy.”

Findles was excited by Tom’s proposed practical use of his information on the deep water’s flow.

“You’d dig deep wells to tap the aquifers and use it to water crops in the middle of the desert? No reason why it can’t be done, I say!” he enthused. “When you’re ready to start, call me. I’ll come help all I can.

You know,” he added, just struck with a new thought, “if the overbear-ing layer is impervious desert rock, as I suspect, the water must be under considerable pressure. In that case it might gush up through a strong well casing without pumping. What a sight!”

“We’ll have to be careful, won’t we, not to take too much of the water?” inquired the Librarian.

“I’ll have an answer for you on that in a few weeks,” promised Findles. “Some care is indicated, of course. Waterfields might go dry!

Of course, I’ve been saying for years and years, Waterfields could stand to have a little less water flowing through!”

As they rested in the late afternoon the white heron glided down to land on a low-hanging oak bough nearby. Tom greeted her eagerly and introduced her to his friends.

The bird overcame her first fears of the huge Dragons and politely exchanged bows with them.

“Now, as to the Dragon’s lair,” she said. “The hummock is most certainly man made, or rather, Dragon enhanced. It’s so large it takes three full minutes to fly across...”

“That would make it six miles wide,” interrupted Findles, consulting an ivory slide rule he pulled from his breast pocket.

“That’s right!” said the heron. “And as long, too.”

“I see why Papa was so long gone,” said Furbetrance, nodding gravely. “It would have taken even a Dragon quite a long time to make such a safe, dry haven.”

“I flew as low as I thought prudent,” continued the heron. “As it turned out, the Dragon was not paying any attention to me. He was playing catch with the man-child.”

“Catch?” cried Furbetrance. “You mean the boy was running away and the Dragon was trying to
catch
him?”

“No, no! They were tossing a ball back and forth. Quite cunningly, I thought, too,” replied the bird. “I’ve played in such manner with my own children, at times, before they learned to fly and left the nesting area.”

“So the child seems safe and well?” asked Retruance with considerable relief in his voice.

“Very much so, I should guess,” the heron answered. “He, the other Dragon, has built a covered nest—a hutch or a cote, I believe you’d call it—so they have a roof over their heads when it rains or the sun’s too hot. The center of the island is smoothly rolling and planted with lawns and flower beds, orchards and gardens of vegetables and fragrant ferns.”

“Papa was always a dirt gardener at heart,” murmured Retruance with a sentimental sniff.

“That’s about all I can tell you, friends,” said the heron, accepting a plateful of broiled bass fillets from the scholar. “I can tell you that anything as big as a Dragon or even a grown man couldn’t approach the Dragon’s island by either air or on foot without being seen when they were yet miles off. At night, perhaps, but I for one wouldn’t want to try it.”

They thanked the bird sincerely for her help. After they’d finished off the broiled fish and cleaned up the campsite, the researcher sat with his back against a tree trunk, smoothing his rough notes of the day and transferring them to his notebook.

The adventurers huddled on the other side of the campsite to discuss their next moves.

“I say we go over tonight, fly in quick and quiet, and snatch the child straight away while he sleeps,” Furbetrance insisted.

“But Papa won’t be asleep, especially if he knows we’re close by,”

his older brother objected. “No, what we need is a diversion. Somehow draw Papa away from the boy long enough to slip in behind him.”

“Wouldn’t he be expecting just that sort of thing?” asked Tom.

“You’re right, of course. That’s just what he would expect and plan for,” the Dragons said in agreement, sighing.

They fell silent for a long while.

Tom at last said, “What he
won’t
expect is anyone to come on foot to his hummock.”

“But that’s impossible!” cried Retruance. “Anyone trying to walk through the quicksands would be swallowed up in a trice! A horrible death and for naught.”

“Still, I recall ways men have managed to cross such quagmires before. I’ve read of their exploits, at least. A keeled boat would become trapped, but if we used Findles’s wide, flat boat that wouldn’t sink. I could lie in it and paddle it ashore under the cover of night.”

“I see what you’re saying,” cried Furbetrance. “Or you might use two wide wooden boards and move one ahead while you lie on the other, and alternate like that. Hard work, however!”

“And very slow,” added his older and wiser brother “It’d take a full night to reach the hummock’s edge. Tom’d be exposed to full view once daylight came. Hmmm!”

“Something must be done, though,” Tom insisted. “What else
is
there?”

“That’s good enough for a beginning,” agreed Furbetrance, rising and stretching his wings. “I’ll find a tree to cut up to make the flats, shall I?”

Retruance stayed him with a lifted claw.

“Wait! I suggest what Tom said earlier is still a good idea. It’s unlikely, as long as we don’t threaten him, that Papa’ll move or harm the Princeling.”

“Agreed,” said Tom.

“We need help. Murdan is, after all, Papa’s Companion.”

“I’d forgotten that,” admitted Furbetrance. “Yes, he would be most helpful.”

“And you’ve been
meaning
to ask Princess Manda to be your Companion for some time, I believe.” Retruance continued.

“True. I’m rather too shy to ask, if the truth were to be known!”

“Go to Overhall...fetch Murdan and the Princess...propose Com-panionship to Manda. I have no doubt she’ll accept you.”

“Nor have I,” said Tom. “She hasn’t ever really said so, but I know she truly wants to be a Companion.”

“If I’d known
that,”
grumbled Furbetrance, “I’d have asked her ages ago.”

It was quickly agreed that while Furbetrance and Tom returned to Overhall, Retruance would stay on the edge of Sinking Marsh, keeping an eye on his papa. He’d circle the hummock, at a distance, each day, and enlist the herons to fly closer to check on the welfare of Prince Ednoll, just in case.

“We can be back in three days if we fly straight to Overhall without stopping for food, drink, or sleep,” decided the Librarian.

“Be on your way, then!” said Retruance gloomily. “Waiting is the hardest part.”

Chapter Eleven

Old Place

As Tom and Furbetrance were departing from the edge of Sinking Marsh, Manda and her parents arrived at Overhall, after an unevent-ful overland ride north and west.

They were greeted warmly, and with great relief, by Rosemary of Ffallmar. She’d moved to her father’s castle after Ffallmar and his troops had marched off to lift the siege of Lexor.