Authors: Carole Wilkinson
Shadow Sister
Map of China in the Sixteen Kingdoms Period
Other Books by Carole Wilkinson
Tao is learning to be a dragonkeeper. With no one to teach him it is not easy. He must keep Kai safe but there is danger at every turn – they are pursued by a gang of murderous nomads, tricked by unseen spirits, attacked by a giant seven-headed snake and disoriented in the realms of the dead. Most terrifying of all is the ghost who can turn blood into ice.
Tao knows he must prove he is truly worthy of the name dragonkeeper. But the road west is never straight and nothing for Tao and Kai is what it seems.
dragonkeeper.com.au
B
ELLYACHE
The dragon groaned. “My stomach hurts.”
He had been slow-moving all day, insisting on stopping often to rest.
“Let me see your tongue.”
The dragon sat on his haunches in front of the boy. Tao had grown a little in the weeks the two had been travelling together but, when sitting, Kai was still head and shoulders taller. He was imposing, even when his scales were dull and the spines down his back were drooping. He obediently stuck out his tongue. It was long, narrow and ended in a point, like a snake’s tail. A grey snake.
Tao knew that a dragon’s tongue should be a healthy red, not grey. Also it should not be covered with a thick, greenish coating. Tao prodded it with a twig. “It doesn’t look good.”
Kai groaned again. “I think I am going to be–”
He retched. Tao stepped back but he wasn’t quick enough. A stream of dragon vomit spewed onto the ground and splattered all over Tao’s straw sandals. It formed a grey puddle, thick and slimy, containing dark yellow lumps and several squashed insects. It smelled putrid.
“That is disgusting,” Tao said, wiping his sandals and feet with leaves.
“Feel bad,” Kai moaned. He held a large rusty nail in his left forepaw.
“The cockroaches I gave you to eat might make you feel sick, but they still could stop the iron from hurting you.”
The dragon opened out his paw. Blisters had formed where the nail touched his pads. Kai threw the iron nail into the forest and then retched again, adding to the pool of vomit.
Tao moved to where he could breathe in fresher air. He drank from his water skin. Then he consulted a list scrawled on a piece of bark and crossed out an item with a stub of charcoal.
“That rules out cockroaches,” he said.
“Insects with shells are bad. I told you that,” Kai said, or at least those were the words Tao heard in his head.
Tao recited a sutra for the dead cockroaches and prayed that their next life would be better.
“I ate some beetles when I was small,” Kai continued. “They made me sick too.”
Tao spent a long time searching for the nail in the undergrowth. When he finally found it he scooped up a handful of wet earth and squeezed it around the nail. He wrapped a length of leather around the clump of earth and put the bundle in his bag.
It was Tao’s fault that the cockroaches had died. He felt guilty, but he was eager to discover how to protect Kai from the effects of iron. Dragons reacted badly to contact with anything made of that metal. Just having iron nearby made them lose their strength. If it touched the belly or the hide around their ankles, where there were no protective scales, weeping sores formed. Prolonged contact with iron resulted in sickness and awful welts. Tao had seen it himself. It also weakened their eyesight.
It was impossible to avoid iron while they were travelling in the realms of men. The poorest peasant had some sort of iron implement for the field or the kitchen. Even a piece of iron as small as the nail, buried in earth and wrapped in three layers of leather, seemed to make the dragon lethargic. Tao hoped they would eventually reach uninhabited lands but, while they were still near human settlements, Kai’s sensitivity to iron was a serious handicap.
“We need to get going, Kai.”
“Am too sick to walk,” the dragon said. “Want to stay here.”
“It’s mid-afternoon. We can’t stop yet.”
The dragon crouched down and pulled all four paws under him, which meant he wasn’t going anywhere.
“And I will not eat the other things on your list.”
Tao leaned on his staff. He was tired too. For six weeks he’d been walking up and down mountains with the dragon. The idea of stopping early was tempting. He looked at the sky, or at least the patches of it visible through the trees. It had been overcast for weeks, but hadn’t rained. They didn’t really need shelter, but Tao still preferred to spend his nights with a roof over his head, or at least a cliff at his back.
To ensure that they didn’t run into bands of nomads, Kai had chosen a path that was no bigger than a goat track. Nomads were men from the tribes beyond the Great Wall who had invaded Huaxia. They were skilled horsemen who could ride anywhere they wished, but they were used to wide plains where their horses could gallop. Nomads didn’t like the mountains with their tall trees and narrow hemmed-in paths. Tao hoped that if they were careful, they could avoid being caught up in the chaos of the time. Most of the conflict took place in the cities and the towns, where rival nomad tribes fought over the ruins. There was little left in the towns for nomads to plunder, but there was nothing at all in the mountains. That’s what Tao hoped anyway.
“Let’s keep going for a little while. There might be swallows nesting in an overhang around the next bend in the path.”
The thought of having his favourite food for his evening meal encouraged the dragon and he got to his feet. Tao was pleased he’d managed to get Kai moving again. Now all he had to do was convince him not to abandon the iron project.
The idea had come to Tao when they were climbing up a particularly steep path and he was wishing he could fly – or at least that Kai could. He had remembered the yellow dragon Sha, a dragon old enough to have wings. Tao had given her a scroll of precious sutras that he had rescued. He was wondering if she had fulfilled her promise to carry them to safety. When Tao had first seen Sha, she was a captive of the Zhao nomad general Jilong. He had given the dragon a potion to make her aggressive – a foul brew of tigers’ blood mixed with scorpion tails, cockroaches, snake tongues, bat droppings and cinnabar. Tao had noticed that when Sha was in battle rage, although iron blades wounded her the same as any creature of flesh and blood, proximity to iron did not make her sick or weak. He had concluded that one of the ingredients of the potion must have made her immune to the effects of iron. The tigers’ blood was the main component. Tigers were one of the few enemies of dragons, and Kai was sure that the blood of an enemy would be what made the shy dragon aggressive. In fact, it had turned her into a killer.
Tao was quite proud of the experiment he had devised to discover which of the other ingredients had given Sha immunity to iron.
Scorpion tail had been the first item on the list. Kai had refused to cooperate, so Tao had no choice but to find a scorpion on his own. His conscience troubled him sorely – a Buddhist should not harm any creature – but he had overturned every rock they passed, searching for one without success.
One night a few days earlier, Tao had made a small fire to cook some taro root.
“Iron is not a problem,” Kai had complained. “Most people have moved south.”
It was true, they had hardly seen a soul since they’d left Yinmi Monastery. Anyone who was able to make the journey had fled from the nomads to Jiankang, a city in the south. Tao had insisted on conducting the experiment anyway.
“We might run into nomads,” Tao had said.
Nomads carried many weapons – spears, swords, daggers, arrow tips – and they were all made of iron.
As he’d poked the taro root to see if it was cooked, he saw a sandy-coloured scorpion sitting on one of his firestones. It edged closer to the fire, warming itself.
