The Dragon in the Sea (17 page)

Jesse watched as the five mermen, swimming ahead of Coral, waved the tridents at the black coral. Wherever the tridents touched, the black coral turned into seaweed that drifted, like brightly colored tissue paper, harmlessly out of their way.

“How did they do that?” Jesse asked Marino.

Marino held up his own trident. “These are forged from Maldew’s original trident. While we were under Maldew’s power, they did only his
bidding. But now that we are free, they will have to obey us.”

“Can your trident help me double-time it to
The Golden Dragon
?” Jesse asked. Then he quickly shared with Marino the details of the plan.

As Marino listened to Jesse, his smile grew ever wider until he positively beamed. “What a grand plan!” he said. “I will be happy to take part in it, along with my trident.”

Marino turned the trident around so that the tines were facing away from them. With one hand, Marino held on to the handle near the top, placing Jesse’s hand below his, just as the trident’s three iron tines fired up like the engine of a small jet rocket. The next thing Jesse knew, they were hurtling through the jungle, the black coral bursting like fireworks into bright seaweed all around them.

“Rock?” said Daisy. She barely recognized the merman who swam up to her, with his white skin and clear eyes. “What happened to you?”

“Dragon ichor turned me into a White Eyes. All six of us. It happened when we laid hands on Jesse to turn him,” Rock said. “He turned
us
instead.”

“That’s great,” Daisy said. “Does that mean Jesse made it back to
The Golden Dragon
?”

“Marino is taking him there now,” Rock said.
“We escorted Coral and the egg safely to the beach. Please,” he said, nodding toward the mob of Red Eyes who were dragging the net, “touch them and turn them to White Eyes. Let them suffer no longer.”

“I wish I could,” Daisy said. “But first I have to swim up through the coral to the surface and blow on this pipe. It doesn’t seem to work underwater, and we need help moving your former master to the ship.”

“I can get you there very quickly,” said Rock. “Hold on to my trident.”

One minute Daisy was wrapping her fingers around the handle of Rock’s trident. The next minute, she was shooting upward through a colorful tunnel of swirling seaweed that grew brighter the closer to the surface they came. Then the seaweed faded away as the water lightened to pale aquamarine shot through with sunlight.

Daisy hadn’t realized until that moment how badly she had missed the sun until it beamed down upon her face through the water. It was morning sun, warm and golden. The next moment, her head broke the surface of the water. She let go of the trident and drank in the fresh air.

Rock floated next to her, smiling, his face lifted toward the sun. Daisy noticed immediately that she
was only about a half mile from the beach in front of the Inn of the Barking Seal and that the seals were, as always, barking. She never thought she would be so happy to hear that sound.

Daisy fastened her lips around the gun of the boatswain’s pipe. Closing and opening her hand over the hole in the sphere, she sent out one long, low burst and two short, high ones. This time the pipe sounded, loud and clear.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN
THE SACRED DRACONIAN
BIRTHING INCANTATION

The seals fell instantly silent. The next moment, Daisy heard a loud splashing sound as the seals slipped off the rock and into the sea, one after another until the big flat rock was empty.
The seals were swimming swiftly toward her.

Daisy ducked back beneath the sea. Soon, the water around her and Rock was swarming with the sinuous black and gray bodies of seals. There must have been hundreds of them, brushing against her, their golden eyes filled with alert intelligence, their whiskery noses pointed toward her, awaiting further instructions.

“Follow us!” she cried as she headed back down into the jungle.

Rock led the way, his trident turning any black coral it touched into harmless puffs and swirls of seaweed.

When Emmy saw Daisy at the head of the massive club of seals, she dropped the net and cried out, “You brought help! Good work, Daisy!”

“I blew the boatswain’s pipe and look what came a-swimmin’!” Daisy called out.

Without even being told what to do, the seals took up places along the net, doubling the workforce. With the seals’ assistance, the net holding Maldew now skimmed across the seafloor as fast as a nuclear sub on an urgent mission. Daisy had to whip her tail like mad to keep up with them. It wasn’t long before the big orange fan coral flashed past. When the jawbone of the Leviathan loomed
ahead, Daisy knew that their final destination was near.

Daisy swam up abreast of Emmy and said, “Take the cargo around to the stern.” She shifted her eyes to Maldew. “I believe you’ll find the ‘dragon egg’ in the captain’s cabin.”

Emmy winked. “Aye, aye, Skipper,” she said as she and the crew tugged Maldew sternward.

Soon, they arrived at the high windows of the captain’s cabin, which was flanked by portholes. Inside, the cabin glowed cozily with the light of a dozen phosphairy lanterns.

Daisy swam up to a window and peered inside. There was Jesse standing over the chart table. As planned, he had obtained a prop from the Armory. The Revolutionary War solid-shot cannonball was encrusted with white barnacles. From this distance, it was a dead ringer for a Thunder Egg. It lay in the center of their backpack.

Yar stood by the counter between the brass telescope and the crystal ball. Fluke hovered midway between Yar and Jesse. When Jesse looked up at the windows and saw them, he began to wave his hands over the egg, his lips moving feverishly, muttering mumbo jumbo.

Daisy turned and signaled Emmy to bring the
load closer. The host of bearers dragged the net so that Maldew’s nose was pressed up against the porthole glass.

“What’s the White Eyes doing?” the Mermage demanded.

“He’s uttering the Ultra-Supersonic-Sacred Draconian Birthing Incantation,” Daisy said.

“But I can’t hear him! I want to hear every word that’s being uttered,” the Mermage whined.

“That can be arranged,” said Emmy. She bashed the porthole and picked away the shards of glass. Then she gave Maldew one last good shove so that his business end bulged through the porthole into the cabin. “There you go, Super Cuke. You’ve got a ringside seat.”

Emmy would never be able to squeeze him all the way into the cabin. He would never fit. But they had agreed that so long as
part of him
was inside the cabin, their plan might just stand a chance of working.

Jesse stopped moving his lips. He looked up. First he winked at Daisy. Then he said to the Mermage, “Welcome aboard, Maldew. We thought you’d never get here.”

Jesse directed a solemn nod at Fluke.

Fluke nodded at Yar. “Give it a bit of a twist, will you, Chief?” she said.

“A twist, you say, Cap’n?” Yar asked.

“Yes, like the time you wrenched open that tasty jar of grapefruit marmalade left over from the
Titanic
. Remember, Chief?” Fluke said.

“Dashed delectable stuff it was, too. Twisting, Cap’n.” Yar turned from the telescope and wrapped his finny hands around the coral base of the crystal ball. With a grunt and a snort, he gave it a good vigorous wrenching.

A mighty roaring sound rose up through the hull, like thousands of tons of water pounding down, like Niagara Falls going over the rocky shelf and thundering into the gorge below.

When the roaring stopped, Daisy uncovered her eyes. Jesse, Fluke, and Yar had disappeared from the cabin. But, more importantly, Maldew was also gone.

Daisy squeezed through the porthole and swam over to gaze into the crystal ball. There was Maldew’s great green, red-bristled bulk, laid out on the beach in front of the Driftwoods’ shack.

“Yes!” she said.

A sea cucumber, no matter how big, Jesse had assured them all when he had proposed his plan, could not survive very long on dry land.

Just then, Daisy heard a great commotion coming from above deck. She swam to the porthole
just in time to see hundreds of sprites, kelpies, selkies, merfolk, and a vast assortment of undersea creatures, from penguins to polar bears, come tumbling down from the ship to join the Red Eyes and the seals.

But something was happening to the Red Eyes. They looked around at each other in wonder as the green tinge drained from their skin, their bloodshot eyes cleared, and their fingernails turned pale and pearly. The rest of the Red Eyes had become White Eyes.

The passengers of
The Golden Dragon
pumped the hands of the newly transformed White Eyes and clapped them heartily on their backs. Then everyone froze as a sound like a very loud foghorn filled the water. When they started moving again, it was as one body, pouring through the white arch and disappearing from sight.

Star swam up to the porthole. “Are you coming?” she asked.

“Where’s everyone going?” Daisy asked.

“To the hatching,” Star said happily. “Follow me.”

“Oh!” said Daisy. She had been so intent on carrying out their plan, she had almost forgotten the reason for it in the first place: the Thunder Egg.
Daisy squeezed herself back out of the porthole and followed Star through the arch.

On the beach, Maldew’s body was already beginning to dry in the rays of the midmorning sun.

Jesse was in too much discomfort to appreciate the moment of victory. He couldn’t breathe. His tail flopped helplessly in the sand. Just when a great blackness began closing in on him, Mitzi knelt beside him and laid her cool hands on either side of his face. Her shiny dark eyes looked deeply into his. His tail stopped flopping and his legs and feet, in their jeans and sneakers, kicked their way out of their sheath of scales.

He lay back in the sand and took a long, shaky breath of air, his first in days. His hands dug into the dry sand, reveling in the dry, gritty feel of it. Then he reached up and groped behind his ears just as the last of his six gills sealed shut beneath his sandy fingers. The dragon ichor, he noticed, had also disappeared from his hands and arms.

“Thanks, Captain Belleweather,” he said as he sat up.

“Call me Mitzi. And it’s my thanks that go out to all of you,” she said. “You saved the life of a precious dragon, and you’ve rid the Eighth Sea of
the greatest scourge it has ever known.”

Jesse looked around and his eyes fell on Fluke and Yar. They were flopping around in the sand, gasping and wheezing.

“Please help them!” Jesse pleaded. He knew exactly how they felt.

But Emmy beat Mitzi to it. She bent over and picked one of them up in each arm. Gently, she carried them down to the water’s edge and set them loose in the surf. They dived beneath the waves and their heads bobbed up beyond the line of the breaking surf.

“Thank you, Emerald!” Fluke called out.

“Good show, what?” said Yar. “Say, who’s got the egg now?”

“We’ve got the egg!” Emmy and Reef called out to them, pumping fists in the air.

“Jolly good show!” Yar said with a wave of his finny hand. “Pity, though, after all this, we’ll miss the hatching.”

“No, you won’t,” said Mitzi. “Swim through the Arch of Leviathan and we’ll meet you in the Back Bay. We’re holding the hatching in there. It’s too unpleasant here on the beach,” she said, indicating the festering body of Maldew.

“Ra
ther
,” said Yar.

“Quite!” said Fluke.

Then the selkie and the kelpie dipped beneath the waves.

The sea cucumber seemed to be rapidly shrinking in the sun. But the smaller it got, the more disgusting it smelled. Only the seagulls seemed able to tolerate it. In fact, it was as if they had found a delicacy. They wheeled overhead, diving and plucking off little bits of green slime and red gristle, then flying off with it.

Jesse was glad Daisy wasn’t here. Although scavenging was a perfectly natural process, he knew she would find the spectacle of the seabirds picking over the carrion truly gross. Then he realized that if Daisy wasn’t here, she would miss the hatching.

“Somebody needs to find Daisy!” he called out.

“Dude. Maintain your mellow.” Bill Driftwood leaned over him and held out a hand.

At first, Jesse thought he was going to do the handshake, but then he realized he was just offering Jesse a hand up. “Come on into the sugar shack,” said Bill. “I’ll bet my Marc Newson nickel-plated elephant-gun surfboard that your cousin’s already waiting for you in the Back Bay with Corey. They’re tending the egg. Last time I looked in, it was shaking, rattling, and rolling, so it must be time.”

“Corey?” Jesse asked. He was still in a bit of a
daze and he felt more than a little wobbly on his feet.

“That’s what we call Coral,” Bill said, catching Jesse’s elbow as he stumbled. “It might take you a while to get your lubber legs back.”

Jesse, Bill, and Emmy followed Reef and Mitzi as they skirted the corpse of the sea cucumber and headed toward the small ramshackle structure, made of driftwood and sea salvage, set into the side of the cliff. The front door hung on a set of rusty hinges that protested loudly when Bill Driftwood hauled it open.