The London Pride (2 page)

‘Hello, Tradge!’ he said. ‘Strange days, ain’t they?’

‘They is indeed,’ said Tragedy. ‘This here is Will and this is Jo, and they’re my new mates.’

He pointed at the grinning charioteer. ‘And this is Quad,’ he said. ‘One of my old mates.’

‘Quad?’ said Jo.

‘Short for Quadriga Boy,’ said Tragedy. ‘The Quadriga is the name of his infernal chariot—’

‘And it
is
an infernal chariot,’ agreed the boy. ‘On account of the horses being so wilful and ungovernable, like.’

‘What’s going on?’ said Tragedy.

‘The soldiers have all been frozen,’ said the fireman. Will noticed that while he spoke, the other firemen stayed vigilant, their eyes scanning the night sky as if expecting something dangerous to drop out of it at any moment. Their air of alertness was a bit unnerving.

‘We know that,’ said Will. ‘That’s why we’re running away.’

The fireman grunted. It wasn’t a grunt that contained much approval either.

‘You can run all you like. Lucky you. But they can’t run. They can’t move a bleeding inch, can they? And if they’re not back on their plinths by midnight they will never move again,’ he said, looking at Tragedy. ‘You know how it works.’

‘Cor!’ said Tragedy. ‘Cor, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking.’

‘Well, come on then!’ said the fireman. ‘All hands to the pump. We’ve got to drag them back to their plinths ourselves. Because if we don’t, they’re going to be dead forever!’

‘He’s right,’ said Tragedy, looking at Jo and Will. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight. I was too scared. I’d better be off to lend a hand.’

‘You’re not big enough to carry a statue,’ said Will. He didn’t want to lose their one guide in this strange city they had got trapped in.

‘No. I’ve got to do this,’ said Tragedy. ‘I mean, I bet I could carry one of them little St Georges if I had to …’

The memory of the cheerful and brave Georges who had ridden to their rescue stung Will. He had not only been grateful to them, he had liked them. They had been funny and irreverent and had stuck up for him when the snootier soldier-statues had not taken him seriously. He wanted to help too.

He looked at Jo. She nodded.

‘You stay,’ said Tragedy. He pointed at the dog. ‘Filax here’ll be a good guard dog for you.’

‘No,’ insisted Will. ‘We’re coming with you.’

He watched Jo limp across to the chariot.

‘The soldiers got frozen because they came to help us,’ he said. ‘We can rest when we’ve repaid the favour.’

He helped her up and into the chariot.

‘This is better than thrashing,’ he said.

‘And much easier on my knee than all that running,’ Jo replied. ‘I can ride on this and we can keep an eye on the sky and watch out for dragons.’

She looked a question at the firemen.

The shape of their tin hats reminded Will of the Fusilier who had saved him. In the kind of clear moment you sometimes get when you’re very tired, he realised he had liked him because he reminded him of their father, who was also a soldier. He felt a pang of guilt, and then a sudden boost of energy as he realised what they should do next. It was the tiniest first seed of a plan, and though small, it was the end of thrashing around in panic.

‘That is what you’re watching the sky for, isn’t it?’ said Jo to the nearest fireman.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Dragons and worse.’

Will joined Tragedy and his sister, stowing the dragon shield on the floor, keeping it in place with his foot and holding onto the insides of the chariot as the firemen climbed onto the outside and hung on there. It lurched into motion as Quad snapped the reins and the four horses snorted and leapt forwards.

He looked at Jo. She smiled grimly at him.

‘Dragons and worse?’ she said. He looked back at her. She was scanning the strip of sky above them. ‘What could be worse than dragons?’

Not for the first time Will thought she was much braver than he was.

‘Don’t know,’ he said, trying to sound normal. And older. And more intrepid. And cool. ‘Wish we didn’t have to find out. But I expect we will …’

As they raced away, they left the street behind them to the eerie and unmoving silence that had bewitched everything – or almost everything. And because they were scanning the sky and the way ahead they didn’t spare a look backwards. So they missed the two golden rats on the School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who shifted slightly, their noses wrinkling and tails lashing as they smelled the air. Nor did they see one of the giant, bird-sized mosquitoes detaching from the ironwork and hanging in the air beneath its humming wings, like a drone.

Jo looked at Will.

‘Why are you smiling?’ she said.

‘Because we needed a plan,’ he said. ‘And if the statues are healed at midnight, then maybe they’ll be healed from being frozen too. And then we can talk to the Fusilier.’

‘Who?’ she said.

‘You didn’t meet him. He saved me after you got taken by the dragons. But he’s the one I trust,’ he said. ‘You’ll like him. He feels … safe, you know? He’s a bit like Dad. He got melted saving me. I reckon he’s the one that’ll have the best plan.’

‘OK,’ she agreed. ‘Maybe he can tell us how to help Mum too.’

‘Fusilier’s a good egg,’ said Tragedy, who’d been listening. ‘Talking to him’s a good plan.’

‘Maybe he can help us to help everyone,’ said Will.

Behind them, unseen, the mosquito tipped in the air and drifted slowly after them.

A dead dragon should at the very least be majestic. The merest glimpse of its corpse should chill the bones of any viewer and inspire a bowel-loosening sense of dread at the horrific fact that even the most magnificent and fabulous of creatures can perish. It should be awe-inspiring.

The very sight of slain dragon should change the world.

The lifeless thing impaled on the railings round Coram’s Fields was not majestic. Not any more. He was sad. He wasn’t fabulous either, or awe-inspiring. He was awkward and – frankly – ridiculous. He had expired in a particularly ungainly and self-destructive fashion when Will had used his own shield to ricochet the twisting spirals of his fire-jet back onto him. This had heated the dragon to the point where he first became welded to the iron railings and then collapsed in an undignified slump, the spikes on top of the railing sliding through him like hot skewers through a pat of butter.

As he had cooled, so he had become part of the railings themselves, a twisted, half-melted flail of wings and talons. His legs, claws, tail and horribly skewed neck all pointed in different directions, turning him into a grotesque, silvered bomb-burst, frozen into a permanent 3D splat and pinned in place by the line of black spikes that passed straight through him.

And, worse than not being majestic, he was clearly a problem.

Two identical dragons, unmelted, mobile and entirely normal (as much as a fire-breathing flying lizard the size of a skip can be normal) stood in front of him with cocked heads and deeply furrowed brows. They’d laid their shields on the pavement beside them, and had the distinct air of workmen about to execute a necessary but rather unwelcome task.

One of them stepped up to the dead dragon and tugged him by the wingtip.

He didn’t move. The other shouldered past with a huff of frustration and took a businesslike two-taloned grip of the impaled dragon’s torso. His muscular thighs flexed and bunched as he tried to slide the body off the railings.

He didn’t move at all.

The first dragon gave a huff of his own, which had a distinct ‘told you so’ edge to it.

Next they both tried to lift together.

The dragon didn’t budge an inch off the railings, but the railings themselves started to work free of the crumbling concrete in which they were embedded. The horizontal bars that held them in place began to bow upwards with the force the two dragons were exerting, but after a moment they gave up, and the railings whanged back into place with a loud concussion of metal on stone.

The dragons looked at each other.

One looked back at the transfixed dragon and cocked his head sideways, allowing his stubby arms to reach the top of his head and give it a puzzled scratch.

He made a noise that sounded distinctly like ‘Ook?’

The other one looked over his head, into the sky, and made an answering noise that was definitely an ‘Ulp …’ And it wasn’t any old ‘Ulp’. It was the kind of ‘Ulp …’ that clearly meant ‘Uh-oh …’ in any language.

The head-scratcher followed his eyeline and saw the incoming shape gliding out of the sky.

He stepped back and stood waiting with the other one. Both of them dropped their heads and folded their ears back, like guilty dogs about to be scolded for doing something unmentionable.

The incoming third dragon snapped back his wings with a tremendous thunder-crack, and then beat downwards with such perfect timing that he killed his inbound velocity and landed with a delicacy that made him appear to have just stepped out of the air. He was, in fact, a whole different class of dragon to the silver ones busy trying not to cower in front of him like a pair of naughty schoolboys. They, like all the city dragons, looked rather stocky and mass-produced. This wasn’t their fault. It was how they had been ordered by the city fathers who had commissioned them. They were workmanlike and very effectively dragonish. Nine times out of ten the impression they created on the viewer was entirely satisfactory: they emanated a stolid aura and were – due to the bright-red and silver paint job – real eye-catchers. It was only when seen next to the other dragon (who was known as the Temple Bar dragon from the spot he normally occupied outside the The Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand) that people realised how much they lacked. The Temple Bar dragon was not stocky, painted nor mass-produced: he was the work of a far more talented artist than the municipal sculptor; he was wiry and spiky and savage and distinctly dangerous. He oozed peril. His face was haughty and commanding, his deep-set eyes terrifying and fiercely intelligent. He had the air of a steel mainspring flexed to near-breaking point, and the pent-up energy he exuded made him look like the worst trouble just about to happen: a cocked gun on a hair-trigger, a nightmare on the point of coming true in the most lethal fashion.

He was the master of all the other dragons, brighter, sharper and more deadly. If they had been made to guard the city, he was the leader of the guard, and he was the reason the other two dragons were now looking both very shamefaced and anywhere but directly into his cold, unforgiving eyes.

He stared at them until they found their gaze rising to meet his against their better judgement, forced to do so by the power of his will.

‘Ulp,’ said one, in answer to the unspoken question.

‘Ook,’ his companion added quietly.

The Temple Bar dragon stepped across the pavement and looked at the disastrously impaled corpse. He exhaled slowly, like a very patient but still irritated steam-boiler. He rapped the knuckles of his fore-claws against the breastbone of the unmoving creature. He poked at the railings skewering it in place. Then he shook his head and looked at the two dragons with eyes that mixed disappointment with equal parts of pity and frustration.

Then he took a long breath inwards, unnaturally long, inhaling so deeply that the air howled as it was sucked down the long stretch of his thin, muscular neck. He clamped his pointy jaws shut and let the hotness build in the fire-crop at the base of his throat, until his breastbone glowed red with the banked-up heat, and then he aimed his mouth at the base of the railings just below the messily spatchcocked dragon and breathed out.

The multicoloured blast of wildfire that shot from within him was a jet braided from blue and yellow and orange and purple and red flames. He played it back and forth across the iron paling, carefully avoiding the dragon’s body, but getting as close to it as he could. As he washed the fiery stream over the railings, they themselves began to change colour as they heated up – going from black to grey, then to orange, red then pink and then, as the railings reached white heat, he snapped his talons at the other two dragons.

They leapt forwards and gripped the fallen dragon, sliding it cleanly off the spikes.

As soon as it was clear, the Temple Bar dragon choked off the stream of wildfire and turned to look at the corpse, which the others had laid carefully on the ground.

He bent and touched the smoking holes left by the railings, and shook his head in disapproval. He emitted a chuff of angry wildfire that bowled through the park fence and accidentally ignited the contents of a nearby rubbish bin. This made him even more irritated. He gestured to the other dragons, one of whom hopped the railings, stood over the bin and blew the fire out with one thunderous blast of air.

They were, after all, city dragons, and no matter what the cat had got them doing, they were instinctively protective of the fabric of the place. Setting fire to London was the last thing they’d want to be caught doing, even by accident.

By the time he hopped back over the railings, the Temple Bar dragon had stood straight and got his anger under control. He nodded to the others, who picked up their shields with one claw, and then each took hold of an arm of the fallen dragon with the other, clearly about to carry him away with them.