The Tower of Bones (25 page)

Turkeya attempted to protect Mo but his fingers were
too numb to hold her, so that she began to roll and slide away from him, at the mercy of the next great wave. Turkeya began to slide into oblivion himself, his eyes clenched shut, expecting death. Abruptly, an enormous hand took a firm grip of his hair and yanked him back to his feet. He blinked open his eyes to be confronted by the cook, Larrh. The cook’s mane of white hair had broken free of its plait so it whirled about his head and face in the frenzy of wind. The giant figure took a better grip of Turkeya, pushing him up against an ice-encrusted rope where he managed to find a grip. His blurred vision searched frantically for Mo. He glimpsed her through the snow flurries, clinging onto the starboard rail.

‘There!’ he cried to Larrh. ‘The girl – save her!’

But Larrh ignored him, staring up into the wrack of sky, his arm pointing to where the lurid red light of the star was faintly visible even through the deluge of snow and storm.

‘That spiteful moon!’ Larrh cried, as if there was no escaping the fact that the star was directly overhead. The vortex that gripped them spun about the fulcrum of the red star. ‘It robs me of sleep. It invades my dreams. It fills me with foreboding.’

Turkeya shouted into Larrh’s distracted ear. ‘Listen to me! The girl will perish, unless we save her!’

Larrh’s enormous head was shaking, his lips trembling. ‘That monstrosity – I cannot tear it from my mind. Is it possible that we are being punished?’

Turkeya reached up and slapped Larrh’s face. ‘Will you not listen to me, Mr Larrh? You know who I am. I am the shaman. If we lose the girl we are lost!’

Larrh’s head swivelled slowly down. His brow glowered, his eyes protruding with what appeared to be uncontrollable emotions.

‘Such is my torment I can neither rest nor sleep. That confounded thing – that bloody eye.’

‘Only you have the strength to save my friend. Save her, Mr Larrh. Save the girl and you will save us all.’

The wheel was the only fragment of superstructure that resisted the ice. Shivering, holding onto it with every ounce of his strength, Alan waited for the Temple Ship to recover from the blow of another wave that had pitched the starboard rail below the waves. His breath was reduced to a desperate panting through nostrils that were encrusted with ice. Through similarly ice-grimed eyelids he surveyed the aft deck, or what little he could make of it, with visibility reduced to snatches between squalls. He was startled to see movement, a small huddle of figures breaking through the blizzard in a series of shuffles, holding on wherever they discovered a foothold, but determined, it seemed, to approach him at the wheel. With hair frozen awry on their heads and a wild, desperate look in their grime-etched faces, he recognised Turkeya and Mo – and then the giant figure that released them both from his powerful grip, before fading away into storm.

‘Are you crazy?’

What could they be thinking of, coming up from below into these conditions? He shouted for Ainé.

‘I see them!’

The Kyra, in some form he had never witnessed before, half woman, half tigress, with extended claws on all four limbs, hauled the two shivering figures up close to Alan, where they clutched onto the wheel on either side of him. Mo’s features were luminescent with pallor. Alan extended his right arm so it encircled her, helping her cling to the wheel, then turned to Turkeya, whose eyes were closed and whose lips appeared to be praying.

‘What’s going on?’

It was Mo who answered, her girlish voice strong enough in his ear to penetrate the shriek of the wind.

‘Mark has spoken to me.’ Mo explained the nature of Mark’s message. A splinter of malice had invaded the Ship.

‘But what does that mean? Are you talking about the red eye?’

‘No. Not the eye. Something else. Something here, within the Ship itself. Mark believes that it will destroy us all if we don’t do something about it.’

Alan shook his head, baffled by her words. If only he could communicate directly with Mark himself. But he had been trying to do that, without success, ever since he had come back to the after deck. He turned to the Kyra, who was crouched nearby, her arms about a stanchion of iron at the base of the wheel, her talons extended and
gripping. The fur of her face was solid with ice and even the pulsations in her oraculum were dulled.

‘Do you sense anything more of this splinter of malice?’ He addressed the young shaman.

Turkeya told Alan about the rose of ice that had invaded his cabin – and the figure of darkness he had sensed to be part of it.

‘Not the Witch?’

‘The Tyrant, I fear!’

The Tyrant?

A new blast of wind threatened their balance, so each held tightly to the wheel and waited for it to ebb. Alan closed his eyes, forcing himself to think. ‘The Tyrant is mounting some kind of attack from inside the Ship?’

‘It’s as if some malign force is weakening us from within. Some malaise of the spirit. But it attacks more than the Ship. It attacks us all, in heart and spirit. Do you not sense it – feel it – within yourself?’

Alan stared at the young shaman, shocked by what he was suggesting.

‘Mage Lord!’ He heard the Kyra’s urgent call, mind-to-mind. ‘The Ship is heeling about!’

‘Watch out, Mo, Turkeya. I’m taking the wheel.’

But the Ship did not respond to the wheel. The Ship was turning by itself – spinning around its own axis- and the sensation was dizzying. Even as it did so another gigantic wave struck. Water surged over the decks, the spray from the wave foaming high into the upper masts
and lines, then cascading back down onto the decks. They had to cling to the wheel, their hearts in their throats and their breaths suspended. With a sudden deafening crack the centre mast snapped. There was a thunderous series of detonations as the huge timbers crashed down onto the decks, dragging rigging and fragments of the other two great masts down with it, smashing through superstructure and rails, killing sailors.

Mo cried into Alan’s ear. ‘Talk to the Ship!’

He glanced down into her face, observing up close the beaded tracery of the ice in her eyelids that made it almost impossible for her to blink.

‘Find a way, Alan!’

All of a sudden the light faded, as though the sun, already obscured by the pall of blizzard, had been eclipsed. The Ship reeled as another monstrous wave struck it broadside, and Alan lost his footing on the slippery planks, crashing heavily against the rail. Half-stunned, he felt the surging rise of the recovering deck, which hurled him forward, smashing him against the base of the wheel. It stunned him for several moments while he clung to the icy woodwork, attempting to recover his senses. He could only hope that Mo and Turkeya remained safe nearby.

The Kyra helped him struggle back onto his feet. He felt her claws penetrate his surcoat as she pressed him back against the wheel. Thank goodness, Mo and Turkeya were still alive, huddled together immediately below him.

‘Mark!’ he cried, staring anew at the great wheel, realising
that this too was now frozen solid, encased in ice. There was no impression of the soul spirit of his friend, no impression of Mark’s presence at all.

The world about him had gone berserk.

Close to his ear he heard the Kyra roar. ‘The sea ahead! A monster wave. It is twenty feet above the deck.’

‘Tie me to the wheel!’

Wordlessly the Kyra took hold of Alan’s right arm. She lashed it to the rim of the great wheel. The Ship heeled, as if anticipating the approaching horror. With an almighty heave, the Kyra was at his other side, lashing his left arm to the other side of the wheel. He heard her departing words, mind-to-mind.

‘Discover the source of malice!’

The Kyra was gone, and with her, his friends Mo and Turkeya. Alan counted the seconds, hoping that they made it to safety below decks before the great wave swept over the decks. He held his breath as the monster wave struck, tearing his feet from under him and roaring through him.

Returning to the riverbank, with the morning sun warming the air about her, Kate had never felt more exhausted and yet so exhilarated. The dragon waited for her return, his tail swishing through the long grass, disturbing a swarm of brightly coloured butterflies. She stared at him, as if to reassure herself that what she recalled had been real: those great wings really were there, furled like collapsed tents along his back. When she squatted back down beside him, his head and neck extended almost to her lap.

It had all been so exciting she had forgotten her hunger. But that hunger had never gone away.

She murmured, ‘I feel so famished my muscles feel jittery.’

‘Driftwood find food.’

‘I don’t know where – but I wish you would.’

She threw her arms around the long, scaly neck, squeezing his iron-like solidity. ‘Show me that you can fly.
Let me see those wonderful wings in action. Let me see the real you – Driftwood the magnificent!’

With a swirl of his long body he turned riverwards, and then he moved with a blur of speed in those powerful hind legs that startled her. In moments he was airborne, the long slender body rising in a spiral so graceful it took her breath away. She watched as he grew smaller with distance, moving out until he hovered several hundred feet above the central stream, and then plummeted down, his body sheening blue-black as he dived vertically into the river. He was gone for something like a minute, with just the spreading ripples to show the place of his entry, and then suddenly he surfaced again in a cascade of water, and with a fish in his jaws. His great wings beat the air as he lifted slowly clear of the river, and a small rainbow shimmered within the rain of droplets falling from his wings. Kate squealed with delight. She thought a rainbow needed a peep of sunlight twinkling through it. But then she realised that Driftwood was himself the source of the light. She blinked, a slow entranced blink, only just realising something she should have grasped before. The odd, cantankerous little dragon wasn’t just some exotic animal. He was a being of magic.

Even so he couldn’t resist showing off, rising in another glorious spiral, preening his brightly coloured ruff so it flashed a delight of iridescent colours for her benefit, before swooping down to alight before her, his wings
folding about him like a cape, and depositing a flapping salmon at her feet.

She clapped her applause.

‘Kate – eat!’

‘I can’t just eat it like that. It’s still jumping.’

He bit off the head and swallowed it. ‘Not jumping.’

‘I just couldn’t. It’s still raw.’

The dragon bit the remains of the fish into two halves. One half he swallowed whole before he picked up what remained of the fish and trapped it between his sharp teeth. Then flames rose from his throat and he grilled the fish for her, allowing the cooked meat to lie within the bowl of his lower jaw.

He looked so pelican-like, unable to speak because his mouth was full, a talon-tipped finger – or maybe it was a thumb – pointing towards his burdened jaw.

‘Mmmmmm!’

Kate sniffed: it really did smell delicious.

‘Mmmmmm – mmmmmmmhhhhh!’

‘I think I’ve found a way to stop you prattling on.’

Those great eyes regarded her, fast blinking, with steam exuding from between his nostrils.

Kate’s mouth slavered with hunger. She wanted to taste the fish very badly, but she quaked with fear at the thought of going anywhere near those jaws. At the same time she really was starving and her hunger got the better of her, so she dashed one hand quickly into the maw and took a fistful of fish, burning her fingers so she had to pass the
hot flesh rapidly from one hand to another, blowing on it in an attempt to cool it. She was forced to drop it before dashing off and gathering several dock-like leaves and returning, arranging them into a makeshift platter before the dragon on the ground.

‘Put it there.’

He dropped the mouthful of fish, then snorted, blowing steam and fragments of fish all over her.

But Kate didn’t care. She blew on a morsel of fish and she tasted it as hot as her mouth would bear it.

‘It’s lovely.’ She snorted through her nose, with her mouth still half full. ‘It’s the most delicious food I have ever tasted.’

‘Eatings – not talks!’

She couldn’t wait. She blew on some more, aware that she was slobbering saliva from the corners of her mouth.

‘Just look at the state of me!’

The dragon watched her all the while, those great kumquat eyes blinking slowly, as Kate couldn’t stop herself slobbering, or her poor wasted body shivering and trembling, and all the while her fingers dipped repeatedly into the mess of fish, and her mouth gobbled, reluctant even to chew properly, until her belly felt full to bursting.

Although her mind was full of wonder at all that had happened, yet still there were mysteries about the dragon, and about the island, that deeply puzzled her. For example, who was this Momu who had dressed her in the
diaphanous clothes while she slept that second night? And there were mysteries that applied to Driftwood himself. If she was right, and her oraculum had somehow restored life to the dragon from what had appeared nothing more than an ancient fossil, he had come back into the world as a new-born – a child. That would explain the childish behaviour and speech. But over the few days – a week at the most – he appeared to be growing, maturing at enormous speed. Granny Dew had sent her here, to this island. So there had to be a logic to her arrival here, even if she couldn’t fathom any of it.

‘Can I ask you a question?’ It emerged more like, ‘Unn ahh assshhh u ehhh wesssnnn?’

The dragon merely flicked an eye in her direction. He was lying prone in the grass, peering down at the river, as if impatient to hunt again.

‘I know that our meeting – even if it just seemed to happen by chance – must signify something important.’

His tail whumped in the grass.

Kate sighed. Then she began to twirl a seed head of grass before her eyes, astonished in studying it that it had grown from the purse given to her by Granny Dew.