Читать книгу Sword Quest - Nancy Fan Yi - Страница 7

Who loses and who gains is settled within a flap of the wings.

FROM THE OLD SCRIPTURE

1 LOSS

Hungrias II, the Ancient Wing, emperor of the archaeopteryxes, sprawled like a huge spider on his whalebone perch. He was staring out of a rounded window at the forests of Castlewood, but his eyes reflected the world. “Secrets. Delicious!” he declared, his bloated face squished into furrows. “No secrets can sneak past my mighty empire’s eyes and ears. Yes, go on!” Down the great golden hall of the Sun Palace, the rows of plumes on the leather headgear of his knights all dipped forward as the subjects leaned in to listen. Across from them, his scholars swished their sleeves.

“The lowly birds in your territories are starting to whisper about rare gemstones. Leasorn gems, they’re called,” the head of the scholars said. “They have strange markings on them. It is said they come from the sky and have something to do with a hero. One in particular, our sources reveal, seems to hint at when the hero will come – sometime in three years.” The members of the court gasped. The scholar spread the claws of one foot wide in wonderment, then closed them abruptly. He pointed at a ragamuffin twitching beside him. “I have found a witness, Your Majesty!”

“Speak.”

“Yes, Your Majesty!” the young archaeopteryx said. “I chanced to see that particular stone during my morning foraging. ‘Thank the Great Spirit the gem is here,’ one of the birds around it was saying, so I knew something was peculiar. I hid and watched…”

Magical stones from the sky! thought the emperor, his gaze sweeping across the sunset painted on the arched ceiling.

“Colour! Location! Tribe!” Hungrias’s eyes glittered as if two gemstones were already in his pupils. “Speak up!”

“Beautifully orange it was, Your Majesty. It’s about a couple of dozen miles south of your Plains territory, with a band of doves living near a river.”

Sounds like something for me. Hero, the wise bird said? Well, I’ll show how archaeopteryxes can crush all heroes! “I must have this treasure.” Drumming his sausagelike talons, Hungrias straightened on his jewelled perch and barked, “Sir Maldeor!”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” The head of the knights stepped forward on the carpet and bowed.

“Take some elite soldiers and find this gem for me.”

Before the knight could reply, the curtains behind Hungrias’s throne trembled and a fat feathered ball waddled up to the emperor. “Me too!” Prince Phaëthon cried, his beak full. In his claws he held a blueberry muffin. “I shall go along. I must!”

“You’re young. Battles are not for you.”

“I must! I want to learn how to fight. Please, Father!” the prince begged, crumbs on his beak.

Hungrias’s tiny eyes flitted shut. Then he huffed and said, “Sir Maldeor, I entrust my son to you.”

Phaëthon grinned with green-tinged teeth.

Good grief, thought the knight. “Yes, Your Majesty,” he managed to say.

The next day, Sir Maldeor, Prince Phaëthon and thirty soldiers journeyed to the dove tribe.

Easy picking, Maldeor thought when they arrived. The squat, knobbly olive trees where the tribe lived did not seem to present a threat, but because of the prince, precautions had to be taken. “Stay behind the first line,” Maldeor whispered.

“Why? I hate that!” shouted the prince, surprising a dove named Irene coming back from a morning flight. She rushed towards her tribe, shouting, “Archaeopteryxes! They’re coming, they’re coming!”

Surprise plan foiled! Maldeor spat in disgust and flipped his long tail to signal the charge. As if that weren’t enough, as the soft fluttering wings of the defending doves obscured the olive trees beyond, Phaëthon whined in the knight’s ear, “Can I find the gem?”

“No, Prince. Not now.”

Why did the prince want to come in the first place? I can’t be a nursemaid and a knight at the same time, Maldeor thought as he muttered plans to a group of his soldiers. With a nod, they formed into a tight ball prickling with spears and flew directly at the bigges olive tree. An old dove was frantically burying the gemstone in a hollow of the tree. Beside him stood Irene, the bird who had forewarned their tribe.

The knight aimed for the Leasorn gem, but the old dove jumped and kicked Maldeor’s face with his pink claws. Maldeor bit one toe and hung on. The old dove tried to beat Maldeor off, but he was too small to have much chance. One of Maldeor’s soldiers swung a club.

“Flee, my daughter!” the old dove gasped, and died.

“No!” Irene shrieked. Sobbing, she tensed her neck and, with a mighty flap of her wings, dived at Maldeor’s claws, which now held the gemstone. Maldeor whooped in pain. The stone sailed out of his grip, out of the olive tree, and landed a way off, in a sandy ditch. With grunts and Yahh!s, the birds propelled themselves madly towards it. Maldeor forgot the dove and scrambled to see. He sighed in relief when he saw that an archaeopteryx reached the gem first. “Yes!”

But it was none other than the prince. Turning in the direction of Maldeor, he lifted the gem up in the air. “I have found the gem!” Phaëthon pronounced, gloating.

You little bother! Maldeor grumbled angrily to himself and gripped his sword tighter. He gave a curt order to his soldiers to kill all the doves they could find. The foolish birds would have to pay for their defiance of the emperor – and Maldeor would have to go and get the prince. If only he hadn’t agreed to bring the brat here. As if in answer to his hidden wishes, a dark shadow suddenly loomed from the grove of birches behind the prince.

Now, this was no dove or archaeopteryx. It was the last of the long-lived flying creatures who had four wings. This intelligent creature, neither reptile nor bird, had blundered along in the darkness of the bracken for years and years and years, revealing himself to his contemporary cousins only when necessity called. Lizard eyes staring, he scanned the battleground he had just come across and focused on a young, tender specimen. A bigger bite than the doves he thought. The evil cogwheels in his ancient brain whirled as he calculated.

He sprang into the sunlight, unfurling four wings. For trembling seconds the dinosaur eclipsed the sun, then, lifting its leathery lips, bore down on the fat young prince.

The mouth opened, in went the front half of the prince, and the mouth closed. The prince’s muffled squeals came echoing out of the creature’s nostrils. Six times the size of an archaeopteryx, the monster jerked its neck, trying to swallow.

“Prince, Prince!” Sir Maldeor yelled hoarsely, grudges forgotten, as pure fear flooded his being. What was this? Was the prince dead already? My knighthood and life are in jeopardy! He jumped towards the four-winged dinosaur. His soldiers swarmed to corner the new danger as well, but their spears clattered off its scales and did not worry it. Now the fat legs and tail of the prince were kicking between the teeth. Maldeor grabbed one round leg and started desperately pulling.

Phaëthon, in the throat of the monster, was suffocating. He has little hope, Maldeor thought, and tugged at the gemstone instead. He wrestled fiercely to uncurl the stiffening talons, even beating on the prince’s foot with his sword, but it seemed of little use. Like any dying bird, the prince’s claws fastened tightly to whatever he was holding in an iron clutch.

Maldeor succeeded in loosening two toes, but just as the gemstone wobbled, the dinosaur broke loose, reared on its hind legs and tipped its head back. Phaëthon disappeared, gem and all.

Before Maldeor could try to slash open the creature’s throat and belly to retrieve the prince’s body and get the gemstone, a sudden deep groan issued from the winged monster. Its eyes shrivelled up like two huge raisins, and, with a horrified bellow, it dropped to all fours and disappeared in a wreath of blue flames.

Sir Maldeor hacked the air as fiercely as he could where the monster had been, but it was gone, along with the prince and the gemstone. He looked back in despair. The dove who had knocked the gem out of his claws was nowhere to be seen. He howled in frustration and panic.

Meanwhile, Irene the dove mourned for her destroyed tribe and her dead father. Between each trembling wing beat, she distractedly wondered where she should head. An image of foaming waves flitted across her mind. The archaeopteryxes never patrolled the southern seaside, except on a rare mission. Yes, the seaside would be a safe place to go for now, she thought.

The trip that she made to the sea was an extraordinary one. Where it might have taken a seasoned migratory bird two days, she got there in just one day. Exhausted, she fell into a deep slumber in a crevice within a seaside cliff and did not wake till morning.

She felt wretched with despair. Now she had lost everything. Family, safety, responsibility. She staggered along the sand in the whispering tide, her vision blinding white with sickening greyish shadows.

A few days later, she laid an egg, and her interest in life was renewed. I won’t lose you to the archaeopteryxes, my little one, she vowed. I will die for you if I have to.

The days that she brooded her egg brought the worst sea storms ever imagined. The clouds finally cleared on the day the egg trembled and broke; and a thread of light fell upon the small bird, who was covered with down as delicate as frost.

Irene stared at the hatchling, amazed. Doves never hatched with feathers! The strange little bird turned his face to his mother, and his eyes opened, dark and shining. But baby doves were hatched blind. In the distance the sea wind sang. Winds could be gentle or powerful. Winds could be captured, but never for long. Irene cupped her claw around her hatchling’s head and whispered, “Wind-voice…”

Still, the hatchling looked a lot like her: red beak, red feet and an honest little face with a perpetual smile on it. She feared, sadly and bitterly, that somehow the archaeopteryxes would be a threat to her hatchling.

When the four-winged dinosaur awoke in a room with shadowy granite walls, he was diminished in size. He pressed a trembling forelimb to his heart. Nothing was beating.

Before him, misty smoke whirled in a gigantic circle. High up in the very middle of the spinning grey wisps, a voice boomed out. “I am Yama, Lord of Death. Welcome, four-winged creature. You are no longer truly alive, but partially a ghost, and here you shall be known as Yin Soul. You have swallowed a sacred gemstone, a crystallised tear of my opposite, the Great Spirit. It is lodged inside you. This is your punishment! You shall be suspended here in torment in this small space, between the world of the living and the dead.”

The dinosaur widened his eyes. “What? There must be a mistake! I didn’t eat a gem; I ate an archaeopteryx!”

“The archaeopteryx was holding on to a gemstone. It is one of seven that points the way to the magical sword in Kauria, the Island of Paradise. A hero will come to get the sword in the fifth full moon two years from now. When he does, you shall die an utterly painful death.”

Yin Soul yelped. “Can I get out? I don’t want to be here!”

“Only if you manage to reincarnate in the body of a likely hero before Hero’s Day and get the sword yourself will you escape. Otherwise, my realm shall welcome you!” Yama’s voice sent chills through the dinosaur.

In the same mysterious way he had come, Yama dissolved.

There were bookshelves full of dark tomes all around Yin Soul. In the long, agonising days after his arrival, he devoted himself to learning ways of trickery and deceit. All the while, he scanned the frozen thoughts of dying birds, searching – searching for a victim to pull him out of this wretched place.

He waited bitterly for two years before he finally found one.