Lenna and the Last Dragon Read online

  Chapter Five

  A Meeting

  or, How Can the Cloud Know?

  “What now?” asked Kaldi, sitting heavily on the brown waves of the tree’s underside and rubbing his rubbery arms. The origami paper sky went white with spirals, and a strange picture of a Japanese landscape painted on a fan slid by beneath the thickening clouds.

  “We find the fisherman, obviously,” said Brugda. “I would ask Joukka Pelata, and I will want silence. Lenna, beside me.”

  Brugda reached into the big front pocket of her pale yellow sequined dress. She took out a sharp black stake made of obsidian with a rough chiseled point on the end. Together they gripped the stake and awkwardly pressed the tip into the flesh of the wood. They pulling it skiddingly, uncomfortably through the base of the giant tree. A strip of white wood peeled up like ribbon. It felt nasty, like spraying graffiti. The tree seemed to vibrate and hum under the stone needle.

  “Will the tree heal? Later?” whispered Lenna.

  “No.”

  They made a triangle, a few feet across, and sat at two of the three points. Lenna frowned at the sliced wood.

  “I don’t like hurting the tree.”

  “I don’t like a torn-down home,” Brugda answered. She chanted:

  Fær hana fyrr

  Andi madur uppi

  three times.

  “Do you know many workings, Brugda?” whispered Lenna.

  Brugda added the words hush, child to the words of the chant. At the end of the spell, when nothing happened, the old woman nodded meaningfully to Lenna. It took a few promptings to say all the words in the right order. A ripple took her, and Joukka Pelata was there. Not an image, but the woman herself, wearing the same simple frock and petticoats as before. She sat at the third point of the triangle.

  “How did the chant bring you here?” asked Lenna, staring.

  “The chant asks. The tree answers,” said Brugda, sideways. Joukka Pelata merely smiled.

  “Hello, my daughters. You asked well,” the Lady began, smiling matter-of-factly at Lenna.

  “Thank you, Momma,” Lenna said.

  “Ireland,” grunted Brugda. It was a question, but not quite.

  “Oh,” the Lady replied.

  “A fisherman.”

  “Hum.”

  “Do you have friends there?” Brugda asked.

  “Few.”

  “Reliable?”

  “Mo Bagohn, in Kells.”

  “Bagohn.”

  “A witch in a wagon.”

  “Yes.”

  Lenna’s head dodged back and forth to follow the whiplash conversation.

  “The empress can’t swim,” shouted Binnan Darnan from afar.

  “We’ll manage,” said Brugda without turning.

  A look of unplaced alarm broke onto Joukka Pelata’s placid face. The Lady’s eyes rotated straight up until only the whites showed. Her head tilted back like a camera on a loose tripod. It looked inhuman, somehow. Robotic. Her body began to pixellate. Squares of color blanked out. “You shouldn’t have called me,” she gurgled, and vanished.

  Brugda stood quickly and braced a hand against her stiff back. Wild and uncertain, she turned her face to the sky. She looked over the edge of the pit to the hungry void. She looked over the side to where the dragon’s hand had withdrawn. “Something’s up.” Turning to every direction, she hurried everyone aboard the wooden monster.

  It was already too late. A spiralling cloud condensed into the wallpaper sky above them, a heaving white swastika-shaped maelstrom, four crooked arms cutting across the Japanese origami designs. It flattened against the sun. A bird screamed. The light fell.

  “Hurry, empress!” called Binnan Darnan at the front. “Go! Go! Go!”

  As heavy gears led the empress backwards, a perfect blinding line dropped from the cloud and shattered into silver centipede-legs. It was lightning, striking with a sound like breaking glass. Where it hit, fifty feet of green land tore away from the surface of Iceland and sank into the swallowing black pit. Crumble.

  The empress turned, but another lightning bolt took away another arc of land, ripping the soil out and pushing it into the blackness in a throat-shaking landslide. The empress turned, and another bolt struck, and again, always where the machine faced.

  “How can the cloud know?” asked Binnan Darnan in horror.

  “There are eyes on us,” said Brugda sharply. “There always will be.”

  The empress galloped to the edge of the tree, wouldn’t jump, wouldn’t jump. Lenna started to cry. Binnan Darnan quailed. All around them they had no land to jump to. The lightning tore the land away, dripping swaths of dirt into the pit. The circle of the pit spread and sank and squandered to fallen ramps with a deep sound.

  “Will the lightning hit us?” whimpered Aitta.

  “If it does, we’re dead for sure,” mumbled Talvi with his arms around her.

  “Can’t hit the old magic,” Brugda said decisively. “That doesn’t help us, though.”

  “Use magic,” suggested Kaldi.

  “Try the kiss-me-quick, Little Len.”

  Huddling far down, Lenna closed her eyes and carefully spoke the chant to bring a wish to life.

  Kast minn baen

  Ad himnariki

  Tak hugmynd hedan

  she said, her hands clenched, her mind holding tightly to a vision of the empress landing softly on the land below.

  The shimmer of magic reached a few feet away from her and became a prismatic sphere, which plinked and vanished.

  “Have we used up all magic?” she asked desperately.

  “No,” Brugda coughed. “One spell against another, nothing more. A child against a Power of Magic.”

  After the first round of lightning had torn away all the land around them, the swastika cloud widened and began to strike again. The empress tried climbing out along the longest root but lost its grip and almost dropped everyone. It veered desperately, twisting its thorax, digging into the meat of the root with its footplates. Lenna held the seat in front of her with both hands, her head down, not even looking not even looking. It began to rain, big splashes and rapid sound in the gloom.

  “What do we do?” asked Lenna into her huddled elbows.

  “I don’t know, ” muttered Brugda.

  She gripped Brugda’s arm. “What happens?”

  “Silence, child. I’m thinking.”

  “Brugda!”

  The old hand cracked into her cheek, plak! She flew off the doily and sprawled onto the wooden floor, hugging herself and the ache in her jaw. Her tongue was bleeding a little. She closed her eyes to the taste and shivered violently.

  Kaldi cast a dolorous eye but said nothing.

  In the front, Binnan Darnan began to hyperventilate. “There’s nothing,” she whispered over and over to herself.

  “Can we climb down into the pit and up the other side?” asked Aitta tremulously.

  “I saw no bottom to the pit below the tree,” said Kaldi.

  A terrible sound struck the air. It was Binnan Darnan, who called for the dragon. And as sure as stars are turning, the secret dragon answered.

  “It can’t help us,” snapped Brugda, covering her ears, but Binnan Darnan called again. The top of the tree broke open, splitting into three wedges from the points of the obsidian-scratched triangle.

  “No!” Brugda screamed.

  Kindling tore, cracked, split, and a yellow tail uncurled beneath them like an endless waking snake. The tree broke to pieces as the dragon spread its spiked, veined wings in a burst of wild freedom. Flicking its tail, it sent the empress and its family soaring, soaring beyond the reach of the cloud, beyond the Pit of Old Magic, out toward the barrens of Iceland. Wings sent wind like hurricanes after them as the dragon flapped up, up, up towards freedom.

  Shivering and angry, Lenna clutched her bruised jaw. Her lower face was swelling up. Scootching away from Brugda, she looked back over the railing of the empress. She was just in time to watch as the ri
sing dragon crossed some invisible boundary. With a crushing ripple, it transformed into a second wooden empress. Metal pincers and legs flailed as the wingless yellow-painted machine fell helplessly back towards the darkness of the pit. Flying debris from the split tree thudded up into the yellow empress and cracked it in half. A hail of splintering wood. A silver bolt of lightning from the terrible cloud set the flailing creature aflame. When the second empress fell across the barrier of old magic far below, Lenna heard, now far away, the dying sound of the last dragon.