But Ben had looked fascinated as he listened to Me-Rah’s alarming description. Oh, Twigleg had seen that expression on his face only too often before. Danger? it said. Bring it on! And who would give up before things got started anyway?
‘Me-Rah! Please!’ Ben called up to the narrow gap in the wall where he knew the parrot was hiding. ‘Just show us which island they live on, and then you can fly anywhere you like!’
But Me-Rah did not reappear. They could hear the rustle of feathers in her hideout, but that was all.
‘I’m so sorry, master!’ said Twigleg. ‘I’m afraid we’ll have to look for another guide.’
What a hypocrite he could be! To his shame, he had to admit to putting up a silent prayer to Garuda, or whatever god he had to thank (there were so many of them in India that even Twigleg had lost count), for Me-Rah’s refusal.
But Ben’s face suddenly brightened, and Twigleg didn’t have to look up to know that Me-Rah’s homesickness had overcome her fear of the lion-birds.
Ben held his arm out to her invitingly.
‘Let me introduce you to the leader of our expedition, Barnabas Greenbloom!’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’ll like him. He’s dead against people like the human beings who caught you and sold you.’
Even if Me-Rah hadn’t understood English, there was so much of the love and respect that Ben and the Greenblooms felt for all wild creatures in his voice that she would surely have trusted him even without knowing what his words meant. And so she flew down to the boy who had won Twigleg’s heart with the same ease, and dug her scaly toes into the arm of Ben’s jacket.
The Pegasus rescue mission had a guide!
If Me-Rah’s lion-birds really were griffins, and she hadn’t just made them up as a way of getting home.
Twigl
eg knew that a small part of him hoped for that very thing. They’ll feed your beating heart to their young… he felt sure that the heart of a homunculus was just the right size for that.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
A Goodbye Present
Wherever you go,
Go with all your heart.
Confucius (551-479 BC)
And now it was time to say goodbye. Firedrake would be flying north, back to the Rim of Heaven, with Sorrel, while Ben went in the opposite direction with Barnabas, over southern India and Sri Lanka and then on to Indonesia.
The others were already sitting in the plane. Hothbrodd had made Me-Rah a perch in the cockpit, using a couple of branches from a mango tree. Ben thought that was very nice of him. ‘Nice?’ was all that Hothbrodd had growled when he said so. ‘Trolls are never nice, dragon rider. But you clearly know just as little about parrots. They eat anything they can lay their claws on! I made the thing solely to keep our new friend from taking my aircraft apart!’
The troll was not exaggerating. Me-Rah began gnawing the mango wood as soon as she closed her sharp-clawed feet around it. Hothbrodd had put the perch right behind the co-pilot’s seat, so that Me-Rah could give him and Lola flight instructions. The rat did not like that one bit.
‘Flight instructions from a parrot?’ she squealed in such a loud voice that Me-Rah, startled, flew down on Hothbrodd’s instrument panel controls. That, of course, led to a quarrel between Lola and the troll. Hothbrodd’s wooden-voiced ranting was coming out of the cockpit window, at the same volume as the rat’s shrill voice, as Ben flung his arms around Firedrake’s neck for the last time. He was glad that the others were already on the plane, and not just because that meant Me-Rah wouldn’t give away the real purpose of their quest to Firedrake. It was bad enough to have Sorrel watching as they said goodbye: she was sitting in what was usually his own place on Firedrake’s back.
‘Well, then,’ he murmured, trying not to look up at Sorrel too enviously. If he had, he might have noticed that Sorrel herself was avoiding the sight of Hothbrodd’s plane. She was even more homesick than Firedrake and Ben had realised. Homesick for damp, green hills and pine forests, for hedgehog-men and rivers where water-sprites lurked, for the ever-cloudy sky of the north and a horizon uncluttered by snow-covered mountains. MÍMAMEIÐR came so much closer to her native Scotland than the mountains of Nepal. But brownies are considerably less sentimental than humans (or so they claim, anyway). Sorrel accepted her homesickness like a bitter mushroom that reminded her of past pleasures. And then again, she was very good at hiding it when she wanted.
Ben was just turning around – very quickly so that the dragon wouldn’t see his suspiciously moist eyes – when Firedrake called him back once more.
‘I have a present for you,’ he said as he stretched his wings.
‘And I’m telling you again, this is not a good idea!’ Sorrel shouted down from his back.
The dragon ignored her.
‘One of the stone-dwarves who helped us to free the petrified dragons two years ago…’ he began.
‘… and we all know what stupid idiots stone-dwarves are!’ muttered Sorrel.
Firedrake silenced her with a stern glance.