‘I am very glad to meet you, Guinevere Vitasdaughter,’ said the centaur. ‘It’s wonderful to know someone still so young. I was no longer young myself when the Vikings set out plundering from here! But I hear that you have a guest who can remember even older times?’
Ànemos was standing, as he did so often, on the bank of the fjord, where the water horses were coming up from the water to greet the day, as usual in the morning. The mist-ravens had told Vita that one of their mares reminded Ànemos of his lost companion, but when the wat
er horses saw the centaur they went down again to the depths where they lived, and the Pegasus turned around as if awoken from a dream.
Raskervint had been speaking Norwegian to Vita and Guinevere, but when the centaur approached the Pegasus she used sounds that were more like the whinnying of a horse than human words.
Ànemos pricked up his copper-coloured ears and replied in the same way.
‘Come along!’ Vita whispered to Guinevere. ‘We should leave them alone. Raskervint herself lost a companion years ago. She will understand the pain that Ànemos is feeling, and maybe she can tell us how to help him better. Meanwhile you and I will go and see to the eggs.’
Two swans were keeping the nest warm that morning. They rose with some reluctance when Guinevere went over to take the temperature of the shells. By now all the inhabitants of MÍMAMEIÐR felt an almost parental responsibility for the three unhatched foals. Maybe they were also trying to make up for the way their father avoided the stable.
The eggs were as warm as if you could feel the life that they protected, and when Guinevere tucked the largest egg back under the white breast of one of the female swans, she thought for a moment that she could feel a scraping inside it, like the movement of tiny hooves. How she longed to catch a glimpse of the foals! But the shells were still like polished silver, hiding what they protected.
Vita fed the swans with water-grass and fresh grain, while Guinevere went over to the calendar on the stable door. Her heart beat a little faster as she wrote the result of the temperature she had taken in a new box, and she caught herself counting the number of days still to go, although she knew exactly how many there were.
She had heard from Ben that a parrot had guided him and Barnabas to an island where they thought that griffins lived. But the line had been so bad that she’d had to make sense of a few fragmentary words. They’ll make it! Guinevere kept repeating that to herself. They’ll get the feather, the eggs will grow, and soon three tiny foals will be flying over the meadows out there. She just had to believe that firmly enough and it would come true.
The mist-ravens were making their report to her and Vita (a weasel among the Tummetott houses, an owl attacking a swamp-impet child), when Raskervint came back from the fjord. Ànemos was not with her.
‘I don’t know that I’ve been much help, Vita,’ said the centaur. ‘I remember the pain that he is feeling. Only my children were able to dispel the black cloud in which in which he is shrouded now. If you want to help Ànemos, you must save those foals! You’re right, he dares not love them because he thinks he is going to lose them too… He says Barnabas has gone in search of a phoenix feather? But how will that help? I know of only one feather that will make things grow, and that’s the feather of a griffin.’
Guinevere instinctively looked around in concern, but the Pegasus was nowhere to be seen.
‘Barnabas is in fact looking for a griffin’s feather,’ said Vita, lowering her voice. ‘We lied to Ànemos so that he wouldn’t guess how risky the quest is and insist on going with them. I don’t have to tell you what griffins think of horses!’
‘No, you certainly don’t!’ replied Raskervint quietly. ‘But it’s dangerous medicine, Vita. I admire Barnabas for his courage. And I hope the griffins are not as terrible as people say. We have many songs about them, and none of them ends well.’
And none of them ends well. Raskervint’s words followed Guinevere all that day, and kept her lying awake for a long time in the evening. Twigleg had once told her that he used to be able to speak to his old master even over great distances, when Nettlebrand appeared to him in the water of rivers or lakes. Guinevere wished she had as easy a way of communicating with Ben. But when she tried to get through to him after what Raskervint had said, she was answered only by a rushing noise, like the sound of the distant ocean that she had seen on Gilbert’s map.
No, it really wasn’t easy to be the one left waiting at home.
CHAPTER TWENTY
All We Could Wish For
Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me;
I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
Albert Camus
Dragons fly in their dreams. But for the last few nights, when Firedrake was dreaming, his wings were made of iron. They weighed him down to the ground, and hard as he tried he could not raise them.
It wasn’t difficult for Firedrake to interpret this dream. He missed the boy. But he couldn’t fly away to see him, because he was needed by the others. Not just Maia, for whom he was collecting moon-moss and fire-lichen in the surrounding mountains so that she would be strong enough to sit on the nest all those months, or the two young dragons now growing in their dull blue eggshells, kept warm by their mother. No, they all needed him: the dragons he had brought here from Scotland, as well as those woken from their moonless sleep by the stone-dwarves here in the valley of the Rim of Heaven. It had been possible to save them all: twenty-three dragons who had hidden away in their cave, afraid, for so long that in the end they were surrounded by a layer of stone.
By now over fifty of them were living in the Rim of Heaven – in the same caves where, if the old stories were to be believed, the first dragons of all had been born. Firedrake had never appointed himself their leader, but without a word that was what the others had made him. They came to consult him about everything: Firedrake, the brownies aren’t finding enough mushrooms; Firedrake, the stone-dwarves are driving their tunnels too far into the cave walls; Firedrake, Moonscale has been arguing with Beowulf again.
No, he really didn’t want to be the leader of anyone or anything. It was quite enough having to put up with Sorrel’s bad temper because she couldn’t find her favourite mushrooms in the Rim of Heaven. Firedrake hoped fervently that the arrival of young dragons would make her less homesick, and then this valley would be home for Sorrel too, because he had no intention of leaving it again. Firedrake had never loved any other place as much. The mountains that surrounded and protected them had a thousand tales to tell. The sky seemed so much wider, and there was no more hide and seek, no life lived only by night, like the life he had led in Scotland. Since their arrival a human being had twice wandered into this valley, but the humans who lived in these mountains were different. They bowed if they saw one of the dragons – and they went away again, just as they bowed to the mountains and were disconcerted by the foreigners who came to climb their stony sides and feel like conquerors of the peaks.
No, Firedrake really did not want to leave the Rim of Heaven. Luckily Maia felt just the same. They both wanted to teach their children to fly over the slopes where dragon-flowers grew, and see them growing up free, without the fear of the world that Firedrake had known in his youth. If only he didn’t miss Ben so much… sometimes that made him so melancholy that even when he was awake, his wings felt like iron.
Maia raised her head from the edge of the nest.
‘Did you hear that, Firedrake?’
She touched one of the eggs that she was keeping warm under her body. Yes, Firedrake did hear it! A soft tapping sound, barely audible even by dragon ears.