Battle of the Sun (6 page)

SOME USEFUL INFORMATION

T
he Magus was in the laboratory. He was standing examining the pieces of the Eyebat’s heavy glass jar. Wedge was standing with him.

‘Jackster did it, Master, not Wedge, I swear on the Queen’s life, not Wedge.’

‘Where is the Eyebat now?’

‘Behind you,’ said Wedge, humbly, though it did cross his half a brain for half a second that his master was all-powerful and should know where the Eyebat lurked.

The Magus turned. Yes, there was the Eyebat, watching from its perch. ‘It is not so simple to return it as it was to free it,’ said the Magus. ‘While it is in the laboratory there is little enough harm that it can do, but it would be unwise to free it further, do you understand, Wedge?’

Wedge didn’t understand, but he obeyed, and nodded.

‘Go and prepare the boys for bed,’ said the Magus.

Wedge left the room. The Magus bent down and picked up the bottom of the jar. Then he looked up towards the skylight, and frowned.

The boys were in a file at the door of the refectory. Jack’s mother was clearing the table. While Mistress Split was yelling and threatening and waiting for Wedge, Jack’s mother shoved something into Jack’s pocket as she brushed past him.

Then the boys went up the stone stairs, Mistress Split in front carrying the blazing flare, and Wedge behind, muttering oaths and threats and curses. As Jack was last in line, he felt that these oaths and threats and curses were meant for him, which they were.

In the bedchamber, Wedge made a great fuss about examining the window, and then noisily locking, unlocking and relocking the door. ‘Any person that finds himself able to pass through this door is no person but a ghost!’ he shouted from the other side. ‘Hear me? Dead!’

‘Well said!’ came the voice of Mistress Split, and the two of them, or the one of them, however it is best to describe them, went hopping back down the stairs.

Jack was sitting on his bed. He got out the hard thing his mother had pushed into his pocket; it was a leg of chicken, and round the chicken leg was a message.
I am near.

While Jack was hungrily devouring the chicken leg, and wishing he had another, he felt someone beside him. It was Crispis with a piece of bread.

‘I saved it for you, Jack,’ said the little boy.

Jack smiled. ‘Do you know anything about dragons, Crispis?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said the boy. ‘The one in the moat, I’ve seen it.’

‘Did you speak to it?’

‘Oh, no,’ said the boy. ‘A dragon cannot be spoken to unless it speaks first. It is very ancient, and has the ancient right of speaking first.’

‘Who told you this?’ asked Jack.

‘The Magus,’ said Crispis. ‘He used to love me, and when he used to love me he used to sit me on his knee and tell me things.’

‘Why doesn’t he love you now?’ said Jack.

‘I wasn’t what he wanted. I wasn’t the right magic.’

‘What is the right magic?’ asked Jack, but Crispis shook his head.

‘I wish I were a heron that came to the deep pool and found the golden fish.’ Then the boy fell straight asleep, just like that.

Jack laid him gently in his own bed and went and stood at the window. There were clues here if he could unriddle them.

What was the truth about the boys? What was the ‘right magic’? And what about the Dragon?

There was a noise at the door.

Jack bounded across on soft feet and listened. He put his eye to the keyhole and fell back, because there was another eye on the other side of the keyhole.

‘JACK . . . JACK . . .’

It was his mother.

Jack speedily unlocked the door. His mother came into the bedchamber and hugged him with all her heart. Jack locked the door again and he took her by the hand and led her over to the window.

‘How ever did you find me?’ asked Jack.

‘The magnet did lead me here. Then by some miracle, the

Creature – Mistress Split – conceived so great a longing for your dog Max, that she allowed me leave to be a servant here. I shall see you every day, and before another moon passes, I swear we shall escape, Jack.’

‘Escape we shall, Mother,’ said Jack, ‘but we cannot forget the other boys, and there is an old king imprisoned in the cellar. And the Magus has some Work, some terrible Work I think, that will make gold out of all the world, and that is why he stole these boys, and that is why he stole me.’

‘Gave he a word of explanation?’ said Jack’s mother.

‘Yes, he tells me I am something called the Radiant Boy.’

In the clear moonlight Jack could see his mother’s face cloud with alarm. ‘Mother?’ he said questioningly.

‘Oh, Jack, remember when you were a little boy and I had a position as housekeeper in the house of John Dee? Your father lived then, and he was employed by that man to make all kinds of strange work in metal, and all under great secrecy.’

‘Yes, I remember,’ said Jack.

‘John Dee did tell me that you were born under a fiery star at the exact conjunction in the Heavens of Jupiter and Saturn, and that although you had no magic power of your own, you were a boy where magic could happen. That is what he did tell me: “Here is a boy where magic could happen.” Your father did say that was all well and good, but better to be able to unlock any lock . . .’

‘And so he made me this . . .’ said Jack, turning the iron tool in his hands.

‘And better to find anything that needed to be found . . .’ Jack’s mother took out the magnet. ‘These are your gifts from your own father, Jack. What gifts the unseen powers gave you, I know not.’

‘Perhaps to outwit a dragon,’ said Jack, and told his mother all that had passed up to that moment.

Suddenly, while they talked in whispers, there was the sound of a key in the lock of the bedchamber. Jack’s mother lay flat in the dark space between Jack’s bed and the window, and Jack jumped into his bed, forgetting that Crispis was there already, but the boy was so tiny that it hardly mattered.

The door opened slowly. The wavering light of a candle threw giant shadows through the chamber. Jack opened one eye; it was the Magus.

The Magus came over to where Jack was pretending to sleep, his mother prone and terrified on the floor beside him, but the Magus seemed not to notice.

‘Get up, Jack, and follow me.’

Jack had to obey. Under cover of the covers he slipped his iron tool out of his pocket and left it in the bed. Then he got up, put on his jacket and shoes and followed the Magus, who locked the door after him. Jack hoped and prayed that his mother would get away.

Down the stairs went Jack, following the Magus. At the door of the Creature’s room he half stopped, and half looked in, and there, as before, the Creature(s) lay half asleep.

‘Why did you cleave them in two?’ said Jack, suddenly.

The Magus half turned on the stair. ‘I wished to know what would happen. Without experiment there is no knowledge.’

The Magus continued down the stairs, and as Jack stood in the entrance to the room, half mesmerised again, a small black bundle detached itself from Mistress Split’s half-bed and half ran, half tumbled, in all its complete and black and soft self, like night sky and night stars, its eyes shining in the heavy dark of its head.

‘Max!’ Jack’s own eyes filled with tears and fell in liquid stars on to the dog’s upturned face. Max licked Jack’s tears away. ‘Stay here and help me, Max. Be ready and be brave and I’ll try to be brave too.’

Holding the puppy to himself for half a minute, Jack put Max down and swiftly left the room. He heard a whimper that went to his heart, but he knew in his heart that Max understood him. The Magus, with his stony face, was waiting at the bottom of the stone stairs.

Jack entered the library.

Upstairs, Crispis woke up. ‘Ouch!’ he said.

Jack’s mother got up from her position. ‘Oh,’ said Crispis. ‘Who are you?’

‘I am Anne, the mother of Jack.’

Crispis regarded her with his deep anxious eyes. ‘I haven’t got a mother.’ Then he pulled the iron tool out of the bed, and glared at it. ‘Ouch!’ he said again. Jack’s mother knew what it was, and gently took it from the little boy.

‘Sleep,’ she said, tucking him up and bending over him. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of.’

‘There is!’ said Crispis. ‘Quite a lot to be frightened of, but I’ll go to sleep if you will sit with me a while. Do you know any stories?’

‘I know one about a sunflower that found the sun,’ said Jack’s mother.

Crispis nodded. ‘I wish I were that sunflower.’

‘If you promise to go to sleep, I promise there will be a sunflower for you tomorrow,’ said Jack’s mother.

Crispis began to close his eyes. Jack’s mother took his hand, and waited, warm and quiet, until the little boy’s hand in hers relaxed, and he was asleep in the sunflower place of safe dreams.

Then Anne let herself out of the bedchamber and went swiftly and silently down the stairs, wondering where on earth she would find a sunflower by morning.

THE DRAGON

T
he Magus and Jack were in the library.

‘Jack, can you turn that goblet into solid gold?’

‘I cannot,’ said Jack, keeping his eyes on the Magus.

‘And neither can I. Yet, together, I believe we might. Put out your hand . . .’

Reluctantly Jack did so and the Magus put his own hand over Jack’s. Jack felt a burning sensation like holding something hot that is getting hotter. He struggled.

‘Let me go!’

But the Magus tightened his grip. Jack looked up at him and saw that he was in a kind of trance, so Jack did the only thing he could think of and let out a kick right at the shins of the Magus. The Magus let go with a yelp. Jack ran for it. In his panic as he reached the hallway, he dodged through a door and found himself face to face with the top of a tree. He didn’t even think, just swung down the downward tree, breaking and falling through the colossal branches, and he found to his astonishment that he had dropped into another world.

A growing world, a green world, a huge world.

These plants weren’t cabbages or sweet peas or lettuces or apples; they were quite unlike anything Jack had ever seen.

* * * The glasshouse was hot as a hot summer day and dark as a hot summer night – not quite dark, and not the thick dark of scariness or the inky dark of a hole; in fact it was quite a light dark, as light as dark can be, like on the longest day of summer as it changes into night, and so Jack could see easily.

Drops of warm water fell on him from the leaves, and the air was so moist that it was like breathing water.

Jack looked up. Far above his head were gigantic green leaves that spread from branches thick as pillars that grew out of tree trunks too big for Jack to wrap his arms around, too big for three Jacks to wrap their arms around.

Lower down were plants with soft spongy hairy leaves, like creatures, and when Jack brushed through them he felt the hairs on the leaves touch him like whiskers.

There were palm trees that he had seen in pictures in books, their bark pale brown and rough and ribbed. He picked up a coconut from the floor, but he didn’t know it was a coconut and he wondered if he had found the egg of some big creature, but what kind of creature lived here?

Jack shoved the coconut into his pocket and went on through the strange forest. And it was then that he saw an eye watching him.

A wide unblinking eye. A wide unblinking eye still like a pool is still, but deep as an underground pool is deep.

Jack opened his mouth but no words came out, which was just as well, because he was facing the very tip, the very top, of a very big dragon.

‘Well met, Jack Snap. You have been waiting to speak to me, I know, but I know not why so.’

Jack remembered what Crispis had said about a dragon having the right to speak first, so he reckoned that it should be safe now for him to answer. ‘I have indeed been waiting, for I am sure that you can answer me a question.’

The Dragon shot out a purple tongue to catch a big blue fly.

‘No doubt, but what is it that you will do for me?’

Jack had no idea what should or could be done for a dragon. ‘I have seen you on maps,’ he said, ‘in the bottom corners, where there is writing that says HERE BE DRAGONS.’

The Dragon looked pleased. ‘Yes, my picture strikes fear into the hearts of men, for that is where I live – in the hearts of men. In their greed and envy and in their hoardings and hidings.’

Jack didn’t understand any of this, but he had heard that dragons speak in riddles.

‘What do you eat?’ he asked suddenly, immediately wishing he hadn’t. The Dragon looked amused.

‘Are you wondering, perhaps, if I will eat you? The answer is, that I eat what there is to eat, and if Jack Snap is what there is to eat, then eat him I will. Yet, I am well provided for today. I will not speak of tomorrow.’

‘Where do you come from?’ said Jack, who wanted desperately to run away, but found himself unable to move. And the silly questions keep forming and foaming in his mouth like soap bubbles and he wished he would be quiet. But at the same time he had the strange thought that it was as though the Dragon was asking itself questions through him.

‘I began in the world that you see before you,’ said the Dragon. ‘Your knowledge is very small and you did not know that once the whole world looked like this forest here, deep and dense and vast and untravelled. There were frogs as big as St Paul’s Cathedral, and reptiles whose bodies were longer than the Thames. There were birds whose wingspan darkened the sun, and there were spiders whose webs were like spun cities. The tiniest fly could have carried you off as an eagle does a lamb.

‘In that world, so great a heat from the sun and so great a moisture from the canopy of the trees caused a perpetual steam to rise from the floor of the forest, and from this steam creatures of every kind emerged, hunting, crying, stalking their prey. At evening the creatures of your nightmares came slowly to drink at the edge of a purple lake fringed with trees that cast odd shadows on to the water, and in whose branches hung fruit and nuts enough to feed a nation. Nuts the swell of pumpkins, sardines that would take two men to land them. Not that there were any men, for this was a time before men, and that is also a time that will come again in the far, very far distant future, when the Earth reclaims herself, as she will.

‘My kind and I were plentiful. We roamed and ranged the full stretch of the Earth, and if we had continued, your kind could not have come to be.’

‘The good Lord made the Earth,’ said Jack, ‘and everything in it within seven days.’

‘Mayhap so,’ said the Dragon. ‘But not everything at the same time. Not everything at once. How long were seven days in those days, Jack? You cannot answer me, for you do not know.’

And Jack did not know how to answer and he was silent.

‘When my kind became extinct, do you think it was so simple for us to disappear? No, not so. We disappeared from the face of the Earth only to return in the deepest lairs of men.’

‘When a thing is gone it is gone,’ said Jack stubbornly. ‘When a house is knocked down and another built in its place, why, the first house is gone for ever.’

‘Even that is not so simple as you would believe,’ said the Dragon, ‘for whatever has stood in the world leaves behind an imprint, an echo, a scent, a spirit. What is destroyed is also reclaimed. What has been lost waits to be found.’

Jack was out of his depth, like a swimmer who can hardly see the land. Dragons talk in riddles, yes, in riddles . . .

‘Time passes,’ said the Dragon, ‘the clock chimes, men are born, grow old, and die, the world changes. All that is true, Jack, but that is not the sum of truth. You are young, but your deepest mind is as old as the mind of the first man who ever was, and what he saw, you can see, and what he knew, you can know, and what he feared, you fear too. You are many Jacks, many minds, many lives, but you live this one now, and that is what you see, like a man in a great house who confines himself to a single room and a single view.

‘And I, I am older even than mankind, and I have seen much.’

Jack thought of the Thames, and how his mother had told him that the Romans had rowed up the river and how in those days, so far away, the banks were thickly wooded and mammoths roamed the land. And how there were rich houses along the banks of the Thames, and the mammoths were all gone, but the river still ran its course. It was the same river. Perhaps his mind was like that river.

‘Yes so, Jack Snap,’ said the Dragon. ‘You are like that river.’

Jack said, ‘The Magus can read my mind too.’

The Dragon said, ‘The Magus is able to read your mind only when you are troubled in mind. When you are asking yourself a question, or when you are afraid, or when you are in doubt, then he can read you. When you are certain, and if your mind is bold, he cannot. There, I have told you a useful secret.’

‘There’s an old man locked in the cellar,’ said Jack, blurting things out as usual. ‘He’s a King, and he said I had to find you and bid you to prepare him a Bath.’

‘And if I do that,’ said the Dragon, ‘why, what will you do for me, Jack Snap?’

Jack stood a long time. He said nothing.

‘And your mother is here . . .’ said the Dragon softly, ‘is she not, and your dog?’

‘Does the Magus know that?’ said Jack, suddenly anxious in his mind.

‘He does now,’ said the Dragon, ‘for your foolishness has told him so.’

Jack went red. ‘You are the same as him!’

‘Not so, Jack Snap, but something of so.’

Jack turned and tried to stumble away. He felt stupid and angry and scared. Was the Dragon really the Magus and the Magus really the Dragon? Why did the Dragon talk in riddles all the time?

The Dragon called him back. ‘Jack Snap! I am the only one who can help you.’

‘I can’t trust you,’ said Jack, ‘if you are him or of him!’

‘I did not ask you to trust me,’ replied the Dragon, ‘and if you knew anything about dragons, you would not trust me. Your trust is not interesting. You want something from me and I want something from you. That is interesting.’

‘What do you want from me?’ asked Jack.

‘I want the Cinnabar Egg that he keeps in his bedchamber.’

‘I don’t even know where he sleeps!’ said Jack.

‘He does not sleep,’ said the Dragon, ‘but you will find the Egg and bring it to me. It looks rather like that coconut you have in your pocket.’

Jack started guiltily. The Dragon knew everything. The Dragon suddenly plucked a coconut from a great palm that grew beside him, split the nut, and gave it to Jack to drink.

‘Drink to our bargain,’ said the Dragon, ‘for that is how the race of men seals a bargain.’

Jack drank, expecting to fall down dead, but the coconut milk was delicious.

‘And if I find the Egg . . . and if I bring it to you?’

‘Only in the sulphur waters can the Sunken King be set free.’