Icefire (2 page)

G’reth

 

“You left the
a
out,” said Lucy.

Liz turned the paper around. “No, I don’t think he did. That’s an archaic spelling. I’ve seen dragon names written that way before.” She drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “And you saw Gadzooks do this?”

David nodded and chomped his banana. Not only
had he pictured Gadzooks doing the scribble, the dragon had stomped his feet several times and thrust his pad forward, as though keen to push the name right to the forefront of David’s mind.

“How do you say it?” asked Lucy.

“Guh-reth,” said Liz. “With a hard
G.
Guh.”

“Guh-reth,” repeated Lucy. “You say it.” She gave the tenant a nudge.

“Guh-reth,” he said tiredly, just to please her. He looked at the dragon with its impish smile and sent it a silent, disparaging
hrrr.

“Lucy, try making a wish,” said her mom.

Lucy’s mouth fell open in astonishment. “Is it allowed? It’s David’s dragon.”

“What?” he coughed. “I don’t want it.”

“You named him,” said Lucy. “You have to keep him.”

David shook his head. “No,” he said firmly. “One dragon’s enough for me.”

Lucy’s face took on a hurt expression. “You can’t stay in this house if you don’t believe in dragons.”

“Yeah, well,” muttered David, tossing his banana skin into the trash can. He traced the grouting in the floor tiles with his toe as if he had something more to add, something he didn’t want to talk about now.

Liz noticed the movement but didn’t comment. “The maker may have one wish,” she said, turning the dragon face-on to Lucy. “That’s a rule among dragon-makers. It must be something beneficial and completely unselfish. You can’t just wish for a bar of chocolate. If you do, the wish will turn on you.”

“OK,” said Lucy, resting her thumbs in G’reth’s dished paws. “I wish, I wish, I wish … it would snow.”

“Snow?” hooted David. “How is that beneficial?”

“They like it,” said Lucy. “Dragons like snow.” As if to prove it, a gentle
hrring
sound echoed around the walls of the house.

David, who had heard this sound many times before (and had never quite got to the bottom of it), ignored the rumble and frowned in disbelief. “Why do dragons like snow? And don’t tell me they’re fond of skiing.”

Lucy shook her head till her ponytail danced. “No one really knows — do they, Mom?”

“No,” said Liz, carefully shaping one of G’reth’s wings.

“But when it does snow,” Lucy went on excitedly, “they sit by the windows and watch it, don’t they?”

“Yes,” said Liz, turning G’reth back and forth on his stand. “This really is very good, Lucy. You’re coming along in leaps and bounds.”

“There,” said Lucy, and stuck out a pimple of tongue at the tenant.

To take the wind from her sails, he gave a weather report. “Oh, bad luck. Sun’s out and shining. Not a flake of snow in sight.” He grinned at the Pennykettle women in turn. They stared back as if to say, “Give it time.”

Time. David shot his watch hand up. “Oh, no!” he exclaimed. “I should have been at school
ages
ago. I’m supposed to be having a tutorial with …” Leaving the end of his sentence hanging, he shot down the hall in search of his coat.

Liz patted Lucy’s arm and told her to work on G’reth a little more. “Take him up to the den when you’re finished. We’ll kiln him when I get back.” Grabbing her car keys, she went after David. “Come on,” she said, overtaking him on the porch, “if it’s that important, I’ll give you a ride.”

On the drive into Scrubbley, Liz said quietly, “You seemed a little uptight in the kitchen. Not just about G’reth. Is there something on your mind?”

David ran the zipper of his bag back and forth. “I’m meeting Sophie for dinner tonight.” A smile spread slowly across his face at the mention of his girlfriend’s name. “She says she wants to tell me something important. I think she might want me to move in with her.”

“I see. Do you think you will?” David bit his lip and looked the other way. “We’ll miss you,” said Liz, taking his silence as a yes. “It’s going to be hard telling Lucy, though.” “I’ll come and see you. Regularly. I promise.”

Liz smiled and touched his arm. “If you need to move on, that’s all there is to it. You can’t stay in our mad dragon house for ever. Don’t worry. We’ll cope.” She brought the car to a halt at the gates of Scrubbley College. “Go on, we’ll talk about this another time. I hope you’re not too late. Who’s this guy again? The one you’re having the tutorial with?”

“Dr. Bergstrom. He’s a polar research scientist. He’s only in the country for three or four weeks, doing a sort of lecture tour.”

“Bergstrom,” said Liz, running the word like a spell off her tongue. “Is that Swedish?”

“Norwegian, but he works in Canada — with polar bears.”

Liz nodded and lifted her gaze. Her bright green eyes seemed suddenly very distant. “Well, he won’t mind this weather, then.”

David turned to the windshield.

Impossible as it seemed, it was specked with snow.

2
A V
ERY
S
TRANGE
E
SSAY

 

T
hat’s amazing,” David gasped. “Where did that come from?”

Liz rolled down her window and caught a few flakes. “Never underestimate a wishing dragon.”

David gave her a withering look. “Liz, G’reth did
not
do this.” He pulled up his collar and got out of the car. “I’ll probably stay over at Sophie’s tonight. Thanks for the ride. See you tomorrow.” He blew a snowflake off his nose and looked at the sky. “Weird,” he muttered, and hurried indoors.

The elevator on the ground floor opened conveniently and he was up four flights to the geography department quicker than he might usually have expected. He swept through the map room, catching a
globe with the corner of his bag and almost spinning it off its stand. By the time he’d reached the offices along the faculty corridor he was slightly out of breath and warm under the collar. He took a moment to steady himself, then knocked at a door labeled
SEMINAR ROOM.

“Come in,” said a voice.

David eased himself inside. He’d been hoping to see at least three other students, but the padded orange chairs around the low coffee table were all abandoned. He grimaced and glanced at the clock. He was forty-five minutes late. The tutorial had happened without him. “Dr. Bergstrom, I’m really sorry,” he began. “I — gosh, it’s freezing in here.”

It was then that he realized the window was open. A chill breeze was rattling the vertical blinds, making them clatter against the glass. On an open wooden stand beside the large chalkboard, a row of journals were flapping their covers. Even in his overcoat, David shuddered.

Dr. Bergstrom was standing at the window, looking out, his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his slacks. He was wearing a plain white cotton shirt with
the sleeves rolled loosely up to the elbows. Not a goose bump could be seen on his muscular forearms, just a gentle stream of honey white hairs that matched the color of those on his head. “You must be David,” he said, without looking around. His voice was even, as soft as the snowflakes floating past the window. It carried just a hint of the country of his birth.

“Yes. Excuse me, aren’t you cold?”

A smile touched the corner of Bergstrom’s mouth. “Right now, off the shores of Hudson Bay, the temperature will have fallen low enough to turn the sea to an icy slush. That’s cold, David. Glacial to you. Moderately chilly to the Inuit people. Still rather warm to a polar bear. It’s all a question of acclimatization. Do you want to tell me why you’re late?” He gestured to the arc of empty chairs.

David unbuttoned his overcoat and sat. “I, erm, got held up at home, sorry.”

Bergstrom closed the window and joined him. He had a classic Scandinavian appearance: wavy, well-groomed, collar-length hair and a beard so fine it
seemed taped to his face. “Yes, your colleagues had a theory on that. They thought you were probably talking to your dragon.”

The tips of David’s ears flared red. Many times in the past he’d regretted the day that he’d once let slip about keeping Gadzooks. The news had circled the geography department quicker than a virus infecting the Internet.

Bergstrom, swift to see his student’s discomfort, dismissed any awkwardness with a wave of his hand. “Please, don’t be embarrassed. I’m really quite intrigued by dragons. And as we don’t have time for a formal tutorial I thought we might spend a few minutes chatting about them.”

“I thought I was here to talk about geography?”

“You are,” said Bergstrom, opening a hand. “The study of the earth, its climate and inhabitants. That’s geography, isn’t it? We all have our place on this spinning rock. Why leave out dragons?”

“Because they’re not real,” David said bluntly. “They’re mythical creatures. We made them up.”

“And yet they’ve survived for centuries in our lives. I’m just curious to know how they came into yours?”

David glanced sideways, hiding a frown. Was he being teased here for being late? Where was Bergstrom going with this? Shouldn’t they be talking about glacial activity or rock formations or sea levels or something? What was the point of yapping about dragons? “I’m a tenant with a woman who makes them,” he said, answering the question as plainly as he could. “She’s a potter. She sells them at the market, in Scrubbley. She has a room in her house called the Dragons’ Den. She’s the one you should ask about dragons.”

Leaning forward, Bergstrom said, “I’m asking you. Come on, give me a folk legend. Anything. You have to have a story hidden away somewhere.”

David shook his head. “You’re not serious, surely?”

Bergstrom studied him carefully for a moment. “You forget, I live and work among the Inuit. Stories to them are like well-chewed bones: to be passed from mouth to mouth so their flavor might be shared and
long remembered. Much of the history of the Arctic regions has been told across the light of a seal-oil lamp. Stories have a unique power, David. The Inuit believe they can capture souls.” He reached into his trousers then and drew out a gold-rimmed pocket watch. He opened it on the table in front of them. “This saved my life on the ice one time. Would you like me to tell you how?”

David steered his gaze to the watch. The back of the casing was scratched and dented and the watch glass clouded by weather and age. A lot of history had passed between its hands. “OK,” he ventured.

“Good. You first.”

“What?”

“It’s a trade. Your story for mine. Briefly, I’m afraid. We don’t have long.”

David snorted into his hands. A trade? A trick, more like. Only Lucy could have cornered him better. “OK, but it’s not that much of a story. It’s about a dragon whose name was Gawain. He was supposed to be the
very last dragon in the world and when he died he shed something called a fire tear. That’s like … his essence, wrapped up in a teardrop.”

Bergstrom nodded, a pale light twinkling in his eyes. He had strange eyes, David thought, deep set and slightly close together. If he stared your way for any length of time the gaze became a bold, imperious squint. David thought he’d seen the look somewhere before, but for the moment he couldn’t quite place it.

“A dragon’s power in a teardrop,” mused Bergstrom. “That sounds intriguingly precious. The sort of thing you wouldn’t want falling into the wrong hands, I expect.”

“A woman called Guinevere caught it,” said David. “But I’m not really sure what happened after that. I fell asleep and never heard the end of the story. I dreamed she took the fire inside her, though. She was trying to preserve the spirit of dragons. That’s why she went to Gwilanna, anyway.”

“Gwilanna?” Bergstrom’s blue eyes narrowed.

“A hermit, a sort of ‘wise woman’ type. She lived
alone in a cave on a hill. She told Guinevere about the tear in exchange for one of Gawain’s old scales.”

Bergstrom folded his arms and nodded. “That seems a poor exchange. Why did Gwilanna settle for a scale when she might have had the fire of Gawain herself?”

“I don’t know,” said David, with a shake of his head. He’d thought about that many times himself and wondered, in passing, if Bergstrom had. Why did he get the gnawing feeling that Bergstrom, far from listening to the tale, was interrogating him to find out what he knew? “Told you it wasn’t a very good story.”

“On the contrary, it’s an excellent story. Merely incomplete. But it’s given me a good idea for your essay.”

“Essay?”

Bergstrom smiled again. “Your supervisor asked me to assign you one. Not just you, all the students I’ve seen.” He flipped open a briefcase propped up against his chair and brought a small sheaf of papers to his lap. “So, I would like two thousand words, by a week from Friday, on the existence — or not — of dragons.”

David felt the color drain out of his face. “You’re joking? That’s impossible. How on earth am I supposed to write that?”

Bergstrom shuffled the papers and said, “Maybe ‘where on earth’ would be better than ‘how.’ That’s the geographical challenge, David. What sort of terrain would a dragon inhabit? Find the terrain and you might find the dweller. I’m sure the library will have some interesting literature. Or perhaps your dragon-making landlady could help?”

“Liz? She’s always so secretive about the dragons.”

“Well, here’s an incentive to unlock her, then.” Bergstrom pushed a leaflet across the table. “Details of an Arctic field trip. I’ve agreed to take a limited number of students up to my polar research base in Chamberlain, to work firsthand with my team for a while.”

David scanned the flyer with an envious gaze. “Chamberlain? Wow, I’d love to go. But … jeez, it costs
seven hundred dollars.
I can’t afford that! I’m a week behind with my rent as it is.”

Bergstrom delved into the briefcase once more, this time bringing out what looked to be a piece of polished bone. “It won’t cost you a penny if you write a good paper. The essay I judge to be best of the bunch will receive a free passage. How’s your coursework?”

David tilted a hand.

“Then maybe you could use some help. Tell me, do you believe in good luck charms?”

David glanced at the bone, which he’d guessed by now was an Inuit carving. It was creamy white and about the same length as Bergstrom’s hand. Its shaft was etched with a baffling variety of whirls and symbols, cut into the surface by something rough.

Bergstrom handed it over. “It was made from the tusk of a narwhal,” he said, “and given to me many years ago by an Inuit shaman called Angatarqok — a man who claimed he could fly to the moon, commune with spirits, and turn into a wolf. Be careful, David. What you’re holding is a
tornaq.
A talisman of fortunes. If you shake it, tightly, in your left hand, the spirit of the narwhal will breach your consciousness
and point you along the path of true destiny. That’s the theory. Try.”

A talisman of fortunes? David was tempted to throw it in the trash can. It was politeness rather than fascination that made him switch the carving to his left hand. He closed his eyes and shook the tusk hard.

At once, Gadzooks popped into his mind. Great. That was all he needed. “Go away,” David hissed. “What are you doing here?”

Gadzooks, as usual, ignored the slight and quickly scribbled a word on his pad.