The Vanishing Island (24 page)

T
he old man in the black robe put his arms together, his hands disappearing inside his sleeves, and when he separated them again, a flock of small birds emerged like a gust of wind and wove a bridge across the mercury moat.

“She may come,” the old man said.

“Can he come, too?” said Mouse. “Please? He's my friend.”

The old man bowed slightly. “If you wish.”

She held out her hand to Bren, who took it, and the two of them walked together across the bridge of birds.

The old man led them through the far mouth of the cave, through a short tunnel, until they came to another, much smaller chamber. In the middle was a stone table, and upon the table were the bones of someone no bigger than Mouse.

They walked closer. Each major bone of the skeleton—the legs and arms, the breastbone and shoulders, the hands, the feet and the skull—were etched with symbols in badly faded ink. But they weren't like the Chinese or Japanese characters Bren had seen before, in books and on his coin. They were cruder . . . more like pictures. And then Bren noticed the right eye socket, where a pearly white stone rested.

“What is this place?” said Bren. “Who are you?”

“I am her guardian,” said the old man, indicating the bones. “Waiting for a sister of Sun to arrive.” He motioned for Mouse to step closer. “Look,” he said, pointing to the tattooed bones. “You can read?”

Mouse looked closely at the skeleton. She nodded. “I can.”

The guardian smiled. “Go on.”

She looked at the bones again, as if deciding where to start.

“Mouse, what is it?”

“Oracle bones,” said the guardian. “The script is the language of the Ancients. Written here is a question, and the bones will answer.”

Bren watched as Mouse took a step closer and began to read, carefully and quietly enunciating the foreign script.

When she finished, the guardian removed the jade eye from the skull and handed it to Mouse.

“Her body died long ago, but her spirit lives here. You are the guardian now.”

Mouse took the stone, and the old man clapped his hand with a noise that sounded like thunder in the cavern, and a spark ignited beneath the skeleton. The stone table became a pyre, with flames rising up around the bones, flames of such intense heat that Bren was forced to turn away and shield his eyes and face. He heard a cracking sound, and almost as suddenly the heat was gone, and Bren turned around to see that the fire was out and the skeleton was webbed with hairline fractures. The old man was gone.

“Mouse, what happened?”

“Look,” said Mouse.

“Look at what?” said Bren, but Mouse jerked him by the arm and pointed at the broken bones.

“Look,” she said again, and Bren stared at the aftermath of the fire. “Remember this.”

“I promise,” said Bren, who felt afraid. He felt alone, because the Mouse standing next to him was like a complete stranger.

“Come on,” she said, and they left the stone room, walked through the tunnel, and came out again into the
larger cavern. The bridge of birds was still there.

“Is that what the admiral was after?” said Bren as they crossed the moat again. “The jade eye? You think it's magical?”

“I do.”

Bren halted midstride. Out of the darkness of the tunnel, the admiral slowly emerged, looking as if he had just come back from holiday. He came closer and extended his hand toward Mouse. “May I see it?”

She opened her fist to reveal the pearly white stone in her palm, and the admiral's eyes lit up with anticipation. He kept his hand outstretched, but Mouse closed her fist around the stone.

“It's not meant for you,” she said. “It was given to me.”

Even in the dim light Bren could see the admiral's cheeks flush. “Not
meant
for me?” he said, his words ricocheting off the cave walls. “I've spent years working my way to this place. Risked my life countless times, subjugated myself to worthless patroons like Bram Richter . . . this
is
meant for me.”

He moved toward Mouse, who took a step back.

“Stop,” said Bren, and the admiral turned on him.

“I have proven to be true to my word, have I not? And so believe me well when I say I will do whatever is necessary to leave here with that stone.” He looked at Mouse.
“Neither of you is armed, and even if you were, I have this,” he said, pulling the paiza from inside his shirt. Bren's eyes widened.

“What the . . . when?”

The admiral smiled. “Your trusted friend Mouse filched it for me, after you two came looking for me at the governor's house. It occurred to me it might come in quite handy in case my little insurrection got out of hand, which it very nearly did.”

Bren turned to Mouse, devastated. Had she really betrayed him like that?

“You just now noticed?” said the admiral, laughing. “Young people take so much for granted.”

“So what are you waiting for?” said Bren to Mouse. “You're on his side. Give him the stone, too.” But she took another step back, toward the moat, until she was right on the edge. She held the jade eye up in the flat of her palm, and her palm over the moat.

“Mouse—” said the admiral, a flutter of panic in his voice. He lunged for her, and she turned her hand over. The stone disappeared with a
plonk
into the mercury.

The admiral's face transformed before Bren's very eyes, from handsome and animated to a twisted mask of hatred. He grabbed Mouse by the throat and pulled her away from the moat, lifting her off her feet. Her black eyes grew
larger as the admiral's hands squeezed her windpipe, and she gurgled for air.

Bren screamed and grabbed for the admiral's arms, trying to pry them away. The admiral threw an elbow that struck Bren square in the nose, and he fell back, dazed and tasting blood. He pushed himself up on his elbows and looked for anything he could use as a weapon. There was nothing, so he kicked as hard as he could against the back of the admiral's legs, and Bowman dropped Mouse and fell backward into Bren.

The admiral pounced on him and raised his fist above his head. Bren instinctively shut his eyes, but when the blow didn't come, he opened them again. The admiral was still on top of him, but he was half turned, looking at the moat. Then Bren noticed it, too—a ripple along the surface, as if something were swimming just below. A long, slow wave circled the moat, and then the moat itself began to change shape, silver spines forming out of the liquid metal so that the whole thing briefly took the shape of a huge reptile.

“What's happening?” said Bren.

Another wave rolled the length of the moat, disappearing beneath the cavern wall, and then came round again, and when it did, the crest rose up above their heads, like a metal sculpture of a wave. The mercury expanded forward and began to take the shape of a face, as if someone, or some
thing
, were pushing through it from behind. Something
resembling a nose stretched forward to the length of a snout. Its silver nostrils flared, and metal teeth dripped down from the roof of its metal mouth. Above the snout a pair of eyes formed, one silver and the other milky white.

As Bren and the admiral both lay there, too terrified to move, a long neck and body etched with scales rose up, its body supple silver, and clawed hands and feet stretched themselves sideways as if the thing had awakened from a long sleep. The body added a tail, a spiked whip tapering to a silver point.

“Mouse!” said the admiral. “Are you doing this?”

But Mouse said nothing, and the mercury dragon with one jade eye slithered into a towering S above their heads.

The admiral rolled off Bren and ran out of the cavern, back toward the entrance of the cave. Bren scooted up against the wall, shaking. Mouse stood where she was. The massive metal head of the dragon lowered itself almost to the ground and brought its nose to the end of Bren's nose, warming Bren's face with its metallic breath. He tried to shut his eyes but couldn't, and he could see his own terrified face in the glossy metal surface of the dragon.

And then the dragon, like an onslaught of water from a burst dam, threw itself after the admiral, flooding the tunnel with a silver river, until Bren could see nothing but a trail of metal droplets left in its wake.

“C
ome on,” said Mouse, holding out her hand.

Bren looked at her hand, and then at the trail of mercury leading back up the tunnel, and he stayed where he was.

“It's okay,” said Mouse. “It's gone.”

She kept her hand out, and finally Bren took it, but when she let go he had to brace himself against the wall. He steadied himself as best he could and looked at Mouse.

“What now?” said Bren.

“We leave.”

They walked back to the mouth of the cave, toward the curtain of water, and with every step Bren was afraid of what they would find. The mercury dragon? The bloody remains of the admiral? But there was nothing but an empty tunnel, and then the waterfall. Except for one thing—lying at the mouth of the cave: a milky white stone.

Mouse picked up the jade eye, tucked it into her trouser pocket, and led them back the way they had come.

“We're going back to the beach?” said Bren.

“Maybe some of the others made it off the ship in the boat,” said Mouse.

“What if they didn't?”

“Then we find another way.”

And that was all they said to each other on the long walk back to where they had first come ashore. They slept in the dry sand, and in the morning Bren woke to find that Mouse had gathered more fresh fruit.

As they ate, Bren thought of something. “Mouse, why didn't the paiza protect the admiral? Was it because he had evil intentions?” He wasn't sure why it was so important for him to believe this.

“It wasn't the paiza that was powerful,” said Mouse. “It was this.” And she reached across and touched Bren's chest, pulling the black stone from inside his shirt.

Bren felt overcome with dizziness.
It can't be
, he thought. The robbers, the battle with the galleons . . . but
he realized that whenever he had worn the paiza, it was on the same necklace, and he had been wearing the stone when they escaped the Iberians. And those other times he had tried to stow away, when dumb luck prevented him from certain death . . . or was it luck after all?

“I don't understand, Mouse.”

“I don't either,” she said. “Not really. Maybe it contains the spirit of someone, the way the girl, Sun, transferred hers to the white jade. But I know your stone is important.”

Bren sat there, caressing the black stone, thinking of his mother, and his father and Mr. Black . . . and even Map.

“Mouse, I . . . I just want to go home.”

She looked at him again with her fathomless black eyes, somehow even blacker in the bright sunshine. “I know. But you can't go home. Not now, anyway. I need you. Just like I needed the admiral to get me here.”

Bren didn't know what to say. He knew it would be futile to argue with her.

“What is it you need me for?” he said. “The stone? I could just give it to you, if you want it.”

“Stand up,” she said.

He obeyed.

“Draw what you saw. In there. The bones, and after.”

He didn't understand, but Bren used his finger and dug the tip into the firm, wet sand where the tide had gone out.
He drew the outline of the bones, and within them, the hairline fractures after the sudden fire.

When he finished, he said, “What is it?”

“It's a map,” said Mouse. “To the place called the Dragon's Gate. Like this island, it was erased from maps long ago, but we have to find it.”

“And then what?” said Bren.

“I'm not sure,” said Mouse. “I only read the oracle bones, but I don't know what it all means exactly. I do know I need to go there, and I need your help. I have to find out who I really am—what my real name is.”

Bren just stared at her, his head filling up with a million questions, but he didn't know where to begin. For one thing, what good was a map—any map—if you were stranded on a deserted island?

“What do we do now, Mouse?”

Mouse gathered small stones and shells from the surf, some light colored, others darker, and brought them back to the beach. She drew a grid there of lines, seventeen by seventeen, and divided up the dark and light shells and stones.

“We play a game,” she said. “It's called Go—invented by the Ancients. I'll teach you.”

Bren sat down in front of the makeshift board, but his heart wasn't in it. “What if we never get off this island?”

“The masters of Go say you can never truly learn the
game, even with a lifetime of trying. Maybe we'll find out.”

Bren didn't find that the least bit encouraging. But he let Mouse teach him, and over the course of three days she beat him every time they played. So it was with especially great relief when, upon looking out at the sea, he saw what looked like a small boat coming toward the shore, numerous oars rising and falling from its sides like the legs of a flailing insect.

“Mouse, look!”

They stood as far out in the water as they could, the waves lapping their thighs, until they could see the shock of red hair atop Sean's head, and Mr. Leiden with a spyglass to his left eye.

And at that very moment, thousands of miles away, Archibald Black was bent over a chessboard, contemplating his next move, and David Owen sat by his woodstove, drinking cabbage wine as his candle guttered, and in a small pot on the windowsill in a boy's sleeping alcove, a neglected tulip bulb, nourished only by accidental rainfall, poked its first shoots of life through the dirt.

To be continued . . .