Something was seriously wrong. Farthing had saved me from the centipede. She’d fed me, found me shelter from the dragon and rescued me from bull sea lions. She might only be a small lizard but if she needed help, I couldn’t deny her.
‘You win,’ I said. ‘I’ll come and see.’
I stared into the darkness of the tunnel, recalling my panic and the bats. Not in the dark. Not if I could help it.
Avoiding another lunge from Farthing, I scrambled up the rock pile to the surface and ran to the fire, now just a tiny flame.
I looked at the fiddle case. Without it, Scratch would be ruined.
What would your da say?
‘I think he’d say I should stay bricky. And do what was right.’
He would say you should help a friend.
I took the old fiddle out of the case, and laid him gently inside the boat. Before I could change my mind, I raised the open case I’d taken such great care with all these years and smashed it down on the rock. It cracked lengthways and, on the second go, into long jagged sticks.
‘Sorry, Scratch,’ I said, my throat tight. There was no reply. Farthing was waiting at the hole, clawing the ground and growl-whining.
I thrust the end of one long stick into the embers. The old wood had dried in the sun and quickly caught.
With the rest of Scratch’s case in the other hand I ran after Farthing once more.
The light of my makeshift torch bobbed and flickered as I ran, and I could only just keep Farthing in sight ahead of me in the dark tunnel. I passed the crack in the tunnel roof much more quickly that I would have expected.
At first, I didn’t notice it getting warmer. I was already sweating from running and had tied my neckerchief around my forehead to catch the drips before they stung my eyes. The tunnel had taken a downward slope and then a number of turns. I held back. I was sure I’d passed the place where I met the bats last time – where was Farthing taking me? But when she yelped and whined, darting at my trouser legs again, I continued after her.
Suddenly the air became hot and dry, and the heat of it seemed to touch my eyeballs. The floor shook and I careered from side to side, like a drunkard. Was something else happening with the volcano, or did the tremors just feel stronger because I was deep underground? Farthing darted ahead, outside the pool of my torchlight.
‘Farthing?’
My voice echoed in a new way, the repeats of my words spaced further apart. Without warning, the tunnel ended.
Ahead of me was a cavern. It was a gigantic bubble in the rock, the size of a cathedral. High above my head was an opening to the surface, the sun streaming down. We must be at the foot of the volcano by now. A wave of heat struck me, along with an unholy stench of fish and rot. I drew my sweat-soaked rag of a kerchief over my nose and mouth and stepped down out of the tunnel in to the epic space, my bare feet crunching painfully on something. I couldn’t see Farthing. The floor was thickly covered with some kind of rock, or gravel – jagged, shifting and uneven.
Stumbling on something extra sharp, I looked down at my feet. A skull stared up at me. I recognized the shape of it – a huge fish, maybe a shark. How did it get all the way here? The lava tube didn’t flood, or the buccaneer wouldn’t be there . . .
There was only one way. I stared up at the patch of sky above.
Farthing had brought me to the dragon’s lair.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I stared up at the opening far above me in the roof of the cavern, just wide enough for a dragon.
The light streaming down from it allowed me to look more closely at what I was standing on. I shuddered. A carpet of bones. Mostly small – fish, I guessed – some encased in large round dried-out droppings. I could see no sign of anything that looked . . . human. But it would be difficult to tell. I picked up the largest bone I could see, it looked like the jaw of a small whale.
What would Mr Darwin make of it? He found it fascinating to dissect animal droppings to find out which animal they belonged to and what they’d been eating, and these were as big as a human skull.
Which was about right, considering the size of the animal that lived here.
My heart fluttered in my throat and the sweat soaked through my kerchief and dripped in my eyes. I scanned the cavern for Farthing.
When she hooted, the sound echoed on and on, like we were inside a gigantic hollow ball. I finally spotted her, a flash of green on a wide ledge that jutted from the cavern wall. I didn’t rightly know what to do. I’d been trying to avoid the dragon since I was washed up here and Farthing had seemed to understand that very well, so why had she led me right to it? Ever since I’d met her, she’d helped me – fed me, defended me – or had I imagined that?
‘Come on, Farthing, we can’t be here,’ I hissed.
She whined, and the high pitch sound echoed. I imagined it spiralling around the walls and out of the opening way above me, alerting the cave’s owner.
I shuddered as I crushed across the bones and droppings. Farthing ducked back on the ledge out of sight. This was no time for playing; she couldn’t have brought me here for that. I propped my burning torch up against the cave wall.
‘What are you doing up there?’
The cave shook, and the layer of bones jangled until they covered my feet; it was like being inside an immense baby’s rattle. This time the tremors continued, on and on, and the heat grew unbearable. I needed to run for it, now.
I made up my mind; I was taking Farthing with me. I wasn’t leaving her here in a volcanic eruption, and I didn’t care if she bit or scratched me. I reached out over the ledge, which was just higher than my head, and felt a scattering of rocks, dried seaweed and something soft and bouncy, like moss.
Then my fingers found the curve of a smooth, warm surface.
I rolled the object towards me. Farthing appeared and nudged it off the edge, and I caught it in both my waiting hands.
It was golden, shot through with marbled lines of black.
I had known what it was the moment I’d touched that perfect roundness, but I hadn’t wanted to believe it.
A dragon’s egg.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
I held the golden egg tight to my chest, suddenly afraid I would drop it, and stared up at the hole in the cavern way above me.
I remembered Mr Darwin’s excitement at the huge rhea eggs we’d found on the mud banks in Patagonia; this was half that size again. The biggest egg ever found. Just one of these golden eggs would be a wonder of the world. Mr Darwin only ever took what we needed, he was very particular about that, especially when it came to birds’ nests. Yet Farthing was nudging more eggs forward along the ledge. Six, now seven.
My thoughts were interrupted by a screech that made the contents of the cave jangle and clatter, and a burning wind buffeted my back. I spun round, as the dragon’s two huge claws descended through the roof of the cavern.
I hooked one hand under Farthing’s belly and slung her across my shoulder, she was lighter than I would have thought and curled herself around my neck. With my other arm cradling the egg, I ran from the cavern, ducking into the entrance tunnel. A second screech rocked me to my core, and I clutched my ear with my free hand, crouching in the dark, out of the dragon’s sight.
A different sound tore the air, like old sheets being ripped up for bandages. The earth beneath my feet didn’t tremble this time; it slid back and forth like a heavy load on rollers. I collapsed to the ground, clasping the egg. With Farthing still wrapped around my neck, I squeezed my eyes tight, waiting for the entire tunnel to collapse on my head.
The rumble died away, leaving the air swirling with dust and stinking as if the guts of the earth had split open. I pressed my neckerchief over my nose and peered into the cavern.
The dragon filled the cave with muscular golden bulk. She nudged at the ledge with her huge snout, pushing the eggs back. All the while she was groaning and rumbling, a sound not unlike the earthquakes, her huge sides panting like bellows. Up close she w
as beyond magnificent. Her folded wings were a deeper bronze than her scales, which glittered gold where the light hit. She was bigger than ten elephants, maybe bigger than a whale.
Her head whipped towards me, and I pressed my back against the wall, in the shadow of the tunnel.
She sniffed the air through cavernous nostrils on the end of a majestic, long snout. Her dinner plate eyes opened wide and were mesmerizing, a burnished gold like her scales. She reared and bellowed again, a teeth-jangling tormented shriek. Now I saw the reason for her horror.
Red-orange glowing clots of lava were dropping from the hole above. As the molten rock splatted into the scree of the cave it sizzled, and the fish carcasses and dung released choking black smoke.
The dragon had chosen a place near the volcano – perhaps even at its base – for her nest, so heat couldn’t be harmful to her eggs, maybe it was even good for them. But the lava would surely kill them; it had to be why Farthing had nudged the eggs towards me. And why had the little lizard wanted to rescue her enemy’s eggs? She had wanted to rescue me too, and I supposed that didn’t make sense either. Maybe the lizard and the dragon were connected, like the birds that pecked lice from the tortoises’ necks. There wasn’t time to consider it, I needed to escape; the lava was now pouring into the cave in continuous lumps like milk curds.
The volcano had erupted.
CHAPTER THIRTY
I watched from the entrance of the tunnel, crouched, still clutching a dragon egg, warm against my chest. Avoiding the smoking pool of lava now in the centre of the cavern, the dragon turned to the ledge so she was almost facing my hiding place, but she didn’t seem interested in me. She tried to take an egg in her mouth, but her jaws were too huge, her teeth too sharp, and she nudged it right off the ledge and into the bones below. She nosed at it again, her massive claws tensing, crunching the scree beneath them. I inhaled sharply then coughed in the smoke, then froze. Had the giant beast heard me? Farthing sprung from around my neck, but I caught hold of the base of her tail and hauled her back as the dragon roared, spurting two streams of fire from her nostrils up into the cavern above. She had to be the most powerful creature on earth, but she couldn’t save her eggs. I should be running for my life . . . but my heart was squeezed tight by her anguish.
I’d known that feeling. I’d known that feeling in the times I’d tried to forget, when Da had writhed in fever and cried for Ma, and there was nothing I could do to stop him joining her. I’d felt like shrieking up at the heavens too.
When the dragon unfurled her wings, an almighty dollop of lava engulfed her. She tried to shake free; and in a spray of burning droplets her head and body emerged. She didn’t seem to have been burnt by it, though goodness knows, the heat must have been more than a blacksmith’s forge. I couldn’t make out what she was doing – snapping and clawing at the lava . . .
One outstretched wing was now pinned by the weight of the molten rock.
The dragon was trapped.
I watched in horror as she struggled to release herself and screeched, sending more plumes of fire into the air. Farthing darted free of my grip and scampered up the curved wall and on to the ledge.
I couldn’t leave the eggs to be swallowed by lava. The only dragon eggs in the world, gone, and their mother with them. My decision, a wild unthinking decision, was made, and I didn’t have long. What would I carry them in? I only had the shirt on my back.
Then the shirt on my back would do.
I stripped it off and crunched as lightly as I could across the bones to the ledge, the lava now only a couple of yards away. The dragon was distracted, turned away from me, using her snout and claws to try to work her wing out of the heavy lava, flicking great clumps of it into the air. I tied the arms of the shirt together, and looped it around my torso and over my shoulder to make a sling.
Farthing nudged the golden eggs down into it, as the dragon roared in agony and torment.
Shivers ran over my neck, spine and behind my knees, in dreadful expectation of dragon fire engulfing me at any second. It didn’t come. I counted seven eggs into the fabric, and they clicked together like strong china, the shells rigid and hot against my chest.
Farthing leapt down, and we raced from the cave. I stopped to snatch up the first egg from the mouth of the tunnel and added it to the others, then looked back to see the dragon, coated in great clots of molten orange rock, only one wing free and flapping . . . frantic. As we left, she screamed – a racket so loud, and higher and higher in pitch. I collapsed against the tunnel wall as the unearthly shriek pickaxed through my skull. Too loud, it was too loud. My ear seemed to swell, and then the sound was only on one side of my head as the other side exploded in agony.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The dragon’s scream tailed off, but my injured ear beat like a gong, and I staggered, unbalanced, as Farthing raced ahead down the lava tube, away from the cavern. I didn’t have time to worry about the damage to my ear, I was running for my life. Smoke stung my eyes and the fabric of my sweat-soaked neckerchief sucked at my mouth, but I daren’t move it for fear the stench would choke me. There was a sharp pain in my foot, not the centipede sting but a new hurt, since walking barefoot on the bones of the cave. I couldn’t let that slow me either. The eight huge eggs were heavy across my chest, like the sacks of potatoes my aunt had made me haul from the market. I risked a glance behind me. The flow of the lava had turned into a flood of molten rock, now pouring into the tunnel, crackling and hissing, its fumes and heat racing ahead of it.
The mother dragon was alive when we left her but must have drowned in this boiling rock by now. Did she see me take the eggs, or think they had died with her? I didn’t have time for pity. If I stopped or tripped, I’d be going the same way. The lava surged and bubbled, spattering the back of my legs with scalding flecks. If I’d reached the hole in the tunnel ceiling any later I would have been done for.
Lava was dripping through from the surface here too. The flow had chased me both above and below ground. I dodged around it, the rocks hot beneath my feet. This new stream of lava would join what was behind me, and it was only going to get faster. The eggs clanked and Farthing scuttled ahead.
What exactly happens to a person engulfed by molten rock?
Probably not the best moment to think about that.
There would be nothing left. Not even bones for even an intrepid scientist like Mr Darwin to dig from the rock. No one was going to find my ashy remains and send me home to London for men to talk about over their fancy cigars.
I wasn’t going to let this hellhole be my tomb.
Light ahead. Not the eerie red of the lava, but the pure light of sun. I raced through the buccaneer’s cave and ducked out, on to the earth’s surface where I belonged, and pulled down my neckerchief to heave in gulps of fresh air.
There was no time to rest. The volcano was in full furious eruption, spraying out its molten insides. Above me flew a flock of the huge pink birds. Great hunks of red lava flew into the air like a giant infant flinging sand, and more flooded from the summit, a river slowly engulfing the plain. The flows advanced towards me from two directions, merging with each other in a thick burning tide. Ahead of it skittered a retreating army of red Sally Lightfoot crabs.
Despite my exhaustion, my feet raced across the black mud to the boat. I threw the chest in, flung it open, stepped out of the makeshift sling and tumbled the eggs inside, still bundled in my shirt. I would leave, as I was, shirtless and barefoot, with a broken oar, a copper pan, a knife and my fiddle without a case.
The sea was calm . . . but the island was raging.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Farthing. Where was she?
‘Farthing!’ I screamed. I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen her. She was in front of me as I climbed from the cave, I was sure of it.
‘Farthing!’
I grabbed the rope I had tied to the prow of the rowboat and pulled. On the second tug the boat slooped out of the mud, and on the third tug t
he hull started to slide. It gained momentum until I was almost running. The lava made its journey across the jagged rocks, empty of the iguanas I’d always seen draped there.
‘Farthing!’
It wasn’t much further to the sea, and I forced my trembling muscles on. The water lapped wonderfully cool around my ankles then my thighs, stinging as it hit the burns from the spitting lava, and the boat lifted. I tipped myself in, as three thick tongues of lava hit the wet mudflats, sizzling and sending up huge plumes of steam.
I searched the shoreline for a glimpse of green. I couldn’t be sure of the last time I’d seen her. Had she fallen behind, been engulfed by the lava, and I hadn’t even noticed?
No. The little lizard had survived the dragon fire before, she must have escaped again. She’d be sheltering somewhere safe from the lava, somewhere I couldn’t go.
I couldn’t wait for her. I couldn’t stay here any longer. I looked down at the chest. The dragon eggs were my responsibility. They might be the last of their kind in the world, and Farthing had brought me to their mother’s lair to rescue them. And with or without Farthing, I had to keep them safe.
I used the oar to direct me out to sea, and once I was past the small breakers I stopped to wait. A wall of black smoke and ash billowed towards me.
I willed Farthing to appear. Please, just this one thing.
If you wait any longer, this will all have been for nothing.
‘I know. I know.’
I looked at my fiddle and cleared my raw throat.
There were only a few tiny spurts of water along the seams of the boat, my rosin wax treatment had worked better than I could have imagined, but there was no way to keep Scratch dry now. I could lay the fiddle on top of the eggs in the chest, but the neck would stick out and I wouldn’t be able to close it. If we were hit by a wave the fiddle and eggs would both tumble out.
Farthing risked her life to stop the eggs being engulfed in lava. As long as I was alive, I’d keep them safe for her.
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