by Lari Don
Yann continued, “If the Master of the Maze has all the answers and follows none of the rules, and if no one else can ask the Book for help, he will soon have unlimited power over the fabled beasts. And he will not stop there.” Yann came closer to Helen, and spoke quietly. “Soon he will look at your world and start using questions and answers to get round your magic too.”
Helen shook her head. “We don’t have magic.”
“Yes, you do, you just call it science.” Yann turned away and spoke into the emptiness of the cave. “The one question to which the Master craves the answer is: how can I rule this world?”
There was a cold dark silence.
Helen put her arm round Rona. She felt so warm and real. Helen had only just started truly believing in these people and their world, and now it might be destroyed.
“Alright then,” Helen said firmly, “We’d better solve the riddle as fast as possible. Let’s have another look.
I come from a gap-toothed grin in the ground,
with no beginning and no end.
“But the Book didn’t come from a gap-toothed grin in the ground, did it?” she asked again.
“No,” agreed Rona, “It is made of thick paper, ancient bark and sea pearls. From woods and water, not earth.”
“So who is saying, ‘I came from a gap-toothed grin in the ground’ then?”
They all thought. Yann tapped a hoof. Catesby preened his tail. Rona hummed a short melody over and over. Lavender went round the cave brightening up some balls of light. Sapphire rocked the stone back and forth with her clawed foot.
Helen watched them all. She watched the words on the stone, and the moving shadows the stone cast on the bumpy floor.
“The stone!” she cried out. “The stone is saying: ‘I came from a gap-toothed grin in the ground.’ It’s a place where stones make a shape without beginning or end!”
She closed her eyes, seeing shapes and patterns made out of stones in her head. Towers and cliffs, sheepfolds and cairns, harbours and mazes. But they all had beginnings and ends. They all had tops, bottoms, doors and corners. None of them seemed to answer the riddle. Suddenly, she thought of a shape that had no beginning nor end, that just kept going round and round and round …
“A circle! A stone circle! That’s a shape without end. And standing stones in a circle … you know, those huge ancient stones poking up out of the earth … they look just like teeth in an open mouth. They could be a gap-toothed grin. It must be an old stone circle!”
Yann was looking at her with surprise on his face. Lavender blew her a kiss. Rona smiled at her confidently and said, “I knew you were the one to help. A human bard with books in her blood! Which stone circle could it be?”
Yann grunted. “Sapphire, you’re the expert on stones. Where does this rock come from?”
Sapphire sat back on her hind legs and picked the stone up between her front legs. She turned it over and looked at each of its six sides. Then she sighed a breath of pale smoke and snuffed a small dragon laugh. She laid the stone on the rough floor, with the writing downwards, and tapped her tiniest silver claw on a mark on the top surface.
Helen brushed shoulders with Rona as they all leaned forward to look.
Scratched on to the stone was a shape like a tree with three short branches pointing up on one side, and four on the other.
“A rune!” exclaimed Yann. “Well done. Can you read it?”
Sapphire snorted again, and rumbled briefly.
Yann said disapprovingly, “It’s a joke! It says ‘ouch!’ Sapphire says she thinks someone dropped the stone on his foot and scratched an ‘ouch’ rune. The Book wouldn’t tell jokes. It must have been on the stone before the Book carved its clue.”
“But that’s great,” said Helen, “We want to know where the stone came from, so if the rune is earlier than the Book’s visit to the garden then it’s a really good clue. I can look for a book about stone circles at school tomorrow if you want, see if any circles near here have runes carved on the stones.
“Then we can meet tomorrow night, and I might be able to tell you which circle this stone came from. And if you think it would be helpful, maybe I could come with you again, just in case you need my first aid kit.”
Sapphire mumbled something warmly, which Rona explained was an offer to carry the human who had restored her sight anywhere, anytime. Helen grinned. Her Dad always said the first song she’d ever written, when she was six, was about a ride on a dragon. “Thank you so much, I would love that.”
“But not tonight,” said Yann. “Sapphire, you need to recover and regain your strength for tomorrow. I will take the healer’s child home safely, and we will all meet again in her garden tomorrow after the sun goes down. We have only three days before the Winter Solstice, when our elders will notice the loss of the Book.”
Suddenly the group broke up. Lavender’s lights dimmed and everyone said goodbye. Yann took Helen home through the wider front entrance to Sapphire’s cave. He cantered rather than galloped, but he did not say one word to her the whole way home.
When he let her down in front of the garage, she asked him politely to step back in so she could check his wound. She unwound the bandages, and tried not to sound too surprised when she said, “It seems to be healing perfectly, no pus or swelling at all.” She put a clean pad on and bound it up again.
He barely seemed to hear her, or notice the new bandage. But just as he left, he turned to her.
“Human girl. I hope you find the answer to our riddle soon, because the Master’s creatures have been in the walled garden since last night and they will have read the clue long before we did. We have to puzzle out the answer, then reach the stone circle and the Book before they do, or the Master will gain answers to all the questions he burns with, and we fabled beasts will have no answers at all.”
Helen asked, “Are you afraid of that, Yann, even though you’re not afraid of pain?”
“Yes, I am afraid.” He looked directly into her eyes. “I am afraid because it will mean war. A war my people cannot win, and a war your people may lose too.”
Then he galloped off.
Chapter 8
Helen woke full of excitement and jumped eagerly out of bed. If she could find the right stone circle today, she would fly there tonight on a dragon!
After buttoning up her school dress, she stood in front of the mirror pulling her thick dark curls into a ponytail. Then she turned to go downstairs for breakfast, and nearly tripped over the green first aid kit in the middle of the floor, where she’d dropped it on arriving home last night in her rush to get cleaned up before suppertime.
The rucksack was slightly scorched and very dirty. She couldn’t possibly put it back in her Mum’s surgery. She would have to replace it. But first she would have to refill it with supplies she might need tonight: a new syringe, more saline, swabs, clean bandages and what else? What could go wrong at a stone circle? What injuries could her new friends suffer? She tried not to think of huge stone slabs falling on small fairies, or even middle-sized schoolgirls.
She shoved the first aid kit under her bed and went downstairs for breakfast.
Nicola wasn’t being a horse today. Today she was being a teddy’s mummy, feeding porridge to a bright pink bear in a bib. “Open wiiiiiiiiiide!” she said to the bear. Helen gave her little sister a kiss, and got a dollop of porridge on her sleeve in thanks.
Her Dad handed Helen a bowl of porridge, and waved vaguely at the blueberries and honey on the table.
“Mr Crombie phoned last night to make an appointment for his cat’s booster jags. He seemed a bit worried about this solo you’re supposed to be performing at the concert. He says you still haven’t told him which piece you’re going to play yet. Is that right?”
Oops, thought Helen, I should have been looking for a tune last night, not crawling about in caves and solving riddles.
“I just haven’t played it for him yet, Dad, that’s all. It’ll be ready by Monday. Don’t worry.�
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“Look … Mum and I know you want to be a great fiddle player, but we’re still not sure about this summer school idea. It’s a lot of work, and if you aren’t ready to find, practise and perform a solo, then perhaps you should just wait a year or two.”
“But I can’t wait! These particular violinists might only play together at next year’s summer school, and then maybe never again. I may never get this chance again.”
Helen’s Dad tried to look stern. “Then you need to impress Mr Crombie at his rehearsals, don’t you, rather than make him nervous about his concert?”
“I know, I know.” Helen wanted to distract her Dad from this awkward conversation, so she asked, “Dad, do you know anything about stone circles?”
“What … like Stonehenge? That sort of thing?”
“Yes. Are there any round here?”
Her Dad thought. “I don’t know of any standing stones nearby. There are a couple of very old burial sites and lots of Roman remains in the Borders, but the big circles are mostly in the south of England, I think. There are a couple in Orkney and the Western Isles though. Why do you ask?”
“Just something I read.” Helen grinned, remembering reading the riddle on the stone in the flickering light of the cave.
Then her Mum marched in, slightly grumpy, as she often was until she’d had her breakfast.
“I’ve lost my first aid kit. The rucksack I use for long distance jobs like sheep on cliff faces, and puppies in septic tanks. The one in the Landrover has just fallen apart, and I can’t find my spare anywhere. Does anyone know where it is?”
Helen didn’t know exactly where the rucksack had come to rest under her bed when she pushed it with her foot, so she crossed her fingers and said, “I don’t know, Mum.” Then she filled her mouth with blueberry porridge and started eating very fast.
“Alasdair, do you know where it is?”
“No, Tricia dear. Where did you last see it?”
“It’s usually filled with supplies and hanging on the door of the small animal surgery, but it’s not there.”
“Did you take it with you to rescue the sheep a couple of nights ago?”
“No, it was that barbed wire which wrecked my old one.”
“Nicola, have you taken Mummy’s green bag?” Dad asked gently.
“Green bag for picnic. Teddy bear picnic.”
“Nicola! That’s Mummy’s …” her Mum’s voice started to rise.
Helen broke in, “No, Mum!” She didn’t want Nicola taking the blame for her nighttime adventures again. “No, Mum, Nicola doesn’t mean your green bag. Remember she has a wee green bag with flowers on it, and she uses it for pretend shopping and picnics. That’s the bag she means. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind if you borrowed it though, for your plasters and stuff.”
“It’s got much more important equipment in it than plasters and stuff, as you would know, young lady, if you ever paid the slightest attention to what I do for a living.”
“I don’t have to pay attention, Mum, I don’t want to be a vet. I want to be a musician.”
“For which you will have to practise a bit more,” reminded her Dad. Feeling got at from both sides, Helen put her half-finished bowl of porridge in the sink and clomped off to pack her school bag.
Helen didn’t get a chance to sneak into the school library until lunchtime. As soon as she had finished her packed lunch, she went into the oldest part of the school, which had once been the original village hall. It wasn’t used for teaching any more and she noticed that it was starting to smell quite musty. The library was much bigger than her classroom. There were lots of old books on high wooden shelves, and a ladder on wheels to reach them, but the books that the pupils usually needed were easier to reach, on grey metal bookcases in the middle of the room.
Helen searched the history and geography shelves and found several books on stone circles and other Neolithic remains from four or five thousand years ago.
She was dismayed to discover that there were hundreds of stone circles, stone rows and standing stones in Britain, but then she remembered that she was looking for a shape without end, so she limited her search to circles.
Stonehenge was the most obvious circle, but a photo in a recent book showed it surrounded by barriers and cameras, so it would be hard to get into, even at night, even with the help of a dragon. She had to hope that the Book’s clue came from another, less touristy, circle.
She picked up an old book with yellow crinkled pages containing sketches of stone circles. She flicked through it, back to front, as she always did with serious books, hoping to get to the good bits fast without having to read the introduction.
As the sketches passed her in a cartoon blur of stones moving and dancing, one shape caught her eye. She stopped flicking and turned back half a dozen pages to find the picture that had leapt out at her.
She saw a huge stone circle, a perfect, beautiful circle, even though there were gaps where some stones had fallen.
It was called the Ring of Brodgar, and was on the mainland of Orkney, the group of islands just off the very top corner of Scotland. But what Helen had noticed was the small sketch in the corner of the page; a drawing of just one of the massive stones. It had a rune carved on it, in the same branched tree style as the rune on Sapphire’s block. The notes underneath said a smaller stone with a rune on it had gone missing from Brodgar years ago.
“We could take it back to Brodgar tonight!” she said out loud, delighted to have solved the riddle.
Helen glanced quickly through the rest of the book, but there was no other circle that answered the riddle. So she returned to the Ring of Brodgar, and copied the layout of the circle, including the deep ditch round it and the lochs either side of it, into a notebook she’d brought from home.
She was just sliding all the books back into their spaces when the bell rang for the end of lunchtime. She ran down the corridor between the old building and the new classrooms. As she turned the corner and pushed open the heavy fire door, she heard a noise behind her. She whirled round quickly, and saw something vanish round the corner. It looked like a tail, not at floor level, but at the height of Helen’s waist. She’d been the only person in the library and there were only storerooms in this corridor. So who else was here? Helen stood still and listened. In the background she heard the shuffling and chatter of classes filing back in, but nearby she thought she heard breathing. Rasping, gasping breathing.
She clenched her fists and thought about Yann running away from creatures with teeth. She took a step back towards the library, but then heard Mrs Murray shout from the new building.
“Helen Strang! Get to your class this minute.”
Helen called, “Yes Miss,” and ran into the bright light, straight to her classroom.
There was no rehearsal after school on Wednesday, so Helen was back home while it was still light. Her Mum was at a conference at Edinburgh University, and her Dad had taken Nicola swimming in Selkirk, so she had the house to herself for an hour.
First, she restocked the first aid kit, adding a few extra bandages and swabs just to be safe.
Then, remembering how hungry she had been by the end of the cave adventure, she made some sandwiches. She didn’t know what her new friends ate, so she chose for them: cheese, tuna, chicken and jam. She wondered what horses would like, and added some salad leaves to the plastic box too. Finally, she hid the rucksack and the sandwiches in a bush by the back fence.
As the sun sank lower, her Dad and Nicola came back smelling of chlorine. Helen sat in her room with her music books and tried — yet again — to find a short violin piece that she felt was perfect for her. She had been enjoying herself too much these past few days to play anything sad, and none of the bouncy pieces were serious enough for someone who was trying to save the world from an evil Minotaur.
She found an old book of traditional Scottish dance tunes that Mr Crombie had lent her and was playing her way through those when she suddenly realized that it wa
s almost dark outside. She put her fiddle in its case, ran downstairs and grabbed her fleece.
She trotted through the kitchen, where her Dad was blowing Nicola’s nose.
“I heard you playing upstairs, it sounded great,” he said smiling.
“That was just a warm up. I should really go out to the garage now, to try some more complex music for my solo. I’ve made some sandwiches, so don’t worry if I’m not back for a while.”
Helen had thought about her words carefully, and was pretty sure she hadn’t actually lied. She should indeed be practising in the garage, and she really had made sandwiches … and she certainly wouldn’t be back for a while.
So she gave her Dad a big kiss, and jumped out of the way of a huge sneeze from her little sister. Then she bounced out of the back door and ran to the garage. She nipped in just long enough to put her fiddle carefully on the couch, and switch on the light so it shone through the dusty windows. From the house, it would look as if she was still there.
She headed for the darkest part of the garden where she found Yann resting on the ground with his legs folded under him, and Rona leaning on his flank, her legs stretched out on the grass.
Rona grinned at Helen. “Was that you playing? It was lovely.”
Helen smiled shyly. “I was just sight-reading, trying to find a new piece to play at my school concert.”
“Enough chatter, girls,” said Yann grandly, springing to his hooves. “We have work to do. The others are in the wood up the hill. We must join them.”
“I made food.” Helen grabbed the box and rucksack from behind the bush. “You can eat while I tell you what I found.”
So, as they sat round a tree stump in the old birch wood above the house, Rona ate tuna sandwiches, Yann ate all the salad, Lavender ate little bits of jam sandwiches and Catesby pecked at the fairy’s crusts. Sapphire delicately nibbled the chicken sandwiches.
“You’d really have preferred a whole chicken, wouldn’t you?” laughed Helen.