Max Kowalski Didn't Mean It

by Susie Day

  This was the scramble, according to the book. He stared up at the rock, remembering what Tal had told him. It was a path without a path; a puzzle for you to solve. No right way up. You just kept going till you got to the top.

  ‘And don’t fall off,’ he mumbled.

  ‘OK,’ said Ripley indistinctly.

  Max smiled; she was trying so hard to be good like he’d told her.

  ‘You follow me. You step where I step, yes?’

  Ripley nodded solemnly.

  Wishing he’d had more time to practise, Max reached out a hand and swung himself up. It was easy going for the first few metres, like a broken staircase. Then he reached his first puzzle: a flat face of rock over a metre high, with two possible paths to take on either side. He could jump up to reach a handhold above and swing himself up the face of the rock, he was pretty sure – but Ripley would never reach.

  ‘Let’s try this way,’ he mumbled, veering left. ‘Stay there a second.’

  The choice was good; he could edge along a narrow standing rock and then there was just one awkward moment at full stretch of his legs to make it past the sheer face to his right, and on to another tumbly staircase.

  ‘Come up. This way’s good,’ he said, beckoning.

  Ripley’s little legs did not reach where Max’s did. She stood on the foothold he’d found and stared up, her eyes wide and afraid.

  ‘OK, OK, don’t panic,’ Max whispered, to himself as much as to Ripley. ‘Go back down.’

  Ripley shook her head mutely.

  With a groan, Max turned his body round, and awkwardly slid down the sheer face back to where he’d started.

  It was awkward here, standing not on his comfortable foothold but off to one side to give Ripley space. He felt the wind pull at his coat and as he turned to look for a foothold he caught a dizzying glimpse of where he was: on tiptoes on a snow-slippery rock, up a mountain so high he could not see the valley, could only see the drop. It was a long way down. And although it was carpeted with white and looked soft as a blanket, he knew it was marked with jagged rocks and sharp edges, the kind that could break a dog’s back. The kind that could break him.

  ‘Mmmm-mwww,’ wailed Ripley, her lips too firmly closed to let his name out, tears brimming in her eyes.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said, and he meant it for her, but knew he needed to hear it too. ‘You can do it. Look up, Ripley. See? The place you need to go next is right there. Just jump off from your legs and reach up with your hand and you can grab it and pull yourself up. And I’ll push from below, so you can’t fall. Yeah? I’ll hold you.’

  Even as he said it, he knew she wouldn’t.

  She shook her head mutely, the tears falling now and snot blooming out of her nose.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘I need you to do this, Ripley. Cos if you don’t, we’ll have to go back down. I can’t leave you by yourself. And – and – I have to get to the top. Do you know why?’

  Her big blue eyes blinked at him.

  Max gripped the rock tightly.

  ‘There’s treasure at the top. The dragon guards it. And if I can get it, then we can buy the cottage and live here forever. Buy Christmas presents too.’

  ‘Santa brings Christmas presents,’ said Ripley indistinctly.

  ‘He doesn’t bring all of them. Sometimes Dad buys them.’

  Ripley thought about it.

  Max wished he wasn’t waiting for her to think while standing on a cliff edge with the wind swirling round him and his fingertips growing numb. But with Ripley you had to be patient.

  She wiped her nose on her sleeve, frowning. ‘Really, Max? There’s really a dragon?’

  Max nodded.

  For a moment Max thought he’d made a terrible mistake. Maybe she’d want to go back down even more now.

  But her teeth sucked on her bottom lip hopefully, and she gazed up at him, and he knew she was in.

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘But you need to push quite hard on my bottom, because if I fall off I’ll be cross. And dead.’

  ‘Deal,’ said Max.

  It was not as simple as he’d imagined, to get Ripley to leap up a rock and push her from below, and it was not the only moment of the scramble that led to tears and backtracking. Twice Max found himself at a dead end of impossible sheer rock, and had to pick his way backwards round Ripley to find a new path. Twice he realized the leap up was one he could have made alone, but not one she could manage. It was desperately slow going, and with every step he could feel cold seeping into his bones.

  But it came with something else too. An inner fire of hope. A sense of purpose, and pride in it. He was getting there. Every step was getting there. He – Max Kowalski, of all people! – was headed for victory.

  Elis Evans would be proud to be his friend. Mr Brew wouldn’t send him to the Reflection Room. Dad – Dad would come back to see … because who could stay away?

  The last rocks of the scramble were laid out as neatly as a staircase and Max stepped up them with barely a hand to the ground.

  The wind nearly took him straight back down.

  Out of the shelter of the mountain, on this high plateau, the wind was free to gust and sweep, swirling snow wildly round his head. Buffeted, Max dropped to one knee, bowing his head against the onslaught. His face was whipped raw, his hands bright red. He pulled on gloves, even though they were damp, and pulled his hood up.

  Ripley followed a moment later, and he held out a hand to catch her; she was so small he was afraid a big gust would lift her right off the mountain.

  This was no place to be.

  It was exactly where a dragon would live.

  Max turned his face into the wind and looked into the spiky heart of the dragon’s castle.

  27

  It was just as it was in Tal’s painting – and nothing like it at all.

  The looming spikes of rock were tipped, not with gold, but with snow, nestled deep into the crevices and swept into drift lines along the sharp edges. It was as vast and intimidating as the painting suggested – but what Tal had not shown was the world around it: the towering spikes of rock beyond, as the crest of the ridge continued and dipped before peaking again in the misty distance; the high peak behind completely thick with banked snow; the looming skies so vast above, swirling white and threatening to topple him over if he looked too long.

  Ripley’s hand tightened on his glove.

  Max squeezed her hand firmly, and threw her a grin.

  This was where he was meant to be. Everything had led him here: the keys from Elis Evans’s bedroom, and Kriss’s story from Louise’s book, and Michael’s quiet voice telling the tale of the golden dragon. His hours at the mountain centre. All his hard work. He had earned this moment.

  With care, he swung the backpack off his back and, resting against a rock to shelter it from the wind, pulled it open. The bulk of the copper bucket glowed inside. It was chill to the touch even through his gloves, and as awkward to get out of the bag as it had been to get in, but he pulled it out anyway.

  Inside was the kitchen knife.

  Then he tugged the fire blanket free and, with difficulty, fighting the wind, tied it round his neck.

  Ripley regarded him with a quizzical crinkle of her nose.

  ‘Trust me,’ said Max.

  He tucked the cauldron under one arm, the knife gripped in his other hand, and stood, his fireproof cloak billowing.

  The beast was ahead to his left.

  He looked across to the snowbound mountain beyond, spotting the distant blue dots of Michael’s group toiling up Blaidd Ddrwg, making slow but steady progress.

  They might cut across to this peak, along the ridge once they were higher. They might catch him up.

  It had to be now. Now.

  ‘Stay here,’ said Max. He should keep Ripley safe; there was no sense risking her going any further. And he should go alone. The warrior, alone.

  She clung on to his elbow, shaking her head. ‘Please. Don’t want to be by myself.’

>   ‘Do as you’re told,’ he said, shaking her off. ‘By those rocks, now.’

  She made a mournful squeak, and skittered across the snow, half-blown there, to huddle in the rock.

  He felt a moment’s guilt. She looked so frightened. But she was safer there.

  He turned his shoulders into the wind and stepped towards the snow-tipped spiked rocks of the dragon’s lair.

  The bitter wind stung his eyes. It was hard to see, hard to keep stepping. The bulk of the cauldron under his arm felt heavy and unwieldy. The fire blanket caught the wind and tugged him off course. But he kept moving. The beast was there, right there: an unmoving sleeping form hidden among the slanted rocks.

  Max stepped so close it was as if he was in Tal’s painting in the Bevans’ hallway. There it was, that vast and terrible spine. There were the folded wings. There was the low-lying line of a spiked and evil tail. There was the long neck, and the sleek flat head.

  Max stood still and silent, waiting for the emerald bright eyes to flick into horrifying life.

  The wind quieted.

  The dragon stayed sleeping.

  Summoning up every brave thought he could muster, Max took a step forward. Holding the knife before him, he whispered to himself.

  ‘Feel the fear, let it go. Feel the fear, let it go.’

  He could feel Ripley’s eyes on him.

  Max risked stepping closer. And closer. Close enough to be torn apart if the great claws swiped at his heart. Close enough to be burned to a cinder if the great and terrible jaws roared into flaming life. Close enough to touch.

  Max reached out one ungloved hand to the low flat head.

  It was rock.

  Just rock.

  It didn’t even look like a head, now he was closer. The spine of the beast was just an unusual line of rocks, jutting upwards at an odd angle. There were similar rocks all around.

  There was no dragon.

  There was no lake of gold.

  This was not a magical story, and he was not going home a hero who had saved them all.

  It was a clear thought, quite calm. A fact. A simple inevitable fact.

  But once he had thought it, it was as if it tore away something inside him that had been in place for a long time, holding him together: a strip of human sticky-tape that had lost its stick at last.

  Max opened his mouth and a sound came out. A deep low sound like a terrible song of misery and despair, a wail from the past. His eyes were full of tears that he couldn’t stop. They flowed out of him. He wiped his face but they kept coming. Ripley stared at him, but they kept coming.

  And Max could hear the familiar voice, telling him to stop; telling him what a man was. Boys don’t cry. Stop sniffing like a girl. Man up, big man. Pull yourself together. You’ve got to look after them, Max. Look after the girls. Because he was different from them, more special and less at the same time. Strong and silent. Daft as a brush but never weak, never needy. A big brave boy.

  And – that wasn’t fair, either. In all his life, nothing had been fair, but nothing more so than this.

  Max fought back.

  He was eleven years old and he was allowed to feel, to care, to cry at sorrow. He was allowed to walk away from a fight. He was allowed to not be the man of the house … Because that wasn’t his job. That was his dad’s job. And Max had been doing it for him – they all had – and it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right.

  His dad wasn’t fair. His dad wasn’t right.

  An image swirled through the snow before his wet eyes: a shape, the shape of a man. As if he was coming back at last, just like Max had longed for.

  Max gripped the handle of the knife and roared as he ran forward, the blade lifted to strike.

  There was no dragon to slay. But he had something bigger to defeat.

  He swung at nothing. There was no man.

  But there was a sound around him suddenly: not one single noise but a vibration in the air as if voices from deep within the mountain were stirring. As if he had woken something.

  He stopped still, searching through the whirling snow.

  He could hear Ripley calling his name, indistinct in the wind, as something rippled through the world like a universal cry.

  Then there was a roaring, and the rocks began to move.

  28

  Max had dropped the knife in the snow and he fell to his knees, searching desperately, as all around the ground seemed to quake and shift under the claws of the waking dragon.

  Its great back was moving, shaking snow from the tips of its sharp-ridged spine.

  Max scrabbled desperately, the snow coming up in clumps, until he saw it: a flash of silver. His knife.

  He gripped it, jumping up, reaching his arm out to catch her as Ripley ran towards him, her face white.

  But there were no emerald eyes or snarling jaws before him, no spiny dragon raising its head to strike.

  The roaring grew louder and then, with a blur and a quake in the valley below, two jet fighters flew past at impossible speed.

  There was a gigantic bang, that echoed off the sheer faces of the rocks around him and rang through the valley.

  The rocks fell still.

  The dragon – the not-dragon – was not roaring to life.

  It was the fighters from down the valley, not a monster. There was nothing to fear.

  Until Max heard a great low groan from far behind him, and spun round.

  The high mountain pass beyond was still deep in its cap of snow. But, as he watched, a crack began to form across the smooth white surface of the deep-packed frozen snow atop Blaidd Ddrwg. It rang out loud across the plateau, a tearing sound as the crack widened and grew. With a vast and terrible creak, the block of snow and ice detached itself from its home, and after a breathless pause, as if it was waiting to gain confidence, it began to slide.

  ‘No …’ breathed Max.

  It moved so swiftly once it had begun that there was no stopping it. It crashed a path through rock and ice, pulling with it great plumes of dashed snow and flying rocks, and battering its way down the mountain. It was followed by another slide, this time of scree and rock, treacherous slivers of slaty stone and heavy slabs that crashed and boomed.

  Towards the walkers.

  Towards Michael, and his mountain-centre walkers.

  Who would have no idea what was heading their way until it was upon them; nowhere to run to escape its thundering path.

  And no one would know.

  ‘Max,’ wailed Ripley, looking round in panic.

  ‘We’re OK,’ he whispered, hoping it was true.

  No icy bank of snow was hanging over them, no tumbling rock. The lifeless stone dragon stayed where it was.

  But the others … the others would not be OK.

  Max fumbled in his pocket for the mobile phone. He remembered a poster in the mountain centre: Call Mountain Rescue. You just dialled 999, and asked them to come. Told them where and what had happened. Got help.

  It didn’t matter how much trouble Max would be in. He was in it, already. It didn’t matter. He could do something to help. Had to.

  But the mobile phone’s faint glowing screen showed the familiar picture.

  No signal.

  Even here, high up in the mountains.

  He waved it around a little, stomping across the plateau to hunt down a bar, just one – but there was still nothing.

  ‘We need to go back down,’ he said, pulling off the fire blanket and shoving it along with the knife and the cauldron awkwardly back inside the backpack. ‘There’s people on that mountain, Ripley. They need us to call them some help.’

  She pouted. ‘But we have to get to the top.’

  ‘We did.’ He looked around them. ‘We’re here.’

  ‘Oh. OK.’ She looked around too. ‘I thought you’d be happy, when you got to the top.’

  Max followed her gaze, taking a last look at the spine of rock.

  His dragon.

  Now slain.

  ‘Me too,
’ he said.

  Then he struck out for the scramble.

  It was worse going back down, with the looming view of the drop unavoidable, and a sense of panic in his blood at the thought of Michael and the others, and deep snow upon them. They had to hurry, and they had to go slow; be swift, be safe. He took each downward step of the scramble backwards, facing the rock and wishing he’d left a marker behind him to know how he’d come up.

  Ripley, meanwhile, seemed quite cheerful about it all, and followed him without complaint.

  She stepped where he stepped. She held on where he held on. She reached the bottom of the scramble a moment after he did, and dusted the snow off her hands.

  ‘I quite like that bit,’ she said.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Max, who did not, and would not, perhaps, ever.

  He waved the phone. Still nothing. But he could keep it in his hand now, and from here he could see the path of sorts they’d carved. Their footprints had drifted and were half-filled with snow or blown away entirely, but they were visible, and this would be easier going down than up.

  Max walked and waited, walked and waited, a choked feeling in his throat, until at last the screen showed a sudden two then three bars.

  The call took only seconds. They wanted his name, and the time it had happened, and a map reference, and Max wished he had a watch, wished he’d known to think, wished he could say the name of the mountains properly – but he told them of the walkers and they thanked him. They said they would do their best.

  They crossed the long stretch of snow and the scree and were halfway along the zigzag before they heard it: the slow whup-whup-whirr of the helicopter.

  ‘Nooo,’ mumbled Ripley, clinging on to his arm. ‘What if it makes things fall on us?’

  But the helicopter was not loud or echoing enough to risk that, and by now they were deep into the valley, more sheltered and in lighter snow banks.

  ‘We’re fine. Come on.’

  He gave her a biscuit to keep her going. He had one too. He had started to feel oddly light all over, as if the slow thawing of his face and the lifting of the need to slay dragons were changing him. They walked on down the zigzag, and watched as the helicopter hovered, lingered, dipped out of sight in the cleft of the valley, then wheeled up and away, the whip of its blades fading away to silence.