I looked up at her with wide eyes. “You speak cat?” I said, and I thought I said it in my own language.
“No, I speak the dragon tongue,” she replied. “Now, it appears you do too.”
“What’s the point of doing that when I can talk to you in my head?” I had the sinking feeling of being cheated. All those promises of being able to shoot fire out of staffs and cast intense beams of energy at warlocks. Now, this crystal had given me an ability that I already had.
“I also prefer to communicate with you that way,” Salanraja said, still out loud. “It will help preserve my voice for when I need it the most.”
I growled at her. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Salanraja let off a deep and loud sigh. She continued to speak, as we had been previously, inside my mind. “I will tell you what abilities you’ve gained, because you seem too ignorant to work it out yourself. Firstly, now we’re bonded we can communicate like this across vast distances. But it’s not just me you can speak with, but any sentient creature. The crystals have gifted you with the magic of language. Do you realise how powerful that can be?”
I yawned, and I turned away from the dragon. “I still think it’s pretty lame.”
“I’m sure you’ll find good uses for it,” Salanraja replied.
“I wonder how long that will take.”
“That is surely up to you. Now hop on, it’s time to return to Dragonsbond Academy.”
I mewled, remembering the venison Salanraja had promised me. After everything that had happened, admittedly, I was famished. Salanraja turned her tail towards me, and I ran up it into the corridor on her back. She took off into the cerulean sky, and then she swooped down again to pick up the crystal with her talons.
“One more thing,” she said. “We must now defend this crystal at all costs. It is now the medium of our bond.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means that if anyone destroys it, then both of us shall die.”
10
Kinship
My mouth was watering by the time the castle, or Dragonsbond Academy as Salanraja styled it, came into sight. I couldn’t imagine anything but that wonderful tender venison that she’d promised me.
I’d been pretty sleepy on the way through, and I’d drifted in and out of dreamland several times. Fortunately, Salanraja had kept her flight gentle. She was probably tired too, after everything. This made the corridor of Salanraja’s spikes feel like a cradle that could rock me gently to sleep. My dreams were sweet, of venison and the gamey and majestic taste of it.
Soon enough, I woke up to see the castle getting ever bigger, and the tower containing Salanraja’s chamber speeding towards us. She touched down with a soft thud, and I lifted myself up and stretched and yawned. I looked down Salanraja’s corridor of spikes towards the shiny castle floor.
Guess what? There was no venison there, and the floor had a polished look, as if someone had just swept and scoured it clean.
I shrieked out loud, and I tried to tear my claws into Salanraja’s flesh. But her skin was still tough, and it probably hurt me more than it hurt her. Before she could retaliate, I ran down her back and off her tail. I turned to the dragon.
“There’s no venison,” I said. “Salanraja, you promised.”
Salanraja glanced over at the spot where the carcass had been. She then turned to me and gave a devilishly wicked grin. “So there isn’t,” she said. “They must have given it to another dragon. We can’t have meat going off in this place. It will attract crows.”
I felt the rage burning in my chest. “Eaten by another dragon? That was my venison, Salanraja. You promised it to me.”
“I did nothing of the sort,” Salanraja replied, shaking her head slowly. “I only said that I might let you have some of it, which you did. You can’t claim someone else’s hunt as your own. What are you, a scavenger?”
“A scavenger?” I took a step forward and then arched my back to make myself seem as big as possible.
“Well, isn’t that what you do? You eat the food that others have hunted and farmed after all.”
“That doesn’t make me a scavenger… How could you call me such a thing?”
“You’re the one accusing me of breaking promises. If there’s one thing you should know about dragons is that we always keep our word. It’s our code, and it keeps us noble.”
But I wasn’t listening to her nonsense. “You promised me venison, and you lied to me. For that, I shall make you pay!” I turned around, strolled back up to the corner, and then I angled my behind towards the wall and sprayed there.
Salanraja let out a deep threatening growl, and smoke rose from her flared nostrils. “What in the Seventh Dimension do you think you’re doing?” she asked.
“That should teach you,” I replied. “This is my territory now, and any food that enters it I claim as my own.”
“You just urinated in my home!”
“But it’s mine now. I’ve just marked it so.”
“What are you talking about?”
I lowered my back and scowled up at the dragon. “Don’t you know how to mark territory?”
“What do you mean, territory?”
“Have you forgotten what it’s like to be wild? Pah, you’re just like the moggies in the cattery.”
“You’re insane. Now get out the way, before that stuff you’ve just put there starts to stink.”
“I’m not moving,” I said, and I lowered my front to the ground and growled, ready to mark the wall again.
“Move, or you shall burn!”
Salanraja lifted her neck, and her glands started to swell there. More smoke seeped out of her nostrils, like steam does a kettle. Then, she pulled back her head, and a jet of flame leaped out towards me.
I darted just out of the way in time, and I turned to the dragon, screeching and hissing out swear words in my own language. “You could have killed me!”
“Oh, you’re nimble, you would have got out of the way in time. Now, never do that again, because I hate having to clean up after smelly creatures.”
I wanted to give her some more of my mind. But before I could even put word to thought, a scratchy voice coming from the doorway interrupted me. It belonged to an old man.
“What in the Seventh Dimension is going on here?” he said.
11
Meeting the Alchemist
The old man was huddled over a staff with a blue crystal on top of it, polished and ground into a smooth bevel at the edges. I actually couldn’t tell how old he was. He had a multitude of wrinkles set deep into his skin, but he didn’t look sallow or pale, as a lot of incredibly old humans might. Rather, he emanated a sense of vitality – not only through the colour of his skin but also out of his brilliant blue eyes.
Salanraja turned to him. The way both the old man and the dragon looked at each other, told me they were talking telepathically. I felt a little jealous, admittedly, to have Salanraja talking to someone in my own presence, without having a clue what they were saying. I mewled, trying to get some attention, but that didn’t distract either of them. So, I looked at the scorched stone where I had sprayed and considered remarking it. But I thought better of the idea and instead put my nose to the floor and tried to sniff out a scrap of venison that whoever had cleaned this place might have overlooked.
Eventually, the old man hobbled over to me on his staff. He stooped over it and put down his hand to pet me. His skin was dry and wrinkled but he didn’t seem scary in any way. I rubbed my face against his hand, then looked up to him and mewled again, thinking he might have food.
I let him tickle me underneath my chin, as I tried to find out what he and Salanraja had been talking about.
“Can you talk to anyone like that?” I asked Salanraja.
“Like what?”
“Like you do with me, in my head.”
“Not now I’m bonded to you,” Salanraja said. “Now you’re the only non-dragon I can connect to telepathically.”
“Then how did you just speak to him? And don’t try to tell me you were just staring at each other like lovers.”
“I talked through his dragon. He’s a dragon rider too, you know.”
“Oh,” I said.
Meanwhile, the old man had now started to scratch behind my ear. It tickled a little, so I gently pushed away his hand with my paw. The old man smiled.
“We can talk, you know, Bengie?” he said. “The crystals gave you that gift.”
“Not Bengie,” I said. “Bengie is an awful name. Call me Ben.”
The old man turned to Salanraja, and she chuckled from deep in her belly. “Bengie is a much better name, so much more elegant,” she said to me.
“It’s a childish name,” I said.
“Ben sounds like a commoner.”
“Better that than what a child might name a stuffed toy.”
I mewled at the old man again, jealous of the attention he was giving Salanraja. He turned back to me.
“Salanraja refuses to use the name I prefer,” I said. “But you seem to have much more respect…” I licked my paw, which had picked up a little of the taste of the venison from the floor.
“Very well,” the old man said. “Ben it is. Meanwhile, I am Aleam. A dragon rider and also an alchemist and healer here at the academy. It’s a pleasure to make the acquaintance of such a fascinating creature.”
“The pleasure is all mine to be so fascinating,” I said. “Now, do you have any food?”
The old man chuckled. “Yes. I heard Matron Canda complaining about the starving cat who tried to steal from her kitchens. That must have been you. You must be famished.”
He reached into a leather pouch on his hip and produced out of it a chicken drumstick, yellowed with turmeric on the outside. I looked up at him, unable to distinguish between the rumbling sound in my tummy and my purr.
Aleam reached down and scratched me under the chin again, and then he threw the chicken on the floor. I picked it up in my mouth by the thigh bone and sequestered it over in the corner which I had marked. I ripped into the meat with my teeth, savouring a taste I hadn’t experienced for months. The chicken was cold, admittedly. But it still tasted fresh, and slightly herby – the way I liked it.
“Well,” Aleam said. “This is certainly going to rile up the Council of Three. They wanted to cut the spikes off Salanraja to make her saddleable again, but Salanraja wasn’t having any of it.”
I glanced over my shoulder at Aleam. “Yes, you humans have a habit of cutting off our body parts.” The number of times they’d trimmed my claws, and there was something else their ‘vet’ had done to me when I was younger too – I won’t go into that one.
“Thank you,” Salanraja said to me. “I’m glad to hear there’s someone here who understands these things.”
Aleam shook his head. “I guess we do. If only they could hear you talk, maybe they’d think a little differently about cats. But for now, you’re only here to catch mice. Except for Ta’ra, that is. But many don’t believe Ta’ra is actually a cat at all.”
I finished the last scrap of meat off the chicken and then licked the remaining taste off my lips. So, it wasn’t as good as venison, but chicken was still a great tasting classic.
I walked up to Aleam and rubbed my nose against his knee. He smelled like someone I could trust. I don’t know how to describe it, really, but his scent had a certain cleanliness about it. Unlike Astravar, who smelled of dark things that set off thoughts of decay and despair in my mind, Aleam smelled of lavender perhaps, or like pollen drifting upon a warm summer breeze. It’s these kinds of subtle things that tell a cat whether a human can be trusted from the start.
“Who’s Ta’ra, anyway?” I asked. Where I came from, South Wales, the humans liked to say ‘ta-ra’ to people all the time. It meant goodbye.
“Ta’ra is quite a character, if I say so myself,” Aleam replied. “But really, you should meet her for yourself. I think you two might get on well – if Ta’ra can get on with anyone, that is.”
He turned on his heel and hobbled away on his staff. I turned around to Salanraja, who had already folded herself up on the floor. “Go with Aleam,” she said. “I need a rest anyway, and I don’t want you urinating all around this place while I sleep.”
I growled back at Salanraja. In all honesty, I didn’t like her tone of voice. I turned back to Aleam and mewled again – kind of hoping he had more chicken.
“Come on, Ben,” Aleam said. “Let’s go and meet our friend.”
He hobbled off, and I followed him into the corridors of this cold, unfriendly castle.
12
Cat Sidhe
I couldn’t believe my eyes when I first saw Ta’ra. If it weren’t for her size, she would have looked like a standard black cat, with a tapered face and wide round green eyes. But she was absolutely massive, and she didn’t quite smell like a cat. Instead she had a wild scent about her. She sat propped up by a few cushions on a mahogany bench, licking her fur.
As soon as I entered Aleam’s workshop, she stared at me and her eyes, I swear, started to glow. Her gaze had a kind of intensity that seemed able to measure the worth of my soul. But she didn’t seem to think it worth very much at all, because she soon broke off her examination, yawned, and returned to grooming herself.
“Bengie, will you stop thinking so loud?” Salanraja said in my head. “I’m trying to get some hard-earned sleep.”
“But she’s ginormous,” I said. “She’s even bigger than a Maine Coon.”
“Who?” Salanraja replied. “And what in the Seventh Dimension is a Maine Coon?”
“A Maine Coon is the biggest cat in the world. I thought everyone knew that.” Although, to be honest, the Savannah cats often disagreed with that fact. They claimed that their grandfather was much, much bigger than the Maine Coon some of us saw on television. To which our old neighbourhood Ragamuffin, perhaps the wisest of our clowder, pointed out that crossing a domestic cat with a serval of the Savannah to create a massive domestic cat is cheating. No domestic cat, he said, was bigger than the Maine Coon.
Salanraja laughed. “I think you’ll find the Sabre-Tooth tiger is the biggest cat in the world. Or, debatably, it might be the chimera.”
“Never heard of them.”
“Well, if you don’t quieten your thoughts a little, I might decide to drop you into a chimera’s lair. Now, let me sleep.”
I didn’t know how I was meant to think quieter. But, although I didn’t know what a chimera was, I honestly wasn’t enthusiastic to find out either. I imagined myself whispering with each thought, and that seemed to do the trick. A moment later, something went quiet in my head, as if a voice nattering in there had shut itself off. Had that been Salanraja’s thoughts?
The massive cat, Ta’ra, had now put her head down against a cushion and her eyes had sealed shut. Around her, a load of dusty looking books peered down from the high mounted bookshelves. The humans back in South Wales used to read much more glossy looking versions of these, but I’d never worked out what any of those funny symbols meant.
I wondered if I could also read the human language, now I could speak it. I tried to find a way up onto the shelves, but I couldn’t see one. So instead, I sauntered over to see what Aleam was up to.
He stood over a complex glass alembic – and I wouldn’t have known the word for that if the crystal hadn’t granted me the gift of language. It was a collection of tubes and bulbs with green and yellow liquids bubbling within. Aleam peered over, studying the apparatus through a pair of glasses he had balanced on the bridge of his nose. After a while, he nodded as if in satisfaction, raised his staff to the apparatus, said some words I didn’t quite understand – even with my gift – and turned to face the bench.
“Ta’ra,” he said. “You have a guest, and you haven’t even said a word to him. Show some respect, for goodness’ sake.”
Ta’ra opened her eyes again, blinked slowly at me, and yawned once more. “He’s a common house cat,” she
said, and I recognised her to be speaking in the human tongue.
I responded in my language, screaming out feline expletives that would have disgusted Aleam if he could understand them. “I’m no common cat,” I told her in the same language. “I’m a Bengal. The greatest of all domesticated cats. A descendant of the great Asian leopard cat.”
But the massive cat seemed nonplussed by this. “See what I mean. He speaks cat language. He should be out hunting mice and not bothering me here.”
Aleam shook his head, and he opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something. But I decided it better to butt in and try to deflate this cat’s ego, which seemed almost as large as its bulk.
“What in the whiskers are you?” I said in the human language. “You look like a cat, but you don’t look like a cat.”
Ta’ra snarled at me. “I’m a much more spiritual creature than you can ever imagine. I can also look smaller, if it intimidates you less?” She stood up, and then for the first time I noticed her fur wasn’t completely black. She had a single white diamond on her chest, neatly arranged as if someone had painted it there.
Then, the air seemed to shimmer around her, and she literally started to shrink in her chair. She went from being larger than a Maine Coon to the size of a normal cat within the space of seconds.
“What are you?” I asked again.
The cat let out a loud, desultory laugh. “If you were as intelligent as you like to think, you would know. Those versed in the ways of magic would call me a Cat Sidhe. I’m of the Faerie Realm, once a princess, but fate changed my form. You don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, do you?”
I tried to blink off my disbelief. I must have been dreaming; this couldn’t have been real.
“Ta’ra,” Aleam said. “Don’t be so judgemental. Ben is not of this world. Astravar teleported him here from another dimension, and he would still be under the warlock’s thrall now if he hadn’t managed to escape.”
A Cat's Guide to Bonding with Dragons Page 5