Here was the boat she’d arrived on, the matted forest she’d trekked through and local people she’d met along the way. But there were also lorries piled high with sawn logs and stretches of road cutting a straight path through the trees.
As the photos went on there were more and more close-ups of tiny creatures, beautiful flowers and also one particular man. He had dark wavy hair and a neatly cropped beard and moustache, and in every picture he was smiling. I could almost see the same twinkle I saw in Grandad’s eyes shining out from the photographs. I imagined being in his shoes, exploring deeper into the forest, not knowing what I might find there. And how exciting that must have felt.
Had Elvi and this man really been searching for the Hidden City – and had they found it?
Eagerly I started going through more bundles of photos. More forest, more birds, more photos of the man and finally a few of Elvi herself. Either everyone she met was especially tall or Elvi was tiny. Her white-blonde hair was pulled back loosely, and there was something about the look she gave the photographer that made you suspect she’d just dropped a centipede down their back and was dying to burst out laughing and tell them.
Then I came to one of her standing in front of an enormous tree trunk. She was smiling and her arm was stretched out as if she was pointing to something down behind her. I peered closer and could see that in among the tangle of tree roots and vegetation there was what looked like a small pile of rubble. It might not seem like much to get excited about. But if you’d been looking for evidence of a lost civilisation, I reckon the sight of rubble in such dense forest would probably warrant a bit of a grin. And when I saw the next picture I’d have bet her grin got even wider.
I leaped up, waving the photo and startling Sunny into unleashing a fiery belch that almost set it alight.
‘I’ve got something!’ I cried.
It was a picture of Elvi standing in front of a wall, and the expression on her face seemed to scream, ‘I told you so!’ The huge stone blocks of the wall fitted together like one of those wooden puzzles you get at Christmas. And carved into the stone was an enormous dragon’s head.
‘Whoa,’ whispered Ted.
I turned the picture over and squinted at the date written on the back.
‘Hey, Kai, look up 28 April.’
Kai riffled through the notebook. ‘Got it,’ he said.
And we all crowded round to hear what she had written on that day.
‘We are here. Finally, after all this time, Arturo and I have found it– … La Ciudad Oculta de los Dragones. We have been searching for so long. And we were right to believe.’
‘It must have felt amazing,’ said Kat.
‘Shhh,’ snapped Kai. ‘There’s more. She says: We are walking through the ruins of a city where people and dragons lived cheek by jowl.’
‘What’s a jowl?’ asked Ted.
I had no idea, but my dream flashed into my mind, the family with their hands raised. Maybe it was some kind of weapon?
‘I think it means dragons and people lived side by side,’ said Kat.
‘Are you done?’ asked Kai. He scowled at us and cleared his throat, ready to continue.
‘According to the stories Arturo grew up with, it was in this place that dragons breathed upon the forest, burning the land and reigniting the life within it. And in return the citizens of the city guarded the dragon-fruit trees and celebrated and protected the dragons.’
My stomach lurched, as if I had wings again and was soaring over the heads of the family. I looked down at them, at their raised hands. And then it hit me. Of course! Those people weren’t cowering in fear. They were waving. Welcoming the dragons!
Grandad had told me once how forest fires bring new growth and how sometimes farmers even set fire to their land on purpose to reinvigorate it. The dragons must have been doing that for the people of this place.
We all looked at each other and grinned. As if picking up on our excitement, Crystal, Dodger, Sunny and Flicker sent a spray of sparks glittering into the air around us.
‘Keep going. What else does she say?’ Kat urged.
‘Arturo fears that we will not be the last to find the city, now the roads are cutting through the forest. I expect he is right. This Hidden City may not stay hidden for much longer.’
‘But it did stay hidden, didn’t it?’ said Ted. ‘I mean, you said there was nothing about it when you looked it up.’
I shook my head. ‘No, it looks like they managed to keep it secret after all.’
‘I wonder what happened to the city?’ Kat said. ‘Why it fell into such ruin. Do you think the dragons left?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe something else happened. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. It must have been such a long time ago.’
Kai flicked further through the notebook, squinting at Elvi’s tiny handwriting. We all waited. I actually wanted to grab it out of his hand he was taking so long. But since I had struggled to read it in the first place I jammed my hands under my bum to stop myself.
‘Here you go. This is from a couple of months later.’
‘I do not want to leave. Especially now when we have found there is more to this place than stories. And I do not want to leave Arturo. But this is not my home. And England is not Arturo’s. So we have said our goodbyes. But because of him I am taking this most precious of things with me.’
‘What did she take?’ Kat said.
Kai unstuck a piece of paper from the notebook. ‘I don’t know. But look, there’s a letter.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘More than stories? Found what? What did they find? Do you think they found dragons there?’ Kat asked, her excitement bubbling over into a torrent of questions.
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I bet they’re talking about the dragon-fruit tree.’
‘I can’t see her bringing that back in her suitcase,’ Ted said.
‘Well, no, but she could have brought back a cutting or even a fruit and grown the tree here.’
The others nodded.
‘But what made them think that was even possible? They must have found some evidence that dragons really had existed – and that they could again.’
We all looked at each other. There was so much we didn’t know. It was like being given the coolest jigsaw ever and finding that so many pieces were missing, you ended up with just sky and one tantalising glimpse of some mysterious shape.
But, with Ted’s stomach rumbling and the dragons getting fidgety, searching for the missing pieces was just going to have to wait.
You know how my mum often brings home pets to look after? Those ferrets for a start. Well, they’ve gone, thank goodness. But we’ve still got the cockatoo, so it didn’t surprise me that much to find a chicken sitting on the toaster when I got in. I was a bit more surprised by the gaggle of gulls squabbling in the downstairs loo. But it wasn’t totally unheard of. So I grabbed a handful of biscuits and headed upstairs.
I thought I heard a gobbling noise coming from the airing cupboard on the landing, but with Flicker wriggling in my pocket I didn’t have time to stop and check that one out.
Safe in my room, Flicker fluttered around stretching his wings and then settled down in the shoebox under my bed.
I lay back and imagined walking with Elvi and Arturo through the dense rainforest. What other secrets had they discovered hidden in that place? I’d left the notebook with Kai, who was the best at deciphering Elvi’s writing. If anyone could tell us more about the dragons, I now knew it was Elvi.
Later I met Dad coming out of the lounge, and for once he wasn’t wearing headphones. Which was actually weirder than seeing the turkey that suddenly strutted past us wearing a pair of Lolli’s pants on its head.
‘Can you hear that?’ Dad asked.
‘You mean the turkey?’ I said, watching it disappear into the kitchen.
Dad looked at me like I was barmy. He’d obviously missed the turkey completely.
; ‘No, that sound.’
I screwed up my ears, which is harder than screwing up your eyes and involves more of your face. Nope. I couldn’t hear anything.
‘Maybe it’s the heating,’ I offered. ‘I hear it whistling sometimes, when I’m in bed.’
‘It’s not a whistle. It’s more like a … a song.’
My eyes shot up to the ceiling and Lolli’s room above. Was Tinkle singing? I couldn’t hear anything, but then Dad had ears like one of those bat-eared foxes. Having a job in music had definitely sensitised him. He could hear an ant fart in next door’s garden through double glazing.
I shrugged. Dad waggled his finger in his ear like he thought there was something in there that he could fish out.
He shook his head and wandered off down the hall, muttering about insuring his ears and seeing the doctor to check for signs of tinnitus, whatever that was.
I headed upstairs and stuck my head round Lolli’s door. She’d made a nest of cushions on the floor, and her duvet and a sheet had been pulled over the back of a chair. Mum was used to building her hideouts – under Lolli’s strict supervision of course. I crawled in and found Lolli tucked up with Tinkle on her lap. She was chatting to the little dragon as if Tinkle could understand every word.
Flicker had followed me in and now hopped over onto Lolli’s lap. He and Tinkle greeted each other by bending their heads forward and crossing necks so each of them rested their head on the other’s shoulder. Flicker’s scales shone brilliantly as he started changing colour. It always felt like looking at him through a kaleidoscope when he did this, the glittering colours falling away in a never-ending shimmer. Only this time he finally settled on a bright moonlight silver with flecks of blue, as if he was trying to match Tinkle. As they curled up together, Flicker wrapped his tail around Tinkle, keeping her close.
Something wriggled under one of the cushions. A claw peeked out and for a second I thought Lolli had gone and hatched another dragon. But then I saw a little yellow feathery head. It was a baby chick. And when I lifted the cushion further I saw three more fluffy faces, their beaks open wide.
‘I think we’d better take these downstairs,’ I said, remembering the chicken on the toaster. ‘Their mum’s probably looking for them.’
Lolli nodded.
‘Moo,’ she said, and pointed out the window.
‘No cows out there, Lollibob.’
Lolli shook her head and frowned. Sometimes I had the feeling she thought I was just plain dim.
‘A moo,’ she said again. And then waggled her arms like a chicken.
Usually I was pretty good at working out what Lolli was saying, but this had me stumped. I wasn’t quite sure what a cow had to do with a nest of chicks or why it might need wings.
I understood a bit more at teatime. We’d just finished Mum’s not entirely successful attempt at shepherd’s pie – frankly the shepherd could have it back. We were about to face a cheesecake that I could clearly see had nothing to do with cheese or cake and I knew for a fact shouldn’t be dribbling off the plate.
Mum poured a slice onto Dad’s plate and then shrieked, just as Lolli cried, ‘Moo!’ Dad, who was already nervous from looking at the dessert he was going to have to eat, jumped a mile.
I stared as they all pointed out the patio doors. Running across the garden was a huge long-necked bird with flames bursting from its tail feathers.
‘Oh,’ I said, finally understanding. ‘Emu.’
Lolli nodded, satisfied that at last someone had listened.
The emu, chickens, turkey and gulls weren’t the only feathery friends we’d suddenly acquired. Along with the resident cockatoo, there were at least sixty pigeons on the roof, dozens of ducks and geese on the lawn and the trees were chock-full of starlings, blackbirds, sparrows and goodness knows what else.
‘There’s that song again,’ Dad cried. ‘Come on, you lot, you’ve got to be able to hear that?’
This time, above the cheeping, squawking, clucking and quacking, I could definitely make out the sound of Tinkle singing.
Lolli’s dragon might not be causing mayhem with sparks and flames, but compared to the mess her new feathered friends were making, cleaning up after Flicker was a piece of cake.
After finding the photos and Elvi’s diary we stopped talking about letting the dragons go. We’d all decided we couldn’t do that. Not yet. At least not until we knew more.
As soon as I saw Kat and Kai in the cloakroom outside our class I knew they had found something important. They were pretty much glowing with excitement. While everyone else piled in to take their seats, they pulled Ted and me to one side.
‘You were right, Tomas,’ hissed Kat. ‘Elvi was talking about the tree. That is what she brought back.’
‘Well, the seed of the tree,’ corrected Kai. ‘In the city, she and Arturo found this temple, and inside that they discovered the map you have and –’
‘And … and … a golden dragon’s foot with a seed on two of its claws,’ spluttered Kat.
Kai glared at his twin. ‘We agreed I was going to tell them. I found it out.’
‘Oh all right, go on then,’ she said sulkily.
Ted’s eyes were growing wider by the second as we waited for Kai to continue.
‘There was writing carved into the stone around the dragon’s foot. It said they were the last active dragon-fruit seeds. That the trees that grew from them would grow dragons. Arturo kept one and gave one to Elvi. That’s what he meant about there being hope in two places.’
‘But his didn’t grow,’ said Kat.
‘Why? What happened to it?’ Ted demanded.
Kai shrugged. ‘They have all these theories, but they don’t know for sure.’
‘And then something terrible happened,’ Kat said in little more than a squeak. ‘Elvi’s letters to Arturo started going unanswered.’
I stared at Kat, whose eyes were shining.
‘She flew back to Mexico to find him, but all anyone could tell her was that he had walked into the forest one day and never returned,’ she said.
I pictured Arturo’s wavy dark hair against the green of the forest, and his twinkling eyes. I think we were all thinking the same thing. That we had only just met Arturo, but his story was now part of ours too. And we weren’t ready to say goodbye. We had barely said hello properly.
‘I’d like to have met him – and Elvi,’ Kat said quietly.
‘They were pretty awesome,’ Ted agreed. ‘Proper explorers.’
Kai and I nodded. And then Kai said, ‘And you haven’t heard the half of it.’
‘Wait till you hear this,’ Kat said.
Elvi waited ten years before the tree was big enough to grow fruit,’ he said. ‘Ten years! And then at last the dragons came. Can you imagine waiting that long for anything?’
I couldn’t – but then I had trouble waiting till lunchtime to get the chocolate crackle surprise on that day’s menu.
‘So from then on Elvi was hatching dragons?’ I asked.
Kai nodded. ‘After that first crop she planted some of the seeds from the fruits that had grown. But only one of those seeds grew into a tree – it sounds like dragon-fruit trees are pretty hard to grow. Then she waited another ten years, looking after that new tree. But the second tree never grew dragons. And even when she took cuttings, the new trees that grew didn’t have dragons either. The fruit just stayed normal fruit.’
‘How come?’
‘She never knew that either. But it means the tree in your grandad’s garden is more important than ever. It’s the last active dragon-fruit tree anywhere. She keeps saying how if there is only this one tree, there may not be a future for the dragons. Without Arturo there was no one else to help her. And she didn’t ever tell anyone else, as she was afraid other people would take the dragons and the tree away. She felt it was up to her to protect the tree and look after the dragons.’
‘And now it’s up to us,’ I said weakly. ‘No pressure then.’
Kat starte
d jiggling up and down manically.
‘But I figured something out,’ she said. ‘I think I know why the second tree never grew dragons.’
‘Why?’ I asked, my head still spinning from everything they’d just said.
‘The legend, remember? In Elvi’s encyclopedia. It said the dragons breathe out the dragon fruits.’
‘Yeah. So?’ said Ted.
‘Maybe the legend got it wrong. Miss Logan was telling us how stories change over time. Bits get added or forgotten. It could have got altered sometime in the retelling. What if it’s not that they breathed the fruit out? What if they breathed on it and that’s what turns a normal fruit into an active fruit – one that has seeds that grow into a tree that hatches dragons?’
‘But that doesn’t make sense. There were plenty of dragons in the garden – why didn’t they activate the seeds?’ Ted asked.
Kat’s shoulders suddenly sagged. She looked at Kai, but he just shrugged.
‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ she said flatly.
‘Maybe it takes a particular dragon,’ I said quietly. ‘I mean all our dragons seem to have their own special ability. Maybe there was a dragon that activated the tree?’
Before I could say anything else, there was the sound of a toilet flushing and Mahid, a boy in our class, appeared from round the corner. We all kept silent and pretended to look for Kai’s supposedly missing gloves.
As Mahid disappeared into class, Kat whispered, ‘You don’t think he overheard anything, do you?’
‘I doubt it, but if he did, we’ll just pretend we were talking about a book we’ve been reading.’
It was only when we’d taken our seats that I saw someone else come in from around the corner. Someone who’d been in the toilets this whole time and who could have heard every word we’d said. Someone who would know it was no story book we were talking about.
And that someone was the King of Trouble.
The Boy Who Flew with Dragons Page 5