Lenna and the Last Dragon

by James Comins

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Into the Liffey

  or, Don’t Call Me a Sissy!

  “Do you think I could turn Berber into unicorns, too?” Andy asked Lenna loudly over the howl of wind.

  “Try it! Try it!” Lenna clapped.

  They all sat streaming through the upper air along Annie’s stealth-bomber back, bracing themselves on the rocking feathers with their hands. The sky was a morning piece of origami paper with little black wind swirls printed across it. Annie’s vast shadow was making herds of sheep turn to puddles of fluff. The bony puddles turned back to surprised-looking sheep, pop.

  “Will Annie’s feathers turn into carpeting, do you think?” He put out his hands vaguely, the way she had. “I command the Fomor to be here?” he asked tentatively. “Please?”

  Nothing happened.

  Pol leaned back from up ahead. “It’s music you’re after.”

  Andy took the silver harp from behind his ear and unfolded it carefully, holding tight in the sharp breeze under the gently spinning scrimshaw halo of the sun.

  “Harp of me uncle, I’d like to see unicorns here, if you’d be so kind.”

  He played a made-up melody, plucking the small resonant strings with fingertips. A gold thread spun out, drawing a shining gold tapestry in the sky, a field of unicorns with a woven Celtic trim.

  “Ooo.”

  “What’s oo? Nothing’s happened, silly.”

  “Look harder, sir Andy!” She followed the thread with a pointing pointing finger.

  He squinted. “Thought it was a trick of the light I was seeing. Is it a picture of unicorns?”

  Lenna nodded. The thread followed the picture around, unweaving and disappearing.

  “Guess it’s the harp that does it.”

  Lenna shook her head. “I saw it when you were playing guitar, too.”

  Andy’s eyebrows rose. “S’pose it’s me, then. Maybe there’s something to being son of the Dagda after all. Wonder what else I can do?”

  Pol winked. “Yull find it all out, I’ve no doubt of it.”

  “How about ... harp of me uncle, let’s have us in Dublin right away? Pretty please with gumdrops?” He plucked a chord.

  Annie shot forward in a blaze of gold sparks above the meadows, passed over roads full of cars and over the peaked roofs of row houses to the sprawled city of Dublin. She landed on the roof of a mammoth building that looked like a castle.

  “Where are we?” Lenna asked.

  “Dublin Castle,” said Annie.

  “Oh.”

  The tower Annie was perched on was circular and carved out of a single gray stone. Below was a bright lawn with a giant yellow flower the size of a fountain.

  “Hang on,” said Annie. She leapt off the tower, glided down and landed beside the flower. It was a fountain.

  The castle was a jumble. Parts were painted colors and parts were gray. Mo Bagohn impatiently led them around the side of the castle to the sidewalk beyond. Around the building--

  “Wow!” There were people everywhere, more people than Lenna had ever seen. Tourists and shoppers and windowgazers and a thousand thousand new faces and sights and sounds and smells, a buzzing hive of people and shops and strange buildings. There were flowers everywhere, up the walls and down the balconies. The buildings were huge and wrapped in sculptures and columns and pretty green swoopy lettering and all sorts of architecture things. Much of the city was green and gold, with some huge old buildings sitting nobly in white marble and others painted in sunny pastels.

  There were people everywhere. The streets were lined with ladies pushing levitating strollers, skinny young men with crew cuts and enormous upturned collars, businessmen with wide faces and saggy pale jowls, children dodging into traffic and their parents following, old-timers in gold Nehru jackets and little hats, like Pol ... They turned the corner and found a band playing music on whistles and tiny guitars. Andy recognized the song. He grabbed Lenna’s hand, led her over to the musicians, spun her off her feet and started singing:

  I wish I was in Carrickfergus

  Only for nights in Ballygran

  I’d swim across the deepest ocean

  The deepest ocean my love to find.

  But the sea is wide and I can’t swim over it

  Neither have I wings to fly

  I’d find me a handsome boatman

  To ferry me o’er to my love and die.

  Pol clapped to the music. Lenna danced. Someone flipped a big coin to Andy; he tossed it into one of the tiny guitar cases.

  “That’s aught Manannan would be proud of,” Pol said, ruffling Andy’s hair. Andy grinned sheepishly.

  Lenna kept dancing a little, then stopped. “But why would the boatman die?” she asked.

  “Cause he’s too handsome. Wouldn’t want a handsome boatman hanging around after he’s ferried you o’er to your love,” said Andy.

  “Right. Hm.”

  They walked on. Restaurants and shops clustered around cathedrals and giant stone buildings. There were more people than there could ever be. It was a swirl.

  “Ah, the Liffey,” said Emily.

  A river ran, lined by a fence of little columns and a strand of linen grass. Big trees with pairs of black robotic branches adjusted themselves automatically as the wind blew. The water was perfectly flat and as reflective as a mirror. There were no vibrating tides and no ripples, not even when a wooden turtle with a basket on its back paddled through the dark river water.

  It was a peaceful peaceful place. Lenna sat on the bank and hummed the song to herself. Somewhere, somehow, in this wild noisy city was a stampede of unicorns. Binnan Darnan was still lost. Rotten Bres was making everybody do things that they wouldn’t have to do if he would just give them Binnan Darnan. Wherever she was hidden she was probably frightened and crying. But sitting here under the thin shade of a clicking budding robo-tree beside the flat, running river in the sunny sunny day was the first relaxation Lenna had really had since the magical picnic with Mo Bagohn.

  The mirror-water rippled. A series of glassy bubbles erupted. A circle sank into the river as if a plug had been pulled from under it. From this gap came a hand, then another, then another. A bald head like a boulder followed, fierce and dripping water.

  “Eeeeeeeek.”

  “Lenna,” said the monster man, folding his four muscular tree-trunk arms. “I am Baldur. I know why you’re here.” The voice was an avalanche beneath an iron mountain. Lenna looked around, checking to see whether all the Irish people could see him. Apparently the strangers on the street couldn’t, but Brugda lifted her eyes to the monster, and Andy was pressed up against a robo-tree with his mouth open. Lenna turned back to Baldur the monster, who was leaning forward with his pink face casting a shadow across her.

  “Omihaaah.”

  “Lenna. I am one of the old gods. I have heard of a sorrow in the world, and I need your help.”

  The river god was bare-chested and taller than the clicking trees beside her. He wore leggings sewn of sealskin, held up by a rope belt. No one walking through the streets behind her noticed him or turned their heads. Annie was standing behind Lenna protectively.

  “I know your quest, Lenna,” said the god Baldur. “I will show you the path to the Fomor. But there's a terror upon me.”

  “Uh uh uh why?” Lenna was happy that the river god was a friendly god.

  “A raven came to me in my home in Breidablik.” An Icelandic word. It meant broad and shining. “The raven told me that the Nidhagg, the last dragon on Earth, has escaped from the World Tree.”

  “Um, it died,” said Lenna.

  Trouble crossed Baldur’s face. “Died? How do you know this?”

  “We were there,” she said.

  Behind her, Brugda nodded once.

  “This is grave. Do you understand what will happen now that the Old Magic is freed?”

  Lenna shook her hair.

  “All the Powers of Magic will have the strength to shift the world agai
n and again and again. The time of Ragnarok, the world’s descent into destruction, threatens us even now. I was going to ask for your help, Lenna, in stopping the murderous dragon Nidhagg, who was placed in the tree by my father, Odin the Wise. But if the Nidhagg is dead and the tree is broken, that’s far worse. I’ll tell you everything later. We have too little time. For now, I’ll lead you to the Fomor. Your friend Binnan Darnan will be needed, too, before the end. After that, once she’s free--” Baldur breathed heavily--“we will see.”

  Lenna looked behind her, up and down the street that ran along the Liffey. All of her friends and family seemed to see the river god, but none of the numerous strangers noticed him at all. They hadn’t noticed Annie either, she realized, although Talvi had received the occasional curious look at his red beard and floppy hair.

  She sat on her butt on the banks of the Liffey, looking up into the pink barrel chest and strongman-bald face of a real Norse god. His existence and the words he had said to her were such a jolt, so diagonal to everything that had happened, that she sat and blinked and thought about them. It was like she had to restart her brain to fit this enormous person into it.

  So the dragon in the tree was a bad dragon who shouldn’t have been let loose. But he was dead now. The upside-down tree was something important, something having to do with Odin, but it’d got blown up. And all the Powers that Momma Joukka Pelata had said were out looking for her would become super powerful now. And Ragnarok? A descent into destruction? She had heard stories about it, growing up. Ragnarok was the day the world would blow up.

  But something else seemed more important to talk about.

  “Why do I matter?” Her voice was very small. It felt small. “Why were you looking for me?”

  Baldur spread a pair of hands toward the crowd that stood behind her. “With you are many of the Old Ones. They are a people of magic.” He pointed to people. “The Dagda, druid of stone. Manannan Reborn, druid of song.” Andy’s eyebrows rose. “Taillvin, druid of illusion. Caoilte, druid of strength. Mo Bagohn, lady of growth. Brigid, lady of order. Each follows only one sphere of magic.” Baldur put his hands, all four of them, on the grass bank beside the fence and leaned close to Lenna. “You have magic too, Lenna, but you are not one of them. You are not tied to one magic. This is very strange, something no one has seen before in all the ages of the world. I have traveled up and down the Earth, and to places beyond the Earth. Nowhere is there another like you. You can see through all magic, and you can learn to use it. All of it. You are the Allnorn, the most important person in the world.”

  “Eek.” She looked up at Annie, who looked across her at Baldur, puzzled.

  “There's no limit to what you can learn to do. But this is for later. Come with me and fulfill your quest.”

  “Are you trying to trick me? Do you want to make a deal or, or curse me or--”

  “No. I ask nothing for myself,” said Baldur. “My responsibility is to the Liege-god, Honnur, who is too foolish to carry out his own responsibilities.”

  “But you wouldn’t be helping people without asking for--”

  “Lenna,” whispered Andy beside her. “I think you’ve been worrying. Scary people like Bres are one in a million. It’s okay to make a new friend.”

  “Oh. Okay. Mmmister Baldur? Andy says I should be your friend.”

  Baldur smiled. A giant hand reached down to her. Lenna shook the end of one of his fingernails.

  “Follow me to the bottom. Dive in. Do not fear the river.” Baldur plunged below the dark mirror-surface of the water, leaving behind a stretched tunnel of air.

  Lenna examined the empty space dubiously.

  “He said not to be afraid,” said Andy. “I for one trust anybody who could squish me and chooses not to.” He dove into the space in the River Liffey and disappeared down the chasm.

  “Waitwaitwait.” Lenna crouched at the bank, then let a green boot toe the channel of air where water should be. She squirmed. “Are you still alive?” she yelled into the void.

  “Come on, sissy! It’s fine.” Andy’s voice was tinny and far, far away.

  “Don’t call me a sissy!” She looked up at Brugda, who stood, dubious, with her arms crossed. “Should I?”

  “If you would.”

  “Hm.” She jumped.