by Tad Williams
“Colin!” Mrs. Needle shouted from the Snake Parlor. “Where are you?”
Tyler waved as he walked away. “Enjoy your afternoon!” He made a point of sauntering out the front door in case Colin had doubled back to watch. It would drive him crazy to think that Tyler might already be going out in search of the nest.
Dude, this is crazy, Tyler thought. Who would ever believe I’d ever be glad I took math?
But his teacher Ms. Shah had taught him how to make a Cartesian Plane, which was basically a piece of graph paper with a big cross in the middle of it and a zero at the center point with numbers going off in each direction so that they made a cross. Each number then became half of a coordinate, so Tyler drew the whole thing in pencil on a copy of an Ordinary Farm map from the Yokuts County Assessor’s Office he’d found in the library and then began marking in everything the farm workers had told him about where they usually saw Alamu. When he’d finished with that he spread his newly marked map over his bed and studied it.
Tyler needed to find the place the male dragon went back to every time-that would probably be his nest. So if he marked every position where the dragon had been sighted, then drew a big circle around every mark, the place where the most circles overlapped should be a good central place to start looking for a nest… and in fact, Tyler thought he’d spotted a likely area: all of the dragon’s favorite hang-outs seemed about the same distance away from the high hills on the western edge of the farm, an isolated area far from neighbors and roads.
So let’s have a look for that nest of yours, dragon-dude, Tyler thought, -and all your shiny treasures. But not tonight-no way. The idea of hunting for a dragon’s nest in the dark frightened even Tyler the Impulsive. No, I’ll go tomorrow, when the sun’s up and you’re out making your rounds…
The next day he raced through his chores so quickly that even Mr. Walkwell (who himself hardly ever slept or even took a break) suggested he might be working too hard. When he had finished he made himself a sack lunch, then waited to set out until Colin Needle was upstairs being lectured by his mother.
It took Tyler a good part of an hour to cross the farm and reach the hills where most of the Alamu reports seemed to overlap. According to his marked-up county map the tallest hill was called Miners Mountain; he decided that would be the best place to start looking, because even if he didn’t find anything on the hill itself he’d have a good view from the top.
The late-morning sun was already baking the ground and the dry grasses were buzzing with insect noises. By the time Tyler reached the top (and had found no sign of Alamu’s nest) he’d emptied half his canteen; by the time he’d eaten the sandwich he brought along he’d drunk most of the rest. The scrubby trees on the hillside didn’t provide much shade, either.
An hour later he had finished the rest of his water, had watched the sun move all the way across the valley like someone wiping a window clean, and had stared through his binoculars until his eyes hurt, but still hadn’t located anything that looked the least bit like a dragon’s nest. He had also discovered that some of the bugs singing in the dry grass liked to bite people-liked it quite a lot, in fact. He was beginning to rethink the entire expedition when he noticed something glimmering in a fold of a hill near Miners Mountain.
Even with the binoculars he couldn’t make out much more than a glint in the undergrowth, so he didn’t leap up: he had already been fooled a couple of times by other shining things, discarded bottles, glass insulators from power lines. But though he stared and stared through the expensive binoculars his father had given him as a guilty late-birthday gift, this particular bright spot remained stubbornly mysterious.
Tyler finally decided that although it was mid-afternoon already, he wanted to go down Miners Mountain and go climb the other hill. Who knew when he’d get this much free time again?
Tyler didn’t know the name of this second hill, but discovered quickly that although it was not as tall as Miners Mountain it was actually a much more difficult climb, with no obvious trail and the way up blocked tangled undergrowth and by outcrops of layered stone that looked like haphazard piles of books. Each outcropping had to be either climbed or avoided, and by the time Tyler had got near the top even more of the afternoon had slid away and the sun was hurrying down the sky like an animal going to ground. For the first time Tyler started to worry. He didn’t want to have to climb down rocky, dangerous slope in darkness, and he had left the house so early he hadn’t even thought of bringing a flashlight.
Lucinda’s right-I really do stupid things sometimes, he told himself angrily.
He clambered up over the last large bulge of pale stone and into the shade of a tangle of oak and madrone trees where he crouched to catch his breath. He forced himself to get up again after only a couple of minutes and climbed the last hundred feet of the uneven slope, then stepped out onto the flat, windswept summit of the hill. And there it lay in front of him-not just a single object, but a shining, sparkling line several feet long snaking through a trail of trampled grass. He’d found it!
Tyler’s heart sped in triumph. He hurried toward the glittering track, then slowed, looking high and low to make sure that no one, scaly or otherwise, was watching him. Heart pounding, he paused beside his discovery…
… And found that it was nothing but a few dozen bottle caps strewn across the hilltop like confetti.
“Huh?” Tyler stared, disbelief rapidly turning into fury. What was this crap? Was this it? The thing he’d been searching for all day-the thing that he had climbed two high, hot hillsides to find?
“Crap,” he said, kicking at one of the shiny things. “Look at me,” he shouted in disgust, “Oh, yeah, I’m a hero! I’ve found the famous hoard of ancient bottle caps! ”
And they weren’t even that ancient-most of them looked like they were from regular modern pop bottles. So they weren’t even worth anything.
Tyler reached for his canteen, then remembered it was empty. Was this pathetic scatter really Alamu’s horde of stolen shiny things? Bottle caps, a couple of shiny pennies and a few bits of foil? Disgusted and very tired, Tyler was about to admit defeat and head down the hill when he noticed the bottle caps weren’t just scattered, or at least they didn’t look completely random, but lay in a rough line. In places the line stopped completely, but as he squinted his eyes against the afternoon light he could see that they did form a kind of trail across the hilltop, as if something had dropped them from a clumsy, toothy mouth…
On the way to where…?
He squinted his eyes, doing his best to follow the almost invisible line, which petered out at the top of the slope which faced away from the distant farmhouse. He looked down and saw another flash of reflected light in a clump of undergrowth about twenty yards down the steep slope-something very much larger than any bottle cap. He almost lost his balance several times as he hurried down the slope, racing the dying afternoon. As he drew nearer he saw that it was not an aimless growth of shrubs and small trees but a pile of trees and sticks and branches almost fifty feet wide, the sticks covered with brown leaves and the whole mass propped between the twisted trunks of several madrone trees growing at an angle on the hillside.
It was a nest. A very big nest.
I found it! he thought. I was right! I did it all by myself!
Tyler began to make his way down the slope, leaning so far backward to keep his balance that half the time he just gave up and slid down on his butt. Alamu, whether from brains or instinct, had built his nest on far the side of the hill from the farmhouse, out of sight, with nothing but the trail of bottle caps on top to lead whoever it was supposed to impress… Meseret, pretty obviously
… to where the real thing was hidden just below the crest.
As he got near the thicket Tyler realized he was making a lot of noise and settled into a crouch. There hadn’t been any sign of Alamu but he couldn’t see the whole nest because of the trees and the angle of the hill and he certainly didn’t want to encounter an angry dragon
on this naked hillside…
The wind changed direction, and as the animal stench of the dragon’s nest struck him he realized he had been upwind of it all this time: if Alamu had been home he would have smelled Tyler a long time ago. He could almost hear Lucinda asking him whether he wanted to get eaten.
The closer he got the stranger and more impressive the nest appeared, a huge shape wedged between the madrone trunks like a bushy flower head. It might be hidden from the farmhouse but Alamu had still built it right out in the open, with all the arrogance of his position at the top of the food chain, and then filled it with his scavenged treasures-hub caps, bicycle wheels, a crutch, wire fencing, aluminum garden furniture, all things that had glittered once, though many were rusted now. Tyler wondered how long it had taken the dragon to collect so much junk with no way to carry it but claws and jaws. The variety was amazing-there was even an artificial Christmas tree like a toilet brush made of tinsel. If Alamu had indeed stolen the Continuascope, then this had to be the place to find it.
He looked around for the dragon once more, then climbed carefully down into the nest, which swayed in a very alarming way: Tyler had to grab onto a huge tangle of baling wire to keep himself upright. Several seconds passed before he was sure that the whole thing wouldn’t slide down from between the trees and take him tobogganing down the hill in a pile of jagged, rusty metal. How did it support the dragon, which must weigh something like a thousand pounds?
Tyler eased forward like a man crossing a frozen but thawing river, stopping at each unusual sound or movement beneath him, and as he moved he sifted cautiously through the dragon’s hoard, bits of pipe, chrome from cars, the rusted remains of a giant ceiling fan as big as the propeller of an ocean liner. Tyler couldn’t even imagine where Alamu had found that.
Not only was he becoming more and more desperate to find the Continuascope before the light failed, the bottom of the nest had proved itself little more than a loose weave of madrone branches, so he kept his head down as he moved.
“Owww! Rotten lizard and his stupid trash!”
The sudden sound of a human voice was so startling that Tyler almost lost his grip and tumbled through the bottom of the nest. Colin Needle’s pale face appeared above him, sucking on a bloody finger. When the older boy saw Tyler a flurry of emotions passed over his face-surprise, a little fear, but most of all, triumph.
“You! You creep!” Tyler shouted up at him. “You followed me!”
“Really? You figured that out, did you, Jenkins?” Colin rubbed his finger on the sleeve of his shirt and left a bloody smear. “So what? I would have found it myself if my mother hadn’t made me do all those stupid chores.”
Tyler began to clamber across the mat of branches and junk, heading straight toward the older boy. “Yeah? Well she’ll have a chore of her own-putting your face back on after I beat if off you!”
Colin’s eyes widened. “Stop! Right now!”
“Why?” said Tyler. “You going to stop me?”
Colin looked more terrified than dangerous. “Just… stop, Jenkins. I’m serious. Behind you… ”
“Oh, nice one…!” Tyler began, then a huge shadow fell across him and he whirled to see Alamu sweeping down from the hilltop, wings spread. Tyler tried to throw himself forward to where Colin crouched at the edge of the nest but fell short. He could hear Alamu’s deep rumble of fury as the gliding dragon darted its long head at him and just missed by inches, then the orange and bronze monster swept past, wheeled in the air, and hurtled back toward him again, little pennants of fire trailing from its open mouth. Tyler tried to scramble out toward Colin Needle, but before he could reach the edge of the nest the part of the nest beneath his feet suddenly shuddered and then collapsed and Tyler tumbled into a chaos of broken branches and rusting metal.
Chapter 18
Angel with a Fiery Sword
With Gideon downstairs in the Snake Parlor all of the house staff had been tiptoeing in and out to have a look at him, thrilled to have the master of the farm home again, but when Lucinda saw him it shook her badly. Her great-uncle was sitting up and eating broth from a spoon, but he didn’t quite look right, although she wasn’t certain exactly why. It was obviously Gideon, and he was still able to talk-she heard him grumbling a warning at Pema when the nervous young woman almost spilled some water on him-but his eyes were sunken and bloodshot, and he looked at almost everyone who came close as if he suspected them of trying to harm him. Yes, she realized, that was it-Gideon Goldring looked like one of his own less pleasant animals, peering out of its cage at its captors.
Mrs. Needle seemed to think everything was as it should be, though, and it was true that he didn’t make those faces at her: instead, Gideon looked up at her like a trusting child. She even made encouraging little noises as he slurped his broth or drank water, which made Lucinda feel sick to her stomach. She wondered whether Gideon had suffered some kind of stroke or something really bad, but no one was telling them.
Well, she thought, if they’re trying to hide it from us, maybe they shouldn’t move his bedroom downstairs where we all have to see him…
“Where are you going?” Mrs. Needle asked as Lucinda sidled toward the door. “I might need you to run an errand for me.”
The last thing Lucinda wanted to do was spend all day here in this room, under the cold, watchful eyes of Patience Needle. “Oh, I’ll be back really quick,” she said. “I just wanted to… to pick some flowers in the garden. To brighten the room up.”
“The garden,” said Gideon, nodding, his eyes not quite focused on anything. “We lived in the garden once.”
“Huh?” Lucinda took a step back. “What did you say, Uncle Gideon?”
“The garden.” Her great-uncle spoke as though it were an ordinary conversation, but what he said next showed that it wasn’t. “We had to leave. Angel… an angel chased us out. With a flaming sword. You saw him, didn’t you? Or was that the serpent…?”
“Hush, Gideon, you’re confused,” Mrs. Needle said, which seemed a bit of an understatement. “Just finish your broth.”
Suddenly the old man seemed to see Lucinda for the first time. He leaned forward, fingers outstretched as though he might grab at her, but she was well out of his reach. “But listen… ” He looked around as though worried about eavesdroppers, then turned his red, staring eyes to Lucinda once more. “ We can go back. Yes! We can sneak past the angel and get back into that lovely garden again… ”
Lucinda could not bear to listen to any more of Gideon’s crazy ramblings. She turned and all but ran for the door.
I know he wasn’t talking about this place, not this garden, Lucinda thought as she made her way down the rows, but this part of the property still creeps me out sometimes.
The huge garden spread down from the slightly higher spot where the house stood, or at least where the main and largest part of the house stood, and stretched across what would have been at least a city block back home, most of it overgrown and neglected. Only Mrs. Needle’s herb garden and Sarah’s vegetable garden, which covered quite a bit of space at the end nearest the kitchen, looked as though they were regularly tended. The rest of the sprawling garden, with its rioting plants, overgrown paths, vine-choked arbors, and corroded greenhouse almost buried in vegetation, looked more like the remnants of some ancient civilization that the jungle had reclaimed.
It took a while for Lucinda to find the rose bushes she had been thinking of-the garden, like the farmhouse itself, could be a slippery place to find your way around-but she located them at last along a wooden fence some ten or eleven rows forward from the old greenhouse. Lucinda thought it was a little strange that although the roses looked completely untended, the stems tangled in each other and many of the blooms brown and withered, the rose arbor had a smell like someone had been putting fresh fertilizer on it, a pungent stink that made her want to hold her nose. Then, as she went down the length of the rose bed clipping the stems of the flowers that had just started to bloom, she stepped
on something squishily unpleasant.
It felt so wrong that she was reluctant to lift her shoe, afraid to find she had trodden on a slug or some kind of animal dropping. When she finally worked up the courage to look, though, it was even worse-she had stepped on a dead mouse.
Except it was still moving.
Lucinda leaped back with a cry of disgust and horror. The dying mouse’s legs paddled weakly, as though it were trying to swim, then slowed and stopped.
She stared at it from a safe distance. Whoever heard of a mouse being slow enough for a human to step on? What if it had rabies? The very thought made Lucinda’s toes curl. She yanked off her shoe and scraped it on a wooden fencepost until she thought she would be sick, then pounded the sole in the dirt, trying to make sure every last bit of the mouse was gone, but suddenly in her mind she stood in a cloud of invisible rabies germs. Didn’t people say there was no cure? Or was that something else? What would her mother say? What if she had to have rabies shots… her friend at school had told her they injected them in your stomach…!
The unexpected sound of voices made her jump, but it was only Pema and Azinza laughing as they picked vegetables from the kitchen garden. She looked back down at the mouse carcass and for a disturbing second thought she saw it moving again-some kind of unkillable zombie mouse-but then realized that the movement was fleas and other small creatures deserting the corpse.
“Gross,” she said out loud. There was a daddy longlegs walking away, too-surely that hadn’t been on the mouse. But in fact many different kinds of bugs were all walking and hopping in the same direction, like a tiny parade. Horrified but fascinated, Lucinda bent and followed it along for several feet.
“But why would they all do that?” Several roly-polies joined the little procession. It was beginning to look more like some kind of bug protest march. She poked with a twig at one of the roly-polies, which curled into a ball until she stopped, but then it got right back up and trundled after the others toward the back of the garden.