The Petrified Flesh

by Cornelia Funke

  She was in her human form, and badly scratched and bruised. She certainly hadn’t made it easy for the Goyl to catch her. Her arms and ankles were bleeding when Valiant freed them from the chains, and when Jacob knelt down beside her, she wrapped her arms around him and sobbed like a child.

  “I thought they had killed you.”

  “You know they tried that before.” He pushed her hair back from her bruised forehead. He was so relieved to see her and that she wasn’t angry with him anymore. Holding her felt as if he had lost and found part of himself. For that’s what she was after all these years: a part of himself. The better part.

  “They said they’d make you pay if I changed shape.” She wiped the tears from her face with her dirty sleeve, embarrassed that Jacob had caught her crying. The vixen didn’t cry. She bit and fought. Jacob had seen Fox cry only once, when she had thought he wouldn’t come back from the other world and had shown him her human shape for the very first time.

  Of course she read the despair in his face, once she cleared her eyes of the tears.

  “You didn’t find Will.”

  “No, I did. But he is one of them now.” The words felt wrong, so wrong. “The Dark Fairy took him with her. He is under her spell.”

  A door slammed down the corridor. Valiant cocked his rifle. But the guards were dragging another prisoner out of a cell.

  Fox climbed as swiftly as the Dwarf, and Clara looked very relieved when the three of them pulled themselves up onto the iron beam next to her. Valiant then swung himself onto the bridge, while Jacob rubbed the Rapunzel-rope between his hands until it was once again nothing more than a golden hair.

  A platoon of Goyl was marching across one of the iron passageways above them, and below them a freight train belched black smoke into the huge cavern as it crossed the abyss. The wait seemed to last for hours, but finally Valiant waved them up to the bridge. There was no indication of how the Goyl dealt with their exhaust fumes except for two shafts through which a hint of daylight entered the cave. Maybe Jacob’s father had taught them that as well.

  “What about horses?” Jacob asked Valiant, as they ducked into one of the archways that lined the cave’s wall.

  “Forget it! The stables are right by the main gate. Too many guards.”

  “So you want to cross the mountains on foot?”

  “You’ve got a better plan?”

  No, he didn’t. They would count themselves lucky if they ever saw the sun again. All they had to defend themselves were Valiant’s rifle and a knife that he had brought for Jacob—in exchange for a gold coin, of course.

  While Fox shifted into the vixen, Clara stepped behind one of the pillars and stared down at the Goyl’s underground city. Jacob was sure that she saw neither the houses nor the Goyl between them. She looked as if she was back behind the mirror in the shabby hospital cafeteria with Will, or kissing him in the hallway in front of the room where their mother lay dying. It would be a long journey back to the ruin, and every mile would remind her that they were leaving Will behind.

  Windows and doors behind curtains of sandstone, houses like swallows’ nests, golden eyes everywhere… To make themselves less conspicuous, Valiant first took only Clara with him while Jacob hid with Fox among the houses. Then the Dwarf fetched them and Clara stayed somewhere in the shadows. Valiant had refreshed the letter on Jacob’s forehead and still vastly enjoyed treating him like his slave, while he kept Clara by his side, as if he was presenting his new bride to the Goyl. Going down the steep stairs and alleyways was even more difficult than going up, and each time Jacob pushed past a Goyl uniform he expected a barked order or a stone hand on his shoulder. But nobody stopped them and after seemingly endless hours, they finally reached the tunnel through which they had first arrived.

  An hour later, though, their luck ran out.

  They were so exhausted by then that they stayed together. A foolish mistake. The first Goyl they encountered were returning from a hunt. There were six of them, and they had a pack of the tame wolves that followed them even into the deepest caves. Two horses were packed with their quarry: three of the huge lizards, whose spines the Goyl cavalry wore on their helmets, and a dozen albino bats, whose hearts were said to be Kami’en’s favorite delicacy. The hunters cast only a cursory glance as they passed by, but the Goyl patrol that emerged from one of the dark side tunnels a few minutes later wasn’t so careless. There were three soldiers. Two jasper, one moonstone—the color of most of their spies because it came closest to the skin tone of their human enemies.

  When Valiant named the merchant whose slave Jacob supposedly was, they exchanged a quick glance and the moonstone Goyl reached for his pistol, calmly informing the Dwarf that his business partner had been arrested for illegal mineral dealings. Valiant shot him before the Goyl could pull the trigger, and Jacob threw his knife into the chest of the second soldier. Valiant had bought the knife in one of the shops on the palace bridge, and its blade cut through the stone skin like butter. It sickened Jacob how much he wanted to kill all of them. At the same time he felt like killing his own brother. The vixen tried to frighten the third soldier’s horse into throwing him off, but the Goyl regained control and galloped off before Jacob could pull a gun from one of his dead comrades’ belts.

  Valiant spat out curses that Jacob had never heard before. While the hoofbeats were still dying in the distance, the tunnel filled with a noise that resembled the chirping of thousands of crickets, and before they could take another step, the stone around them sprung to life. Hundreds of bugs crawled from the fissures and holes; millipedes, spiders, cockroaches. Moths fluttered into their faces, mosquitoes, and dragonflies covered their hair and crawled into their clothes. The Goyl alarm made the earth breathe out life—crawling, biting, fluttering life.

  They stumbled on, half-blind in the dark tunnels, crushing insects with their hands and feet. Not even Fox could remember which direction they had come from while she was snapping at the bugs in her fur, or in which direction they might find the tunnel that would lead them back to the Ogre’s cave. The walls were chittering louder and louder, and the flashlight was nothing but a helplessly probing finger in the darkness. Jacob thought he could hear hooves in the distance. Voices… It would for sure not take long until the Goyl chased them down. They were trapped, caught in an endlessly branching labyrinth. But suddenly the vixen barked and Jacob saw her disappear into a side passage. The hint of a breeze brushed his face as he pulled Clara with him. Light fell through the entrance of a huge cave, and there they were: the red Dragons the ferryman had warned them about. But they were made of metal and wood and were the grown-up brothers of the model airplanes hanging above his father’s desk.

  41

  WINGS

  The alarm could be heard in the plane cave too, but nothing was crawling out of its walls. The rock had been smoothed and sealed, and through a wide tunnel bright daylight poured in. The two Goyl working on one of the planes were mechanics and unarmed.

  They clenched their fists when Valiant pointed his rifle at them, but raised their arms. Jacob bound them with cables Clara found between the planes. When the younger one tore himself free, Jacob already imagined his claws at his neck and his brother’s fate for himself, but the Goyl stumbled back the moment Valiant cocked his rifle. Although Jacob reminded himself that his brother had been attacked by one of their soldiers, not by an unarmed mechanic, he longed to drive the knife into the Goyl’s chest. He’d never enjoyed killing, but the void he felt since Will had followed the Dark Fairy made him afraid of his own hands.

  Fox took human shape as though she sensed that fear. The Goyl barely reacted when the vixen turned into a young woman; they weren’t scared of shape-shifters like most humans and Fox just moved to Jacob’s side. She didn’t say a word but just reached for his hand, as if to make sure it wouldn’t pull out the knife. Nothing bound them together more firmly than this—the knowledge of each other’s darkness.

  Valiant was still pointing his rifle at
the Goyl, but his eyes wandered off to the planes. Behind them they could hear voices approaching through the tunnels, louder and louder, closer and closer, but the Dwarf was lost in admiration of the flying machines.

  “Oh, this is fabulous!” he mumbled. “So much better than any stinking Dragon! But what makes them fly? And what do the Goyl use them for?”

  “To spit fire,” Jacob said, “as all Dragons do.”

  They were biplanes, similar to the ones built in his world in the early twentieth century. A huge leap into the future, much farther than anything the engineers of the Empress or the Crookback were working on. Two were solo planes, like the ones flown by fighter pilots in World War I; the third was a replica of a two-seater Junkers J4, a bomber and reconnaissance plane from the same period. Jacob had once built a model of that very plane with his father.

  Fox was clearly worried when he climbed into the tight cockpit.

  “What are you doing?” she called. “Let’s try the tunnel. We just have to follow the light.”

  Jacob ran his fingers over the plane’s controls and checked the gauges. The Junkers was relatively easy to fly but difficult to maneuver on the ground. You know this from a book, Jacob, and from playing with model airplanes. You don’t seriously think you can fly this thing? He’d flown a few times with his father, when John Reckless was still escaping his world in a single-engine plane, instead of through a mirror. But that was such a long time ago that it seemed as unreal as the fact that he’d once actually had a father.

  The alarm was still shrilling through the cave like crickets roused from a freshly mown meadow.

  Jacob pumped up the fuel pressure. Where was the ignition? Valiant was watching him, his forehead one incredulous frown.

  “Hold on! You think you can fly this thing?”

  “Sure!” Jacob managed to sound so confident that he almost convinced himself.

  “Nonsense! We have to go!” Fox pointed to the cave’s entrance. “They’re coming!”

  She was right. The voices from the tunnels sounded worryingly close, but Jacob was tired of the endless tunnels and they would never escape the Goyl on foot.

  “I promise I can fly this!” he called down to the others. “So get up here! All of you!”

  Valiant was the first to get over his doubts and pull himself onto one of the wings. But there was only one more seat and Fox still eyed the plane very skeptically. Finally she shifted shape and squeezed into the narrow space behind the pilot seat, while Clara shared the back seat with Valiant. Jacob sent a quick prayer to the god of pilots and planes that the four passengers wouldn’t crash the Junkers, while his fingers found the ignition switch.

  The engine sputtered to life. The propeller began to turn and as Jacob made his final checks, he remembered his father’s hands going through the same motions in another world, another life; memories he hadn’t recalled for at least a dozen years. Look at this, Jacob! Aluminum body on a steel frame. Only the rudder is still made of wood. John Reckless had never sounded more passionate than when he spoke about old airplanes. Or weapons.

  Jacob felt the vixen shiver behind his legs. Machines. Engineered motion, mechanical magic for those who had neither fur nor wings. Jacob steered the plane toward the large tunnel. Yes, it certainly was hard to navigate on the ground. He could only hope flying it would be easier.

  Shots rang out behind them as the plane rolled down the tunnel. The roar of the engine reverberated between the walls. Oil splattered into Jacob’s face, and one of the wings nearly grazed the rock. He accelerated, although that made it even harder to keep the wings clear of the tunnel walls, and held his breath to exhale with relief when the heavy plane shot out of the tunnel and onto a gravel runway. Above them, a pale sun was drifting among gray rain clouds. A flock of crows rose from the nearby trees when he pulled the plane up, but luckily they stayed clear of the propeller.

  Fox had her fur, his brother had a skin of jade, and now he had a pair of wings.

  Engineered magic. John Reckless had brought metal Dragons through the mirror and Jacob caught himself in the same irrational thought he had had that night the sheet of paper had slipped out of the book to reveal the mirror’s secret—that maybe his father had left some things behind for him after all.

  The plane rose higher and higher, revealing roads and railroads below them disappearing through massive gates inside a mountain. Gone were the times when the Goyl had hidden from the world. The gates were made from silver and high above them Kami’en’s coat of arms was inserted into the mountain flank: the silhouette of a black moth on a carnelian moon, so huge that it could be seen for miles. The sun threw the plane’s silhouette onto the carnelian when Jacob flew past it.

  He was robbing the Goyl King of one his Dragons.

  A pitiful revenge for stealing his brother.

  42

  WHAT NOW?

  Back. Over the river where the Lorelei had almost devoured them, the mountains where Jacob had died, the plundered lands where the Princess was still sleeping among the roses and where Will had almost joined the Goyl for the first time. Kami’en’s airplane would cover the miles in just a few hours, but Jacob would later have sworn that they were in the air for months.

  “Jacob, where’s Will?”

  When they were children, he’d most times lost him because he’d felt embarrassed to hold his little brother’s hand, and Will would be off stalking a squirrel, a stray dog, or a crow, as soon as one let go of his fingers. Their mother never heard about those adventures. They had never given each other away, although Jacob had at times been very tempted to just lose Will in the park or in the ever-so-busy streets of their childhood. Each time he got away Will had seemed incredibly relieved when Jacob finally found him—as if something in him got so lost at times that only his brother could bring it back. What had happened when Jacob had stayed behind the mirror more and more often, leaving him alone? Maybe Will had lost himself in those years without another world to escape to like his older brother.

  None of them talked much on that flight in the Goyl King’s plane. The noise of the propellers trapped them all in their own thoughts. Fox was the only one who closed her eyes and slept away the exhaustion of the past few days. It was bitterly cold in the open cockpit, though Jacob kept the plane quite close to the ground, and they were all glad when they spotted the familiar roofs and towers of Schwanstein in the distance. Jacob landed on a barren field not far away from the railroad tracks that made it so much easier now to get to Vena. It took the train more than eight hours to the Empress’s capital, but the journey was much more comfortable than on horseback or in one of the coaches Jacob had used whenever the Empress summoned him.

  It wasn’t a coincidence that he landed the plane so close to the rails, Fox was certainly aware of that. The vixen didn’t take her eyes off him while she was stretching her furry limbs to make her body forget the ride in the plane.

  Valiant in contrast had, of course, only one thought on his mind.

  “Where is it?” he asked, scanning the fields and meadows.

  “What?”

  “My gold tree! Don’t play the fool, Jacob Reckless! I took you to the Fortress, that was the deal—it didn’t include bringing your brother back! But I’ll be generous and won’t charge extra for saving your neck.”

  A column of smoke was rising into the sky. A train was approaching. Jacob had seen it from above.

  “Fox will show you the tree,” he said.

  The vixen stared at the oncoming train. The wind stirred her fur.

  Jacob knelt down by her side. “Will you take Clara back to the ruin?”

  She didn’t ask where he was going.

  “Your brother is gone,” she said. “As you were when you stayed with her red sister. He belongs to the Dark Fairy now, and he likes the skin she gave him.” Even though you don’t want to admit that, her eyes added.

  Clara was standing a few steps away. Jacob couldn’t read from her face what she wished for. All he saw was exh
austion. And the same void he felt in himself.

  “You know I was never good at letting go,” he whispered into the vixen’s pointed ear. “I simply don’t know how to do it, Fox. I cannot even give up on a glass shoe or a magical ring. How am I supposed to give up on my brother?”

  “And I guess you once again don’t want me to come with you.”

  “You hate the city!” They both knew that was not the reason why he wouldn’t take her. He would look for the Fairy and he couldn’t bear the thought of losing Fox as well.

  The vixen looked at Clara.

  “What if she doesn’t want to go back?”

  She was right. Clara would want to stay. He was not the only one who hadn’t given up on Will yet.

  “For now just don’t tell her where I’m going. And ask Chanute to let her stay in my room. Until…”

  Until what? You don’t seriously believe you’ll come back, Jacob?

  “Chanute?” The vixen uttered an amused purr. “That will be interesting.”

  The train grew larger, cloaking the fields and meadows with its smoke. Eight hours to Vena.

  Jacob rose to his feet. And then what, Jacob? He didn’t even know when the wedding was supposed to take place.

  Valiant shouted something after him as he headed for the rails, but Jacob didn’t look back. The air filled with the smoke and noise of the train. He broke into a run and pulled himself onto one of the wagons.

  43

  DOG AND WOLF

  Trams, carriages, carts, and riders on horseback. Jacob had never seen Vena so crowded. It seemed as if all of Austry had come for the wedding, rich and poor, young and old. There were guests from Lotharaine, Albion, and Lombardia, visitors in the traditional costumes of Varangia, Parsia, even Zhonghua. Some of them had surely been invited by the Empress, but Kami’en had been weaving his diplomatic net wide and far, and his allies were not just humans. Dwarfs were being carried through the busy streets by their human servants, Giantlings and Trolls towered above the crowds, and of course every color of Goyl could be found amongst the visitors.