Dragon Shield

by Charlie Fletcher

  ‘If any of us are hurt but put back on our plinths by midnight then we revive and all our wounds are healed,’ she said. ‘I must take her. You can help yourselves. Tragedy will guide you. And take that shield.’

  She gave Little Tragedy a severe look.

  ‘You know where to take them if they want angels.’

  ‘’Course I do,’ he said, ‘I’ll take ’em to the Prudentials. Couple of useful Georges there too, and all. But . . .’

  ‘No buts. They’ll be safe enough there until the Tithing tonight,’ said Victory. ‘And no jokes, no fibs and no detours. I’m counting on you to be your good self.’

  The look that passed between them was precisely the one a parent would give a habitually naughty child.

  ‘He’ll take good care of you,’ said Victory walking back to Will and Jo. ‘No malice in him, but he is easily distracted, so watch him.’

  She leant in and spoke very quietly, so that Tragedy couldn’t hear.

  ‘He’s lonely. Always looking for playmates. The real tragedy of Little Tragedy is he wants a gang, but no one will play with him for long. He’s very young under his cocky exterior. His bravado’s about as thin as that mask he carries around. He gets upset if he thinks he’s being left out or left on his own, but be nice to him and he’s loyal as a puppy.’

  Will thought she looked like she was hiding a smile, but then she looked back up into the sky as if smelling a change in the wind.

  ‘The dragons will know that one is hurt. They will come for him too to get him to his plinth. You should go now. They will not forgive you for hurting one of their own. And there are more dangerous things than dragons abroad.’

  Jo and Will looked in the direction she was staring.

  A bird was circling in the air a long way off.

  ‘It’s a hawk,’ said Will. ‘Just a bird.’

  ‘But no other birds are flying,’ said Victory pointedly. ‘The pigeons, the sparrows, all frozen in time too . . .’

  And then she grasped the twisted torso of Ariel around the waist as her wings unfolded and flapped her into the sky.

  ‘Wait!’ said Will. ‘Please!’

  Victory kept rising into the air.

  ‘Go now,’ she said. ‘I will likely see you at The Tithing.’

  Jo and Will exchanged a look of controlled panic.

  ‘What about Mum,’ said Jo, looking across at where their mum was still running motionlessly in the frozen traffic.

  ‘Can’t leave her like that,’ said Will. He looked over his shoulder.

  The hawk was still circling a long way off, but there was something he didn’t like about it.

  ‘We can’t move her,’ he said. ‘Jo. She’ll be safe there for now.’

  Then he picked up the wheelchair and put their mother back on her feet, on the pavement.

  ‘That your mum?’ said Little Tragedy.

  Jo nodded.

  ‘Luck-y!’ said Little Tragedy. ‘I never had a mum. What’s it like then?

  Jo swallowed.

  ‘It’s good,’ said Will.

  ‘It’s nice,’ said Jo.

  ‘Bet it is,’ said Tragedy wistfully. ‘I didn’t get a father neither . . .’

  For a moment they all looked at Will and Jo’s mother. Will wished more than anything that their dad was there too. Then the moment was broken by Little Tragedy snorting up a chuckle.

  ‘Tell you what though, it ain’t half a laugh seeing you lot all still as statues for a change, eh? Whole world’s gone vicey-versa, and for all we know up’ll be down before we know it. Come on slowcoaches,’ he said. ‘Keep up. It won’t help your old mum if we get flamed by a dragon, will it? Let’s do what Victory said.’

  Jo looked at Will, and then she got in the wheelchair.

  ‘We’re going to be OK,’ she said. ‘Right, Will?’

  ‘Right,’ he said.

  ‘Promise?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘Don’t make promises you can’t keep,’ said Little Tragedy. ‘You killed a dragon, and now you’re nicking its shield. We’re in big trouble if they catch us.’

  Will shrugged and slung the shield over his back.

  ‘You could leave it,’ said Jo.

  ‘Don’t think that’d make up for killing the dragon,’ said Will, pushing forward. ‘And the truth is, the shield makes me feel stronger. Don’t know why.’

  He picked up speed. It was true. The shield did seem to give him more strength. He needed it to keep up with Tragedy who was jogging ahead of them and beckoning for them to follow as he ran.

  ‘Stronger is good,’ she said. ‘Trust him?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ said Will. ‘He’s just a kid really.’

  ‘Loyal as a puppy doesn’t sound very reassuring does it? Puppies are all over the shop till you train them,’ she whispered. ‘See the horns?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said bouncing off the curb and round a corner.

  ‘Watch it!’ she said.

  ‘Hold on and you’ll be fine,’ he gritted, as his legs pistoned into a sprint. Tragedy was peering round the next corner as if to see if the coast was clear. He looked back, flashed a grin, and waved them on.

  Will looked up into the sky and had the nasty feeling the hawk had just flown closer.

  He wondered if he’d just lied to Jo for the second time in a minute.

  He had no idea if they were going to be safe. And he was pretty sure the hawk was trouble.

  7

  The Eye of Horus

  The stone hawk hung in the air, wings stretched wide, cutting slow circles across the sky as its unblinking eyes scanned the city streets.

  From this high London did not look like a map. It did not look like anyone had planned it at all. It looked like an accident, a mess of roofs jumbled together without any rhyme and no more reason than the contents of a crammed toy-box would have shown if they’d been dumped out onto the floor by a fretful child.

  The river writhed through the city in a series of powerful curves, like a thick brown snake, but apart from the choppy flow of the water, nothing was moving in the glimpsed streets beneath.

  And that is what the hawk’s eye was looking for.

  Movement.

  Hawks are not praised for their wisdom, like owls. They are not prized for their song, like nightingales. They are feared for their purpose, which is to spy from on high, and then stoop to kill. Hawks are feared because they are hunters, and rightly so. They have no mercy, no gentleness, no remorse. Hawks are death-from-the-sky.

  On the edge of its field of vision something flickered.

  The hawk blinked the blue disk of its eye and tipped its wings, drifting silently across the evening air towards the spot where the stillness had been momentarily broken.

  Deep in the Ancient Egyptian Gallery of the British Museum, a mile away, nothing was moving, except shadows. The four lion-women were now on their hands and knees looking down into the black stone coffin with intense concentration; the band round the outside was still glowing with blue light, and the hieroglyphics within seemed to be moving like agitated stick-cartoons.

  The lion-women ignored them entirely, concentrating on the inside of the stone coffin which was carved out in a rough man-shape.

  It had – like the bath it resembled – been filled with water. It was – unlike a bath – showing the four lion-women everything the hawk was seeing, like a screen projected on the inky surface of the liquid. The blueish light coming from it was sending the shadows dancing across the walls and ceiling.

  The image disappeared for a fraction of a second as the hawk blinked.

  ‘There,’ said one of the lion-women. ‘It has seen something.’

  ‘THE HAWK IS THE SKY,’ said the strange everywhere-voice that came from nowhere, or from all of them at once despite the fact that their mouths did not move. ‘THE SKY CONTAINS THE SUN AND THE MOON, WHICH ARE ITS EYES. SUN AND MOON SEE EVERYTHING.’

  The lion-women bent closer over the
sarcophagus to examine the picture playing across the surface of the liquid within. They looked rather less like women and considerably more like lionesses gathered at a water-hole. The small cat, a bronze statue whose golden earrings and matching nose-rings marked it as a considerably tamer and very distant cousin of the four huntresses, purred beneath their bodies, twining in and out of their arms and legs. They paid it no mind.

  They were concentrating on what the hawk’s eye was showing them. The huntresses were sharing the hunter’s eye and quivering with sympathetic anticipation as it swooped lower.

  Again the hawk saw movement, and this time it was close enough for them to see that what it saw was a boy running along a street, pushing a girl in a wheelchair. They ran out of the hawk’s view as they turned into a narrow lane, but they had been visible for long enough to recognize them

  ‘People. Moving,’ said the lion-woman with the stick. ‘People should all be held unmoving by the Great Curse.’

  Four pairs of cats’ eyes lifted from the scene below them and met across the inky water.

  ‘THE GREAT CURSE IS OUR POWER. THE GREAT CURSE IS OUR REVENGE. WE HAVE FROZEN TIME. ITS CHILDREN ARE ALL STILL. THESE TWO MUST BEAR SOME PROTECTION. THEY ARE NOT STILL. THIS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE.’

  ‘What shall we do?’ said the stick bearer.

  ‘THE HAWK MUST GO TO THE DRAGONS. THE DRAGONS MUST NOT FAIL US A SECOND TIME.’

  ‘Kill the children?’

  ‘BRING THE CHILDREN. SEE WHAT THEIR PROTECTION IS. FOR IT CAN BE USED AGAINST US. THEN DESTROY IT.’

  ‘Then kill the children?’

  There was a pause. The small cat, unconcerned by the debate going on above it and the unanswered question, looked down into the hawk’s eye-view of London roof-tops gliding away beneath it, and then dipped a paw into the water. The ripples destroyed the mirror-like surface and the image disappeared.

  The lion-women sighed and straightened up, going from four legs back to two.

  The everywhere-voice answered the question with a quiet laugh that was too sinister to have much humour in it.

  ‘KILL THE CHILDREN? HUNTERS MUST DO WHAT HUNTERS DO.’

  8

  Taken

  As he ran through the streets pushing Jo in the wheelchair – which was getting heavier the further they ran after Little Tragedy – Will was learning something new about being terrified: when something frightening happens and keeps on happening, you do get more and more scared to start with. But as it goes on, the upward curve of your fear ceases to rise, and flattens, so you just stay at a constant level of fear. You can’t keep getting even more scared indefinitely because you’d probably explode your head or something, so the fear levels off and stays the same, and then because it stays the same something really interesting happens. You get used to it.

  He was beginning to be able to think straight.

  They ran past a church front, old weathered grey stone with green moss stains running down from the turreted edge of the tower. A wedding party was just emerging. The bride and the groom looked radiantly happy as they walked out onto the steps into a frozen cloud of multi-coloured confetti and petals and rice that the guest were throwing.

  The confetti cloud hung across the pavement blurring the view ahead like a soft but vivid mist. Tragedy just ran straight through it with a laugh. As they were right behind him they saw him cut a clean urchin-shaped tunnel through the static storm of bright scraps suspended in the air. He turned and beckoned them after him.

  ‘Come on! S’only paper!’

  They could see that, because all the confetti he had run through was now stuck to his front, making him look for an instant like a multi-hued papier-maché boy. Then Will pushed on through the confetti and they themselves emerged with a liberal coating of their own.

  ‘Ugh,’ spat Jo. ‘Should have closed my mouth!’

  Will wiped paper shreds off his face and kept going.

  The flat fronts of the Georgian houses on this street were all sooty brick, and the white painted stone that surrounded the windows and doors was dingy with exhaust fumes. It had been a pretty street in its day, but a century of motor cars had turned it into one of the clogged, dirty arteries of London. The pavement was almost empty, and they were able to pick up speed as Will had no need to slalom round frozen pedestrians.

  ‘Why’s he going down here?’ said Jo, craning back in the chair to look at Will as the wheels thrummed and jiggled across more uneven pavement. His face was red and sweating with the effort of running whilst pushing the wheelchair in front of him.

  ‘HEY!’ Will shouted, as Little Tragedy disappeared round a corner into a narrow lane. After a beat the impish face reappeared and waited for them.

  ‘Why are we taking such a wiggly route,’ he panted in irritation as he slowed to turn the corner into a street that was even narrower than the side street Tragedy’d just ducked them down.

  ‘Safer,’ said Tragedy. ‘Your face is all red. You aren’t cross are you?’

  He looked unsettled by the thought, suddenly not so impish and much younger than normal.

  ‘I’m doing my best,’ he explained. ‘It’s safer, see . . .’

  ‘Doesn’t feel safer,’ Jo said, looking up at the walls crowding in on them from both sides.

  ‘I saw the hawk,’ Tragedy said, setting off again. ‘It might be, er, safer when we can’t see the hawk.’

  ‘It’s just a bird,’ she said.

  ‘And a dragon’s just a statue. Until it comes alive,’ puffed Will, grimacing as he tried to keep up with Tragedy. ‘Nothing’s normal today, and that includes the birds. Because there aren’t any.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you,’ she said, craning back to look at him. ‘Why are you making that weird face.’

  He was suddenly cross with her again, so cross that he actually felt as if he’d been cross with her for a very long time but hadn’t quite noticed exactly how much, which made him doubly irritated. The feeling came at him all at once, like a giant wave. He felt almost as surprised as he felt angry. It was such a strong feeling that it left a sour taste in his mouth.

  He came to a sudden halt. Jo had to grab the armrests to stop herself tumbling forward out of the chair.

  ‘Watch out, you doofus!’ she yelped, then saw his expression. ‘What?’

  ‘I’m making that weird face because I’ve got a stitch,’ he said, breathing hard. ‘And I’ve got a stitch because I’m pushing you all around London while you just sit there because you can’t—’

  He clamped his teeth on the ugly words before they could hop out of his mouth like a toad, but he needn’t have bothered. Jo’s face coloured right up, looking as red as his felt.

  ‘Because I can’t walk properly,’ she said. ‘Right?’

  ‘Didn’t say that,’ he mumbled.

  Tragedy ran back and looked at them both. He hopped from one foot to the other, as if he suddenly had to pee.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘All chums eh? Don’t argue. Gets me nervy when people argue . . .’

  Will looked up and met Jo’s eyes.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ he said thickly.

  ‘Yeah you did,’ she said, levering herself out of the chair and catching her balance on the walking stick.

  ‘You just didn’t have the guts to say it out loud.’

  She strode jerkily away from him. He followed her.

  ‘No, no, come on, this isn’t good,’ cried Little Tragedy. ‘We’re mates, right, we’re a gang, we shouldn’t be arguing, arguing’s what grown-ups do. We’re not grown-ups are we? We’re better than that!’

  Will barely heard him. He only fleetingly noticed how upset the small boy was getting and then discarded the thought. Jo just marched lopsidedly off.

  Will’s own anger didn’t just magically evaporate because he felt bad about what he’d nearly said. He still felt he was a coward who had lied. That just made it all curdle in his gut. In fact he felt angrier because he felt bad about being angry in the first place. Nothing was
fair.

  ‘Jo,’ he said. ‘Look. Wait . . .’

  She turned another corner without looking back.

  He trotted after her into a sort of courtyard where someone had had the bright idea of squeezing a mini-park and recreation area into a space that was not nearly big enough for just one, let alone both of them.

  Now it was Tragedy’s turn to follow them, awkwardly pushing the discarded wheelchair ahead of him, even though he was too short to manage it properly.

  ‘Hold up!’ he panted. ‘Here, I got your chair. Stick together, we got to stick together!’

  Jo turned and leaned against a sign reading ‘Old Gloucester Street Gardens (Alf Barrat Playground)’.

  Gardens they might have once been in a long distant past, but right now there was not a blade of real grass in sight. The Gardens were divided in two, one half covered in a sickly green mat of faded astroturf on which were bolted outside versions of exercise machines you’d normally expect to see inside a gym, painted an even sicklier shade of lime than the plastic grass.

  On the other side of a low fence was the children’s playground, with a metal climbing frame that was a series of barred cages painted in funhouse primary colours. Beyond this was a swing-set on which a solitary child was frozen at the very end of her swing, her feet pointing to the sky and her back parallel with the ground. In front of her was a merry-go-round on which her parents, also unmoving, sat watching her with smiles stuck on their faces.

  It was a dank, sad place, the opposite of Coram’s Fields. In fact if Coram’s Fields was one of the gloried ‘Lungs of London’ as the great parks were known, this was more like an abscess, one of those accidental voids created by the basic disorder of the city. It felt not just accidental but ignored, even by the blank-eyed windows and balconies that faced it.

  ‘You know why my leg doesn’t work?’ she said, voice dangerously calm.

  This was the conversation they never had.

  Tragedy creaked up with the wheelchair, opened his mouth to say something, then shut it as he saw the deadly seriousness in their faces. Somehow this made him very agitated: his eyes widened and darted from one to the other.