by Laurence Yep
I asked her on my tablet:
Did you see anything be4 yr wishes granted at school?
Taking the tablet, she wrote:
Only saw tan streak. 2 fast. Not sure what it was.
Neither did I, but its speed had to be the way the creature got through protective charms and wards. In the microseconds before the charm or ward could finish working, the imp was already past it. It would be like slipping through an open doorway before the door could shut and the lock could click into place to foil a burglar’s entrance. But how would we catch a being that darted about like lightning?
At that velocity, the imp would barely have time to sense the magical objects ahead of it. So it might ignore a non-magical trap, especially if that trap was so simple that it didn’t even look like one. Perhaps I could transform the creature’s greatest strength—its speed—into its greatest weakness.
Suddenly I recalled a trick that a Chinese taro farmer in Hawaii had used to deal with pests.
With my tablet, I explained what I wanted Winnie to do and then showed the message to her.
When she nodded in understanding, I went into the kitchen and began to work on something that would stick to more than the creature’s ribs.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Wishes are like eating peanuts. It’s hard to stop with just one.
Winnie
I rolled up Miss Drake’s old rug and put it in her bedroom. I couldn’t wait to catch the imp that had been making so much trouble for me.
Then Miss Drake carried a big pot of thick goo from the kitchen and set it down on the bare floorboards.
She used her tablet to warn me:
Do NOT get superpaste on u.
I sniffed it cautiously and then borrowed her tablet to write:
What’s in it?
Rice with other sticky ingredients. In old days, Chinese used rice paste 4 kites. This is improved version. Farmer in Hawaii caught big cockroaches with it. Some 3 inches long.
I didn’t want to imagine what one looked like. “Ugh,” I automatically said aloud. And she quickly agreed, tapping:
Ugh, indeed. But they didn’t move once they stepped on paper. Neither will our pest.
We used spoons to drop the goop onto sheets of paper and smear it around until the whole surface was sticky.
I knew the stuff worked real good after I got some on my fingers. I couldn’t pull them apart until Miss Drake wrote that I should spit on them. The paste dissolved enough for me to spread my fingers again.
After that, I was more careful putting the paste on the paper while Miss Drake shrank to about a yard in length and flew around her living room and placed the paper on the floor. We did that again and again until the floor was covered with sheets of the wet, sticky paper. The sofa became our little island, where we huddled in a white sticky sea.
Miss Drake’s claws tapped on her tablet:
Wish 4 something.
When you can have anything in the world, what do you ask for? I could have had my personal pair of koala bears or panda cubs or the latest video games—and assorted junk to go with it. Of course, later, everyone and everything would have to be returned.
At that moment, my stomach growled a hint to me. “I wish for a lot of snacks,” I said, wondering if a vending machine would match Miss Drake’s color scheme.
Then I held my breath and crossed my fingers. Since I’d gotten my dragon, I did a lot of that. Even grocery shopping was exciting because Miss Drake liked to get her stuff from a shop up in the clouds. I bet she had never even gone into a supermarket.
Miss Drake’s eyes narrowed, her whole body tensed, and the tip of her tail twitched back and forth, but she would have been annoyed if I told her she looked like a cat getting ready to pounce.
Suddenly the paper sheets by the door whipped into the air and began to spin around until they became a white whirlwind. The next moment, the sofa shook as Miss Drake sprang from it, her wings flaring outward as she swooped toward the commotion. Then she hovered as her hind paws held up a wriggling ball of paper.
“Got you!” she cried.
“Let Nanu Nakula go!” a muffled voice said.
Though the trapped creature was a lot smaller than Miss Drake, my dragon had trouble holding on to it. It seemed like the paper tangle was swinging her around so that her wings knocked over a jar full of fancy pens and bottles of ink.
When she tipped over the antique clock on the mantle, though, she lost her temper. “Hold still or I’ll use you for a punching bag.”
The bundle grew quiet. “Nanu Nakula cannot move in here. Is that a fair fight?”
“Of course not, because life itself isn’t fair.” Miss Drake pulled off a sheet of paper. “Now don’t move until we get a good look at you,” she warned, and began peeling the paper away like the layers of an onion. The last piece came away with some tan fur.
“Ow! Ow! Ow! You scalped Nanu Nakula, nāgī!”
Dangling from Miss Drake’s claws, the wish-granting creature was about the size of a mouse but very thin with a long furry tail. His soft fur was a pale brown flecked with spots of gold, but his chest fur was a reddish color like an English robin. His forepaws clutched a celery stick—a snack for me, I guessed.
I leaned forward to stare. “Hey, he looks sort of like the carving on the side of Great-Grandpa’s whistle.”
“Release Nanu Nakula!” the very tiny mongoose said to Miss Drake and jabbed the celery at me. “Look at her. She’s skin and bones. Nanu Nakula must feed her.”
“That overgrown piece of grass won’t fill her up.” Miss Drake sniffed. She did love her cookies and cakes.
“Nanu Nakula was just starting the harvest.” The mongoose waved the celery like a sword. “Anyway, it wouldn’t do you any harm to eat healthy, you nāgī nag.”
It’s always important to stick up for your friends. “Miss Drake’s a dragon,” I corrected him. “She’s not one of those whatchamacallits.”
“I’ve fought enough nāgas to know one when I see one.” The mongoose used the celery as a pointer. “Body thin like a giant cobra and a face like an old boot—only a nāgī could be this ugly.”
“Nāgas don’t have wings, but I do,” Miss Drake said, and flapped them noisily.
The mongoose craned his head to the side and saw her wings reflected in a mirror. “Nanu Nakula will give you this much: you have a very clever disguise, nāgī.”
When Miss Drake lowered her head, I thought she was going to pop him into her mouth like a snack, but she stopped an inch away from the mongoose. “We don’t have time for games. Who sent you to spy on Winnie?” She made a point of showing her fangs.
The mongoose wasn’t scared at all by the difference in their sizes. Instead, he thumped the celery against her muzzle. “As if Nanu Nakula would tell his enemy anything.”
Then I knew what I should have asked for in the first place. “Cancel the snacks. I wish for a card or something with your master’s name on it.” That would give us all the proof we needed.
The mongoose jerked a free paw at Miss Drake. “The nāgī will have to let go of Nanu Nakula first.”
“And have to trap you all over again?” Miss Drake laughed harshly. “Not likely.”
The mongoose spoke slowly for emphasis. “Get…out…of…Nanu Nakula’s…way.”
“And who will make me? You?” Miss Drake dared him.
“Yes—Nanu Nakula!” With a sudden thrust, the mongoose shoved the celery between Miss Drake’s lips, and it dangled like a green cigar.
Miss Drake reared in surprise, and he broke free from her claws, throwing himself hind paws first at her scales. Bouncing off her, he soared through the air and dived into my backpack.
“Hey,” I said as he squirmed under the flap.
The next moment, he reappeared with my student ID. Hopping onto my lap, he held it up to me. “The nāgī has bewitched you and stolen your memories, poor master. Such a cheat. Such a liar. Even Heaven despairs of reforming her.”
I
took the card. “I’m not your master.”
The mongoose gave a little bow. “Yes, you are. You are Nanu Nakula’s one and only master. He has waited a hundred years in the attic to be summoned.” The mongoose made it sound like it was my fault.
Miss Drake spat out the celery as she circled overhead, ready to pounce. “Small Doll must not bother cleaning up there, but someone would have heard you going bump in the night.”
The mongoose jumped onto my palm. He was just the right size to fit in the hollow. “Because Nanu Nakula was Beautiful and Beautiful is never Helpful, and Helpful is never Beautiful.” The mongoose’s hind paws began to tickle my palm as he twirled around. “Then you blew the whistle, and he became Helpful once more. Beautiful is silent and still, but Helpful must be quick, quick, quick.”
“He must change from something else to a mongoose each time someone plays the whistle,” Miss Drake said thoughtfully.
So the whistle’s like a remote control. I was curious. “I wish for my great-granddad’s whistle.” I added quickly, “And just the whistle.”
Instantly, he became a tan blur, leaping from my palm, and soared above the sticky paper on the floor. He used Miss Drake as a trampoline to jump over to the door and then under it.
Before my dragon could complain, he was on my palm, holding up the whistle in both paws. “Oh, the loveliness of Nanu Nakula! He dazzles. He enthralls. Mightiest of all mongooses. Kings and queens fight wars for him. But Nanu Nakula belongs to you and only to you. So rejoice. Play the whistle!”
Lifting the whistle to my lips, I blew several notes on it, and with each note, he began to pirouette faster and faster until he was a blur again. Suddenly there was a flash of red light, and on my lap was a large pendant of a golden mongoose with a ruby the size of a quail’s egg.
“The Heart of Kubera,” Miss Drake gasped.
The ruby in the gold mongoose’s chest flickered with light from without and within. It was a rich bright red, radiant and pulsing like a beating heart, almost with a life of its own.
I pointed the whistle at the pendant. “So this is when he’s Beautiful. And when he’s a mongoose, he must be Helpful.”
Miss Drake rubbed her muzzle as she studied it. “At the Exposition, Nanu Nakula was a pendant around Lady Gravelston’s neck, but when Caleb blew on the whistle that first time, he changed into the mongoose once again, left the ball, and tracked Caleb, even though we were invisible.”
I snapped my fingers. “No one stole the Heart of Kubera because he stole himself. But then why didn’t Caleb get into a mess with wishes like I did?”
“He made the time capsule the next day. I guess he just didn’t happen to make any wishes before then.” Miss Drake shrugged. “I assume the mongoose had hidden in the attic to wait. But Caleb must have blown the whistle one more time before he put it in the box, but that was enough to change the mongoose into the pendant for another hundred years—hidden so well not even Small Doll could find it.”
I started to grow excited. “You mean if I had wished for a fortune, the mongoose would have brought me gold and jewels instead of stuff to make me taller?”
“Yes,” Miss Drake warned, “but the mongoose doesn’t make them from thin air. He steals them.” She tapped a claw against her muzzle. “Nāgas and mongooses are mortal enemies. I suspect a wizard or sorceress copied Kubera’s mongoose and created this pest to raid nāga treasure vaults just as a normal mongoose would raid a chicken coop.”
“But why give him two forms?” I asked.
Miss Drake spread her paws. “Perhaps it was to avoid trouble like you got into with casual wishes. And if the mongoose has to have another shape, why not make it something pretty to see? Somehow long ago the whistle got separated from the pendant, and then people forgot that the whistle controlled the Heart of Kubera. Over time, everyone just thought of the pendant as simply a beautiful piece of jewelry.”
“So it was just an accident that the whistle wound up at the fair?” I asked.
“More like serendipity…fate reuniting it with the Heart of Kubera,” Miss Drake said, and continued. “A sailor brought it there on purpose. I think he knew it was magical but had no clue about its power or real secret. If he had, he wouldn’t have sold it to the stall keeper.”
I remembered how frantic the stall keeper had been. “But Great-Granddad bought it before the stall keeper could use it.”
Miss Drake nodded. “The stall keeper must have died a bitter, frustrated man.”
I stared down at the pendant. “So what do we do with the Heart of Kubera? Return him to Lady Gravelston’s family?”
She tapped a claw on her muzzle. “Well, her ancestor stole him from the Manchus in China, but the Manchus had stolen it from someone else, so who knows to whom it truly belongs? I suppose we’ll have to hold on to him until I decide the proper thing to do.”
“In the meantime, shouldn’t we tell the club?” I asked, picturing Sir Isaac’s face when we solved the theft. Maybe he’d even forget our duel and let me be.
Miss Drake must have imagined Sir Isaac’s reaction too because she smiled. “Yes, I’ll ask Willamar to call a meeting.” She reached for the pendant. “Until then, I’ll lock up Mr. Beautiful where he can’t do any harm.”
I thought of the poor mongoose trapped as a pendant all those centuries before the Exposition and then another hundred years afterward. That didn’t seem right.
And maybe I could do something good for everybody. Something that counted!
So before Miss Drake could stop me, I set the whistle to my lips and blew.
* * *
MISS DRAKE
I have always liked a little spirit in my pets, but unfortunately, Winnie had spirit by the barrelful. The pendant twirled like a top until it was a red streak. “Leave it alone,” I ordered. “No more wishes!”
“But this isn’t just for me. It’s for everybody,” Winnie promised. The spinning red blur turned brown…tan, until the mongoose was standing on her palm, bouncing up and down eagerly on his hind paws.
“Nanu Nakula lives to be Helpful. Please tell him what you want, master,” he begged.
“I wish for world peace,” Winnie said.
I was touched by such a generous wish—one worthy of Caleb. Right now the impulse was just a seed but worth nurturing and encouraging to grow.
Instead of darting off, though, the mongoose’s forepaws ruffled the fur on his head in frustration. “Gold Nanu Nakula can grab. Diamonds he can hold. But peace he cannot carry.”
Winnie’s finger stroked the mongoose’s head, trying to calm him down. “Okay, okay, I take back my wish.”
“Now change him into Mr. Beautiful,” I ordered urgently.
The mongoose started to tremble. “No, no. Nanu Nakula is Helpful.”
Winnie didn’t raise her whistle. “Poor little guy, he’s shaking.” Her finger stroked his side. “You don’t like being cooped up as a pendant, do you?”
The mongoose shook his head violently. “No, no. Nanu Nakula lives, but he cannot move. He cannot see. He can only hear. Year after year.”
Winnie shuddered. “It’s like being buried alive.”
He’d had a lot of masters over the centuries, and probably every one of them had kept him in his Beautiful form so he couldn’t create mischief.
I was beginning to understand what made the mongoose tick, so I spoke to him in Sanskrit. “Dost thou understand me, Nanu Nakula?”
The mongoose’s head jerked around. “So thou speakest the language of the gods, O sly nāgī.”
I had been careful to use the accent of the highest caste, the priests. “I warn thee for the last time: I am no nāgī. Dragon am I, and know I what the stars sing to burn away the dark and the cold. One word of star song and thy ears would shrivel, and thy toes curl.”
The mongoose gazed up at me unafraid. “Dragon thou may or may not be, but thou art surely a creature of power and knowledge. And so Nanu Nakula shall make a small peace with thee. He will not call the
e nāgī.”
I hovered over him. “Nor art thou as simple as thou pretendest to be.”
“How so?” He folded his paws, the picture of innocence.
The bantam confidence artist didn’t fool me one bit, though. “Thou knew Lady Winnie desired a ladder, yet thou found the imperfections in her wish and gave her pogo sticks and high-heeled shoes.”
He dipped his head, humble as any common church mouse. “But Nanu Nakula lives to serve his lady.”
“I do not censure thee, Nanu Nakula. Long wert thou trapped as Beautiful,” I said, trying to see things as he had. “Impatience decayed into a foul temper, and so thou took thy revenge by mocking thy young master.”
“Thinkest thou so?” the mongoose asked warily.
Winnie had wrinkled her forehead in irritation. “Talk English so I can understand.”
I kept my eyes on the mongoose. “We were discussing the nature of wishes, weren’t we?”
“Wishing is as noble an art as painting or poetry,” the mongoose agreed. “And so is the art of wish giving.”
Maybe that was another reason he had brought all that trash to Winnie.
“If wishes are an art form,” I asked, “does it offend you when someone makes an imperfect wish?” He said nothing, but when he shifted uncomfortably from one hind paw to the other, I knew I had hit the mark. “But as a servant, you can hardly complain. Instead, you get even by magnifying the flaws.”
“Nanu Nakula is in awe.” The mongoose touched the tips of his forepaws to his head and then spread his forelegs in a gesture of humility. “Your great mind understands far more than his small one. He thanks you for taking the time to explain his actions to him.”
I’d heard enough. “Winnie, you can’t trust him. Change him into Beautiful before he does any more harm.”