by Tad Williams
Mr. Walkwell unlocked the gate. “You two children stay with us,” he said, suddenly and sharply. “If you disobey or anger me you will go back to the cart to wait.”
The Three Amigos (whom Ragnar had introduced as Kiwa, Jeg, and Hoka) got down and began to pile feed sacks on their shoulders until each was carrying three. Mr. Walkwell took four (Tyler felt secretly certain by the ease with which he lifted them he could have carried more) and massive Ragnar took three on each shoulder. Without being asked, Tyler helped Haneb lift a sack onto his shoulders. The scarred man did not meet his eye, but mumbled a thank-you in accented, liquid-sounding English.
“More dragons?” Tyler asked Lucinda quietly as they fell in line behind the Amigos. “Do you think this is where they live?”
Lucinda pulled up, horrified. “You’re joking, right? We’re not
… I’m not going near a bunch of wild dragons!”
Mr. Walkwell growled as he almost ran into them from behind. “Keep walking, you children. If you trip me and I drop these sacks on you, you will not thank me.”
But Lucinda was not moving. “Are we going to see a bunch of wild dragons? A herd or whatever? Because I don’t want to do that.”
The wiry old man made a snorting noise. “Do you think the world is so full of these most ancient ones that they roam about in flocks, like pigeons?” He shook his head. “No-they are special and rare. We have two dragons here on the farm. You saw one in the Sick Barn-Meseret, the female. Her mate is named Alamu. We will not see him today.” He made a strange noise in his throat. “If we are lucky.”
“I don’t understand,” Lucinda said.
“No, you do not,” Mr. Walkwell agreed. “Walk faster, please.”
Tyler said, “You let the male dragon, like, roam wild? Is that safe?”
“He would kill himself trying to get out of a cage or barn, but if he is well fed Alamu is perfectly content to stay near Meseret, hiding in the high rocky places. Naturally we keep him very well fed.”
When they reached the bottom of the hill they found themselves in a woodland of madrone and oak trees, so that instead of the hot sun they walked through ragged patches of shade. The farmhands stopped and began dropping the sacks in a little clearing where a long-dry pond had become a shallow bowl of green weeds and yellow grass. Metal troughs stood at the base of several of the trees. The men began cutting open the bags and pouring dark green pellets that looked like giant rabbit food into the troughs. Tyler stepped forward to have a closer look.
A long brown hand descended on Tyler’s shoulder, stopping him as if he’d run into a wall. “Stay here, boy,” Mr. Walkwell said. “They are easily startled.”
Ragnar, standing at the center of the clearing, lifted his fingers to his mouth and whistled three loud, shrill notes. They all waited, Haneb and the other farmhands standing close to Ragnar, as if a rainstorm was coming and the blond man was a tall, sheltering tree.
“What are we waiting for?” Tyler said at last. “And why isn’t it coming?”
“Not one but many,” Mr. Walkwell said. “And they are coming, child. Likely they were far away. Listen!”
For a few moments Tyler had no idea what he meant-he could hear nothing but the rumble of a distant storm. Then he realized it was June in the California valley and there wasn’t a cloud anywhere in the sky. The drumming noise grew louder until the ground itself began to quiver. Tyler had a sudden feeling that the entire grove of trees was being lifted up by gigantic engines and was just about to take off into the sky like a rocket ship.
Then the unicorns came.
They flooded into the clearing like a storm, with so much power and such a swirl of reddish dust, muscled flanks all white and gray and dappled, that they seemed like clouds hurrying along the ground, struggling to fly as far as possible before they burst and released their burdens of rain. But there was no mistaking the bright sharp horns, or the flashing of their eyes, or the glint of their pearly hooves when some young ones excitedly reared in the air at the center of the clearing, jabbing at the air.
“Oh!” said Lucinda beside him, and for the second time in two days Tyler realized that his sister was holding his hand. Strange as that was, he didn’t pull away. As he watched the tall creatures thundering back and forth across the clearing, snorting and bucking, ivory horns shimmering like flickers of lightning, he felt he was watching some kind of magic river, that if he lost contact with the ground it might just carry him away and he would never be heard of again.
“ Oh! ” his sister said again. There really wasn’t much more to say.
The unicorns crowded into the clearing, bumping and rearing so that it was hard even to guess how many there were-two dozen? three? They seemed at least as big as ordinary horses (Tyler didn’t have a lot of experience with real horses), but more slender and long-legged, with great tangled banners of mane at their necks and tufts on their chests and ankles. But it was the horns that made something amazing into something truly unbelievable, the pointed spirals that grew, not from the tops of their heads as in the sappy posters Lucinda still had in her room, but farther down, just below the line of the eyes, like the horn of a rhinoceros.
The herd formed into groups around the troughs and fed, horns clacking together gently, almost silently, ranged according to some hierarchy that Tyler couldn’t make out, since it didn’t seem to have much to do with age or size or color or anything else. At some troughs the young unicorns fed first, while at others the small ones stood patiently while an adult with a mane like store-window Christmas snow took the lead.
“They’re so beautiful,” Lucinda kept saying, over and over.
“Where do they come from?” Tyler asked Ragnar, who seemed more likely to answer questions than Mr. Walkwell. “What are they eating? Do you have to feed them every day?”
“They come from China,” Ragnar answered him. “Or they did once. Now they are gone. Ki-lin, they called them. And they eat grass and other things, but we give them every day a… what is the word, Simos?”
“Vitamin supplement,” growled Mr. Walkwell, who was squatting beside a gray adult unicorn. It watched him nervously from the corner of its eye while it ate, and he in turn examined it for any signs of ill health.
“Yes, vitamins,” said Ragnar. “Because the grass alone is not enough to keep them healthy, I think. And there are other medicines in the food too. These are the only unicorns still living in the world, so we must take good care of them.”
“Yeah,” said Tyler. “Awesome.” He was certainly interested in the unicorns, but more interested in going back to see the dragon again.
Lucinda, who didn’t seem to have listened to anything said, was walking slowly toward the nearest trough, her eyes wide as though she was hypnotized. Tyler hoped she wouldn’t do anything embarrassing, like start crying with joy or some other girl-and-unicorn thing. She stopped only yards away from one of the young unicorns, which examined her with large gray eyes. It didn’t look fright ened, but Tyler thought it didn’t look happy, either. When Lucinda did not move any closer it put its head down again and nosed in the trough.
Mr. Walkwell and Ragnar were together off to the side, looking over other members of the herd. The young unicorn’s pearly horn moved back and forth in front of Lucinda as it fed.
Tyler watched his sister, who was staring at the creature as if she had just opened her front door to find her number-one boy-band heartthrob waiting there to take her on a surprise date. She slowly reached out her hand to touch the horn. Tyler watched, wondering if he should say something-the unicorns were wild animals, so they were dangerous, weren’t they? Or were they? It was hard to know in such a crazy place.
A lot of things suddenly happened all at the same time.
Haneb saw what Lucinda was doing and ran toward her, crying, “No! No!” The unicorn reared up and made a startled noise, something blaring and utterly strange. As it came down it shook its head violently from side to side. The horn whipped past Lucinda’s face so f
ast she didn’t even flinch until after it was gone.
Haneb reached her and pulled her away, but now all the unicorns were milling and snorting, prancing nervously, making little tornados of dust spin up. Mr. Walkwell whistled a single shrill burst and they began to calm, but still would not come close to the troughs again.
“You scared me!” Lucinda shouted at the scarred man, yanking herself free of his protective grasp. She burst into tears, then turned and retreated toward the wagon.
“Wow, are you nuts?” Tyler said to her as she hurried past. He was stunned and impressed that his boring sister would do something so
… Tyler-like. “They said not to touch anything. That thing almost stabbed you!”
Haneb, who looked as though what had happened was somehow his fault, shuffled off to gather up feed bags.
“Everyone back to the truck,” Ragnar said. He bent to pick something off the ground, then went to talk to Lucinda at the edge of the clearing, where she stood wiping her tears away. “You could not know,” he told her kindly, “but the ki-lin do not like their horns to be touched. Very sensitive.”
“I… I didn’t mean… ” Lucinda swallowed. “It was just so beautiful.”
“Yes, they are,” said Ragnar gently. “But it is no ordinary thing, like a bull’s horn or a deer’s antler. It is a sort of tooth that grows up through the skull, like the tusk of the white corpse whales-two teeth, actually, growing together. The enhjorning -as my people call it-uses it to test the air, the water-to smell, almost, as a cat uses its whiskers or a snake its tongue.”
“A tooth?” said Tyler. “ That’s weird.”
“Shut up,” Lucinda said, and gave him a dig with her elbow. Her eyes were red and puffy. “Just… don’t say anything.” She abruptly veered away from the two of them and walked over to Haneb, who was watching with a worried expression, but whatever she said seemed to put him at ease: he nodded his head vigorously as they walked and talked, still keeping his face turned away from her as much as possible.
“I am glad she thanks Haneb,” said Ragnar. “The little man may have saved her life.”
“Saved her life?” Tyler made a face. “You’re joking, right?”
Ragnar held out his large hand. Lying across the palm was a hank of Lucinda’s golden-brown hair, cut as neatly as if by a pair of scissors. “The horn did this. It came that close. It is not wise to startle a unicorn. They are lovely to see, but they are not pets and they are not even friends.”
A cold tingle went right up Tyler’s backbone. He wasn’t always crazy about his sister, but he didn’t want her shredded by some razor-horned horse, either.
“Are we done?” he asked as they climbed back onto the wagon and waited for Mr. Walkwell, who was still crunching toward them. “Where do we go next?”
Ragnar gave him a serious look. “It depends on whether you two learn to do as you are told. Because now we are going to show you some of the dangerous animals.”
Chapter 8
Reptiles, More or Less
“B ut I still don’t get it-where did the unicorns come from?” Lucinda asked as the wagon bumped along. “And the dragon?”
Ragnar smiled and shook his head. “I have said many times: that is not for me to answer. But look there and you will see something.”
Lucinda didn’t want to look at anything else. She wanted to keep the amazing sight of the unicorns in her memory and not let anything else push it out-that cloud of manes and tails and flashing eyes and horns.
And horns, yes. Poor Haneb. The farmhand had only been trying to protect her. She still felt bad about how she had reacted.
“What is it?” Tyler asked. “It’s… huge!”
Lucinda looked up, suddenly fearful that they were being taken to something even more terrifying than the dragon-a chained ogre out of a story, or some monstrous, girl-grabbing gorilla. Instead she saw only a pale, whitewashed building stretched along the valley floor below them. But what a building it was, sunk half into the hillside, a single low wooden structure like a dozen oversized shoeboxes placed end to end, its roof covered in solar panels. It seemed as long as the immense playing field at her school. “It’s… a giant barn,” she said.
Ragnar nodded. “It is, child. That is the dragon barn. No dragons in it now, since Meseret is in the Sick Barn, but you will see what else is there.”
“Was it built just for the dragon?” Tyler asked as the wagon crunched to a stop.
“No, this was made for an earlier owner of the land who kept cattle. We tore out many of the stalls to make space for Meseret. You will see.”
“There are train tracks going right into it,” Lucinda said as they walked through the low, dry grass toward the high doors.
“Of a sort,” Ragnar said. “They are for a rolling flatcar, to bring feed. And to move Meseret when it must be done.”
“Why would you even do that?” Tyler asked. “That dragon must weigh as much as a whale!”
“A small one, yes. But these creatures are delicate, and what makes one animal sick can sweep through them all. So we move the sick ones to the special barn. But you are right-it is not easy to move Meseret, even with the lifting-thing.”
Lucinda was too startled by the smell and the heat that hit her as they went through the big doors to wonder what a “lifting-thing” might be. The ceiling of this barn was dauntingly high, twice as high as the Sick Barn’s, spider-webbed with metal girders and dozens of bright hanging lights. The odor of the place made her nose prickle and her eyes water. It smelled like the dragon, but more so-more musky, more sour, more… strange.
Stranger than a dragon? she couldn’t help thinking. A day ago she couldn’t even have imagined meeting a dragon at all. She heard a sound behind her and turned to see Colin Needle coming in after them.
“Hello, Lucinda,” he said. “Looks like I caught up with you.”
“Are you not supposed to be working on the feed budget, Master Needle?” asked Ragnar sternly.
For a moment, as the pale boy stared angrily at the big yellow-haired man, Colin didn’t look very nice at all. “As it happens, my mother sent me here to ask Gideon something.”
Ragnar was still frowning. “Mr. Goldring is here? I thought he was ill this morning and was going to stay in bed.”
Colin shrugged. “He changed his mind. My mother wasn’t very happy about it, but you know how Gideon is-”
Just then something screeched, a noise like failing car brakes. Lucinda jumped. “What was that?” she demanded. “You said the dragon was gone!”
“Don’t be such a baby,” Tyler growled.
She wanted to slug him. Like he wasn’t ever scared of anything! How about when Mom tried to get him to eat sushi?
Ragnar patted her shoulder. “I said no dragon. But the other serpents-this is their home too.”
“And not just reptiles,” Colin said helpfully. “Almost all of our cold-blooded animals live here. There are amphibians and some… well, not fish, exactly.”
“Their water must boil,” she said. “It’s so hot in here!”
“We turn up the heating lights while Meseret is gone,” Ragnar explained.
“Why?” asked Tyler.
Colin was happy to show what he knew. “Most of the time, she contributes a lot of the warming of this place all by herself.”
Tyler scowled. “What, she breathes fire on everything?”
“No, Tyler.” Colin said “Tyler” like he was an elementary school teacher. “Just with body heat. She’s extremely large and she’s warm-blooded.”
They crossed the open area inside the doors and trooped up the stairs behind Ragnar, who didn’t look quite so big in this building. The second floor ran like a giant balcony all the way around the interior of the massive barn, leaving the middle open. From up there Lucinda could see the huge, empty expanse of straw-covered concrete where the dragon usually lay.
“Gideon is probably in the cockatrice pen,” said Colin.
“Well, perhaps, the
n, we show those to you, if Gideon is there,” Ragnar told Lucinda and Tyler. “But everyone must wear the eye shields.”
“Goggles,” Colin translated.
A large wire enclosure took up much of this side of the second floor, and someone was moving around inside it. The figure straightened up when it saw them and gave a jerky wave with a garden-gloved hand. Lucinda could tell it was Gideon only by his skinny shape and his bathrobe, since his head was covered by something like a beekeeper’s hood, which made him look like a very badly dressed space alien. It came to her suddenly that she didn’t know what frightened her more-the animals or this stranger, this supposed relative, who, out of the blue, seemed to have claimed their lives.
Scattered on a table near the beginning of the wire mesh lay thick plastic goggles, each with its own elastic strap, and the kind of paper masks people wore in hospitals. Ragnar passed Lucinda and Tyler one of each, but Lucinda only stared at hers with dismay. “Do these cocky-whatsits have diseases? I don’t want to catch some snake disease.” She heard Tyler snort but ignored it. Someone had to be practical.
“Not for disease.” Ragnar pulled on the goggles and tugged the mask into place-the elastic barely stretched around his big head and bushy beard. “For spit.”
“What?”
“You’ll see,” said Colin. “Don’t worry, Lucinda, we’re not going inside the pen. They’re too nasty-and they bite, also. But it’s the spitting you really want to avoid.”
“Gross!” she said.
“Excellent!” said Tyler.
Uncle Gideon came out of the pen, being careful to latch the door behind him. Lucinda could see movement inside, but the enclosure was full of boxes and boards piled haphazardly and it was hard to make out what was actually in there. Gideon pulled off his hood and gave them an uncertain look. Lucinda, though she quaked inside, determinedly met his gaze. Gideon said, “What did you think of the unicorns?”
“It was amazing,” Lucinda said. “They’re beautiful!”
A broad grin spread across Gideon’s face. “Aren’t they?” he said. “Aren’t they?”