Legend of the Three Moons (10 page)

`I'll warn you if I see them.'

That will be a great help, thought Lem, as he searched for fins sticking out of the black water while wondering if his gift of talking to animals included sharks.

They were trembling with the cold by the time they got far enough away to climb into Bengg's boat to row, and exhausted when they reached Pebble Cove where the others were waiting.

Lyla, Chad and Swift were drenched and shivering by the time they'd waded out with their bags, food sack and weapons.

`Did the stilt girl tell you how to sail it, Lyla?' asked Lem, cuddling a wet Nutty.

Lyla shook her head.

During the night the waves grew rougher and higher. They broke over the prow and flooded the boat, forcing Lyla and Celeste to tie Chad and Swift to the mast and tie themselves and Lem to the benches. The next day was no better, nor was the second night or the third day and night. Each hour's sailing depended on a capricious wind that either blew so hard they feared it would capsize them, or didn't blow at all, leaving them to rise to the frothing peaks and drop into the troughs of the enormous oncoming waves.

Their food and water lasted two days then Swift was given the task of fishing. Cooking was impossible. All of them, including Splash, ate the fish raw washed down with dew collected each freezing night in their leather capes. The further west they sailed the more leaden became the sky, the wilder the sea, and the colder their noses, ears and hands. So it was with great joy on the fifth day that they saw, silhouetted against the evening sky, a huge pyramid of blue ice surrounded by swirling ice floes.

Suddenly, the wind that had fought them since they'd left Mussel Cove changed its mind. Filling their sail it shoved them into the floes that surrounded the boat and eventually halted it. Lyla swung the anchor wide, embedding it in the nearest floe, while the others pulled down the sail so that they could shelter beneath it.

Lem squeezed in between Chad and Lyla. `What's the plan?'

Lyla wrapped her cape around the three of them. `Edith said it was you that should go, so tomorrow two of us will go with you and two will stay with the boat to keep it moving so it doesn't freeze to the ice.'

`Which two? demanded Swift, who'd been complaining for days that he never got to do anything other than fish.

Lyla took the box of sulphur-tipped sticks out of the jewelled casket and broke one stick in half. Holding the two halves and two more sticks in her fist she held them out. `Short sticks go. Long sticks stay.'

Swift chose first. `I'm going.'

Celeste chose next. `I'm not.'

`I'm not either,' said Lyla.

`I am!' shouted Chad, his voice echoing hollowly back from somewhere high on the mountain.

`Ssshhh!' warned Lem. `This is not a game. Climbing up an ice mountain is going to be dangerous.'

`And we don't know how big the dragon is, or whether it has wings, or if it breathes fire,' said Swift, his dark brown eyes glittering with excitement.

`Or whether it is one of our parents,' said Chad nudging him. He clapped his hand over his mouth and glanced at Lyla with guilty eyes. `Sorry. It just slipped out.'

`What slipped out?' demanded Celeste. `What do you know, Lyla?'

Lyla glared at Chad before answering. `Sebastian said that the merwoman was royal. So maybe the dragon is too. Maybe one or both of them are our parents. But it's only a maybe.'

The idea that the ice dragon might be their mother or father silenced them all, until Lyla handed the box of sulphur-tipped sticks to Lem. `Take these and don't forget Edith's package, string and mirror. Chad and Swift, you take your packets too.'

Their sixth night on the boat passed slowly. The boys shivered as they slept and the girls, who were on guard, couldn't keep their teeth from chattering. Around them the floes bumped and ground together, while across their surfaces purple shadows danced like ghosts balancing on brittle icicle toe-shoes.

`Do you think anyone lives on the island, Cel?'

Celeste wriggled further under the sail for warmth. `No. Too cold.'

Then, as if to challenge her words, there came a series of eerie booming sounds followed by an unearthly howl of pain.

Celeste wriggled closer to Lyla.

`It's just the ice,' said Lyla, although she didn't believe that.

Neither did Celeste, who was thinking that the howl sounded like something in pain. She worried it might have come from the mocked ice dragon, who might be her enchanted mother, father, uncle or aunt.

`Lyla?'

`Yes.'

`Do you think about your mother and father very often?'

`Every day and every night.'

`Me too.'

In the morning they saw that the floes had rearranged themselves into a huge intricate jigsaw. It looked easy enough to cross, as long as no one tripped on the brown seaweed that had floated up during the night or fell into icy slush-filled gashes between the floes.

`When are we going?' demanded Swift, jigging up and down in front of Lem.

`Soon,' grunted a tired Lem. He scraped a handful of snow off the nearest floe and washed his face with it, shivering at the cold when he'd finished.

`Last night I dreamed about the dragon,' said Lyla uncurling herself stiffly from the sail. `It's somewhere inside Tartik Mountain. I saw it through the ice when I was dream-flying.'

Lem stared up at the pyramid-shaped mountain. `Did you see any way to get inside the mountain?'

`No. But there are caves three-quarters of the way up. I saw something else as well.' Lyla waited until they were all listening. `I saw white shadows circling the dragon.'

`There are no such things as white shadows. Shadows are black,' argued Lem.

`That's what I saw.'

They ate raw fish and packed what was left for the boys to take then, while Lyla held Nutty and Celeste held the tiller, the boys climbed onto the bobbing floes. They were travelling light with their swords and bows and arrows strapped to their backs, their daggers in their belts, food in Chad and Swift's tunic pockets and Edith's packet, mirror and red string in Lem's. So, although the floes swayed and dipped, they didn't sink.

They jumped from floe to floe until Lem reached a stretch of ice with a pile of brown seaweed. He was stepping around it when there came a loud bellow and the seaweed was thrown aside to reveal a large sea lion with long yellow tusks, huge flippers and a bad-tempered scowl. Without checking to see if the next floe would hold him, a surprised Lem jumped. The floe sank beneath the surface and icy water filled his boots so he jumped again.

Diving into the ice mush the angry sea lion propelled itself up behind Lem forcing him to leap over a huge expanse of water. Slipping and sliding, Lem headed for the ice pebble beach at the bottom of the glacier.

Behind him swam the sea lion. Behind it ran Chad and Swift trying to avoid all ice floes containing brown seaweed. But it was no use. Great lumps of seaweed were tossed aside as more and more sea lions took to the water and swam alongside the boys, bashing against the floes, trying to unbalance them.

On the boat Nutty barked and Celeste, who was halfway up the mast, shouted down to Lyla that they should go and help.

`We can't,' Lyla yelled back. `See how the sea is dragging at the anchor. We have to stay on board and throw it out again and again. Otherwise the boat could float away and leave us all stranded.'

Meanwhile it was only after the three boys had raced up the beach that Lem realised they were in a triangular-shaped trap made up of an ice pebble shore, jammed ice floes, and the two very high walls of ice.

`There is something strange going on,' he said. `The sea lions could have caught us but they didn't. I think they herded us here and now they're floating out there to stop us from getting back to the boat.'

Chad stared back at the sea lions with their long lethal tusks and their spiky black whiskers. There had to be at least ninety of them. When had they become so many? `Can you talk to them, Lem?'

Lem, who was examining the walls for an escape route, shook his head. `I tried when the big one was chasing me, but all it said was, "Catch the intruders, catch the intruders". Swift, if you stood on my shoulders, could you shimmy up between the two walls to get to the top?'

Swift eyed the apex where the walls joined and noticed there was a rough patch on either side half way up. If he could reach it he might be able to dig foot holes. `Yes.'

`Good. When you're at the top drop down your rope.'

`What will I tie it to?'

`Yourself, our daggers and our swords dug into the ice.'

Swift glanced back at the sea lions. `That will leave you unarmed.'

`Then you'd better climb fast. Quick, climb onto my shoulders.'

Swift had often used his dagger to climb the branchless iron trees of the Forest or the sheer cliffs around the waterfalls, but stabbing into ice was difficult. Sometimes it crumbled before it froze around the blades leaving him dangling from Lem's long sword without a foothold. Sometimes the blades cut his fingers and sliding up the ice made his ribs ache with the cold. But once he reached the rough patch it was easier and he was soon lowering down his rope. As the rope hit the ice pebbles there came a distant triumphant shout from Lyla and Celeste.

Chad scrambled up the rope, swinging and slipping as he followed Swift's footholds. Lem didn't wait for him to get to the top because the sea lions had begun lumbering out of the water after them. By the time he scrambled over the cliff's edge, the ice pebble beach was covered in huge and shiny brown bodies.

The glacier sloped steeply upwards but they hadn't walked ten steps before they discovered it wasn't solid. There were holes everywhere and more appeared as they slid and slipped on the ice. Through its surface they could see turquoise-coloured tunnels, bottomless chasms and plunging ravines. Sometimes - although they realised it was a trick of sunlight - they thought they saw rows of frozen people.

They climbed all day and would have continued into the night with the help of the three moons' light, if it weren't for the blizzard that blew up and blinded them with stinging sleet. They dug a hole in the snow and huddled together in their ice cave. Next morning they saw that a four-footed animal had circled their hole during the night.

`Wolf?' queried Chad with his hand on his sword.

Lem poked at the pugmarks with his boot. `No. Some sort of very large cat.'

They looked around to see if some sort of very large cat might be stalking them at that moment, when they saw ant-sized Lyla and Celeste waving from an ant-size boat. Lem took off his cape and using his sword to hoist it, waved back.

The rest of the morning was spent getting to the caves, which they discovered were full of squawking gulls and their smelly feather, seaweed and driftwood nests. The first five caves came to abrupt dead ends. But the sixth turned into a winding tunnel that was too dark for them to see how far it went. The nests in this cave were oval-shaped, made from matted fur and animal bones and were twenty times the size of the gulls' nests.

Swift climbed inside one of them. `Do you think they belong to the very large cat?'

Lem shook his head. `Cats don't make nests. But it's not here so let's go back to a gull cave, eat some eggs and make some torches so we can see where this tunnel goes to before whatever it is comes back.'

After frightening off the seagulls Swift lit a fire and baked some eggs while Chad and Lem made torches out of seaweed and driftwood. After they'd eaten they tied the torches to their backs and returned to the big nest cave.

Swift handed Lem his bow and arrows. `A long sword isn't much good in a narrow tunnel and if you are going on alone I won't need them.'

`But until then we are coming with you,' added Chad.

Lem slung the bow and quiver over his shoulder, gave Swift a brief brotherly hug and Chad a cousinly punch. Then, after tying the end of Edith's red string to a large bone, he held his torch high and stepped into the tunnel. Chad and Swift followed. Three turns later they'd lost him. They called his name and searched for the red string but couldn't find it, so in the end they backtracked to the glacier.

By the time Lem realised that Swift and Chad were not with him and that the string had come undone and was trailing behind him, he'd turned too many bends and taken too many side tunnels to go back.

Anyway, he told himself, as he double knotted the string to a stalagmite, hadn't Edith said that only he could find the ice dragon? He would find the boys later when he returned with the dragon and the talisman
.

If you return
, a small niggling voice said in his head. He stifled it. Now was not the time to be afraid. Now was the time to be the hero he always imagined he was.
Hope you are
, added the niggling voice. `Oh be quiet!' he said aloud.

The tunnel changed shape at each bend. Sometimes it shrank so he had to crawl. Sometimes it divided into two or widened into caverns full of stalactites resembling giant's teeth. Often there was a blue light flickering through the ice and he had no need of his torch. Other times it was so dark ahead that he was afraid he would step into a void.

On and on he went, relighting new torches from the old and unwinding the string until, squeezing through a narrow gap, he entered a large cavern full of ice columns. The stillness was so unearthly that he did what he always did when he was scared, he started singing. He was half way across the cavern and on his fifth rendition of The Three Moons' Song when he heard a full-throated wolf howl.

His first sighting of the wolf came after the string ran out and he'd tied its end to a column.

It stepped out from behind a column of rock, its teeth bared, its blue eyes narrowed and its white neck-fur standing on end. It growled, and then the words `Go no further,' popped into Lem's head.

`Why not?' he thought back.

`Because it is dangerous,' answered the wolf, advancing stiff-legged and wary. `How is it that you can understand me?'

Determined not to show fear at the closeness of such a dangerous animal, Lem told the wolf that he was Prince Lem and that two M'dgassy queens had given him the magical gift of understanding animals.'