Dragonkeeper 2: Garden of the Purple Dragon (2 page)

Kai swallowed it whole. Then he gobbled down the other five caterpillars in Ping’s pouch. He sat back on his haunches and belched. Ping hoped that meant he was finally satisfied. After walking round in a circle three times on the edge of Ping’s gown, the little dragon settled down. He was asleep almost immediately.

When the old green dragon had flown off to the Isle
of the Blest, leaving her on the shores of Ocean with a dragon hatchling in her care, Ping had had no idea what to do next. Danzi had told her she was the Dragonkeeper and that she would know what to do. It was a heavy responsibility for a girl of ten-and-two years. She didn’t want to stay on the beach. She didn’t like Ocean. It was overwhelmingly huge. She felt insignificant enough as it was, without being dwarfed by the endless waters of Ocean.

The beach where Kai had hatched from the dragon stone was a long way from any town or village, but that didn’t mean it was always deserted. Fishermen came to the shore to launch their flimsy bamboo and goat-hide boats, and Ping knew she had to keep away from people. If anyone saw Kai, the news of a baby dragon would soon spread from person to person, village to village. She didn’t want that. Though Diao, the dragon hunter, was dead, there would be others who saw dragons only as creatures to chop up and sell. She’d already had to confront one of them—a necromancer. He’d captured her and Danzi, and had taken the dragon stone. He had powers beyond understanding that he used only for evil; he was a shape-changer too, like the old dragon. Ping felt a flash of pride. She’d managed to outwit him. She’d escaped with Danzi and the dragon stone.

Even a dragon as small as Kai was worth much gold to such greedy men. Also, if word of the dragon found its way to the Emperor’s ears, he would send imperial
guards to arrest her. As far as he was concerned, Ping had helped the only remaining imperial dragon escape. If he found out that she’d also kept secret the birth of a new dragon, he would be furious.

The sun disappeared behind a distant mountain. The sky darkened. Loneliness crept over Ping like a chill as it always did when she thought of Liu Che. They had had long conversations together, just the two of them. Although he was the Emperor, he was just ten-and-five years old. He had enjoyed spending time with her. Ping had led the lonely life of an ill-treated slave girl. Liu Che had lived the pampered life of an over-protected prince, but they had at least one thing in common—neither of them had ever had friends of their own age.

She reached out to spoon some fish soup into her bowl. With her gown pinned down by the sleeping dragon, she could only just reach the pot of bubbling liquid on the fire. Her soup spoon wasn’t as roughly made as her bucket (which she’d carved from a log herself); it was a bronze ladle with an elegant curved handle that ended in a dragon’s head. She had bought it in the village where she had gone to buy the goat and her store of grain and lentils. An iron ladle would have been much cheaper, but iron hurt dragons when it was nearby. When it touched them, it burned their flesh. Her knife was bronze as well.

Ping was relieved that Kai was asleep, there was no squawking; there were no talons digging into her. But
evening was her least favourite time of the day. It was the time when she missed her friends the most. Liu Che wasn’t the only friend she’d lost. She had enjoyed the young Emperor’s company for just a short while, but Danzi and her pet rat Hua had been her companions throughout the perilous journey from the mountains in the west all the way to Ocean in the east. Danzi was a dragon of few words, but he was most talkative in the evenings. Other people thought of rats as dirty, ugly pests, but Hua had been Ping’s saviour on many occasions. Before Hua had come into her life, Ping had no one. She’d never had a family. Her parents had sold her as a slave to Master Lan when she was small.

Old friends and new, somehow she’d managed to lose them all. She remembered the sounds that the old dragon made. They hadn’t set her teeth on edge like the noises of the baby dragon. Danzi’s sounds changed with his mood—the wind-chime sound of his conversation sounded melancholy, but meant he was happy; an urgent gonging meant he was impatient with her; the jingle of bells was the sound of his laughter. Then there was the gentle voice that she heard in her mind translating his sounds into words. When Kai was still inside the dragon stone, she had been able to hear him as well, not in words but in raw emotions—sadness, happiness, fear. That ability had disappeared after he hatched. It had flown away with the old dragon. She kept waiting to hear words form in her mind, just as
they had with Danzi, but there was nothing. Kai made all sorts of squawks and squeaks, but Ping had to guess what they meant.

She rinsed her bowl and filled it with water from a smaller pot on the fire. She sipped the hot water. (She’d long ago used up her small supply of tea leaves.) Her thoughts darkened with the sky. She tried not to think too much about Danzi and Hua. She wanted to believe that they were both happy and well—healed of their wounds and weariness by the magic waters of the Isle of the Blest far across Ocean. But she couldn’t convince herself this was true. At first she had spent hours staring off to the east in the hope of seeing the old dragon flapping back towards her, but as the months slipped by Ping had come to accept that he was never coming back. She wasn’t even sure if she believed that the Isle of the Blest existed.

Sometimes when she remembered Danzi, it brought tears to her eyes. At other times, she felt frustration and anger bubble up inside her. She was grateful to the old dragon for freeing her from the misery of her life of slavery at Huangling Palace. She was thankful for all the knowledge he had given her about herb lore, about the constellations of stars, and how to concentrate her
qi
power. She owed everything to Danzi. She hadn’t even known her own name until he came into her life.

At the same time, she was very angry with him. As they had travelled to Ocean, day after day,
li
after
li
, he
had taught her much about the world, but the one thing he hadn’t told her was how to raise a baby dragon. He hadn’t even told her that the dragon stone she carried for him was an egg. Rather than telling her the names of birds and flowers, the mating habits of bears, why hadn’t he spent every minute telling her everything he knew about dragon rearing? Instead he had given her just a few words of advice before he flew away from her and his dragon son—forever.

It made Ping furious when she thought about it. He had told her the baby dragon needed milk and she had found a goatherd willing to sell her a she-goat whose baby had died, but she didn’t know how much milk Kai needed every day. It seemed he would go on drinking until he burst if she let him. Danzi had also told her that as Kai grew he needed to include insects in his diet, and later small birds, but he hadn’t mentioned when and how many. She had started feeding him caterpillars and dragonflies when he was three months old because he was always squawking as if he was hungry.

Ping shivered. The fire had died down. It was dark. Her bowl of hot water had gone cold. The sleeping dragon’s purple scales glowed faintly in the light from the slender moon. She carried him into the cave where they slept. Inside, a pile of dried grass and pine needles served as a bed. She put Kai on the bed and then lay next to him. Kai slept in a tight coil, with his nose under his back paws and the end of his tail drawn up through
the centre. It looked as if someone had tied him in a knot. He wriggled closer to Ping until his spines stuck into her side.

At least the baby dragon slept well. Ping’s nights were peaceful, but she often couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t the snoring near her ear that kept her awake, but the thoughts churning in her mind. Was Tai Shan the right place for them to live? Should she have stayed near Ocean? How would they get through the winter?

Rain had been falling from a grey sky all morning. Ping stood at the mouth of the cave and watched the drops dimple the pool. Kai had eaten a small breakfast of worms, but it wasn’t enough for him. The rain showed no signs of stopping, but sooner or later she would have to go out and milk the goat.

She sniffed. There was a bad smell in the air. She sniffed again. It was a sulphurous smell like rotten bird’s egg mixed with long-dead fish—and far too familiar. Ping got up and soon found a large puddle of dark green
liquid in a corner of the cave.

“Kai! I told you to go outside to pee. Even if it is raining!”

The little dragon hung his head. The spines along his back drooped. His scales dulled to the colour of plum juice.

“You’re always wet from swimming in the pool, but you can’t put up with a few drops of rain!”

Kai slunk away to the back of the cave and hid his head under his front paws.

“You’ll have to wait for your milk until I’ve cleaned this up.”

Ping mopped up the dragon urine with some dry moss, but the smell lingered.

The weather showed no sign of improvement. The goat was standing outside with rain dripping from her. Ping didn’t feel like getting soaking wet, so she brought the goat inside. She rested her cheek against the animal’s damp coat as she milked her. The goat was a patient creature that caused no trouble and put up with the trials of life with a small dragon without complaint. She didn’t protest when Kai nipped at her knees or jumped out from behind rocks to frighten her. And every day, without fail, she produced warm milk.

Ping filled a bowl. As usual the dragon was there in a flash, slurping up the milk as if he was starving. Sometimes there was a little left over for Ping to drink.
Not this time. Kai lapped up every last drop.

The smell of wet goat only added to the stench in the cave, but Ping didn’t have the heart to turn the animal out into the rain again. Her food supplies were dwindling. She should have been out collecting nuts, berries and mushrooms to add to her winter store, not sitting around doing nothing. She stared out through the drizzle. The nearest peaks were dull grey, the ones behind them pale grey, the furthest peaks were a faint outline almost blending into the mist. Perhaps she’d go out the next day.

Kai looked for something to amuse himself inside the cave. He dug up the pine-needle bed. He swung on the goat’s tail. He chased beetles, but never managed to catch any. He soon got bored with the amusements available to him in the cave, and went over to annoy Ping. He climbed onto her lap and walked around in a circle, pricking her legs with his sharp talons until he was ready to settle down. But he wasn’t sleepy. He scratched himself behind the ear, chewed on the end of the tie around Ping’s waist and snuffled in her pouch for more insects. It might have been pleasant to have a cat or a puppy sitting on her lap on a cold day, but dragons were not cuddly. Although they were warm-blooded animals, their scales were cold to touch, and Kai had lots of sharp bits that stuck into Ping through her gown.

Ping didn’t want to add smoke to the already-foul air in the cave, so she didn’t light a fire. For her midday
meal she ate the nuts and berries that she had collected the day before. Kai ate the last of the insects that were in her pouch, then made a high-pitched whining sound that meant he was still hungry. Ping took no notice of him, so he snuffled around the cave until he discovered a large moth folded up in a crevice of rock at the back of the cave. He jumped up, trying to reach it, but his huge paws weighed him down like stones. He couldn’t jump high enough, no matter how many times he tried. Ping could have got up and caught the moth for him, but the weather had left her as dull and lifeless as the sky.

It was cold in the cave. Kai’s breath turned to mist. If he wanted to annoy Ping he could make it linger. The cave filled with a damp white fog making it seem even colder.

The summer weather had softened Ping. It was only autumn, but she was shivering as if it were mid-winter. Her gown, though grubby and mended in several places, was still much thicker than the threadbare jacket she’d worn when she was a slave at Huangling. There she hadn’t had a warm goatskin to sleep under at night. She’d slept in a draughty ox shed and Master Lan had forbidden her to light a fire for warmth. The memories made her shiver even more. She needed something warm inside her. She decided that she would light a fire after all.

She went out into the rain and quickly collected some damp wood. With her fire-making sticks, she soon made a flame in a tuft of dry grass, but the wet
wood wouldn’t burn. All she succeeded in doing was filling the cave with smoke.

The clatter of something metallic falling on rock came from the back of the cave. Kai had discovered her precious things hidden on a rock shelf that she’d thought was out of his reach. She hadn’t realised how much he’d grown. He was standing on his back legs, rummaging through her belongings, knocking them off the shelf and onto the hard stone floor of the cave.

“Leave them, Kai!” she shouted. “They’re mine.”

There was nothing of interest for him, nothing to eat. He slunk off with his tail dragging on the ground and buried his head under the pine-needle bed. Ping didn’t scold him again. There was no point. He never took any notice of anything she said.

She picked up her scattered things. Among them were precious gifts from friends. There was the bronze mirror that Danzi had given her and the white jade seal presented to her by the Emperor himself. One end of the slender rectangle of jade had characters cut into its flat surface. The other end was carved into the shape of a dragon. She ran her finger over the cool jade. One corner was chipped where Kai had knocked it to the cave floor. She collected the rest of her things—a comb and a dragon scale which were also gifts from the old dragon. There were gold and copper coins, a jade pendant, a dish of seal ink, a bone needle and a length of red thread. There were several pieces of purple
eggshell—all that remained of the dragon stone. There was also a large dried leaf folded in two. Finally, there was the square of bamboo with her name written on it, given to her by her parents. Some of her belongings were worth a lot of money, some were worthless, but Ping valued them all.