Dragonkeeper 2: Garden of the Purple Dragon (3 page)

She had always worn the bamboo square around her neck, but Kai had snapped the string several weeks ago. She took a length of the red silk, threaded the bamboo square onto it and hung it around her neck again.

She held the jade seal in one hand and the bronze mirror in the other. They were both symbols of the office of Dragonkeeper, but they each represented very different roles.

She inspected the mirror to make sure it wasn’t damaged. On one side was an etched design—a full-grown dragon coiled around a knob that protruded from the centre. The dragon’s paw was reaching out to the knob as if it was something precious, like a pearl. When Ping had accepted the mirror from Danzi, he had warned her that it was a commitment to him and his heirs—for life. Kai was his son, his only heir, and possibly the last living dragon. She had received the mirror gladly, proud to take on the role of Dragonkeeper, but without really understanding the responsibility that came with it, the lonely life she had chosen. The mirror had been carried by all of Danzi’s true Dragonkeepers. It was hundreds of years old. She wasn’t sure she deserved the
honour. She had travelled with the dragon reluctantly at first. It had been her job to feed Danzi who was held in captivity in Huangling Palace where she was a slave. She hadn’t intended to help him escape. It was actually Danzi who had freed
her
. He had given her the task of carrying his dragon stone all the way to Ocean. She smiled, remembering how terrified she’d been at the prospect of leaving her miserable home. Ping turned the mirror over. The other side was supposed to be polished bronze. Instead it was dusty and crisscrossed with the silvery trail of a snail. She slipped it into her pouch. When it stopped raining, she would take it out to the pool and wash it.

The jade seal was the badge of the Imperial Dragonkeeper whose job was to care for dragons owned by the Emperor. Ping should never have accepted the seal. Danzi would have rather died than be held in captivity again.

A crackling sound interrupted her thoughts. A small orange flame licked around the wood in the fireplace. Ping blew on the glowing coals and more flames sprouted. She hung a pot of water over the fire, adding a few red berries that gave it a pleasant flavour. Kai came over to the fire, giving her a wounded look as if she was the one who had done something wrong. He tripped over the woodpile and fell on his nose.

Ping laughed. “Dragons are supposed to have excellent eyesight!”

She could never stay angry with him.

Kai sat by the fire. In the light of the flames his scales glinted like amethyst crystals. He squawked.

“And don’t think you’re getting anything to eat, just because I’ve put on a pot of water. It’s hours till dinner time.”

The dragon continued squawking and staring at the pot.

“I don’t know why I bother talking to you. You don’t understand a word I say.”

Ping lifted the pot off the fire with a stick and tilted it to pour the water into her bowl. Kai squawked again.

“You don’t like hot water,” Ping said.

The air around the dragon distorted and shimmered. Suddenly there wasn’t a small purple dragon sitting next to the fire but another pot exactly the same as the one she was holding. Ping spilt hot water on her hand she was so surprised. A squawking sound came from the second pot. Ping wondered if she was starting to go mad. Strange things happened to people who lived by themselves. Or was it the endless diet of fish that was making her see things? Ping picked up the soup ladle and held it out to poke the pot. Before she could, the air shimmered again. Ping felt a wave of nausea as she watched the pot turn into another soup ladle with a dragon’s head decoration, identical to the one in her hand.

“Kai, is that you?”

Ping’s nausea increased as the second soup ladle turned into a bucket and then into a baby dragon.

“You can shape-change!”

The little dragon blinked his big green eyes at her and squawked again.

“That’s wonderful! What a clever dragon you are.”

She went to the back of the cave and cupped the sleeping moth in her hands. It fluttered its wings frantically, leaving dusty grey powder on her palms. Ping held the struggling insect out to Kai.

“You’ve earned a reward.”

The dragon’s jaws snapped over the moth—and the ends of Ping’s fingers.

“Good boy, Kai.”

She kept the fire going all day. Towards evening the rain stopped. When Kai was asleep, Ping fetched the old dragon’s scale from its place at the back of the cave and went outside. The moon had risen early and the sky glittered with stars. In daylight the dragon’s scale was a faded grey, but in the moonlight it had a greenish glow. She rubbed her fingers over its rough surface. She wished she could tell Danzi that Kai was showing signs of learning dragonish skills at last. She felt a flicker of hope. If he could shape-change, it meant they could move among people. They could go to a market and buy food to see them through the cold months. Perhaps one day Kai would grow into a proper dragon.

Let muddy water stand still and it will gradually clear
.

The dragon’s paw reached out to her. His talons were huge and sharp and could have easily ripped her open, but they touched her hand as delicately as a butterfly.

“I don’t know what you mean, Danzi,” Ping said.

Ping knows
.

“I don’t.”

Do
.

The dragon opened his wings. They were not torn or scarred, but completely healed. The membrane of the
wings was divided into segments by long thin bones, just like a bat’s wings. The full moon came out from behind a cloud. Moonbeams collected in the dragon’s body until it glowed luminous green.

“Don’t leave me alone, Danzi.”

Must go
.

She tried to run towards the dragon, but her feet wouldn’t move. She looked down. The rest of the earth was as dry as a sun-bleached bone, but her feet were in a puddle of sticky mud. She couldn’t pull them out.

The dragon lifted off the ground.

“Please don’t leave me,” she wailed. “Help me get onto your back.”

The even way is often the rough track
.

The beautiful moonbeam-dragon flapped up into the night sky. The more Ping tried to drag her feet out of the grasping mud, the further they sank. The dragon shrank to a small dot of light and then she lost him among the stars. A wind blew up whipping leaves and small stones into the air. One of the stones hit her sharply on the nose. It stung, but the ache in her heart hurt much more.

Ping woke up to find a small purple dragon nipping her nose.

“Kai, I wish you’d find a less painful way to wake me,” she said as she sat up.

The despair of the dream was still with her. She
didn’t dream of Danzi often, but when she did the dreams were heartbreaking. He seemed to be trying to tell her something, but she could never understand his message. It took a few minutes for her to summon the strength to face the day.

The excitement of finding out that Kai could shape-change soon wore off. Ping’s stomach was constantly churning with the sick feeling she got whenever she saw the dragon transform. She tried not to watch, but it was hard to avoid as he changed from one thing to another when she was least expecting it.

Kai shape-changed into whatever he laid his eyes on. One minute he was a bush, the next a turtle, then he was a bowl. Ping tried to encourage him to stay in one shape, rewarding him with treats of tufty brown caterpillars. They were Kai’s favourite food, but Ping didn’t like collecting them because they squirted sticky green stuff at her when she picked them off leaves. As usual Kai didn’t understand a word Ping said. He ate the caterpillars and then changed into something else. Ping’s optimism faded. Walking around with a bowl that turned into a bush or a bucket before people’s eyes would cause just as much fuss as carrying a baby dragon.

Ping knew that dragons could live for thousands of years if they maintained good health. That was one thing that Danzi
had
told her. After five times a hundred years a dragon grew horns, after a thousand it grew wings.
Perhaps it took hundreds of years for them to learn their dragon skills. Even if Ping lived to be a hundred, Kai would still be a very young dragon. He might still need looking after.

A question had been forming at the back of Ping’s mind ever since the dragon was hatched. Who would look after Kai when she died? One day she would have to find someone to take her place. She could teach them everything she knew about dragons—but would anyone want to take on such a task?

Ping scanned the surface of the pond. There wasn’t a dragonfly in sight. She had searched the nearby bushes and hadn’t found a single caterpillar. She hadn’t bothered to go out looking for moths the night before. Now she had no insects for Kai’s breakfast.

Kai was swimming in the pool as he did every fine day. When he walked, he was clumsy and awkward, always tripping over rocks or fallen branches. In the water he moved quickly and gracefully, diving towards rocks on the bottom of the pond and gliding away from them at the last second.

“I’ll be glad when you can catch your own insects,” she said when he next came up for air.

Ping peered into the dark waters. She could see large water beetles, striped with black and yellow, diving among the reeds. She had collected the larvae of these creatures for Kai to eat, but it wasn’t the season for them now. The beetles were big. Three or four of them
would make a good meal for the little dragon.

“Why don’t you catch them instead of just chasing them?” Ping grumbled.

Since he took no notice of this suggestion, she decided to catch them herself. She fetched the fishing net that she had woven from thin, flexible twigs and dipped it into the pond. It only took her a few minutes to catch five beetles.

“Try these, Kai,” she said. “They look like they’ll make a tasty meal.”

Kai pulled himself out of the pond. He sniffed at the beetles that were squirming in the net.

“That’s all you’re getting this morning,” Ping said.

Kai squawked.

“All right, I’ll squash them for you,” Ping said.

She emptied the beetles out onto a flat rock and crushed them with the stone she used to pound grain. Kai sniffed them again. He licked at the yellow stuff oozing from the squashed beetle shells. Then he picked one of them up in his mouth. He crunched the shell and then spat it out again.

Ping sighed. “If you don’t like them, you’ll have to make do with milk.”

Ping went over to where the goat was tethered. She knelt down and rested her cheek against her flank. The goat continued to crop the grass.

“I wish Kai was as easy to feed as you are,” she said.

Kai started making noises again. Not the complaining
squawks he made when he was hungry. Not the noise he made when he wanted Ping to play with him. It was a hoarse coughing sound. Ping turned and saw that the dragon was retching. She ran over to him.

“What’s wrong, Kai?”

Ping patted him on the back, which was not easy to do to a creature with sharp spines from head to tail. He didn’t seem to be able to take a breath. Ping thought that he must have been choking, that he had swallowed something and it was caught in his throat. She banged harder on his back. He still didn’t breathe. Then with one last retch, he vomited into Ping’s lap. In among the unpleasant milky mix of dragonfly legs and caterpillar skin was a squashed water beetle.

Kai made a plaintive sound and lay down. His eyes looked dull. His tongue was no longer bright red. His scales had turned the colour of a bruise. She brought the bowl of milk over to him, but he wouldn’t drink. Ping carried him into the cave and laid him on the bed of pine needles. She gently rubbed the little dragon’s stomach.

“I’m sorry, Kai,” she said. “I shouldn’t have given you the beetles to eat.”

Ping felt ashamed. When she had first introduced insects into Kai’s diet she had given him tiny little tastes at first. Then if there was no bad reaction after a day, she gave him a little more, increasing the amount over a week until she was sure that the insect wasn’t poisonous.
She had grown careless. She could have killed him.

Ping didn’t have any breakfast herself. It didn’t seem fair to eat when Kai couldn’t. She sat by him all day, stroking his stomach. At last, late in the night, he stopped groaning and went to sleep.

Kai ate a little the next morning. By mid-afternoon he was back to his usual tricks, annoying the goat, messing up the bed and demanding food every hour. As Ping put a freshly squashed dragonfly in her pouch, her hand brushed the mirror. She remembered her promise to clean it. She took it over to the pool. The sun warmed her face. She had a feeling that there wouldn’t be many more warm days before winter set in. She glanced around, but couldn’t see Kai.

“Where are you, Kai?” she said.

He had been quiet for too long. It was always a sign that he was up to mischief. There was a branch under one of the pine trees that hadn’t been there before.

“I want you to stay close to the cave,” she said to the branch.

It didn’t respond.

“Just until I’m sure you’re completely well.”

There was a squawk behind her. She turned to find the little dragon sitting at her heels. She had been talking to a tree branch. One big disadvantage of Kai’s new-found shape-changing powers was that even when he was under her nose, she couldn’t always find him.
It would take a while for him to get the hang of this new skill, just like a child learning to walk. She had to be patient.

The mirror fitted into the palm of her hand. She dipped a corner of her gown in the pool and wiped the mirror clean. She could see her reflection. Her hair was knotted and there were leaves tangled in it. Her face was dirty and scratched. There was a scab on her nose. And she was thinner. She had been so busy taking care of the baby dragon, she had forgotten to take care of herself.

Ping remembered when Danzi had made her bathe and comb her hair. The memory brought a smile to her face, but a pain to her heart. Memories of the old dragon always had that effect on her. He would have disapproved if he saw her hair in such a state. She went back into the cave to get her comb. It was a beautiful thing made of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She started to comb her hair.