The Golden Cage (43 page)

‘You're going to teach me that spell, remember,' he said, and hearing his voice the nearest troop of warrior priests leaped to their feet. Melyn turned his back on
Frecknock, muttered, ‘At ease,' and walked slowly to his fire and bedroll. And all the way he tried not to look at his hand, tried not to think about the dragon's healing power, tried not to think how much it had felt like the touch of his god.

Errol decided early on that he didn't like flying. There was certainly a thrill in sweeping down the mountains at high speed, but it was nothing compared to the sheer terror. Benfro held him tight, and in turn he gripped on to the dragon's enormous scaly arms with all his strength, but his feet still dangled in the buffeting wind. He felt like he might slip out of the dragon's embrace and plummet earthward at any moment.

Benfro had recovered fairly quickly from being frozen, as soon as Errol gave him the remaining food. Neither of them had said anything about the events which had led to the dragon stalking off on his own in the first place; Errol suspected that Benfro was embarrassed about it, and about being saved yet again. But neither did he ask for his mother's jewel back. Errol had wrapped both gems tightly and put them in the bottom of his clothes bag along with the hoard of gold coins.

They had set off on foot at first, heading down the gully and out of the deep snow. It was hard going, pushing through the tightly packed conifers, clambering over rock falls and scrambling down scree slopes. The view Errol had seen of the grassy plains laid out to the east disappeared behind lower mountains and foothills as they descended, and then finally they reached the end of a
hanging valley, where a vast waterfall tumbled into an abyss, and could walk no further.

It had been awkward trying to work out how best Benfro could carry him. They hadn't given it any thought before; there hadn't been time. But standing on that cliff top Errol had needed every ounce of his self-control to let the dragon pick him up. It had reminded him all too much of Captain Osgal hauling him to the edge of the Faaeren Chasm like a sack of rotten potatoes to be dumped. In the end he had closed his eyes tightly and tried not to gasp too much when Benfro had grabbed him. Only much later, after the initial feeling of falling had been replaced with the steady up-down motion of proper flight and the regular whooshing beat of huge wings, had he dared to open his eyes.

Now they soared over the foothills, looking out across a landscape of open grassland and occasional copses. The contrast with the endless forest on the other side of the mountains was very marked, as if this were the true face of Gwlad, clean and unblemished. The forest of the Ffrydd was a mess of scars and ancient wounds poorly healed, a rent in the fabric of the world caused by some cataclysm he couldn't begin to understand.

They flew on for what seemed like hours, until the rolling hills smoothed out to flat plains intersected here and there by deep gullies cut by rivers and streams. A herd of animals that looked like great shaggy cattle spooked at the sight of the dragon flying overhead, some ancient instinct triggering them into stampede. Benfro stooped into a dive, dropping low over the backs of the running beasts.
Errol, apparently forgotten, choked and coughed on the thick dust kicked up by thousands of frightened hooves.

The cattle scattered, some turning back the way they had come, others flooding down a series of shallow cuts that dropped into a deeper gully with a sluggish brown river running through its middle. As they shot over it, Errol saw one of the creatures trip, tumble down a cliff and come to a halt at the bottom. From the angle of its neck and the way it had landed, he assumed it was dead.

Benfro banked sharply, wheeling so that Errol's legs swung forward. His heart leaped as for a moment he thought he was going to fall. They were close to the ground, not more than thirty paces or so up, but the drop would still have killed him. He held on tighter still as the dragon continued to turn, losing height all the while. And then, with a final lurch, Benfro pulled his head up, dropped his legs and landed. Two steps forward, his wings beating the air to counteract the force of his landing, and they were down.

‘My thanks indeed. But next time could you maybe give me a little more warning.' Errol rubbed at his chest, sore from being held so tight for so long, and stamped his feet on the ground to get some circulation back into them. It came on a wave of pins and needles that made him hop and shuffle. ‘If there is a next time, that is.'

‘I thought we could eat. And this is as good a place as any to make a camp for the night. Looks like there's a settlement a few miles east, so I couldn't have flown much further anyway.' Benfro turned away, and Errol looked back past him to where the dead beast lay. It was bigger than any cow he had ever seen before, with black shaggy
hair and huge shoulders. The rest of the herd had disappeared, no thought in their flat-faced heads but flight.

Errol found some long-dead dry branches on the shingle bank of the stream and built a fire while Benfro gutted and butchered the cow. He cooked and ate a large slab of the rich pungent-smelling meat, trying to ignore the unsettling noises as the dragon set about the rest. By the time the sun had set and the stars begun their wheel over the night sky, they had both descended into a contented silent stupor.

‘How are we going to find him?' Benfro's deep rumbling voice roused Errol from his half-asleep musings.

‘Find who?'

‘My father. Sir Trefaldwyn. That's what we came here for, isn't it?'

‘I suppose.' Errol cast his mind back over the past few days and their flight from Inquisitor Melyn. Now that he thought about it, he could remember Corwen's last words to Benfro before he had disappeared: ‘
Find your father, find Gog
.' But in the ensuing turmoil he'd completely forgotten about Benfro's father and the quest to find him. Everything had been lost in the need to escape, and then he'd been struggling just to survive. ‘Do you know where he was going?'

‘I don't know anything about him at all. He left before I was even hatched. About the only thing I do know about him is that he was called Sir Trefaldwyn of the Great Span. He had unnaturally large wings and could use them to glide short distances. I wonder what he'd make of me.' Benfro stretched his own enormous wings out, their scales catching the firelight and reflecting back a thousand
shades of orange and yellow. Errol stared at the patterns, trying to work out what they reminded him of. Maybe two dragons fighting.

‘Why exactly are we looking for him?'

‘Ah. I don't know. It's a fool's errand really. But it's the only hope of getting rid of Magog.'

‘How so? Can't you just destroy the jewel. I don't know, crush it or something?'

Benfro laughed, a deep-throated hollow chuckle that nevertheless had no mirth in it. ‘If it were that easy, don't you think I'd have done it already? Magog's jewels are spread throughout Gwlad. I've no idea how he did it, but he managed to extract them while he was still alive. I found a whole pile of them in a cavern at the top of Mount Arnahi, but I'd be surprised if there weren't more.'

‘So what was your father doing, looking for these missing jewels?'

Benfro fell silent, peering through the flickering flame light at Errol with a look of puzzlement on his long face.

‘Did Corwen not tell you? But you were there.'

‘Tell me what? When?'

‘When Corwen left us, when he told me to find my father. He thought he understood the truth about Magog.'

‘What truth? He exists, doesn't he? I mean, he's dead, but he's still about, like Corwen or Sir Radnor.' Errol was about to say
and like your mother
, but he stopped himself at the last moment.

‘No, not like them at all. Magog's presence is far more powerful, far more pervasive than that. But he exists, and if he exists, then Gog must have existed too.'

‘I never assumed he didn't.'

‘But
you know the story. How Gog and Magog fought over who would have Ammorgwm, and then when she died they couldn't bear to be near each other, so they split the world in two and went their separate ways.'

‘Sir Radnor said it was a fable, meant to teach the perils of too much pride and too much power.'

‘And so it was, but like all our fables it seems it was also true, to an extent. Magog existed, we know that. It's likely that Gog did too. So maybe they really did split the world in two. Maybe somewhere there's another world where dragons haven't been hunted almost to extinction, where men know nothing of the subtle arts and where Gog still lives.'

Something stirred in Errol's memory then, a feeling of connection as if he knew what Benfro was talking about.

‘But surely Gog would be impossibly old. How long do dragons live anyway?'

‘I really don't know. Sir Frynwy was a thousand years old, or so he claimed. Even Frecknock's two hundred.'

Errol didn't know who Sir Frynwy was, but the sadness in Benfro's eyes as he spoke of him suggested he must have been one of the dragons Melyn had slaughtered. He tried to change the subject.

‘So your father was looking for Gog.'

‘Well, in a way. He was looking for a window between the two worlds, a place where he could slip through. I guess if he'd found it, he would have come back for the rest of us. We could have escaped. Corwen thought he was a fool, chasing fairy tales.'

‘But then Magog showed up. So maybe your father wasn't as much of a fool as everyone thought.'

‘Yes,
but he's also been gone for more than fifteen years, so it's likely this window never existed. Or if it did, he never found it. Likely he's dead, his unreckoned jewels mouldering in the dark.'

‘Unreckoned?' Errol remembered the word but couldn't for the life of him recall its meaning. It was something Sir Radnor had told him or he'd learned before he'd been taken into the Order of the High Ffrydd, but like so many reollections of that time it was jumbled and unclear, mixed in with all the false memories Inquisitor Melyn had foisted on him.

‘When a dragon dies, his body is burned with the Fflam Gwir, the true flame. Only then are his memories set, and his jewels turned white. A reckoned jewel is still a powerful thing. It can influence you as long as you are in contact with it. But an unreckoned jewel is much more dangerous. It will attach itself to you, try to change you or destroy you as it seeks to be reborn.'

‘But the warrior priests collect the jewels from the dragons they kill. They don't burn the bodies or anything.'

‘I don't know what influence an unreckoned jewel would have on a man, but Magog's jewel has its claws in me, and the only way I can undo that is to reckon it.'

‘So burn it in the Fflam Gwir. Better yet, I'll throw it on the fire here.' Errol reached around for his bag to pull out the gem.

‘If only it were that simple, Errol.' Benfro laughed again, but it was a sad, tired sound. ‘I need a part of Magog's body to burn with the jewel, and the place where his bones lie is protected by powerful magics. No one can
hope to find it unless invited by one of the twin brothers hatched there. Magog invited me in once, but I doubt he'd do that again.'

‘So you need to find Gog. And to do that you need to find the window to his world. You need to follow your father.'

‘Exactly. But I don't know if my father found it, or if he's still alive. I don't even know if there is another world, let alone a window that leads to it. And even if there is, the chances are that Gog died millennia ago.'

Benfro dropped his head as if weighed down by the impossibility of his task. But something stirred in Errol's memory.

‘What would Gog look like, do you suppose?'

‘I don't know. Old. Far older than Corwen. But probably not small and withered like the dragons here.'

‘No. Corwen told me that dragons made a choice many centuries back, and had been shrinking ever since. And he showed me what he looked like when he was young. So it's possible that Gog would be able to fly still.'

‘I'd think so, yes. Why?'

Errol remembered his dream of the strange castle, climbing endless stairs inside the head of a boy called Xando, coming to a huge room at the top of the tallest tower. He'd seen an impossibly old yet still vigorous dragon there. And that was where Martha was trapped.

‘I think Gog is still alive, and I think there must be a way to his world. I've seen it in my dreams.'

Benfro's head rose at Errol's words, and his ears swivelled forward.

‘Your dreams?'

‘Well,
I say dreams, but they were more.' Errol told the dragon all about his encounters in that strange world, and as he did a glint of hope, or perhaps understanding, shone in Benfro's eyes.

‘I've seen this place too,' he said. ‘I've flown over it. But I was attacked by a group of dragons.'

‘Four of them? Three male and one female?'

Benfro nodded. ‘It was the last time I was in Magog's repository. You were there too – just lying there. I tripped over you and found myself flying through mountains I didn't recognize. But how could you have been in my dream?'

‘How could you be in Magog's palace and yet still be sleeping in the cave? How could I be in a castle in another world? I can't begin to explain it, but I know these aren't ordinary dreams. Martha's been calling to me, I'm sure of it. She's trapped there, in Gog's world, with Gog himself.'

‘Then there must be a way of getting there. But how? And where is it?'

Errol didn't answer at first. He was trying to sort all the pieces into some semblance of order in his mind. There was so much he couldn't even begin to understand, but he knew that Martha was depending on him. He and Benfro both needed to find a way across to this other Gwlad, and if that meant trying to follow a fifteen-year-old trail, then that's what they would have to do.