The Origami Dragon And Other Tales (12 page)

Aventur should
have been terrified, but the griffin was just too beautiful to fill
him with anything other than wonder. It had huge wings of with long
green feathers tipped with gold and blue. Its beak was gold and
covered with a pattern of delicate red lines. Its paws were deep
royal purple, and its claws were silver. It opened its mouth and
hissed angrily, and Aventur saw that its tongue was a delicate
shade of pink while its throat was black.

Aventur should
have been scared, but instead he was entranced. He stared at its
delicate white eyebrows and cast admiring eyes over the peacock
patterns in its skin.

“More beautiful
than the first dawn of spring,” he whispered to himself, reaching
forward to stroke its face.

The griffin
snapped at him in warning, ruffling out the feathers on its face.
Aventur slowly drew his hand back. He kept staring into the
griffin’s amber eyes, trying not to blink. The beast winked one eye
at a time slowly uncertainly. It snapped its beak again, and swept
its wings over its back. It looked inquisitively down at the boy
before it, and appeared to be thinking. The griffin normally stayed
away from humans, and it had never met one that wasn’t afraid of
it. It didn’t know what to do with prey that faced it. Besides, it
didn’t hunt men, preferring a diet of lamb and scorpion. It sniffed
the air, wondering what Aventur would try next.

Aventur drew
his flute out, hoping the animal enjoyed music.

He blew a
cautious note on his flute, watching the griffin’s appearance
closely.

It seemed to
enjoy his music, blinking again and then holding its head to one
side. The cheeps of its young quietened, and Aventur began playing
louder and more confidently. The griffin began to purr, and
occasionally clicked its beak in time to the music. The beast
seemed to relax slightly, and so did Aventur. As he played he cast
an admiring eye over the animal’s features: the vivid colours and
delicate fractal patterns in the feathers, the soft lines and clean
spots of its fur.

Only one thing
was out of place on the griffin: one of its feathers was jutting
out of its wing and into the sky. The griffin shuffled its wings,
and the feather stuck out sideways like a tree growing out of a
smooth cliff face. As soon as Aventur noticed it, he couldn’t take
his eyes of it. He wanted it; surely the griffin would understand
if he took it?

The feather
seemed about to fall out. The griffin scratched at it
absent-mindedly with its back claws while it listened to the music.
Aventur began to walk slowly towards the feather, still playing his
flute. The griffin eyed him warily, but he kept playing, and that
kept the beast content.

Finally he was
within reach of the feather. His hand shot out to grab it, and he
jumped backwards as the griffin swiped at him with a paw. The
griffin roared loudly, spreading its wings and raising up on to its
hind legs, towering above Aventur. The young musician stepped
backwards from the animal, but still faced it. He had the feather
clutched tightly in his hand and waved it in front of him like a
sword.

“Good friend,
please excuse my rudeness! I only wish to relieve you of a
discomfort that I would cherish for the rest of my days! Let this
not come between our-” but Aventur had been backing away from the
griffin as he spoke, and had come to the lip of the shelf.

He felt his
foot slip off the cliff, and he began to fall. He could hear the
griffin screaming above him, but he couldn’t tell if it was from
anger or surprise. He landed heavily in the branches of a small
bush growing from the side of the mountain, managing to grab one of
its thin branches with his hands. His weight began to pull the
bush’s roots out of the crevice they clung to, and Aventur once
again began to slide down the mountain.

He screamed as
he fell, tumbling in the air. The valley and mountains spun around
him, swapping places and dancing around his head. He felt a
shooting pain in his foot and wondered how badly he would be
injured. He closed his eyes and prepared for the worst, content in
the knowledge that he had seen a griffin before he died.

His body jerked
unpleasantly and giant wings beat above him. He opened his eyes to
see the sky below his feet and the mountains above his head. He
tried to move, but realised he was hanging uncomfortably by one
leg. He could see the griffin’s claws wrapped gently round his
foot. The beast had caught him as he fell, and was now bearing him
back down the mountain. His weight was too much for it fly
properly, and it quickly stopped trying to flap, instead gliding
smoothly through the air.

“Beautiful,
wise beast! Merciful, wonderful lord of the air!” Aventur called
out, but his words were whipped away from his lips.

As they neared
the bottom of the mountain Aventur began to worry about their
landing. They were moving too fast for it to be safe, but the
griffin didn’t seem intent on slowing down. It swooped down through
the valley, dangling Aventur above the tips of the apple trees. The
young man gasped as green leaves shot past his eyes. He began to
laugh, and then gulped as the griffin released him and he began to
fall head-first towards the ground.

He landed in
the orchard pond with a splash, sending a spray of water high above
him so that rained back down on the pond as heavy droplets. By the
time he had surfaced the griffin was just a dot in the sky. Aventur
swum to the shore and sat in the shallow water, breathing
deeply.

He opened his
hand, and saw that he was still grasping the huge griffin’s feather
that he had taken at the top of the cliff. He had held it even as
he fell, even as the griffin pulled him through the air. He waved
the feather gently in the air to dry it, laughing as he did so. He
checked his few possessions: he could find his knife and journal,
but not his flute. He thought he must have left it near the
griffin’s nest. If so, it was a welcome exchange for the feather,
and he hoped the griffin chicks learnt to use it somehow.

He snuck back
into his home. He shared an apartment in his uncle’s house with his
mother, a couple of small rooms on the second floor. He climbed in
through a window, and pulled off his dirty, wet clothes. After
seeing the griffin’s finery he was inspired to greater things. He
opened up his closet and searched through the collection of old
clothes it contained. He found a red shirt, and matched it with a
pair of yellow pants. A white scarf and blue hat completed the
outfit, although he knew it was far short of the griffin’s
beauty.

“In the future,
all men shall talk of my style and elegance, and even the griffin
will envy my finery,” he promised himself.

He stuck the
griffin’s feather in his hat and placed his few treasures in his
pockets. He had little to take with him: a few bronze coins, a
dagger and a few colourful rocks. He pulled his mother’s portrait
off the wall and stuck it down the front of his shirt. Then he
climbed out of his window and began walking out of the valley.

Life beckoned
to Aventur, and the valley was no longer enough for him. It never
would be again, because Aventur wanted so much more for his life
than the valley could ever hold.

For he had seen
a griffin, and even the sweetest apples could never compare.

Aventur’s
adventures continue in the full length novel‘Wish’.

-
from the
notes of Dr Whenson

During my time
working with the man I knew as Rob Echosoul, I learnt more about
the dark side of this world than any sane person would ever wanted
to. He told me stories that kept me awake at night, stories that
made me buy both a gun and a crossbow, and stories that I could
simply not believe no matter how many times I heard them. As part
of my efforts to chronicle his life, I have recorded a few of his
tamer tales. This is one of them, and has to do with the cause of
both his terrible injuries and incredible endurance.

I had found
Rob, dying, outside my house. For reasons recorded elsewhere, I
took him in and cared for him. His injuries were extensive, and he
should have died. In fact, I think he did for a while, but his
recovery was remarkable. It was only a week later that he was
sitting in a chair out the front of my house, enjoying the sun and
slurping his way through a bowl of chicken soup. I spent years of
my life working in an Afghanistan field hospital, and I had never
seen anything like it. Nor was this recent disaster the closest he
had come to leaving our world through violence.

“I came even
closer once, Doctor, if you would believe it,” he said to me,
enjoying my constant surprise at his steady improvement.

I did believe
him, although it defied all I knew about medicine. As part of my
treatment, I had examined every inch of his body. The terrible
lacerations that had brought him to my notice were my first
concern, but once I had stitched these up and cleaned the blood
away I noticed older, deeper scars. The worst were around his side
where it looked like he had been savaged by a great white shark. I
never mentioned these scars to him, for there was much about his
life that I did not want to know.

My ignorance
was shattered when he finished eating his soup, turned to me and
said:

“I bet you were
wondering what kind of animal left such large tooth marks on my
side?” he asked, as if reading my mind.

“Not really,” I
lied.

“Of course you
were, Doctor. Professional interest, am I right? You would be a
poor doctor if you hadn’t noticed them, and a poor mind if you had
not wondered at their origin. Those scars are souvenirs of my first
adventure as a freelance hunter. They also mark the first time I
met Feather, and the first few millions I ever made. I was young,
so the money didn’t last, but my friendship with Feather did. Pull
up a chair, Doctor, and let me tell you about it.”

I had a
recorder sitting in my pocket, as was my recent habit, and I
carefully switched it on while fetching a second chair. At the
time, I didn’t think he had noticed the recorder, but of course I
found out later that he had known all along. I also brought out
some medical supplies, because it was time to clean his wounds
again. He grimaced when he saw what I was carrying, but gave me his
first arm to work on.

“That first
real adventure was very nearly my last. I was tough back then, but
you can see that the bites would have finished a normal man.
Luckily they healed well, as all my injuries do.”

I remember
nodding at his comments and said, “Incredibly well, possibly even
unnaturally well.”

“As a surgeon
you would know, of course,” Rob agreed, “and I expect that I have
as robust a body as any you have healed, but even then this is
something more, much more. Things are seldom what they seem in the
clandestine world of supernatural espionage, and those scars are
more valuable than you might believe. They are one of the reasons
I’m still alive, although they do have their drawbacks
occasionally.”

I told him that
they looked like bear bites, or possibly a shark. It was hard to
tell, as I had little experience with animal bites. I did know that
it looked nothing like the common or even uncommon marks I had seen
during my years of education and practice.

“Werewolf,” he
told me proudly, lifting his shirt and tracing the bites down his
side.

I snorted, he
grabbed my hand and made me trace the scars.

“You see the
deep marks that show a triple line of canines on both the upper and
lower jaws? Not made by a dog, but unique to the werewolf. You
don’t believe me? It will take you a while to change my dressings,
so let me tell you how it happened. It all started in a little
French café in a small village somewhere south of Paris. I had
recently left my home country in less than happy circumstances, so
I was trying to keep a low profile until the storm of consequences
blew over. I had just left my first employers, who were also in
many ways my makers. They had given me many gifts, and believed I
owed them a debt of loyalty. I thought they were manipulative
devils who would happily send me to my death to benefit their own
schemes. Perhaps we were both right.”

I think he had
been expecting me to ask him who his employers had been, but I had
found that the answers to such queries upset me and my view of the
world. I knew that he had worked as some kind of government agent
before going independent, and that was enough. He looked a little
disappointed at my silence but carried on.

“The reasons
for my leaving are a story for another day, but it won’t surprise
you that my bosses weren’t very happy when they found I had quit.
They scoured the whole of Britain for me, checking every hideaway
and safe house I had ever used. They even went as far as stopping
international travel for two days so that I couldn’t escape by
plane or boat. However, it never occurred to them that I might take
myself out of the country on my own steam, and I was halfway across
the Channel before they even suspected I was gone. I was young, so
I thought France would be far enough to hide but close enough to
keep an eye on things. In hindsight, I was naive to believe that
anywhere in Europe would be safe.”

“And how was
the Channel?” I asked, checking his heart rate and blood
pressure.

His heart beat
dangerously slowly, but he assured me that this was normal for him.
His blood pressure was fine.

“It was cold.
And dark. I was happy when I could finally climb out, and I found
myself in a small village in the countryside. I was looking for a
quiet spot, but that wasn’t to be. My employers were keen to find
me, and even the French countryside isn’t as peaceful as you might
hope. You might ask why, if they wanted to find me so badly, didn’t
they televise a picture of me?”