Chapter Fifty-Two
She awoke a long time later to find a little Amazonian rodent had crawled under the covers with her.
Nestled against her chest, she stroked the tiny creature’s glossy fur, listening to their hectic heartbeat.
They squeaked every now and then, little paws running against her chest bone.
Frida thought they must be dreaming. She gazed up at the rocky ceiling, a soft dreamy light slanting through the entrance.
The roof was covered with crystalline stalactites.
A sort of blueish rock, shot through with gold that danced in the queer light.
She had no idea what time it was. In another life, she might have panicked, but the cave was so peaceful, the stalactites so beautiful, and her companion so deeply asleep, that she just lay there.
She didn’t know how long it had been since she’d felt rested.
She didn’t know how long it had been since she’d slept through the night. Not since her mother had died.
At some point, her rodent friend woke up and squeaked to find Frida looking down at them. With a shy exclamation, they scuttled away in a hurry, muttering,
‘Must get along, must get along.’
Frida sighed with pleasure, stretching out her limbs and giving her own little squeak, before crawling out from her nest. Next to her bed, she found a neatly folded tunic.
She picked it up, running her fingers over the light bark-brown fabric, woven with a soft natural fibre she didn’t recognise.
Unadorned, apart from a single zigzag pattern across the hem.
Quickly, she slipped it on with gratitude.
Feeling more relaxed and at ease with herself than she had in a long time, she had another drink of water, took a baked and gnarled sweet potato to nibble on, and padded on bare feet out of the cave.
At first, she just stood in the entrance and gazed down at the pink misty light that hovered over the carpet of trees.
Dawn or dusk, she wondered. It must be evening, she deduced, as the colours deepened.
She guessed the sun’s rays had already dipped below the canopy.
At first, she thought the dragons must be elsewhere.
The ledge was empty and all she could hear were the raucous cries of a jungle preparing for nightfall.
But then faintly, she thought she heard the soft murmurs of dragon whispers, drifting from behind a brace of trees, their furry aubergine-coloured leaves the size of dustpan lids, their bark the colour of fire.
Padding carefully across the ledge, she slipped between the mammoth trunks, feeling the brush of wispy cobwebs across her face, sparkling like diamonds.
Grief was there, but it didn’t floor her this time.
‘Little stink!’ Lucky cried in a stage whisper, the moment she’d emerged on the other side of the trees.
A musky light casting the world in scarlet and gold.
Her eyes widened when she took in the scene.
Lucky lay across a wide plane of black rock, curled up with his tail around him as he nestled against his father’s side.
The ledge seemed to wrap all the way around the cliff and Frida guessed they were at the back of the cave here, surrounded by tall sprigs of ferns, regal palms and those dustbin lid leaves, casting fluting shadows.
The silver dragon’s scales shimmered in the dying sunlight, sharp and blinding.
Against the side of the cliff, a low depression had been filled with tree fluff and scarlet feathers, all carefully arranged to soften the hard rock beneath.
It reminded Frida of the nest the terracotta dragon had made for the sixth shard of her Jewel.
She could hear the layers of the jungle soaring around her, and she didn’t realise her hand was over her mouth as she took a wondering step forwards.
Lucky, who’d lifted his head when she’d appeared, now lowered it back down onto his oversized paws, and gave a contented sigh.
‘That’s me,’ he told her.
The egg that rested in the nest was enormous. Of course it was. It was nearly as large as she was. The shell was thin and delicate as glass, with an inner fire that rippled across the surface – all the purples of the known world, and more.
‘Fire-spoken-and-soaring-on-exalted-sky-and-deep-notched-trees-with-great-hope-in-many-veined-hearts,’ Frida said quietly, her voice barely a breath in the twilight. She understood where they were now. When they were.
Lucky beamed at her.
The silver dragon’s long, sharp claws curled as he lifted his head.
The purple reflected in the dark slits of his pupils.
Reverently, she approached him, getting down on her knees next to him.
For a time, they just sat there in quiet meditation, watching the flickering of Lucky’s egg as the gloaming shifted to deep sapphire, then black, a slender sickle moon rising.
When Lucky started to snore, the silver dragon finally spoke. ‘Tell me.’
Frida’s voice was hoarse. It felt like she hadn’t used it in a long time. ‘I think – this is the moment before your son hatched. A hundred years ago, a hundred years before my time, but a hundred years after the time I was just in.’ She gazed up at him, her eyes wide. ‘Is that right?’
The silver dragon inclined his gigantic beard, smiling into it. ‘Yes.’ He paused, and then he said with tenderness, ‘You were asleep for a long while.’ In the bushes, a large animal nosed through the undergrowth. ‘Three days and two nights I think, in your time.’
Somehow, what he’d said didn’t come as a shock. None of it did. She just blew out a soft laugh.
They were quiet again.
The moon rose. Soon it began to reflect in the egg’s surface.
Frida asked, ‘Will he hatch soon?’
‘In a few hours, I believe.’
Frida sucked in her breath. ‘So quickly?’
He nodded.
‘You seem remarkably calm!’ she exclaimed.
The silver dragon chuckled, a deep sound that reverberated through the rock, ‘I’ve been waiting a long time.’
But Frida’s heart sank. ‘Will we have to leave before he hatches?’
The silver dragon turned to look at her, a deep interminable sadness in the cracked slits of his pupils.
She could just make out Lucky’s sleeping form, snoring on the other side of his dada.
She felt his absolute joy at being here again, in the warmth of his father’s safety, and the yawning, awful emptiness of the goodbye that was to come.
She choked back a guttural cry, and another rising tide of grief. Would it ever stop?!
She shook her head, swallowing bile and, after a few moments, said fiercely,
‘But Lucky can come back, right? Anytime he needs you. This is the past, and you managed to get us here, so you could do it again!’
The way the silver dragon continued to look at her, with such awesome quiet, the ore in his eyes shifting like rivers, she knew. ‘It’s a one-time deal?’
He inclined his fearsome bearded chin.
Suddenly she knew she’d been holding something so tightly to her chest, something so desperate and precious, so hopeful, that she could barely speak.
It was the unspoken hope that somewhere, somehow, she could still reach her mum.
Her mum was also somewhere in these pockets.
She hadn’t admitted it to herself yet, but she’d been going to beg the dragon to send her to one of them.
But as they stared at each other, the knowledge of his answer reflected in his ancient face, she could only choke out a single word. ‘Why?’
For a moment, even the silver dragon seemed at a loss. Finally, his voice broke the silence, clanging against her skin. ‘I am sorry. But there is a cost.’
The sound of bats whizzed through the treetops. ‘What is it?’ she gasped hoarsely. ‘I’ll pay it. I’ll pay it.’
‘It is too much.’
She was going to argue, but when she saw his expression, all hope bled out of her.
She slumped. For a time, she said nothing.
Then, with growing dread, she forced herself to ask, ‘Did Lucky have to pay something to bring us here? To bring me into the past?’ She stared up at him, terrified. ‘Or did you?’
He gazed at the fire-tarnished egg. He curled his tail a bit tighter around his giant snoring son, exhaustion marking every one of his wrinkles as his shoulders sagged.
Then with a gnarled paw, he tapped the dark rock beneath and just said, ‘They are all down there in the earth. Remember this. All the people you love.’
She hadn’t thought it was possible for her heart to shatter any more than it had already, but she was wrong. It could. Maybe it would keep shattering forever.
But as the silver dragon looked at his son, from whom a steadily growing puddle of drool was emerging, she found herself nodding dumbly.
‘All of this is precious,’ the silver dragon told her. His silver scales stark against Lucky’s wild and wondrous purple.
Frida felt those glimpses of her mum slipping through her fingers, but she stared down at the black rock too, and breathed in the rich scent of the jungle, and the rich scent of the earth.
Her mum was down there. She’d seen it. And then she managed to smile, licking salty tears off her lips.
She’d had twenty-two years with her mum.
It wasn’t enough, it wasn’t anywhere near enough, but she understood a bit more now.
It was also endless. She and her mum would always be together down there in the dirt, long after she, too, had died.
So Antony was right after all. There was a heaven.
It went round and round.
The knowledge eased something in her bruised heart.
But she had to know. ‘Why are we here? And why did you ask Lucky to give me his magic? That’s what he said, that you told him to do it. But I don’t understand why!’