“Stand aside!” he hissed, pushing the dwarf down in the hot sand and peering with one red eye into the little pool they had made. For a moment, the green goo remained clouded, but then it suddenly shone like a mirror, and the dark figure of a raven appeared in the cactus-flesh bowl.

“At last!” cawed the raven, dropping the stone he had been holding in his beak. “Where were you, master? I’ve thrown more stones into this sea than there are stars in the sky. You’ve got to get that brownie and eat her. At once! Look at this!” Indignantly he raised his left wing, where the stone Sorrel had thrown at him still clung. Brownie saliva lasts a long time.

“Don’t make such a fuss!” growled Nettlebrand. “And forget the brownie. Where’s Twigleg? What was he doing when he eavesdropped on the djinn? Had his ears plugged with raisins, did he? I haven’t seen so much as the tip of a dragon’s tail in this ghastly desert where he sent me.”

The raven opened his beak, shut it, and then opened it again.

“Desert? What desert?” he cawed in surprise. “What are you talking about, master? The silver dragon flew over the sea ages ago, taking Twigleg with him. I last saw them riding a sea serpent. Didn’t he tell you about that?” The raven shook his wing again accusingly. “And then the brownie cast her magic spell with the stone. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Twigleg didn’t lift a finger to stop that little fur-faced brute.”

Nettlebrand frowned. “Flew over the sea?” he grunted.

The raven leaned forward a little way. “Master?” he said. “Master, I don’t have a very clear view of you.”

Nettlebrand spat impatiently into the cactus bowl.

“Yes!” cried the raven. “I can see you better now.”

“Over what sea?” Nettlebrand shouted at him.

“You know the sea, master!” cried the raven. “You know the serpent, too. Remember the night of the full moon when you hunted the dragons as they swam? I’m sure it was one of the same serpents that thwarted you then.”

“Shut up!” bellowed Nettlebrand. He was so angry, he could have smashed the cactus bowl with one blow of his paw. Snorting, he dug his claws into the sand. “No, I don’t remember, and you’d better not, either. Go away now. I have to think.”

The startled raven retreated. “Yes, but that brownie,” he squawked in a small voice. “What about that brownie?”

“Get out, I said!” Nettlebrand roared.

Straightening up and growling, he lashed the sand with his tail. “That stinking flea! That spidery monstrosity! That sharp-nosed birdbrain! He actually dared to lie to me! Me!” Nettlebrand’s eyes were blazing. “I’ll trample him to death!” he snarled at the desert sands. “I’ll crack him like a nut. I’ll eat him alive the way I ate his brothers! Aaaargh!” Opening his jaws, he roared so loud that Gravelbeard threw himself onto the sand, trembling, and pulled his hat down over his ears.

“Up on my back, armor-cleaner!” snapped Nettlebrand.

“Yes, Your Goldness!” stammered the dwarf. Weak at the knees, he ran to his master’s tail and ran up it so fast that he almost lost his hat. “Are we going home at last, Your Goldness?” he asked.

“Going home?” Nettlebrand gave a hoarse laugh. “We’re going hunting. But first you’ll tell that treacherous spindly homunculus how I perished miserably in the desert.”

“You what?” asked Gravelbeard, bewildered.

“I rusted up, you fool,” Nettlebrand snapped. “I rusted, I got sand caught everywhere, I was buried alive, all blocked up — oh, invent any story you like. Only make it sound good, make it sound so convincing that the little traitor, suspecting nothing, will jump for joy and lead us to our prey.”

“But,” said Gravelbeard, gasping for breath as he hauled himself up on his master’s gigantic head, “how are you going to find him?”

“Leave that to me,” replied Nettlebrand. “I have a very good idea where the silver dragon was going. But now we need a nice big stretch of water for you to deliver your made-up story. And if you don’t manage to make him believe every word of it,” said Nettlebrand, his muzzle distorting into a terrible smile, “then I shall eat you alive, dwarf.”

Gravelbeard trembled nervously.

Nettlebrand dipped a black claw in the puddle of spit and disappeared like one of the ghostly apparitions of the Great Desert. Only the prints of his mighty paws, together with Gravelbeard’s feather duster, were left in the sand, but the desert wind soon covered them up forever.

31. Return of the Dragon Rider

It was dark inside the tomb of the dragon rider, although the noonday sun was blazing down on the land outside. Only a few dusty sunbeams made their way through the crumbling walls and fell on the strange carved patterns adorning the walls of the tomb. There was enough space under the stone dome for even Firedrake to turn around easily. A strange, heavy fragrance rose from some faded flowers lying on the floor around a stone sarcophagus.

“Look,” said Zubeida Ghalib, taking Ben over to it. The dry petals crackled under their feet. “Do you see this writing?” The dracologist put her hand on the stone slab covering the sarcophagus.

Ben nodded.

“It took me a long time to decipher it,” Zubeida went on. “Many of the characters had been eroded by the salty wind blowing in from the sea, and no one down in the village knew what they said. None of them remembered the old stories clearly. Only with the help of two very old women, whose grandmothers had told them tales of the dragon rider, did I manage to decipher the forgotten words — and, this morning, when I saw you and Sorrel riding into the village on Firedrake’s back, it was as if they had come to life.”

“Why, what do they say?” asked Ben. His heart had been thudding when Dr. Ghalib led him into the burial chamber. He didn’t like cemeteries. They frightened him, and now here he was inside a tomb. But the fragrance rising from the dry petals was reassuring.

“It says here,” replied Zubeida, passing her ringed fingers over the weather-worn characters, “that the dragon rider will return in the shape of a boy with skin as pale as the full moon, coming to save his friends the dragons from a terrible enemy.”

Incredulous, Ben examined the sarcophagus. “Is that really what it says? But …” Baffled, he looked at the professor.

“Did some soothsayer say so at the time, Zubeida?” asked Barnabas Greenbloom.

Zubeida Ghalib nodded. “Yes, a woman who was present at the dragon rider’s deathbed. Some even say now that those were his own words.”

“He said he’d return? But he was a human being, right?” asked Sorrel. She laughed. “Oh, come on! You humans don’t return from the World Beyond. You lose yourselves there. Either you lose yourselves or you forget the world you came from.”

“How do you know if that’s true of all human beings?” asked Zubeida Ghalib. “I know you can enter the other world whenever you like, Sorrel. All fabulous creatures can, except for those who die a violent death. But there are some humans beings who believe we, too, have only to become a little better acquainted with death to be able to return, if we want to. So who knows, perhaps there really is something of the old dragon rider in Ben.”