The Magus and Jack were in the library.
‘Jack, can you turn that goblet into solid gold?’
‘I cannot,’ said Jack, keeping his eyes on the Magus.
‘And neither can I. Yet, together, I believe we might. Put out your hand . . .’
Reluctantly Jack did so and the Magus put his own hand over Jack’s. Jack felt a burning sensation like holding something hot that is getting hotter. He struggled.
‘Let me go!’
But the Magus tightened his grip. Jack looked up at him and saw that he was in a kind of trance, so Jack did the only thing he could think of and let out a kick right at the shins of the Magus. The Magus let go with a yelp. Jack ran for it. In his panic as he reached the hallway, he dodged through a door and found himself face to face with the top of a tree. He didn’t even think, just swung down the downward tree, breaking and falling through the colossal branches, and he found to his astonishment that he had dropped into another world.
A growing world, a green world, a huge world.
These plants weren’t cabbages or sweet peas or lettuces or apples; they were quite unlike anything Jack had ever seen.
* * * The glasshouse was hot as a hot summer day and dark as a hot summer night – not quite dark, and not the thick dark of scariness or the inky dark of a hole; in fact it was quite a light dark, as light as dark can be, like on the longest day of summer as it changes into night, and so Jack could see easily.
Drops of warm water fell on him from the leaves, and the air was so moist that it was like breathing water.
Jack looked up. Far above his head were gigantic green leaves that spread from branches thick as pillars that grew out of tree trunks too big for Jack to wrap his arms around, too big for three Jacks to wrap their arms around.
Lower down were plants with soft spongy hairy leaves, like creatures, and when Jack brushed through them he felt the hairs on the leaves touch him like whiskers.
There were palm trees that he had seen in pictures in books, their bark pale brown and rough and ribbed. He picked up a coconut from the floor, but he didn’t know it was a coconut and he wondered if he had found the egg of some big creature, but what kind of creature lived here?
Jack shoved the coconut into his pocket and went on through the strange forest. And it was then that he saw an eye watching him.
A wide unblinking eye. A wide unblinking eye still like a pool is still, but deep as an underground pool is deep.
Jack opened his mouth but no words came out, which was just as well, because he was facing the very tip, the very top, of a very big dragon.
‘Well met, Jack Snap. You have been waiting to speak to me, I know, but I know not why so.’
Jack remembered what Crispis had said about a dragon having the right to speak first, so he reckoned that it should be safe now for him to answer. ‘I have indeed been waiting, for I am sure that you can answer me a question.’
The Dragon shot out a purple tongue to catch a big blue fly.
‘No doubt, but what is it that you will do for me?’
Jack had no idea what should or could be done for a dragon. ‘I have seen you on maps,’ he said, ‘in the bottom corners, where there is writing that says HERE BE DRAGONS.’
The Dragon looked pleased. ‘Yes, my picture strikes fear into the hearts of men, for that is where I live – in the hearts of men. In their greed and envy and in their hoardings and hidings.’
Jack didn’t understand any of this, but he had heard that dragons speak in riddles.
‘What do you eat?’ he asked suddenly, immediately wishing he hadn’t. The Dragon looked amused.
‘Are you wondering, perhaps, if I will eat you? The answer is, that I eat what there is to eat, and if Jack Snap is what there is to eat, then eat him I will. Yet, I am well provided for today. I will not speak of tomorrow.’
‘Where do you come from?’ said Jack, who wanted desperately to run away, but found himself unable to move. And the silly questions keep forming and foaming in his mouth like soap bubbles and he wished he would be quiet. But at the same time he had the strange thought that it was as though the Dragon was asking itself questions through him.
‘I began in the world that you see before you,’ said the Dragon. ‘Your knowledge is very small and you did not know that once the whole world looked like this forest here, deep and dense and vast and untravelled. There were frogs as big as St Paul’s Cathedral, and reptiles whose bodies were longer than the Thames. There were birds whose wingspan darkened the sun, and there were spiders whose webs were like spun cities. The tiniest fly could have carried you off as an eagle does a lamb.
‘In that world, so great a heat from the sun and so great a moisture from the canopy of the trees caused a perpetual steam to rise from the floor of the forest, and from this steam creatures of every kind emerged, hunting, crying, stalking their prey. At evening the creatures of your nightmares came slowly to drink at the edge of a purple lake fringed with trees that cast odd shadows on to the water, and in whose branches hung fruit and nuts enough to feed a nation. Nuts the swell of pumpkins, sardines that would take two men to land them. Not that there were any men, for this was a time before men, and that is also a time that will come again in the far, very far distant future, when the Earth reclaims herself, as she will.
‘My kind and I were plentiful. We roamed and ranged the full stretch of the Earth, and if we had continued, your kind could not have come to be.’
‘The good Lord made the Earth,’ said Jack, ‘and everything in it within seven days.’
‘Mayhap so,’ said the Dragon. ‘But not everything at the same time. Not everything at once. How long were seven days in those days, Jack? You cannot answer me, for you do not know.’
And Jack did not know how to answer and he was silent.
‘When my kind became extinct, do you think it was so simple for us to disappear? No, not so. We disappeared from the face of the Earth only to return in the deepest lairs of men.’
‘When a thing is gone it is gone,’ said Jack stubbornly. ‘When a house is knocked down and another built in its place, why, the first house is gone for ever.’
‘Even that is not so simple as you would believe,’ said the Dragon, ‘for whatever has stood in the world leaves behind an imprint, an echo, a scent, a spirit. What is destroyed is also reclaimed. What has been lost waits to be found.’
Jack was out of his depth, like a swimmer who can hardly see the land. Dragons talk in riddles, yes, in riddles . . .
‘Time passes,’ said the Dragon, ‘the clock chimes, men are born, grow old, and die, the world changes. All that is true, Jack, but that is not the sum of truth. You are young, but your deepest mind is as old as the mind of the first man who ever was, and what he saw, you can see, and what he knew, you can know, and what he feared, you fear too. You are many Jacks, many minds, many lives, but you live this one now, and that is what you see, like a man in a great house who confines himself to a single room and a single view.
‘And I, I am older even than mankind, and I have seen much.’
Jack thought of the Thames, and how his mother had told him that the Romans had rowed up the river and how in those days, so far away, the banks were thickly wooded and mammoths roamed the land. And how there were rich houses along the banks of the Thames, and the mammoths were all gone, but the river still ran its course. It was the same river. Perhaps his mind was like that river.
‘Yes so, Jack Snap,’ said the Dragon. ‘You are like that river.’
Jack said, ‘The Magus can read my mind too.’
The Dragon said, ‘The Magus is able to read your mind only when you are troubled in mind. When you are asking yourself a question, or when you are afraid, or when you are in doubt, then he can read you. When you are certain, and if your mind is bold, he cannot. There, I have told you a useful secret.’
‘There’s an old man locked in the cellar,’ said Jack, blurting things out as usual. ‘He’s a King, and he said I had to find you and bid you to prepare him a Bath.’
‘And if I do that,’ said the Dragon, ‘why, what will you do for me, Jack Snap?’
Jack stood a long time. He said nothing.
‘And your mother is here . . .’ said the Dragon softly, ‘is she not, and your dog?’
‘Does the Magus know that?’ said Jack, suddenly anxious in his mind.
‘He does now,’ said the Dragon, ‘for your foolishness has told him so.’
Jack went red. ‘You are the same as him!’
‘Not so, Jack Snap, but something of so.’
Jack turned and tried to stumble away. He felt stupid and angry and scared. Was the Dragon really the Magus and the Magus really the Dragon? Why did the Dragon talk in riddles all the time?
The Dragon called him back. ‘Jack Snap! I am the only one who can help you.’
‘I can’t trust you,’ said Jack, ‘if you are him or of him!’
‘I did not ask you to trust me,’ replied the Dragon, ‘and if you knew anything about dragons, you would not trust me. Your trust is not interesting. You want something from me and I want something from you. That is interesting.’
‘What do you want from me?’ asked Jack.
‘I want the Cinnabar Egg that he keeps in his bedchamber.’
‘I don’t even know where he sleeps!’ said Jack.
‘He does not sleep,’ said the Dragon, ‘but you will find the Egg and bring it to me. It looks rather like that coconut you have in your pocket.’
Jack started guiltily. The Dragon knew everything. The Dragon suddenly plucked a coconut from a great palm that grew beside him, split the nut, and gave it to Jack to drink.
‘Drink to our bargain,’ said the Dragon, ‘for that is how the race of men seals a bargain.’
Jack drank, expecting to fall down dead, but the coconut milk was delicious.
‘And if I find the Egg . . . and if I bring it to you?’
‘Only in the sulphur waters can the Sunken King be set free.’