“Kessi!”
“Yes, Kessi, let's get
her!”
“She's an easy one, isn't
she?”
“I want to see the Loch
Ness Monster!”
“No, it's not Loch Ness,
that's in Scotland. Where is it again?”
“Ayia Napa, at the
southeast end of Cyprus. They call it the Friendly Monster.”
There were three more
shrines to find. According to the inscription, they had to leave
Lycia for last, so it was a contest between Cyprus, an island south
of Turkey; and Mysia, in northwest Turkey. One of the charms of
Cyprus was that they had a modern legend of a water monster that
sometimes ripped up fishing nets, but never hurt anyone.
“Do you think the Friendly
Monster will come to shore?” asked Spiderdog.
“Sometimes it does, but
usually people see it from a boat,” answered Yogo. “We're going
to use the Water Master house. It was built as a flotation device.”
“The Water house?”
exclaimed Bending Chalice. “Your house is a boat?”
“Haven't you noticed how
puffy it looks?” she returned. “It's made of spider silk and
seagel. We don't really steer it; we move it magically.” It moved
like the dragons. If a dragon got in the way of another one -pop- it
was suddenly in another spot. When everyone was ready, the Water
house suddenly appeared -pop- in the sea south of Cyprus. Everyone
collected at the windows except BlazeDragon and Franklin, who were
the lookouts, sitting on the ridgeline holding on to the carved prow.
“I love coming here,”
BlazeDragon told Franklin. “This is great! It's getting cold at
home.”
“Cyprus is nice,” he
answered. “Turkey won't be as warm.”
The people inside were talking about the monster. “Do you think it's a Water dragon, Rudna?” PonytailGirl asked. “Dalfgan does.”
“No, I don't really,”
she answered. “It is always alone. People only see one at a time.
If it were a Water, I think people would see groups of them.”
“But a Water is the
friendliest and the most likely to visit people,” Dalfgan objected.
“Still, no one ever says
the monster is blue. If they say anything, they say it is green,”
Rudna countered.
“Well then,” said
PonytailGirl slowly, “it might be a Seaweed.”
“That's likely,” Rudna
answered, “if it is any of the dragons we know about. Tame Seaweeds
like attention from humans, but they don't get along with each other.
You hardly ever see them together.”
“Maybe they are too
selfish and they fight,” laughed PonytailGirl.
“Look out below! Thar she
blows!” called BlazeDragon, “I see one!” It was a Seaweed. It
swam around them and caught blushrooms they threw to it. It came
shooting up high out of the water and waggled its fins while they
cheered. Then it dived. BlazeDragon stood up and tried to see if it
was coming back up on the other side of the Water house, but he lost
his balance and fell in. Rudna and Yogo hurriedly started swirling
the water to bring him up, but there was something bringing him up
already. When the splashing stopped, they saw it wasn't the Seaweed
they had been watching; it was a Water, a rather small one. It
brought him to the houseboat and nudged him towards the door.
“Lady!” sputtered
BlazeDragon. “It's Lady out here!” Sure enough, it was their
friend from Lake Nes. Yogo gave her some blushrooms. Lady rubbed
BlazeDragon's arm with her head and disappeared under the water
again. “Now we'll never know which one is the Friendly Monster,”
he said.
They took the Water house
back to the floating island before they went to Olympus-Cyprus to
find the shrine. Again they had to avoid people. There was a British
long-range radar installation at the top and three smaller Cypriot
bases nearby, one an airfield, and one another radar station. There
were roads and buildings all around, but to the northeast of the peak
was a steep-walled canyon that seemed like a good hiding place. The
children called Kessi and the hidden doors opened right away. “I
guess I don't need to use the detector after all,” laughed Yogo.
In the afternoon they went
to Mysia. “We have Cold and Fire shrines left,” said Dravin.
“Anything to say which one is here? This is supposed to be the
place where the Greek gods watched the Trojan War. It's the tallest
mountain in western Turkey, and it's pretty cold there by now.
There's a ski resort.”
“It has to be the Cold
shrine,” said Tim, “because I've been finding out about Lycia and
I'm sure that one is Fire. There's a place near the sea where fire
comes out of holes in the rocks. It's caused by natural gas coming up
through cracks in the earth, but the ancient Greeks didn't know that.
They thought the fire was from a monster called the Chimera.”
“Ah,” exclaimed Rudna.
“Then that's the name of the Fire shrine. Now we know why the names
of the Fire statue and shrine weren't given in the inscription. Everyone knew them already.”
Olympus-Mysia was the
tallest of all the mountains they had visited except for the first one. It was heavily
forested, with glaciers on the north side and the ski resort on the
west. On the south were summer resorts and hiking trails, now covered in
snow. They had a hard time finding the right place, but the detector
finally reacted in a canyon downhill from the glaciers. Nippy and
ShockWave were getting tired and hungry, and it wasn't until Spiderdog thought of feeding them some fish that Kimzar responded and opened the
doors. “We should have remembered that the hunters always gave
gifts of fish to Kimzar,” said Dravin.
When they went to Lycia in the south-west corner of Turkey
it was warm, much warmer than Mysia had been. Mount Olympus-Lycia was the
center of a national park. An 80-passenger cable-car went up the east
side, with a view of the sea all the way, and a restaurant at the
top. The main hiking trail was on the west and the Chimera
natural-gas vents on a foothill to the south, with Greek and Roman
ruins scattered here and there. The bay was a refuge for endangered
sea turtles. Fortunately since the tourist season was over, it
was not crowded. They spent a long time on the mountain without
finding anything.
“Let's look at that
prophecy again,” said Vander. “What did it say about fallen
shrines?”
“In Lycia, the fallen
shrine is last to gather in,” quoted Rudna. “We talked about that
and decided it meant the Chimera had fallen.”
“Python fell too,” said
Tessa, “but it wasn't mentioned in the poem. What else could it
mean?”
“The statue falling?”
“The cave falling in?” “What would cause that?” “A
landslide?”
“We didn't see any
landslides, and the detector would have read through it anyway,”
said Mohs.
The children wandered off. “Maybe
it's not on the mountain," suggested Spiderdog. "Does it have to be on it?"
“It doesn't say that,” answered PonytailGirl. “It just says Lycia. Maybe it's by the fire."
“It doesn't say that,” answered PonytailGirl. “It just says Lycia. Maybe it's by the fire."
“What fire?” he asked.
“The Chimera fire. It's
the Fire shrine. Maybe they hid it by the fires.” They took their idea
to Tim, who liked anything having to do with fire.
“You think they put the
Chimera statue with the Chimera fires? Not a bad idea. There's even a
shrine there – wait a minute. There is an old Greek shrine to
Hephaestus over there. It's all fallen in, of course.”
They looked at each other.
“Fallen in!” “Fallen shrine!”
“Who's Hef- what's his
name?” asked Bending Chalice. But they were headed off to tell
Dalfgan. Hephaestus turned out to be the Greek fire god. The Romans
had called him Vulcan. The flames, some as large as campfires, came
up through a dozen small openings on a bare gray rocky slope in the
middle of the forest. On the downhill side were the walls of the old
ruin, and the turtle bay was visible below that, between two hills.
Bending Chalice had the idea to bring
a Fire dragon, so he and Vander went home for Norbert and some Sarjin
peppers. By the time they got back, Tim had taken over the detector and
was going carefully over the ruins with it. Bending Chalice sat Norbert down near
Tim. “Speak!” he said. Norbert spit out a small flame, and Bending Chalice
tossed him a pepper. “Good boy!” The detector lit up.
“Chimera! Chimera!”
called the children. A red glow shone in the stone floor of the
shrine. A thin red line outlined a set of doors which slowly opened,
revealing stairs going down into the dark. Some ways below, they
could see a red glow. All the wizards ignited their staffs and as
they descended the stairs the glow grew brighter.
The vaulted room at the
bottom of the stairs was lit by eight torches fed by natural gas vents. In the
center of the room was the statue, with glowing red eyes. They didn't
go out immediately, as the eyes of the others had. They took Chimera up to the
floating island and settled him into his place in the circle of
shrines. The eyes of the shrine next to him lit up, and then the next
one and the next around the circle, until they were all lit. And then
they all went out. At that moment, all the dragons on the island flew
up into the air and roared. “Let's go see if any more dragons have
an orb,” suggested Spiderdog.
“We can check, but I don't think there will
be any more until our dragons get older ,” Tim
replied. “More dragons with higher energy. Then we will see."
