Chapter 4
Polis was an old fortress, which had gradually become a town. It sat on top of an enormous pile of rock, towering over the flat and muddy wetlands around it. There was a story about an ancient giant, Pol, who in a fit of rage had grabbed an entire mountaintop and flung it at a taunting mermaid. The mountaintop had landed slightly short of its mark, creating the Pol Rock, which now rose in front of us, black and square and forbidding.
"Have you been here before?" asked Ontari, who had been mostly silent for the entire trip.
"Once," I said. "With my mother. But we came in through that gate..." I pointed at Eastgate, which was where travelers arrived if they followed the old Polis road.
"This is quicker," she said. She had left the road a while ago, guiding the leggy black stallion along a much less traveled path.
The horse had had to leap or wade through several sluggish canals, which had not been easy with two people on its back. I sincerely hoped Ontari's assurance that this was the quicker way was true; my bottom and my back hurt incredibly from the long ride in my awkward sideways position.
The gate we finally came to was much smaller than Eastgate - not much more than a man-and-horse-sized opening barred by a metal grille. Thistles and nettles crowded the track, and the grille looked depressingly rusty. Did anyone ever come this way? But it turned out a guard was actually waiting to let us in.
"All quiet?" Ontari asked.
"Yes. So far."
Ontari nodded, then spurred the black stallion forward into a narrow passage between old, crumbling fortress walls - a passage so narrow that the toes of my boots brushed against the brickwork more than once. In places it was so overhung with bridges and galleries that it became more of a tunnel, and I wondered at the stallion, who walked there so calmly. Horses were meant for fields and open plains, not cramped and shadowed pits like this one. I hated it. When the sky was visible at all, it was just a narrow ribbon of blue somewhere impossibly high above our heads, and though the afternoon sun gilded the tall merlons, it never reached all the way down into this dank and gloomy canyon. Yet the stallion climbed steadily upward, toward the top of the Pol Rock. The time I went to Polis with my mother, I had been a bit frightened by the teeming swell of people, carts, and beasts seemingly all trying to get through Eastgate at once. This was completely different; on our whole journey from the guarded gate to the fortress at the top of the rock, we met not a single soul. Yet somehow, that was not very reassuring, either.
Finally we reached yet another gate and yet another guard, who greeted Ontari and let us into a yard big enough to breathe in. A groom came to take the reins of the black horse, and I slithered uncertainly to the ground. My knees threatened to buckle, but Ontari held my elbow until my legs became a bit steadier.
"This way, Clarke," she said and guided me toward some stone steps, still holding my arm. I was loath to give up my glimpse of the sky so soon, but down the steps we went, and into a long cellar passage. Then down another stair, through a door, along another passage... I could get lost in this place, I thought, with no trouble at all. Finally Ontari came to a halt in front of the bars of another rusty iron gate.
"Wait here a moment," she ordered, taking a key from her belt and thrusting it into the cumbersome lock. She slipped through the gate, locked it again behind her, and disappeared from sight.
I waited obediently. This cellar smelled strange- of animals, but also of something else, something rotten and unpleasant. Perhaps we were close to the stables? But horses didn't smell like this. I tried to peer through the gate but could see nothing in the dimness except more iron bars and a weak hint of daylight at the end - or was it just a torch? There was a clang, a thud, and some peculiar hissing and dragging noises. Then Ontari reappeared, striding hurriedly. She opened the gate to let me through, and I saw that she had armed himself with a spear that was taller than she was.
"What is this place?" I asked nervously.
"The Dragon Pit," she said tersely. "Stay close to me and you'll be quite safe."
"The Dragon Pit?" I could not believe it. There were rumors about the Pit of Polis Castle, and about the monsters in it: huge scaly worms capable of swallowing a grown man in a few gulps. A sixteen-year-old girl would be just a little tidbit to them.
"Calm yourself. I'm used to handling them. And you do want to see your mother, don't you?"
"Yes... but isn't there some other way? Do we have to go past-"
"Yes. And come on, I just fed them, so that they would have other things to occupy them while we cross the Pit."
She gave me no time for further objections. She simply seized my arm and pulled me along through the next gate and into the open.
I came to an abrupt halt when I saw the first dragon. It was not as big as I had feared, for in my nightmares dragons were bigger than houses. But it was something much worse than that. It was real. Not quite as tall as a horse, but almost three times as long.
Scaled like a serpent. Fat, waddling legs with huge claws that clicked against the rubble. Yellow eyes and a long, flat skull. And a maw full of fanged teeth, from which dangled a bloody mess that used to be the hind leg of a calf. A bit farther off five more monsters were busy ripping the rest of the bullock apart. And we had to walk past all of them.
"Now, Clarke. Quietly and calmly," Ontari said, and started forward without letting the nearest dragon out of his sight. It opened its jaws somewhat and hissed at her, and a heavy rotten stench washed over us. I clung to Ontari’s arm, and my heart beat so that I could barely hear anything else. But the dragon apparently did not want to relinquish the meat in its mouth in favor of a taste of girl. It watched us sullenly with gleaming yellow eyes while we walked past it, less than three dragons' lengths away. No sound had ever been sweeter to me than the clang of the gate swinging shut between me and that creature
.
"Why are they here?" I asked. "Who would willingly keep such monsters in his house?"
"Don't you like them?" Ontari was still watching the nearest yellow-eyed reptile. "Can't you see that they have their own kind of beauty? Strong, lithe, and dangerous. And you can trust them - trust them to be true to their natures— always and completely. Not much different, really, than your own snappish guard dog."
"They're nothing like Ernie!" I was outraged at the thought. Ernie, who liked me to scratch his belly and his ears; Ernie, who was a big, warm, cuddly bedmate for us when mom was away.
"Not many people see it," Ontari said. "But the beauty is there all the same. And as guards they are better than the most vicious pack of hounds you can find me."
The yellow-eyed monster flung back its head and swallowed its meat. Almost a quarter of a calf, hair and hide and hoof and all, gone in one mouthful. You could see its neck swell with it, a lump moving slowly toward the belly of the beast, making the greeny-gray scales shift and ripple, almost like water. At least the calf was already dead, I thought. What would it be like to be swallowed alive?
Ontari turned away from her "guard dogs" with some reluctance, it seemed. "Your mother is waiting," she said. "We had better hurry."
It needed yet another key to get us through the last gate, and then we were inside a whitewashed cellar vault, lit only by thin slivers of daylight entering through three peepholes high above us. The vault itself sported two doors, but Ontari led me up a flight of stairs, along a short passage to a third door, which she opened.
After the dimness of the vaults and the Pit, the light in this room was nearly blinding. Warm yellow evening sun poured in through a large circular window and made the woman standing in front of it appear only as a dark form. But it was a form I knew. "Mom..."
She turned around. The light behind her was so brilliant that I couldn't see the expression on her face. But the sharpness in her voice was unmistakable.
“Clarke. What you are you doing here?”