The three of them walked away. Simos Walkwell and the farmhands filed out to their various jobs. His mother went off with the kitchen workers to supervise the making of the week’s shopping list. Colin Needle was left alone with his oatmeal.
It had gone cold.
Chapter 7
M r. Walkwell sat waiting for them in front of the house. He had hitched two horses to the ancient wagon this time, the brown mare that had brought them back from the train station and a spotted gray, perhaps to help with the extra weight of a rusty old two-wheeled trailer piled with feed sacks that had been attached to the back of the wagon. The whole thing had the look of a small and not very exciting parade.
Haneb, the slender man with the scarred face, sat in the wagon, staring down at his feet. Three other farmhands sat with him among the feed sacks, short, squat, tan-skinned men who looked as if they might be Asian. They touched the brims of their odd hats and smiled shyly at the children.
“It’s the Three Amigos,” Tyler said quietly to Lucinda, but she either didn’t remember the movie or didn’t think it was funny enough to laugh.
Mr. Walkwell didn’t say a word as the children and Ragnar climbed on. When they were settled atop the feed sacks he clicked his tongue and the horses started around the driveway, wagon wheels scrunching through the hard-packed gravel. He was no more talkative when Tyler asked questions about the previous night, the dragon, or the day’s itinerary.
“Simos could beat standing stones in a staring contest,” said Ragnar, smiling. “You’re wasting your time, boy!”
They drove for almost a quarter of an hour across the farm to their first stop, which surprised Tyler: he would have guessed all the animals would be close to the house. When they had reached the base of the hills and the house was almost out of sight behind them, they came to a halt at a chained gate. On the gate’s far side a trail led away down the straw-colored hill.
Mr. Walkwell unlocked the gate. “You two children stay with us,” he said, suddenly and sharply. “If you disobey or anger me you will go back to the cart to wait.”
The Three Amigos (whom Ragnar had introduced as Kiwa, Jeg, and Hoka) got down and began to pile feed sacks on their shoulders until each was carrying three. Mr. Walkwell took four (Tyler felt secretly certain by the ease with which he lifted them he could have carried more) and massive Ragnar took three on each shoulder. Without being asked, Tyler helped Haneb lift a sack onto his shoulders. The scarred man did not meet his eye, but mumbled a thank-you in accented, liquid-sounding English.
“More dragons?” Tyler asked Lucinda quietly as they fell in line behind the Amigos. “Do you think this is where they live?”
Lucinda pulled up, horrified. “You’re joking, right? We’re not
… I’m not going near a bunch of wild dragons!”
Mr. Walkwell growled as he almost ran into them from behind. “Keep walking, you children. If you trip me and I drop these sacks on you, you will not thank me.”
But Lucinda was not moving. “Are we going to see a bunch of wild dragons? A herd or whatever? Because I don’t want to do that.”
The wiry old man made a snorting noise. “Do you think the world is so full of these most ancient ones that they roam about in flocks, like pigeons?” He shook his head. “No-they are special and rare. We have two dragons here on the farm. You saw one in the Sick Barn-Meseret, the female. Her mate is named Alamu. We will not see him today.” He made a strange noise in his throat. “If we are lucky.”
“I don’t understand,” Lucinda said.
“No, you do not,” Mr. Walkwell agreed. “Walk faster, please.”
Tyler said, “You let the male dragon, like, roam wild? Is that safe?”
“He would kill himself trying to get out of a cage or barn, but if he is well fed Alamu is perfectly content to stay near Meseret, hiding in the high rocky places. Naturally we keep him very well fed.”
When they reached the bottom of the hill they found themselves in a woodland of madrone and oak trees, so that instead of the hot sun they walked through ragged patches of shade. The farmhands stopped and began dropping the sacks in a little clearing where a long-dry pond had become a shallow bowl of green weeds and yellow grass. Metal troughs stood at the base of several of the trees. The men began cutting open the bags and pouring dark green pellets that looked like giant rabbit food into the troughs. Tyler stepped forward to have a closer look.
A long brown hand descended on Tyler’s shoulder, stopping him as if he’d run into a wall. “Stay here, boy,” Mr. Walkwell said. “They are easily startled.”
Ragnar, standing at the center of the clearing, lifted his fingers to his mouth and whistled three loud, shrill notes. They all waited, Haneb and the other farmhands standing close to Ragnar, as if a rainstorm was coming and the blond man was a tall, sheltering tree.
“What are we waiting for?” Tyler said at last. “And why isn’t it coming?”
“Not one but many,” Mr. Walkwell said. “And they are coming, child. Likely they were far away. Listen!”
For a few moments Tyler had no idea what he meant-he could hear nothing but the rumble of a distant storm. Then he realized it was June in the California valley and there wasn’t a cloud anywhere in the sky. The drumming noise grew louder until the ground itself began to quiver. Tyler had a sudden feeling that the entire grove of trees was being lifted up by gigantic engines and was just about to take off into the sky like a rocket ship.
Then the unicorns came.
They flooded into the clearing like a storm, with so much power and such a swirl of reddish dust, muscled flanks all white and gray and dappled, that they seemed like clouds hurrying along the ground, struggling to fly as far as possible before they burst and released their burdens of rain. But there was no mistaking the bright sharp horns, or the flashing of their eyes, or the glint of their pearly hooves when some young ones excitedly reared in the air at the center of the clearing, jabbing at the air.
“Oh!” said Lucinda beside him, and for the second time in two days Tyler realized that his sister was holding his hand. Strange as that was, he didn’t pull away. As he watched the tall creatures thundering back and forth across the clearing, snorting and bucking, ivory horns shimmering like flickers of lightning, he felt he was watching some kind of magic river, that if he lost contact with the ground it might just carry him away and he would never be heard of again.
“ Oh! ” his sister said again. There really wasn’t much more to say.
The unicorns crowded into the clearing, bumping and rearing so that it was hard even to guess how many there were-two dozen? three? They seemed at least as big as ordinary horses (Tyler didn’t have a lot of experience with real horses), but more slender and long-legged, with great tangled banners of mane at their necks and tufts on their chests and ankles. But it was the horns that made something amazing into something truly unbelievable, the pointed spirals that grew, not from the tops of their heads as in the sappy posters Lucinda still had in her room, but farther down, just below the line of the eyes, like the horn of a rhinoceros.
The herd formed into groups around the troughs and fed, horns clacking together gently, almost silently, ranged according to some hierarchy that Tyler couldn’t make out, since it didn’t seem to have much to do with age or size or color or anything else. At some troughs the young unicorns fed first, while at others the small ones stood patiently while an adult with a mane like store-window Christmas snow took the lead.
“They’re so beautiful,” Lucinda kept saying, over and over.
“Where do they come from?” Tyler asked Ragnar, who seemed more likely to answer questions than Mr. Walkwell. “What are they eating? Do you have to feed them every day?”
“They come from China,” Ragnar answered him. “Or they did once. Now they are gone. Ki-lin, they called them. And they eat grass and other things, but we give them every day a… what is the word, Simos?”
