VII. The Salamander

The Sandragon could feel a rough floor of rock underneath him. It was warm, almost hot. He stirred a little, wanted to raise his wings, to stretch them out, but as soon as he moved he felt the surface of hard uneven stone on all sides. Left and right, above and below, before and behind, hard hot stone. As soon as he moved his wings or raised his head Sikander could feel hot hard dark rock. He could not move more than half an inch in any direction.

For the first time in his life Sikander met real fear. His heart beat harder and faster than ever before. If he had been a person he would have broken into a cold sweat - being a Sandragon he felt the furnace in his belly burn low, felt his blood run cold – most awful feelings for a dragon.

Nothing threatened him, nothing hurt him as long as he lay still, but he was trapped, with no visible way out, and he knew that he could not survive in the depth of the rock for long. The idea that he might die there, buried in stone, frightened him most terribly. A Sandragon is a creature of vast open horizons, of infinite desert skies; to find himself held fast, locked down, unable to move, wrapped in complete darkness, seemed the worst thing he could possibly imagine. He wanted to scream out for help but just groaned. The sound of his voice died against the stone all around him and he realised that nobody would hear him there, deep in the earth, even if he shouted with all his might.

His mind started to run wild, looping into panic. He trembled in fear, felt sick, felt this situation was more than he could possibly bear. He tried to move again, hoping that somehow he had misunderstood the entire state of affairs and that he was still on the island, but to his greater horror his movement was immediately stopped by the walls of rock all around him.

In the back of his mind, even as panic grabbed and shook Sikander, some element of the Sandragon remained detached from the terror, and realising that there was nothing else he could possibly do, tried to dominate the fear, to let it go, to let calm return. Like waves, his fear subsided, then rose again, then settled down to a lower level, at which he could at least start trying to weigh up his options, if there were any.

Calming down, Sikander realised that although he could not see anything, he could still hear and smell, could still feel. Just as when he had found himself in the ring of trees on the island, he wondered how he could possibly have arrived in this hellish place, but as before there was no answer he could think of. Yet this idea helped him, soothed his fear a little. After all, he thought, as he had come to the Lady's island without travelling, had left it again, and now found himself in this dark hole, so perhaps he might get out again just as mysteriously. The Sandragon, somewhat comforted by this hope, settled down a little and began to take stock of his surroundings.

He realised that it was very warm indeed there, and though muffled by the rock all round him, Sikander could hear a deep roaring sound like continuous thunder, far away. Now and then still deeper and louder booms marked this throbbing noise. The far-away explosions made the very rock vibrate all round the dragon, and when he noticed this the wave of fear surged again as it struck him that the rock above and around might collapse, might crush him in an instant. As though to confirm and worsen his fear, the roaring booms grew stronger, louder, more regular, and the earth shook harder all around him. Sikander clenched his teeth and screwed up his eyes in the dark.

The rock vibrated and shook as though under the blows of some gargantuan smith's hammer. But when he opened his eyes again he realised that the darkness around him was no longer so utter and complete as it had been the instant before. An irregular hairline crack had appeared in the rockface before him. Intense heat, the smell of burnt air and glowing red and golden light came from this split in the rock.

Sikander's hope flared up – perhaps that crack might open a little wider and let him out. Shake earth, shake! Open that door a little wider! The earthquakes that had terrified Sikander just a moment before now seemed the most desirable thing there had ever been. Little by little, over a time-span the Sandragon could not even guess, the hairline crack was shaken broader and broader until at long last, to Sikander's enormous relief, the crack was wide enough for him to push his head and shoulders through, scraping hard against the edges of the crevice that had opened in the rock, then to squeeze out of his rocky trap.

The crack in the stone opened out into a tunnel not much broader or higher than the Sandragon, but the freedom to move, to squirm and stretch out his legs if not his wings, seemed like the sweetest and best of things ever. The walls of the tunnel were of hot black rock. Here and there the relatively cooler surface of the rock cracked open and Sikander could see that under the skin, the stone was incandescent with heat. The red and golden light which slightly lit up the tunnel came from the blazing heat of the rock all around him.

The tunnel was too narrow for the Sandragon to twist round in the other direction, Sikander set off the only way he could. As he proceded the air grew hotter and hotter, the thundering roar louder and louder. The tunnel split and branched again and again. There was no way to guess which turning might lead out – each passage twisted and looped in all directions – so the Sandragon proceeded at random, hoping that sooner or later he might find some way out of this underground labyrinth. For hours, perhaps days, perhaps months, Sikander made his way through the tunnels. A little at a time the relief of having escaped from the rock-trap began to wear off and Sikander started wondering whether and how he would ever get out.

Just as the fear that he might never get away again began to grow in his heart, the dragon came across a small lizard, as black, red and gold as all the rock in that deep strange realm, a halo of flames shimmering all over its body. The lizard merged in with the blazing rock so well that Sikander almost stepped on it before he realised it was there. The fire-lizard had been sleeping or had been in a trance, for it too did not notice the Sandragon approaching and when Sikander's claw bumped it, it leapt away and skittered off down the tunnel out of reach.

"Wait! Wait for me!" Sikander called out as he tried to rush after the fire-lizard. The lizard froze on a lump of blazing rock and turned back to look at the Sandragon. Its eyes had a golden glow in the darkness, just as Sikander's own did. The fire-lizard stared at the dragon coming up.

"Please help me. Please, I must get away from here, I must get out, please please help me." Sikander's voice almost cracked as he begged for the fire-lizard's help.

"Out? Out of where? This is here. What is out? Where is out? And who are you anyway?"

The fire-lizard's tone was flat, neutral, unafraid, but his questions made Sikander's blood freeze again. This underworld creature seemed to know of no reality beyond these winding tunnels in the burning earth. The very idea that there might be another world beyond this seemed to have never even occurred to the lizard.

"I am Sikander, Sandragon and son of desert Sandragons. This is no place for me. I must get out, for the sake of the Phoenix as well as my own. There must be some way to get out. Please won't you help me to get away."

"Sikander." The fire-lizard stared at the Sandragon. "I have seen you before. In a dream. Someone told me that we are somehow brothers. I know your mission and I know you must leave, but I don't know how. This is my whole world and I know of no way in, and of no way out."

"You know me from your dreams, but who are you?"

"I am the Salamander. I live in fire and this is my home. This is all there is for me. But for you there is more. You must meet the Countess Griffin. She and no other can point you at the Phoenix. You will find her on a wise fool's folly, built of a king's kindness on a hilltop, under the midsummer's midday hinge."

Sikander could make no sense of the Salamander's words, but set them aside in his memory and pursued his more immediate need.

"Salamander, if we are brothers and I am to meet a Countess then I must get out. Is there no door anywhere? Is there nothing different to all these tunnels ?"

The Salamander stared at the Sandragon for a moment then turned and set off again down the tunnel. Sikander hurried after. As they wound through the rock Sikander heard the Salamander saying to himself
"A fountain flowing with no water, a fountain never dying,
where it comes from, where it goes,
no-one knows, no-one knows,
but there can be little loss in trying."

For a long while the Salamander and Sandragon crawled through the rock. The blasts of sound grew louder and louder as they progressed and the earth shook all round them. Sikander was terrified by the idea that it might all collapse at any moment, but the Salamander seemed so completely calm that Sikander thought there must be nothing to worry about and followed on. At last they came to a circular cave filled with blazing heat. The walls were white hot and the floor itself glowed in golden light. No creature but a Salamander or a Sandragon could have survived such flaming heat.

The fire-lizard stopped at the edge of the cave and stared at a large glowing hole in the middle of the cave floor. Sikander could see another matching hole in the ceiling of the cave. As he looked down again a blast of heat and noise came rumbling up from the floor and a vast jet of molten rock and lava was hurled from far far below up through the hole in the ceiling, like a monstrous vertical express train shooting up at the speed of a bullet. Then in a shower of sparks part of the blast of magma fell back down again.

Sikander looked at the Salamander and they nodded at one another. The Sandragon stepped forward and leapt into the air above the hole in the floor of the cave. As he folded and arched his wings to fly up through the hole in the ceiling he felt a shockwave of hot air hit him from below. A wave of heat shot him skyward like a shell up the barrel of a cannon.

The walls whipped past him and in a flash Sikander was blasted out of the mouth of a towering volcano, riding a storm of sparks, molten rock and incandescent gas. He was hurled high into the sky – all obscured by the great clouds of smoke, ash and dust thrown out of the mouth of the fiery mountain.

Twisting round and regaining his bearings Sikander swooped down out of the black clouds and saw that it was dusk. The setting sun's light was obscured by ash and smoke thrown into the sky but there was enough light to see that the land all around had been wasted to a moonscape of grey and black rock. Stretching out his wings Sikander glided down and away from the violence of the eruption.

He came to rest on a black sand beach miles away from the mountain. From that distance the fountains of flame at the mountain's peak seemed like mere sparklers, the roar of the eruption could scarcely be heard. As he lay down on the sand, exhaustion hit Sikander and overwhelmed him. He closed his eyes and fell deep, deep, fast, fast asleep.