Der Fluch der Aurelia Chapters 7-8: Enslaved; The Other Dragon Rider; Deep, Deep under the Sea
So how did
Kupfer even come into his service? Well,
if a human discovers the existence of a copperman, then the copperman is under
a curse to serve that
human until death. The only thing that
can break the curse is – dragon fire. I
think we can guess where this is going – but as far as Kupfer knows, dragons have
disappeared.
So Kupfer, as
the reluctant minion of a villain much less intelligent than himself, has
obvious parallels with Fliegenbein in the first book. I hope that, like Fliegenbein, he will be able
to escape. However, I don’t expect that
his story can work out in exactly the same way – after all, if being discovered
by a human automatically means slavery, then meeting Ben and his family or any
of their other human friends isn’t likely to constitute a happy ending as far
as Kupfer is concerned. More likely, he
will disappear into the coppermen’s network of underground tunnels and take
care not to be caught by a human again.
Incidentally,
Kupfer’s process for making hybrid creatures involves spitting into the mixture
of cuttlefish spawn and lobster larvae.
It is a running theme in this story that the saliva of magical creatures
has magical powers. In the first book, spitting
in a pool is one way to activate it to use it as a means of long-distance communication,
spitting into a cup can even provide enough liquid to allow Nesselbrand to
teleport to another body of water in another part of the world, and kobold
saliva is astonishingly sticky and could even be used to make Nesselbrand’s
metal-armoured body susceptible to dragon-fire.
In the second, pegasi are oviparous and the mares (but only mares)
nourish their eggs by licking them – which causes problems when the only
surviving pegasi are a stallion and his late wife’s clutch of eggs. And, here, coppermen’s saliva seems to have
its own powers.
In an earlier
post, I described Kupfer as an ‘elemental’.
This word doesn’t actually appear in the text – but in a book themed
around the four classical elements (Earth, Air, Fire and Water), it is
intriguing that we have a character who seems to be an embodiment of a chemical element, like Order of the Stick’s titanium, chlorine, and gold elementals.
And yet –
weirdly, Kupfer is described as feeling the sound of the Aurelias’s singing ‘in
his rust-red blood’. I’d have expected a
being made of copper to have blue or green blood like Spock and some
arthropods and molluscs in real life.
Now we return to
the Rim of Heaven, where Ben and Lung are making plans to travel to the place
on the Californian coast by which the Aurelia is expected to surface. Lung has ‘a decisive role’ to play in the
mission – and it seems to me that the word ‘role’ comes up a lot in this book. Lung, after all, needs to play the part of
the representative of Fire when Aurelia comes, and they will need to find other
beings who are suitable to represent Air, Water, and Earth.
In subsequent
chapters (okay, I’ve read quite a bit ahead before posting this), characters
frequently ask ‘what role does that play?’ to mean ‘what does it matter? What difference does it make?’ Sometimes words jump out, like the frequency
with which the word ‘betray’ comes up in the first two books, whether in the
literal sense of being a traitor, or in sentences like ‘The twitching of
Tattoo’s ears betrayed his excitement.’
Without being a native speaker of German, I can’t be sure how much of
this is deliberate and significant, and how much is just common phraseology.
At this point,
at any rate, roles are important in a different way. Specifically, as Maja explains to Ben,
Schwefelfell’s role as Lung’s oldest friend, someone who had been an important
part of his life long before he and Ben met.
Now, when Lung is not only friends with a human boy, and married to a
dragoness, but also the father of three hatchlings, the baby dragons are taking
up the little time that Schwefelfell could have had with Lung before. So, at Maja’s suggestion, Ben agrees to
travel to California by aeroplane with his father, so that Schwefelfell and
Lung can spend some quality time together on their own journey over there.
This is a
situation that has been brewing since the first book. After all, it had started out as a story
about a dragon and a kobold on a quest, and Schwefelfell had expected to be the
wise one who could warn Lung away from danger, as she had lived in a human town
and knew how dangerous humans were. But
as things had turned out, not only did Ben have a lot of good ideas (for a
start, unlike Schwefelfell, he knows how to read a map), but everyone was
excited about the coming of ‘the Dragon Rider’ precisely
because friendship between a human and a dragon is so rare.
As Schwefelfell had pointed out at the time, she had been riding dragons all her life, but nobody thought this was significant, because it’s normal for kobolds and dragons to live together. In some media, kobolds are even related to dragons. The kobolds in the Dragon Rider universe, however, vary from cat-like kobolds like Schwefelfell
The next chapter introduces a new group of characters: mermaids. Of the two adult mermaids organising a school trip for orphaned merchildren, Laimoni is a normal-looking Hawaiian mermaid: that is to say, she has a scaly green, fish-like face, wide-set eyes, protruding lips, and no nose – and, judging by the illustration at the start of the chapter, hair that resembles seaweed.
But anyway,
Lizzie Persimmons had survived after all, because Laimoni, the mermaid she had
rescued from Cadoc Aalstrom’s net, had in turn rescued Lizzie from drowning by
placing one of her own scales into Lizzie’s mouth to turn her into a
mermaid. Like saliva, scales are
significant in this universe. In the
first book, Barnabas has a few lost scales from Nesselbrand, and gives them to
Ben – which enables Ben and his friends to test how to melt Nesselbrand’s
armour. In the second book, Lung
deliberately removes one of his own scales and gives it to Ben, so that Ben can
communicate his emotions to Lung when they are apart by touching the scale. This implies that, ironically, in stories
where an apparently villainous dragon has a single vulnerable spot through which
the hero kills him, the dragon must be one who had once loved someone enough to
make himself vulnerable to them. And
here, Laimoni’s scale has both saved and transformed Lizzie’s life.
This chapter has
lots of lovely worldbuilding, starting with the ocean depths, far beyond the
sun’s rays, which should be dark – but aren’t, because of the many luminescent
animals down there. As Lizzie and
Laimoni, along with their lanternfish friend Koo, take out the six oldest of
the ‘merlings’ they look after on a journey to explore a deep ocean cleft, the
narrator explains that they had fed the children algae for breakfast to make
them glow red, so that any animals they passed would assume they were poisonous
and not attempt to eat them. The
children chatter excitedly to each other, not in sounds (since the ocean is too
noisy, between the roaring of waves and the song of whales) but by electrical
signals and flashing bioluminescent patterns.
I am managing to
learn more words from their context here than I could from a dictionary. My dictionary gives Tintenfisch as the catch-all German word for any cephalopods, be
they cuttlefish, squid or octopus, but this story shows the merfolk considering
the risks of being hunted by Kalmare (squid)
and Oktopus.
The adult
mermaids have a difficult task in teaching the children balanced life lessons,
between telling them that, ‘The only thing to fear is fear itself! Courage gives you armour!’ and having to warn
them that all evil comes from above, whence even more horrible things than
giant squid, such as anchors and nets, descend.
They know that one day these children will swim to the surface and
discover that the sun is really real, and encounter the terrible danger of
humans – but at least they can try to deter the children from straying for as
long as possible.
In the meantime,
the expedition into the sea valley reveals something none of them had expected –
a vast sea-monster surrounded by millions of dancing lights, and singing a
wondrous song to which not even whale-song can compare. Laimoni gathers the children to lead them
back to the sunken ship where they live, but Lizzie – who, of course, has
recognised the Aurelia for what she is – asks Koo to transmit a message for her
through electrical signals:
‘Naia to
Fufluns! She sings where Momi sleeps!
Direction hikina.’ Which is cryptic
enough to be incomprehensible to any but the right recipient.
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