Milo and the Dragon Cross Read online

  At first, Milo didn’t even know he had begun to move, but his body must have known he was really in a new place and was eager to find out more even if his mind was paralyzed.

  It was probably good that he’d come at an early hour before the Odalesians were out and about, because it gave him time to adjust before having to act like he was a normal, rational person. He had no idea about how things worked here, what its customs were, and what people might ask a wandering teenager.

  Milo poked down a street of uneven cobblestones, so unlike the smooth asphalt of the streets in his own home town. It was very narrow, much too narrow for cars. There were houses on both sides that snaked first to the right, then back to the left. Closed shops verified the early hour and Milo could see shuttered windows with flowers blooming in flower boxes. But there were no doors.

  Milo was trying to figure out how the people could get into or out of their houses when he spotted a large, gray cat hiding under a stairway. This cat watched him with huge green eyes as if trying to predict if Milo might throw something at him.

  Milo wasn’t thinking that sort of thing at all, because Milo liked cats. He had a cat named Gracie, who was gray just like this cat, only much smaller. So Milo offered this cat part of a sandwich he had stuffed into his pocket after lunch, thinking that it might be hungry.

  The cat was hungry. He came out very slowly, very carefully, as if he thought Milo could just be using the sandwich as bait. Milo used patience and calm tone to speak to the cat, wanting to show him that he couldn’t really be the kind of boy who would offer food just as a ruse. Sidling along on his stomach the way cats do when they want to move cautiously and make of themselves a smaller target, he stretched out to sniff the offering. Milo didn’t pull the sandwich away. Instead he opened it up so the cat could see the bologna. He put it down, took his hand away, and then just sat still.

  “It’s all right,” Milo told the cat. “You don’t have to worry. I won’t hurt you.”

  This encouraged the cat and he crouched down on his belly to very delicately eat the bologna without eating any of the lettuce. Then he said, “Thank you. I haven’t had anything to eat for a long time.”

  Milo said, “Wha...! What did you say?”

  “I said I haven’t eaten for a long time. That was very kind of you to share your food with me.”

  Milo was thunderstruck. “No! I mean...I mean...You talked!”

  “Of course I talked,” the cat replied. “It wouldn’t be polite to accept a kindness without thanking the giver. You must be one of the contestants for the Magical Scavenger Hunt,” the cat commented as he licked the mayonnaise off his chops, then washed his paws clean.

  “I...what’s...Well, I was thinking about a scavenger hunt, a very odd one in a magical place, and...well, I found myself here.”

  “That’s as good a way to arrive as any,” the cat agreed. “It’s not as if the Magical Scavenger Hunt is advertised in newspapers all over the place. The Mayor just expects the contestants to show up. They always do. So you must be the right sort to be a contestant. Are you a wizard? You look a bit young to be a wizard. Maybe you’re an exceptionally gifted apprentice. Ambitious, then, for your age?”

  “What? No, I’m...I’m just Milo.”

  “And I’m Boriboreau, at your service.”

  “Where am I?” Milo asked.

  “Why, The Kingdom of Odalese,” the cat answered. “It’s not really a kingdom, you see...”

  He went on to explain the rest, which Milo had already figured out. Then he gave Milo some important information.

  “If you want to be a contestant in the Magical Scavenger Hunt, you’ll have to register with the Mayor,” Boriboreau explained. “You have registered, haven’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t know I needed to,” Milo replied. He went on. “I didn’t know I was a contestant, or that I was coming here. I didn’t even know there was a here here. This is all very puzzling, and I...I don’t know anything.”

  Boriboreau looked Milo over carefully. “You’re a very honest young man if you admit that. Very few humans I’ve met would admit to a cat that their knowledge is in the least bit limited. You are unusual indeed.”

  “Would you...help me?” Milo asked the cat. “You seem pretty unusual yourself.”

  “Well,” Boriboreau considered. “I like you, and you gave me your sandwich. One good turn deserves another. I’ll take you to the Mayor’s office.”

  By this time, people began coming out of their houses. The shopkeepers opened their shops, and men and women came and went to buy the morning’s groceries or to stop at their favorite cafés on the way to work.

  Milo was surprised to see plenty of doors to the houses now, when only a little earlier he had been confounded to see none. He asked the cat about it.

  “Oh, but of course! They’re open now, because their owners are going out. By the way,” he put it, “you can call me Bori.”

  “Oh, okay. Bori. But back to the doors. A little while ago, I didn’t see any doors.”

  “That’s because they hadn’t opened them yet.”

  “But...there were no doors at all. There were windows, but no doors.”

  “There were windows because people like to be able to look out, but there weren’t any doors because people didn’t want to go out yet. As soon as they wanted to go out, they opened them,” Bori explained with a great deal of patience.

  “But where were the doors?” Milo asked in exasperation. “There weren’t any doors at all. Now there are. Where were the doors before people opened them?”

  Boriboreau looked at Milo closely. “You are a very odd, very perceptive boy. I see you are an original thinker. You may do very well in the MSH. Come this way now, the Mayor’s office is just up the next street, in the Courthouse on the Square.”

  It was a very fine Square, although it was really more a rectangle. The two longer sides had shops and cafés, the cafés with tables out in the open air, with white tablecloths and neatly ironed napkins rolled into rings of silver or horn. People already sat at many of the tables, drinking coffee or tea from china cups and smearing butter and jam on fresh, flaky croissants. The aroma reminded Milo that he was hungry, but he didn’t regret giving his sandwich to his new friend.

  There were shops with groceries, shops with cheeses and milk, wine shops, bakeries, butcher shops, and so on. There were dress shops, housewares shops, shops specializing in metal products, porcelain, soap—pretty much any sort of product that a town needs to make it an agreeable place to live.

  Big, shady trees sheltered benches where people could sit on the Square, and a bandstand in the middle suggested evenings with music. But since the whole town was built on a hill, the Square sloped, with buildings of different kinds on the two ends. At the upper end stood an imposing edifice built of cut stone, with arched buttresses and all sorts of figures carved in relief. A tower rose even above that with bells to ring the hour.

  On the lower side where Bori and Milo had entered was another kind of building more massive than tall, with at least two or three more floors than the regular houses. Sculptures suggested figures of municipal pride and banners spanned from just beneath the roof overhangs in long strips, adding color. They were tied off well above the heads of people and billowed nicely in the breeze. At the center, steps ascended to tall bronze doors, high enough to let in giants, but as far as Milo could tell, the people using them were of ordinary proportions. These doors were flanked on either side by two bronze lions, lying on their sides and looking regally out over the Square to observe whoever passed through the doors.

  “Those lions were the familiars of Count Abracadabracus,” Bori explained. “He was the founder of the Kingdom of Odalese centuries ago. The story is that they’re here to guard our town. I’ve heard it said that they prowl the streets at night, on the lookout for spies and rogues, but I’ve lived in these streets my whole life and never run into them during my own prowling. But then, you never know....”

 
Bori led as he and Milo climbed the steps of the Courthouse. Passing into the galleried foyer with its floor of polished and patterned marble, Milo expected...well, something unexpected. Perhaps moving staircases like the ones in the Harry Potter movies, or portraits on the walls that watched you when you walked by. The paintings on these walls were huge, but they remained inanimate.

  As they walked down a marble corridor, Milo’s footfalls echoed and he could hear muted voices from unseen places. Still, there was nothing you would call magical.

  Milo asked Bori about it. “Magical?” Bori replied. “Why, if the Courthouse were magical, that would make magical things an everyday sort of condition, and then it wouldn’t be magical anymore. That’s why we have the Magical Scavenger Hunt, and celebrate it only once a decade. It highlights how Magic makes it...well, magical. Come this way; the Mayor’s office is up here.”

  They climbed a stair of white marble with black onyx risers and balustrades, quite impressive in a regular sort of way, and at the top of the stairs, they entered an office. It had thick carpets with intricate patterns. A receptionist with a pinched-looking face sat at a huge walnut desk. Bori hopped up with his tail lifted in his friendliest manner.

  “My young friend here would like to register as a contestant in the Magical Scavenger Hunt,” he announced.

  “Are you his cat or is he your boy?” asked the receptionist in a bureaucratic, bored sort of way.

  Milo thought he should answer for himself. “No, I just met him and he agreed to show me where to register as a contestant. May I register, please?”

  The receptionist pushed a form across the desk at Milo. “Fill this out and pay the court treasurer the entry fee downstairs.”

  “Entry fee?” Milo asked apprehensively. “How much is that?” He knew how little of his weekly allowance he had left in his pocket.

  “Fifty kuzurians,” she said without taking her eyes off the papers in front of her, ignoring the boy and the cat.

  Milo didn’t know what a kuzurian was, but he knew he didn’t have fifty of them or anything else.

  “I...I think I’ll have to come back later,” he told her, pushing the entry form back across the desk.

  “All right,” she said as she retrieved the blank form, “but don’t wait too long. The deadline for entering the Hunt is this afternoon when this office closes.”

  Milo turned away, feeling just a bit crestfallen. He hadn’t realized how enthused he had become about being in the Magical Scavenger Hunt. “What should I do?” he asked Bori.

  “I would loan you the fifty kuzurians if I had them. But I don’t, seeing as how I have no pockets to put them in,” Bori replied. “We’ll just have to find you a sponsor.”

  “How will I do that?” Milo protested, trying not to sound whiny. “I don’t know anybody here, and no one knows me.”

  “Then you’ll just have to be imaginative. I’m sure you can do it. Let’s go out and see what we can come up with.”

  It seemed like a better plan than just standing there, so Milo went along with the cat.

  As they walked away from the courthouse and past the cafés, Milo remembered how hungry he was. Just then, breakfast was more appealing than fifty kuzurians. He took a fist full of change and a wadded dollar bill out of his pocket and showed it to Bori.

  “Do you think this might be enough to buy us a breakfast?”

  Bori looked it over. “No, its not kuzurians, but I have an idea. Let’s go down that side street.”

  Bori led him into a small shop several houses away with a sign that said “Numismateria.” Although Milo didn’t know what that meant, displays of coins suggested that the shop was for coin collecting.

  “You’re on your own here,” Bori whispered to him. “I don’t have...a very good history with Dame Constance. I think I’ll just slip off to the side. See if she might be interested in your coins.”

  A woman who looked like a character out of a French movie sat at the counter, polishing coins.

  “Ahh...good morning,” Milo said as he moved up to her counter. The woman looked up without replying. One eye peered and the other squinted at him, presumably from looking at the tiny marks on coins for so long.

  “I...ahh...wondered if you might be interested in any of the coins I have here,” Milo said as he pulled the handful out of his pocket. He laid out six pennies, two quarters, a dime, and three nickels on the counter, taking care not to disturb the ones she was cleaning.

  “Hmm,” she said, suggesting an ability to speak. Then very carefully she picked them up one by one, studying them minutely, using that well-practiced squint.

  “Nothing particularly interesting here,” she said at last. “Nothing truly ancient, and that’s my specialty at this shop. But this one is interesting, and well minted.”

  She held up one of the nickels. “I’ve never seen a portrait of Count Abracadabracus on a coin in semi-profile before.”

  Milo decided not to correct her by telling her that the face on that nickel was Thomas Jefferson’s.

  “And what sort of magical beast is this on the reverse?” she asked.

  “Why, that’s just a”—he checked himself. “That’s an American buffalo—a bison,” he corrected, deciding that bison was a more impressive word. “It’s sacred to the American Indians.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “I might be interested in that. What do you want for it?”

  “What might you offer me for it?”

  “I’ll give you two kuzurians.”

  “Can I get breakfast for two kuzurians?”

  She looked him over as if he were a coin. “You must be a Hunt contestant. Yes, that would get you a breakfast. I’ll give you three kuzurians for the lot.”

  That seemed a fair price to Milo. Eighty-one cents for a breakfast was a pretty good deal.

  “Okay, I’ll take it.” He pulled out the dollar bill. “How much would you give me for this?”

  “I don’t buy certificates,” she replied without even looking. “They have no value.”

  Milo poked the bill back into his pocket as she pushed three coins across the counter at him, raked his coins into her palm, and dumped them into a drawer.

  The kuzurians were about the size of quarters and apparently made of silver. On one side was a head that in profile looked like Thomas Jefferson, and on the other a symbol of some sort. He turned and left the shop.

  Bori was sitting just outside the door. Milo showed him the three kuzurians.

  “Did I get a good price?” he asked the cat.

  “How should I know,” Bori replied. “I told you I don’t have pockets, so I don’t have any coins.”

  “I suppose we should see about breakfast, then,” Milo suggested. “If we can get a breakfast, it doesn’t matter, does it?”

  Bori agreed and led away, tail held high with purpose.

  They went to a café of Bori’s choosing. “The woman proprietor sometimes sets me a saucer of milk out back,” he explained about his choice. He indicated the café across the square with a lift of his chin and a flattening of his ears. “The best I get from that one over there is to have a wilted carrot thrown at me from time to time. Usually while I’m serenading a lady friend. Very disrespectful.”

  They sat at a table with a pale blue table cloth and a vase of tiny daisies in the middle. Milo ordered tea with milk, croissants with butter and fresh jam, and two poached eggs. Boriboreau asked for a saucer of warmed milk and a strip of bacon, which he nibbled like a cultured gentlecat while sitting on the table, his paws neatly wrapped about with his tail.

  By the time they were both down toward the last crumbs of their breakfasts, the necessity of the entry fee had begun to reassert its importance. Milo was at a total loss about how to raise the money.

  “Everything I have with me only bought three kuzurians, and we ate two of them. I won’t even be able to afford lunch, and I’ve got to come up with forty-nine more kuzurians by this afternoon,” Milo lamented. “There’s no way.”

&
nbsp; “There must be a way, or you wouldn’t be a contestant,” Bori pointed out, his confidence in Milo unwaivering.

  “But I won’t be a contestant if I don’t pay the entry fee!” he told Bori in exasperation.

  “Then we must find you a sponsor, as I suggested earlier. There’s an old woman who lives not far from here who has a kind heart. She always gives me her kitchen scraps. On the other hand, judging from the scraps and the tiny amount I see her eat, which looks exactly like what she feeds me, I don’t think it’s likely that she has fifty kuzurians, either, although she does have pockets. No, I think we need to approach a merchant, someone who has piles of kuzurians.”

  “You know, where I come from, contestants are often sponsored by businesses. The businesses see it as advertising,” Milo told the cat.

  “What’s advertising?” asked Bori.

  “The contestants wear a shirt or something with the name of the business on it. People see it and then want to go to that business. The better the contestant does, the more people are likely to buy things from that business.”

  “We’ll try that, then,” Bori said between licks, washing his paws properly after finishing the last nibble of bacon. “I can think of someone to try first.” And off they went.

  The person Bori had in mind was a banker, and he indeed had piles of kuzurians. Milo explained to him his situation and his idea that the bank could sponsor him as advertising in the Magical Scavenger Hunt. The banker looked him over.

  “Since it’s obvious that you have no collateral,” the banker said, “I must ask you this: are you a qualified magician?”

  This was a difficult question for Milo, because he wasn’t, but he wanted the banker to believe he was so he would be willing to give him the kuzurians he needed.

  “I can make things disappear and reappear,” he assured the banker. He took his last remaining kuzurian out of his pocket. He was thinking of a trick he had learned from his Uncle Johnny. It had been very impressive to him when he was about five years old. He held a coin up in his left hand before the banker’s face, supported by its edges between his thumb and forefinger. He made several impressive passes over it with his right hand, coming up behind it and then driving his right hand straight in at it, and “Voilá!” it vanished before the banker’s eyes. Actually, he let the coin drop flat into the palm of his left hand just as the right seemed to engulf it. With the “voilá” part, he held his right hand up, palm open, as if it had done all the work, while taking his left hand away, the kuzurian secretly tucked in the palm.