A Book Dragon Read online

  15

  when he could speak.’ ‘Just as I am.” He burped, and added in a more kindly tone, “Of course, you (Ally lay eggs. Youimbibe no more than a drop of nectar; you only live two days. How could you have any flesh on you?”

  These words didn’t offend the butterfly. She darted over the dragon’s back, then around his head, so that a head-shaped line gleamed in reflection on the water.’ ‘You are large,” she remarked. “What do you do?”

  These words amused Nonesuch, who was still hardly larger than a human being. “You may think I’m large now,” he replied condescendingly, “but wait till I’ve reached my full growth.”

  He realized immediately that the butterfly couldn’t wait; if this thought occurred to the butterfly, it didn’t bother her. “What will you do tfien?” she asked.

  Nonesuch wasn’t sure exactly what he would do. He recalled the most impressive stories he had heard from his grandmother; and from his uncles too, very restless dragons who sometimes slept in the family’s cavern but were always eager to be off. His uncles, he recalled, had claimed that by flying through clouds they could cut them into small pieces. “We can fly through the cloud-capped mountain peaks,” he said proudly. “Nothing can stand in our way.”

  The other animals considered his words. “I can fly in the mist too,” the butterfly said,’ ‘but it makes my wings heavy.”

  The turtle, who had been listening with his head submerged to his ears, now lifted it out of water. “I suppose you’re going to tell us you can fly through stone,” he said suspiciously.

  “Of course not,” Nonesuch replied. “We wouldn’t want to.” Though he spoke haughtily, as was always proper for a dragon, he recalled that his father and his uncles, in the zest

  16

  and gtory of their flights, had sometimes crashed into mountain peaks; perhaps they had imagined that the rocks would give way before them, but they never had.

  The turtle’s reply was even more haughty.’ ‘I should think not! All rocks are derived from the shell of the Greatest Turtle of All. Nothing can be more solid and massive!”

  Before the dragon could ask him to explain this statement, the butterfly piped up again. “We don’t strike against rocks, either, though we may rest on them. But the first butterfly never rested: she was a beam of light, infinitely swift. At last she grew weary of glancing off beautiful objects or passing by them, so she broke up into many butterflies. Like our ancestor, we must always keep moving.”

  “One certainly must avoid striking rocks,” the turtle remarked ponderously.

  “But we avoid nothing else!” Nonesuch asserted, not at all pleased with the way the conversation kept getting away from him. “My uncle and his cousin, Blackhearth, fought a mighty battle with the wild, uncouth, fringed dragons from the Scottish Highlands. The noise of their trumpeting shook the hills; its echoes rolled so that people couldn’t sleep for a month after the battle itself. When the dragon judges declared our side the winner, the battleground had been so plowed up that nothing grew again.” His audience looked at him without speaking.’ ‘At least, not tffl the next year,” Nonesuch conceded.

  The others were silent at first. Then the toad croaked approvingly. “There must have been good rain puddles in the plowed land afterwards: excellent places for breeding fat grubs.”

  “Yes!” the butterfly piped up enthusiastically,’ ‘I’ve seen it that way after the wild pigs have been fighting, if it rains the next day. Then we can watch our own reflections in the water, so close that they are larger than the clouds themselves.”

  17

  Nonesuch didn’t care at all for the comparison with wild pigs. He also recalled that it had not rained for two weeks. • ‘How do you know about rain puddles?” he asked peevishly. “You couldn’t have been alive to see it.”

  The butterfly was not abashed. “I’ve learned it from the other butterflies,” she replied, as if this should have been obvious.’ ‘We tell each other everything that happens. So it’s as if none of us dies at all.” She darted over the dragon’s back and added politely, “I’ll tell them about you. Years from now the butterflies will remember that once a small dragon came to their pool.”

  • ‘Well, I should think so!” Nonesuch exclaimed.’ “They’ll be very impressed that you saw one so close; that you weren’t afraid. Why, when we fly over a city the people scatter in fear. They run to hide in their churches and ring bells.” Nonesuch glanced at the water. “They look no bigger than water bugs then.”

  “Oh my!” the butterfly whistled. “I’m afraid I don’t see the point of flying so high. I keep to ground level, and the children run out to catch me. Some think I’m a sunbeam, as if the first butterfly of all had returned. I avoid them, unless their hands seem gentle; then, I might perch on their wrists a moment.”

  The toad caught another water bug. Nonesuch said to him, ‘ ‘I suppose children run out to see you pass too!”

  The toad was too busy swallowing to answer right away. Then he said, very humbly, “Oh no, at best they laugh at me, which I don’t mind. But they can be cruel too. I’ve seen a dozen of my brothers dangling by the feet from a twig, jerking like puppets. It’s best to keep completely out of sight, in the cool grass of the fields.”

  He sighed. “But even then, there are scythes, and plows, and plowmen’s clogs to grind us into the earth. And besides

  these, besides aB the accidental calamities, we make such excellent food! They all want to eat us,” he said, glancing with mournful pride at his fat thighs. “Snakes, weasels, fish, everyone. They prefer the frogs, who have smoother skins. But if they’re hungry enough they’ll make do even with my wrinkles and warts.”

  The toad sighed again and looked at Nonesuch with soulful brown eyes. “But I recall my glorious past. This lets me forget my troubles and fears, at least for a time.”

  ” Your glorious past!” Nonesuch sputtered, then glared at the toad, unable to speak. Before he found his tongue, the toad continued. “Of course, I have no such cosmic origins as my neighbors here. We are entirely creatures of earth. Some say the first toad arose from a lump of dried mud. What do I know of such matters? But I do remember my change of form,” he explained, with simple, deep pride. “Once I was only a tadpole, no more than a head, a stomach, and a tail. Then my legs grew out, and my tail fell off when it was no longer needed-no offense meant,” he added hastily as the dragon swished his own tail in warning. The toad continued: “And my bone structure changed too, until I was an unmistakable, complete toad. And I remember it all!

  “Now, you will say, ‘What of that? He changed from an insignificant tadpole to a hardly more significant toad.’ But you also changed, when you were in the egg, and you too.” Here the toad nodded at the turtle, and then at the butterfly. ‘ ‘And you, when you were in the pupa, surrounded by a lovely silk wrapping. You each changed, in your special way. But none of you can remember it, except in dreams, /can recall all my changes. Sometimes it seems to me that if 1 tried hard enough I could even remember what it was like to be an egg. This is what we toads think about when we watch the moon,

  19

  which, when it is full, is just the shape of an egg. In the evenings we sing together, again and again, ‘We changed! We changed! We changed!’ “

  The turtle and the butterfly listened respectfully to this ridiculous discourse. Even Nonesuch did not interrupt the small, ugly creature, but he had especially disliked the reference to his own life in an egg. This was a subject that dragons never mentioned: they were ashamed to think that once they had been so small and weak. He said spitefully to the turtle, “I suppose you remember all the details of your past life too!”

  The turtle swayed his head back and forth at the end of his long neck. “No,” he replied ponderously, ‘ ‘I have long since accepted that my early life in an egg will remain a mystery to me. I have, if my humble and bumpy companion here will pardon me” — he looked courteously at the toad — “a more important concern: to come to terms
with the burden I always carry, that is, my shell.” He nodded towards the great orange-green dome at his back. “I know it protects me from my enemies; for years, frankly, none has come to this pool who would even think of attacking me. Perhaps this shell is of no use to me, here. But, useful or not, we turtles all wear our shells in honor of the Greatest Turtle of All, of whom you have surely heard.”

  He paused weightily. The dragon tried to figure out how large this Greatest Turtle of All could be. The particular turtle who was speaking was four times as broad as the lily-pad. Perhaps a greater one would be half as large as the pool itself. He could not imagine that so dull a creature could reach a greater size.

  “The Greatest Turtle of All,” the turtle continued solemnly, when he judged he had given the dragon enough time to answer, “contains within her shell our earth, the sun, the

  20

  moon, and the stars. All order is maintained inside that shell:

  light, winds, and seasons. Without the shell, everything would fly apart. And it must be strong indeed, because this Greatest Turtle is always under attack by a greater beast - a mad dragon, in fact, meaning no offense to you ^ who is the deadly enemy of all order. If he should win, if his teeth should crack the Greatest Turtle’s shell, then all our universe will disappear and return to the dust from which it arose..

  “But we think that, one day, the dragon will grow weary of the battle. Then his own rage and madness will destroy him. When that happens, all our own shells will fall away, and we will dance in the sunlight!”

  Nonesuch listened to the turtle’s outlandish story with growing anger. He thought of trying his own teeth out on the shell of this insolent amphibian, but realized that he could hardly get his mouth around the turtle’s shell. Very well, when he grew larger he could return to the pool. By that time, however, his wings would be so wide that he could no longer fly through the beech forest. Besides, even if he returned on foot then, the turtle was hardly a worthy foe. At this moment it was looking at him benevolently, and a little sadly: as if it felt sony for him. It clearly hadn’t realized how deeply it had insulted him. Nonesuch grew angrier. He considered lashing all the water out of the pond with his tail and thus destroying the little world of these lowly creatures who were so small and weak that they had to make up ridiculous tales to give themselves some importance. He reared back, then recalled another of his grandmother’s sayings:’ ‘Don’t become angry over little things: there are enough big ones.” He turned and, in silent dignity, stalked away.

  As he rustled through the forest. Nonesuch slashed down a hawthorn bush with one sweep of his tail, noting triumphantly

  21

  that the thorns could not hurt him at all. He destroyed a dried anthill with one mighty sweep of his paw and was first amused, then ashamed, to see the tiny ants scurry about. He was delighted at last to find a worthy and edible foe, a wild boar fully as large as he. The boar fought well, gashing him twice with his sharp tusks before it gave up the battle and scurried to cover in a dense thorn thicket where the dragon could not follow him.

  Their battle had left the ground scarred with many furrows and holes. Nonesuch swept it all level with his tail, so that no rain puddles could be formed. Then he found a clearing in the forest wide enough for him to spread his wings and fly away. He crossed the forest until he saw the pool again, then flew higher and higher until it almost vanished. Almost, but not quite. As long as daylight lasted it was still here, fixed in his sight, a piercing blue dot. He deliberately kept it in view, hovering and swooping, until the quiet dusk blotted out all the forest’s details. His grandmother scolded him for returning so late to the cavern, but he never told her where he had been.

  CHAPTER III

  AMILY MISFORTUNES

  25

  AS NONESUCH GREW OLDER. ,THE CATASTROPHES THAT

  stmck his own family stopped him from thinking of the very trivial events of his childhood. Troubles arrived at a gallop, and his grandmother’s most gloomy forebodings came true.

  The first to go was his grandfather, a shambling, good-natured creature known locally as the Warm of Grimsby Bog. He had a flexible twenty-foot-long neck, ending in a great broad head and a gaping mouth that looked humorous, unless it was coming right at you. He would eat anything: cattle;

  horses, and sometimes, by accident, their riders as well; droves of swine; flocks of geese, feathers and all; even wagon-loads of grain if nothing better offered. Nonesuch had exchanged few words with his grandfather, who mainly used the family cavern for sleeping off his huge meals.

  At last, his appetite was his undoing. The exasperated villagers, tired of seeing all their goods disappear down that gigantic maw, decided to cure the dragon’s hunger for good. A great rock in the south meadow roughly resembled a cow, though twice the size of any living one. After keeping all their livestock indoors for a week to starve

  the dragon, the villagers painted the rock reddish-brown and white, tied wooden horns to one end, and slapped on clay here and there to complete the disguise. When the Worm of Grimsby Bog arrived, snorting, the real cows scattered, all but one whose hoof was caught in a mole-tunnel; but she was no more than an appetizer. Then the Warm, whose hunger, when roused, was much greater than his prudence or common sense, licked his lips with a tongue as large as the staysafl of a small coasting vessel, and swallowed the rock whole.

  The unbelieving villagers were too busy watching the enormous bulge pass down the dragon’s throat to notice the shocked and disgusted expression on his face. When the rock reached his stomach, the look of horror deepened. With an indignant squawk, the Warm of Grimsby Bog flapped his mighty wings and rose in the air, slanting this way and that as the rock rolled around in his belly. The dragon flew valiantly, sometimes descending to brush the tree-tops, rising again with incredible force till he looked no larger than a sparrow, then sinking low as the great rock reasserted itself. He flew over the village, scraping thatch from the roofs, and past the castle walls, whose archers were too busy placing bets on the flight’s duration to loose their arrows. He flew past the marsh from which he took his name and finally, as if drawn by the hungry waves, out to sea. Humble fishermen watched, gaping like fish themselves, while the great shape sailed on, now majestic in the sun, though sagging at the bottom, now clumsily tilting to one side or the other, until, with a gurgling splash, it plunged into the sea and rose no more.

  For many years after, the waters of that coast were unlucky. Fish shunned them. Fishermen had to journey far out into the

  26

  region of fogs and lolling gales for any kind of catch. Mothers would frighten naughty children with tales of the great dragon that dwelt beneath the waves, gathering its strength until it could rise in the air again. Some stories changed the cow-shaped stone to an anchor to which the beast had been tethered by a brave prince. Such versions gave more dignity to the dragon than the true story: that he had fallen victim to his own undiscriminating gluttony.

  Nonesuch’s father, the son of the Worm ofGrimsby Bog, perished through his own appetites too, though more indirectly. He was a medium-sized black dragon with a high fringe of scales on his head, rather like a chefs cap. The peasants called him Greedyguts, which was not quite fair since he was more a gourmet than a glutton. Somehow, he had become overly fond of human food, the more ornate and fanciful the better. He would attack wagon-loads of savory game pies on their way to the castle for the pre-Lenten feast, and would often turn up his nose afterwards at the mules. Sometimes he would be seized by a desire for simpler fare: he would thrust his neck down a merchant’s chimney and pull a sizzling haunch of beef right off the spit, or suck up whole kettlefuls of succulent soup. On warm, sultry days, Greedyguts, in search of a lighter repast, would appear at picnics, his widespread wings hiding the sun like a black cloud. After the picnickers had fled, aghast, the dragon would gobble up all the dainties, and sometimes the picnic baskets as well, but he would always wipe his mouth with the white ground-cloths before flying away.


  He was considered more a nuisance than a disaster, and people accepted his visits with wry humor. After all, no one

  27

  wants to turn every merry feast into an armed camp. But the day came when Greedyguts attacked Lady Ursula’s betrothal feast in the marquee.

  Ursula, oldest and only unmarried daughter of the Earl of Grimsby, was, at twenty-eight, handsome, stem-eyed, and critical. Her temper and her tongue scared suitors away. At last her harried father arranged a match with a silent, balding, widowed knight whose stunted castle in the Welsh mountains would supply his daughter with a sufficiently distant home of her own.

  The betrothal feast was held on a beautiful June day. The wedding was to follow in four months, right after the harvest. On the lawn before the castle a marquee, a great tent, was set out, bleached linen on a carpet of bluebells and buttercups. It was open at the ends, and a merry breeze stirred the banners hanging inside. At one side a small orchestra of sackbuts, lutes, viols, and trombones played without pause. Facing them at a long table, the guests laughed and chatted, each talking more loudly than the others.

  Lady Ursula, in a long gown whose color exactly matched the bluebells, sat at the center of the table. She glanced from the guests to the musicians, and to her fiance, who sat at her side, dour but unabashed, his eyes quietly calculating the value of the silver dishes and flagons.