A Book Dragon Read online

  Lady Ursula made a sign. The orchestra fell silent; most of the guests, in surprise, did so too. A roll of drums announced the main course. This was ushered in by the chief chef in his high white cap, followed by four serving-men in blue and yellow livery. Each one bore proudly on his head a great silver platter on which rested a whole roast peacock, stuffed with larks. The guests sniffed deeply and happily, then gasped with

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  horror. They remained frozen with their mouths open. The long black neck of a dragon had entered the tent directly behind the last of the serving-men. Very gently the dragon lifted the peacock off the plate, with no more sound than the smacking of his thick lips. The serving-man, feeling his tray suddenly lighter, turned in surprise, clanging it against a tent-pole. While this note still sounded, the dragon ate the next peacock. His great head hung motionless in the marquee while he swallowed. The guests, still unable to move, dumbly watched the passage of the peacock down the dragon’s throat. He ate the next one thoughtfully, in two bites.

  Then, while all her guests remained frozen. Lady Ursula rose to her feet. She seized a trombone from one of the cowering musicians and fearlessly thrust it up the left nostril of the dragon just as it swallowed the last peacock.

  The dragon, whose shoulders and forelegs were now inside the marquee, reared back with an indignant snort. He lifted the great tent from its moorings. The stretched linen sides bowled the musicians into a heap, and many of the guests with them. Those who could run dashed out the other side, bearing the table to the ground. Some, in panic, ran the other way, squeezing past the dragon’s sides. Outside, the men-at- arms, roused at last from the hot afternoon’s lethargy, began to hack at the dragon’s tail with broadswords.

  And now Greedyguts, as eager as any of the guests to be gone, tried to withdraw his head; but his scales had become entangled in the silk banners and his ears were snared by the horizontal support ropes. With a fierce tug he backed away. The marquee followed him, leaving Lady Ursula standing by the wreckage of her betrothal feast. Only when he was within the shadow of the forest was the dragon able to shake the tent and its banners from his neck and ears. He looked back at

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  Lady Ursula, and received such a glare of hatred that, burping apologetically, he slid out of sight among the trees.

  Still Lady Ursula stood by her overturned table, ignoring all efforts to bring her to safety within the castle walls. Her fiance remained at her side, looking at her with wonder and doubt. At last, as darkness was falling, Lady Ursula spoke quietly, but in a voice that precluded any argument. She would never many him, she said, while that dragon, who had shamed her festive day, still lived.

  The Welsh knight received this announcement silently. He tugged at his beard as if thinking that, all things considered, it might be better if the dragon lived a long time. Then he looked at the silver plates again, still lying on the grass amid bones and scraps of fruit, and at the rich trappings of the serving-men, who had started to clear away the debris, cast a quick eye on the castle’s general air of soundness and prosperity, looked again at Lady Ursula, as if weighing up all the pluses and minuses, and nodded grimly to his beloved.

  The Welsh knight took only time for some essential preparation before he carried out his promise. One crisp fall morning, Greedyguts was awakened from a sound sleep, and dreams of spicy sausages, by an extremely irritating cater-wauling. He opened his eyes, then closed them again, hoping the sound would go away. On the contrary, it grew shriller and more insistent. Greedyguts unwillingly dragged his head to the mouth of the cavern.

  In the valley below stood a bandy-legged peasant squeezing a bagpipe, an instrument that the dragon had never before heard. Beside the peasant was a small, neat man in black armor, his helmet under his arm and a businesslike expression on his face. When Greedyguts’s head came in sight the knight gave a signal and three red-clad musicians raised their long

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  trumpets and blew three unharmonic notes. These sounds, and the continuing wail of the bagpipe, struck directly on Greedyguts’s nerves.

  It was a challenge not to be ignored. Though he was still groggy from last night’s visit to the Lord Mayor’s banquet, and though the cavern opened out into a narrow ravine which hampered his movements, Greedyguts sallied forth, huffing and growling as fiercely as was possible for a creature who mainly wanted to go back to sleep. He began to leap up and down, to obtain proper clearance for his wings in preparation for the great sweep downwards towards his puny foes, who continued making their dreadful noises.

  The knight waved his hand again. The bagpipe and trumpets fell silent. On the hillside, men-at-arms carefully aimed two catapults and three trebuchets, whose pivoted beams were loaded with great stones. As the dragon leaped once more into the air, these stones were released. Two of them struck Greedyguts, flinging him against the high wall above his cavern’s mouth. While the stones’ momentum held him against the wall, the catapults hurled their man-long arrows, skewer-ing the dragon like one of the roast oxen of which he had been so fond.

  As the dragon’s twisted body slipped down past the mouth of the cavern, a howl of such sorrow was heard that tears rose to the hardened soldiers’ eyes; they all crossed themselves, even the Welsh knight. It was the dragon’s guilty soul escaping his evil body, they thought. No one suspected it was the dragon’s mother, wailing her foolish son’s fall.

  When his father was killed. Nonesuch was away on his “flyaround.” It had long been the custom for young dragons, on reaching their full growth, to fly around the British Isles. They had done so before the Normans came, before the Vikings,

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  and the Romans, and the Picts; back to the happy times when there were no people at all. In those days, his grandmother told him, the dragons had quite justifiably regarded all the land as their own. Swarms of them would fly along the coastline, soaring above the cliffs of Cornwall, skimming the angry waves of the Irish Sea, circling round each rocky island, seeing few other signs of life than their own wide wings.

  But now, his grandmother said, dragons flew alone and were rarely out of the sight of man.

  So Nonesuch had found it. On rocky mountains and in dark valleys he always sniffed the smoke of peat fires, sure signs of human life. When he swooped down to catch a deer, he realized it was already being pursued by hounds and horsemen.

  He considered flying farther out to sea to seek new lands until he found one with no trace of humans, but the thought of his family in the cavern drew him back. On his return, he learned all the details of his father’s death.

  “My son was worse than his father!” his grandmother lamented. “True, everyone has to eat, but to make such a production of it is worse than foolishness: it borders on stupidity!”

  This was the last complete sentence Nonesuch heard his grandmother speak. She lapsed into her reveries again. Her rare words were disjointed. Sometimes “turtles and toads” again, which caused Nonesuch an unaccountable twinge. Or, with disgust, “the two-legged ones,” by which she meant humans. Or, with a more comfortable sigh, “the warm, liquid rock,” which at the time made no sense at all.

  But for a time, Nonesuch was so immersed in his own thoughts that he hardly noticed his grandmother’s silence. He was beginning to understand that strength and size, and even

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  skill, were not enough, so long as humans existed in the world. It was bitter to think this just when he was reaching his prime; and at first he tried to put the idea away. Sometimes Nonesuch would zoom around furiously, just over the tops of trees, breaking their heavy branches with sweeps of his tail. Or he would carry huge rocks in his claws and drop them on the stony hillsides, to see them split and prove to himself that he was still as strong as ever. But he would look down and see, perhaps, some humble shepherds or plowmen shaking their heads in disbelief. Then he would fly back to his cavern, feeling foolish and wasteful.

  Often, when he returned, he found that his grandmother had opened the wa
y to the tunnel behind her pile of treasure. And then, without knowing exactly when it had started, Nonesuch noticed that his grandmother was entering the tunnel completely. At first she disappeared for only a few minutes;

  gradually this extended to hours.

  With each of her underground visits, Nonesuch’s grandmother became more and more thoughtful. She would sit at the mouth of the cavern afterwards, her head hanging six feet out of its opening, her great dimmed eyes staring out at the valley and all the signs of busy human life. From time to time she would heave a thunderous sigh that caused the peasants to gaze up, surprised, into the clear sky. But she did not speak.

  Then, from one of her underground trips, she did not return at all. Nonesuch waited for her anxiously. He left the cavern as little as possible, lest she come back in his absence. When he did leave, he piled brushwood over the tunnel mouth, to show him if his grandmother had left the hole and entered it again. He slept across the mouth of the tunnel in case she decided to come back at night.

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  An in vain. His grandmother was gone. And after a week of waiting. Nonesuch, who had never stuck so much as his nose into the tunnel, crawled down it in search of her.

  The journey was easy at first. The hole was so wide that the edges of his folded wings barefy touched the sides. It continued thus for some time. though Nonesuch soon realized that his grandmother’s greater bulk and wingspan could not have passed so easily. Here and there he saw her scales dinging to the tunnel wan. He recalled that she had started to grow bright new scales since her first trips into the tunnel, which gave her a speckled appearance. In no time, daylight had vanished behind Nonesuch, and he continued by the tight of hisowneyes. The tunnel descended through chalk and limestone layers, the deposits ofandent seas. Surprised fossils of great sea monsters gazed out at him from the waDs. Then came layers of harder rock, shining with flakes of gold and of quartz. He continued to find his grandmother’s scales along the walls. There was no sign that she had retraced her path. She had gone on, and he must follow.

  Time passed; was it hours or days? He didn’t know; he seemed to have been in the tunnel forever. Nonesuch thought that the light from his eyes was becoming fainter. Was this from weariness, making his fires bum less brightly? No, rather all of the surfaces of the tunnel itself were glowing with heat. Blasts of hotter air were reaching him from the tunnel’s further depths.

  Nonesuch realized then that the tunnel had become a volcanic vent, leading down to the molten rock in the center of the earth. Once, very long ago, his grandmother had told him, all the earth had bubbled like soup in a cauldron. But in time the surface had cooled and hardened. She had, he recalled,

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  spoken of this with regret. Had she gone in search of “the warm liquid rocks” at last?

  He could see that his grandmother had come this far: her scales were more abundant on the walls than before, glowing brighter than the dull rocks. He must follow her still.

  But it grew hotter as he descended. Even dragons have their limits. Nonesuch had long since passed the level of heat at which a man’s hair would have blazed up and his skin cracked and shrivelled. As he continued down he felt no pain, but he was invaded by a curious melting sensation, as if his skin were fusing to his flesh, as if all the cells and tissues of his body were losing their individual character and becoming one entity.

  A few hours later, when the heat was so great that Nonesuch’s paws began to be deformed by his own weight, he realized that if he went much farther he would simply melt and flow into the tunnel’s walls. Had this happened to his grandmother? Nonesuch could see no trace of her body on the walls;

  only scales that continued out of his line of sight, a path he could no longer follow.

  He believed then, and he became more certain afterwards, that his grandmother had continued her journey to the end, into the molten lava itself. Perhaps, he thought (though this was much later), she had travelled to the source of strength of all dragons. Perhaps she would remain in the molten rock, growing larger and fiercer, until one day she would break the rock and earth above her and rise, larger than the British Isles, and destroy the world.

  But, for the present, Nonesuch had to return. The tunnel was much narrower now than at the entrance. Somehow he turned around, forcing his head past his tail - a maneuver he would not have thought possible before - and slowly and sadly made his way to the surface.

  CHAPTER IV

  THE END OF THE GREAT DRAGON

  THUS, NONESUCH WAS LEFT IN POSSESSK)NOFANEMPTY

  cavern and a heap of treasure. He knew - his grandmother had told him often enough — that he was supposed to guard this treasure. It had been collected by his ancestors as far back as anyone could remember, though he himself had added nothing to it except a reliquary, a glass-and-gold box containing the dirty white bone of a saint. This had been stolen from a church together with the communion plate, then cast aside in a forest by the superstitious robbers who feared it might bring a curse on them. Nonesuch had found it, sniffed at it, recognized the gold in it, and carried it back to the cavern.

  His grandmother shook her head.’ ‘Holy objects, now!” she had muttered. “Next we’ll be turning this cavern into a shrine!” But she let the reliquary be added to the rest of the treasure.

  At first Nonesuch did guard the family treasure. He crouched over it, snarling. Any-one entering the cavern would have found a very warm welcome. But no one came. In the world outside the cavern, they were not thinking of the dragons’ hoard. A time of troubles had come.

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  Signs of this appeared everywhere. Mounted messengers hurried along the roads, gazing keenly on either side. Wagons travelled in groups, guarded by bands of archers. Men-at- arms skirmished in the forest glades; in open clearings mounted knights rode at each other with sword and lance. Secret bands of dark, ragged men attacked any unprotected cottages. Soon the peasants entered the castle walls, driving their herds before them. The deer in the forest, anxious and sharp-eared, fled at the slightest sound. Nonesuch found little to eat in forest or field, at best a few scrawny, quarrelsome goats, abandoned by their masters.

  The dragon did not know, of course, that the year was 1460 and that these events were minor consequences of a civil war, the War of the Roses, between the great houses of York and Lancaster, whose emblems contained white and red roses, respectively. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to understand a civil war, or any war. As long as anyone could remember, dragons had settled disputes by formal duels, super-vised by wise elders. Such contests were bloody but very seldom fatal—the judges stopped them first, and their verdict was never challenged. Thus, the thought of killing each other was almost completely foreign to dragons. (Nonesuch’s grandmother said, “What with lightning, and rockfalls, and evil spells, and bad food, and knights who have to prove themselves, why should we have to kill dragons too?”)

  But humans had other practices, as he was now to witness. The air around the castle walls grew stale with waiting. An army marched up. A beautiful array of tents appeared, and the siege began: assaults on the walls with high ladders; rolling towers full of armed men; attempts to mine beneath the walls

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  themselves. All were driven back. Trebuchets hurled boulders that bounced off the sturdy walls. Nonesuch dined well on the invaders’ sheep when their keepers became distracted watching the progress of the siege.

  But when the cannon arrived, even Nonesuch forgot the sheep to watch it. It was as thick through the middle as a tall oak, all bumpy with castings of gods and dragons and battle scenes. It lay in a wagon, drawn by six tall, stout horses with bored, heavy-lidded eyes. The castle’s defenders lined the walls to watch it come and cheered when it paraded past, just out of arrow range. But they did not cheer long.

  The cannon’s first shot tore out a wooden bridge that connected a tower to a wall; the next cracked the tower itself. A third blew a hole in the thick, iron-bound drawbridge. The besiegers advanced wit
h scaling-ladders. But as they approached, the broken drawbridge dropped, still sound enough for a troop of soldiers to sally forth; obviously, more of them than the besiegers had expected. A grim battle began outside the walls, in which the men of the castle seemed well able to take care of themselves.

  After watching these practices of the humans for some time from within the forest. Nonesuch wandered away, deep in thought. He had seen the trebuchets, which must have been like those that had tossed his father around so easily. The new, noisy weapon was obviously much more powerful still. Now the cannon fired again. Nonesuch turned back and saw the ball bounce off the wall and smash into a siege tower, splitting it and spilling out soldiers like ants from an anthill.

  He decided not to watch any more. In a short time the besiegers and the besieged paused to stare at his wide wings cleaving the air as the dragon flew away into the cloudy sky. He stayed aloft all day. till his strength was almost exhausted,

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  looking at the changing cloud shapes below, as if they could describe how the world had changed.

  So Nonesuch did not see what actually happened at the castle. He did not see the cannon, loaded beyond its capacity in an attempt to breech the wall, explode and kill the gun crew, half a dozen knights who had gathered round to watch, and three of the horses. But even if he had seen this, it would not have altered the firm judgment he reached during his flight:

  that the days of dragons as great, powerful beasts were numbered. That, no matter how big and strong a dragon was, the humans could make something bigger, or at least stronger.