A Book Dragon Page 9

  It was the effect of his own breath in this enclosed space. Many old stories tell us that the breath of dragons was poison-ous, or at least that it could make humans become very drowsy. Whatever the truth of such tales, Nonesuch found his eyes

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  always closing. The box was quite still now. He slept deeply;

  for a time his dreams were more vivid than the thoughts of his waking life.

  Dragons’ dreams are far-ranging: some ancients thought that the whole world may be contained in such dreams. The lives of the people with whom Nonesuch had been concerned passed through his sleep in bright images.

  Hubert had boasted to his family of his hope of a position with Sir Ambrose but naturally had said nothing of his treatment by the secretary. The family agreed, each keeping his doubts to himself, that Hubert had got the post, and had so gone up in the world that he would no longer associate with them.

  The juggler and his younger son continued to work at the abbey, where some wall or pavement was always in need of repair. In time Simon became a stone-carver himself, whose skill took him around the countryside. Whenever possible he would embellish his work: a portal, a window, or a capital with the head or whole body of a small dragon. He liked to work in high places. Two hundred years later, at the time of the Puritan revolution, all of his work escaped the destruction by the religious reformers’ hammers and long poles. If you visit these churches today, you can still see the dragons, smiling down on headless saints and apostles without hands.

  SES Though Sir Ambrose certainly didn’t show it, he was more pleased than otherwise at the theft of the book. He took its loss as a reason to break off his proposed match with Lady Blanche. He had already found a richer alliance; if the bride was dull and coarse-featured, what of that? He need not see much of her. He would have dropped the connection with Hungerford Castle in any case. But this loss of the book, an

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  important part of the marriage settlement, gave him a convenient excuse. Because of it, he did not have the thief pursued as vigorously as he would otherwise have done.

  Lady Blanche grieved for a time, as was only proper. But she soon realized that she was mourning more for the book than for her bridegroom. Being a sensible girl, she hinted to her relieved parents that she was not quite ready to retire from the world. After a suitable time she was married to a scholarly, absent-minded knight, with whom she got on very well.

  The loss of the book struck Brother Theophflus hardest of all. “I had come to love the little dragon too well,” he said to himself, “so that it flew away. Even the book was taken from me.” In time, he made other books, though none as beautiful as this one; he never painted another dragon.

  Nonesuch woke from a dream in which Brother Theophilus I was gazing at him sadly and thought sleepily that he really should look at the world outside the box. He began to bite at the wood again, but fell asleep before he had broken off more than a few splinters. After a time, he woke and nibbled at the wood again; but he grew bored and began to look about him, using the light of his own eyes.

  He was lying between two pages. By arching his back, he could spread the pages and look down on the one beneath him, which happened to be the one he had seen on his first visit to the Scriptorium. There were the vines and the flowers, and the small animals Brother Theophilus had drawn, all surrounding the thick black letters that lay there quietly as if they too were sleeping. Nonesuch decided to follow the path of a vine all around the page, and he crept along, from letter to letter, until the vine seemed to be a path through a black

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  forest. He crawled up one side of the page, across, and down the other side. He looked across at the words as he went by;

  soon they seemed to be chuckling at him, daring him to find out their secret. He could almost hear them say, “We are all here, waiting for you.”

  And, in time, he slept again. When he awoke (and he realized that this was long afterwards), he began to explore the book again, crawling between other pages that he had never seen before.

  ; Now that he had all the time in the world, and more, to examine the book, he found new wonders everywhere in it, and many familiar things that made him remember his days in the Abbey of Oddfields.

  In the margins of such books, scribes often drew pictures that they would not dare put among the holy words in the main parts of the pages. Nonesuch saw the abbey again, from the east, as he had first approached it. He also saw it from the south side, where the wall was broken to show the “Neces-sarium,” as the common lavatory was called. Just emerging from the yellow-and-green doors of this building was the Abbot:

  fat, sly, loose-jowled, kindly, in the act of knotting his robe about him. In another margin, Nonesuch found an old monk whose task it was to watch the corn, but who always fell asleep in the sun; the crows used to take turns fanning his face gently, Nonesuch remembered, so that he would go on sleeping. There was a crow by him in the margin now, keeping him asleep forever.

  There were other monks as well: pious Brother Catechismus, who sold some of the poultry from the kitchen and kept the money for himself. Brother Theophilus had caught him in the very act of handing over a goose with one hand and accepting

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  some coins with the other from the owner of the castle inn. Brother Catechismus’s robe was spread wide so that no one could see him. But very little had been missed by Brother Theophilus’s mild, bright eyes.

  As time passed. Nonesuch must have crawled through every page of the book; but he always seemed to find something new.

  And often he slept. He was not hungry at all. Only sometimes, when pale earwigs squeezed through cracks in the box, he took care of them. He had all he wanted to eat. But he was growing still smaller. He realized this once when he came to a large golden “T” at the beginning of a chapter. When he had passed it before, his body just fit nicely over the top of the letter, from end to end. Now large bars of it extended past his nose and past his tail. His left wing, which before had easily covered the upright part of the “T,” now scarcely reached two-thirds of the way down. Really, Nonesuch thought, he should eat more or he would shrink away to nothing. But he forgot this danger and slept again; he dreamed that his grandmother was singing to him in her cracked, vibrant voice, as she had when he was very young.

  Sometimes, because there was, after all, a world outside the box - though he thought of it less and less often - Nonesuch bit at the wood again. His gnawing must have attracted some wood-boring beetles from the outside, because once, when he bit at the box, half asleep, the wood broke suddenly and a dim, dirty light shone through. Then it was easy to enlarge the hole; once he had begun, he didn’t want to stop. In a short time, no more than a month, in fact, he was able to stick his head out of the box and squeeze his body through the hole.

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  It hardly seemed worth while coming out. He was in a cellar full of junk. Above him was a patchy framework of loose beams and broken sticks, laced with cobwebs. Scraps of cloth hung here and there, pieces of broken chairs, fragments of crockery; a stained straw mattress swarming with straw-colored bugs lay against a beam. At one side, beneath black wooden stairs, was a small coal heap, up and down which black-beetles were marching in two orderly lines.

  Nonesuch flew up - almost surprised that he still remembered how to fly. The light, such as it was, came from a shuttered window. Nonesuch peeked between the shutter’s doors and saw the glass, thick with dust and sealed shut. Through it he could see another trash heap in an alley outside. No one passed by.

  He flew back to his book, and just in time. A venturesome cockroach had stuck his head into the hole in the box. He scuttled away - fortunately for him, out of the box - as Nonesuch approached. The dragon crawled back into his box, and sniffed around it carefully to be sure that no other insect had entered. But he realized that the hole left the box open to any passing insect. He crawled out of the box, and looked round the cellar floor until he found a wooden peg whose bro
ad end just closed the hole. He took it in his jaws by the thin end and backed into the box, plugging the hole after he had entered.

  He returned to his book; but soon he realized that a larger animal was roaming among the cellar beams. He could hear its feet patter and the thumps as it leapt from one level to another. Thus far, it had kept away from his box.

  Sometimes Nonesuch slept again, but his sleep was light and his dreams were troubled. He saw an angel with a proud, stem face, like one he had seen in the church, flying around the city streets among great crowds of people, striking them

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  with a black rod. The rod left black marks wherever it touched them and the people fell to the ground and lay still. Men were gathering up the bodies. The faces of the bearers were covered with masks; some had long beaks on them, like birds. Others chewed herbs, or burnt pungent herbs in small vessels so that the smoke covered their faces. They were piling the bodies into carts and hauling them away to deep pits, which were almost full but still had enough room, it seemed, to contain all the bodies in the world. Nonesuch awoke and looked at the figures on the pages of his book, which seemed to be living peacefully without any such dreams. He heard the sound of a leap outside: a substantial body landed on one of the beams. Nonesuch pushed out the plug of wood and squeezed out of the box.

  On a slanting beam was the longest rat he had ever seen. The rat’s patchy black body was more than a foot long and his tail, which hung down out of sight, longer than that. He had a thin neck and a narrow, bald head. As Nonesuch approached, the rat turned his head to look at him with an expression of mild surprise.

  CHAPTER IX

  IHE RAT’S STORY

  THE RAT TURNED HIS ^ BODY TO FACE NONESUCH

  squarely. The dragon flew to a higher beam, in case the animal had any idea of attacking him. The last time he had faced a rat, he had been much larger. It had been long since he had fought anything at all; so long that the very idea of fighting had grown strange to him. Still, he would not flee. It might be foolhardy, or even stupid, to stand up to an animal as large as this, but he could not think of abandoning his box and its contents.

  As the rat continued to watch him, swaying his long neck to and fro. Nonesuch rose on his claws and curved his wings forward. If he attacked, he thought, he should launch himself at a spot on the rat’s spine, too far back for the animal’s teeth to reach him. The rat was not so securely perched on his beam: if he turned quickly on it, he might fall off.

  But the rat showed no desire for battle. His eyes remained mild and inquisitive. Clearly he thought Nonesuch was some kind of insect. But rats ate insects. Well, Nonesuch thought, when he had seen how this particular insect could sting, he would leave it well enough alone. The rat only continued to look at him curiously, as if he could not believe what he saw.

  “Who are you?” he asked finally.

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  “A dragon,” Nonesuch replied.

  The rat seemed to be making an effort not to laugh.’ ‘Apart from your size,” he replied at last, “which makes the whole idea ridiculous, your shape isn’t quite right.”

  “What did you say?” Nonesuch demanded. He curved his wings and bristled his neck scales.

  The rat looked at him even more closely. “At least,” he said in a courteous voice, “you are different from any of the dragons I have seen.”

  “You saw a dragon!” Nonesuch exclaimed. “Where?”

  The rat gestured with his long nose towards a very messy pile of paper in one corner. “Over there some place.”

  “Where is he now?” Nonesuch demanded.

  The rat considered the tone of the question.’ ‘Not a living one, of course,” he explained. “He’d hardly fit into the cellar, would he? There’s a picture of one in that pile. I’ll find it for you presently.”

  He looked at Nonesuch again, at some length, and cleared his throat. “I must admit,” he told the dragon in a more respectful tone, “that I’ve never seen anything like you, whatever you are. You kept yourself well hidden.”

  “I had no reason to come out before.” For the moment, Nonesuch had decided not to tell the rat about his box, much less about the book it contained.

  The rat nodded wisely. “You have even less reason to come out now,” he declared. “This cellar is no better than a dank and foul prison.”

  Nonesuch looked around again. The cellar was certainly untidy, but also quiet and sheltered. “It doesn’t seem as bad as that,” he remarked. “Still, if you don’t like it, why don’t you go outside?”

  The rat looked startled at the suggestion. “Oh no,” he

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  whispered,’ ‘I never go out! Death is out there! They all fall in the street, my people as well as the humans. From the upper windows I can see carts coming to carry them away. But there is no need to go outside to learn what is happening in the world. I’ll show you,” he added.’ ‘Just let me fetch’the dragon I was mentioning.”

  While the surprised Nonesuch watched him, he leaped from his beam, disappeared behind the mattress, and soon returned dragging a large sheet of paper. He bit a hole near one edge of it and, stretching up against a beam, hung it from a nail.

  The paper was covered with letters, except for a picture in the upper left quarter. Nonesuch looked at the sheet for a long time. This, his first sight of a printed page, did not attract him. The coarse and runny letters that covered the paper left no room for a proper margin, and had clearly been put on without love or skill. Furthermore, he wondered who could have had the audacity to paint such a picture as the one he saw. It showed a man standing on a rock in the middle of a river, dressed in armor unlike any Nonesuch had seen before. Sharp, curved blades were attached to the outside of the armor, projecting at all angles. In the water was a large, clumsy, crudely drawn dragon, who was just crawling onto the rock. The knight held out his sword stiffly and smiled at the dragon in a superior fashion.

  ‘ “That was a notable encounter,” the rat informed Nonesuch. “It was the Dragon of Wantly Fell: a beast of great terror; whenever it was cut, its wounds healed of themselves. But the noble knight covered himself with this wonderful armor. When the Dragon seized him, the blades cut its body into pieces, which fell into the river and were washed away before they could join together again.”

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  The rat looked at Nonesuch, waiting for him to be properly impressed. He started back when the little dragon said, “I don’t believe it.”

  ‘ ‘You don’t believe what?”

  “Any of it. Dragons don’t heal by themselves. But, even more, no dragon would be so stupid.”

  “No, no,” the rat replied quickly. “The dragon wasn’t stupid; but the knight was too clever for him. You can see how the blades covered his armor. It took all the armorers in Sheffield a week and a day, working together by candlelight, to make that armor.”

  ‘ ‘It might have taken them a year and a day,” Nonesuch retorted. “But why would the dragon throw himself on the blades?”

  ‘ ‘Why, to devour the knight,” the rat told him.’ ‘Wauldn’t you have done that — that is, if you were somewhat bigger?”

  ‘ ‘If I had wanted to eat the knight, which I wouldn’t have done, even when I was as large as the animal in the picture — and, in point of fact, I was once a good deal larger — I would have seized that log on the cleft in the rock with my tail and pounded him a bit until the armor was loose enough to come off easily. Then, I suppose, I would have eaten him, if I had the least desire to do such a thing. In my day, we had learned to leave humans alone. Your Dragon of Wantly must have come from a degenerate family. I’m surprised he lasted as long as he did, even if he was able to heal his own wounds, which I don’t believe. Did all this happen very long ago?”

  “Oh, no,” the rat told him.’ ‘It says, “The wicked beast of Wantly Fell, not twenty years ago. The terror of all that did there dwell, in truth I tell you so.’ “

  Nonesuch looked at the picture for another
minute before answering.’ ‘Well, the people of Wantly Fell, wherever that is,

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  couldn’t have been very intelligent either. I suppose they and the dragon deserved each other. In my time, I’m sony to say, people knew of ways to deal with dragons besides single combat. Where in the world did you learn all this?”

  The rat seemed surprised at the question. “Why, I read it,” he replied.’ ‘It says so there.” He pointed with his nose at the hanging sheet of paper.

  Nonesuch stared at him.

  “The cellar is full of books,” the rat explained. “Iknowa great deal, more than any other rat, I think; and it all comes from books and from broadsheets, like this one about the Dragon of Wantly Fell. You may not believe it, but it’s all written down, so it must be true.”

  Nonesuch reserved his judgment on this last sentence. The fact that the rat knew how to read interested him much more than the truth and falsehood of what was written. And the rat, who was not a little proud of his knowledge, was glad to tell him how he had come by it.

  A family of weavers had once occupied the house, the rat told Nonesuch. They were busy, practical, prosperous people who made good cloth and sold it at good prices. They had broad, tidy showrooms upstairs. Only, they threw all their waste material down the cellar and never cleaned it out, leaving room only for the coal-pile. This had gone on for generations. ‘ ‘A rat knows what goes on under the surface of things,” he said proudly. They had all packed suddenly and gone away now, he added; he didn’t know where. Surely they would return soon.

  All this family had looked down on the old grandfather, who had once been a skilled weaver, but whose hands had grown too stiff for any real work. The tall, mild, white-haired old man kept to himself and took his simple meals alone in his