The Dragon, the Witch, and the Railroad

by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  A Citizen of Stockyard on the Local Dragon

  As the snow melted, Ephemera found the stake-sized hole in the middle of the communal field outside the town. She wandered wherever she wished by now, letting it be known that she sometimes forgot where she was going or what she’d gone there for, or sometimes if questioned would complain that she had dropped some of the little story-shells from her dress, and had bent down to search the ground for them. Really she was keeping her eye out for any sign that Verity had been there. The only telling clue that she found was that, while it looked as though a substantial sized stake had been set in the hole, the edges of the hole were ragged, as if it had been ripped out at a slight angle.

  Meanwhile the search party returned. Lord Dragomirov graciously offered to assist them, saying he suspected the dragon who lived in the volcano and marauded at will had swooped down on the lost girl like a hawk on a rabbit. He declined to mention that in order to avoid dragon depredations on the higher priced real estate of his domain, he had ordered the villagers to set up just such an incident.

  Ephemera had by this time pretty well pieced together what had happened to Verity. In addition to the square hole for the stake, there were the little stone markers around it. These were regularly visited by solemn looking people who placed sheaves of grain or clumps of berries on them, after brushing them clean of snow. As someone who always inquired about the local customs, Ephemera chatted with a few of them.

  “You’re leaving offerings?” she asked. “Is this some sort of holy site then?”

  “Only to us, Missus,” a man told her. “Here we lost my mother’s sister, offered up to the dragon on her sixteenth birthday. I was only a babe then, mind you, but it’s a thing you don’t forget, hearing the thunderclap of those huge wings, dragon fire forking the sky like lightening, as the great cruel claws seized up the stake—and the blood-curdling screams of my poor auntie. It’s said His Lordship decreed it be her who was offered since his oldest son had his eye on her instead of on some lady whose dowry could increase His Lordship’s holdings.”

  “Lordships are like that,” Ephemera agreed. “But who is this dragon? A vagrant beast without a proper job?”

  Ephemera made the last sound as if she were puzzled, but she was not. She was alarmed and shocked, but like many of the wandering minstrels in days of yore, and unlike her niece, she had an excellent horse trading face and was good at dissembling. A poor woman abroad in a land where the overlord felt comfortable offering females of his choice to dragons needed to be careful how she trod.

  Her has a job, all right,” the man said. “Bein’ a dragon is her job, and Old Vitia does it well and fearsome.”

  Ephemera let it drop. It wasn’t wise, since she had to live among the villagers, to seem too interested in their secrets, but here and there she learned that the dragon had lived in the volcanic crater longer than anyone could remember.

  That much of her investigation was familiar—even fun—reminding her of the field trips of her youth, when she’d gone to unusual places, learned fascinating stories, and caught the eye of more than one likely looking lad to squire her to dances where she surprised her hosts with her skill on the fiddle. These days her hands were a bit arthritic and she played no longer, but if she did, she’d be playing a dirge instead of a dance tune. The idea of the very earnest and honest young Verity, whose size only made her seem more of a child in a grown-up’s body, being a dragon’s dinner seemed somehow more wrong than all of the ancient stories of dragons abducting maidens. Ephemera hadn’t known or been related to those girls.

  People here seemed so ordinary. In spite of their interesting customs and stories, she’d thought them much like Argonians she knew, with the same hopes, loves, hates, fears, ambitions, the same sorrows and pleasures. And yet, they had allowed a harmless young woman to be bound to a stake to be a dragon’s dinner. She was sure of it.

  She skied in ever-widening circles around the post-hole and the pathetic little memorials, wilted bundles of wildflowers buried beneath the snow. Her hem grew heavy and awkward with ice and her eyes also seemed uncommonly icy. Her hair straggled out of its pins beneath her cap and she paused to tuck it back in again, lost her balance, and tumbled into a drift.

  She’d barely raised her bottom out of the snow before her poles sank all the way down past her wrists. She couldn’t exert enough pressure on them to stand upright. Meanwhile one leg plunged back into the drift.

  Perhaps if she could sit back and slide on her rump until she reached firmer ground, where the snow was not so deep?

  But her pack and snowshoes didn’t allow her to slide easily and she could not rearrange herself to a configuration that allowed her to remove them.

  She thought, “Botheration!” but what she spoke were a number of the more colorful curses of the early Argonian seafarers.

  “Oh, that’s a good one, Missus. I must remember that one,” a man’s voice said, accompanied by a lot of bleating and the lanolin scent of sheep. A hand reached down, grasped her under the right arm, and pulled her up and out of the drift.

  “Not wise to be out here this time of evening,” he said.

  It was evening! How long had she been out there, anyway?

  “I’ve often skied alone at night,” she said, “Though I did have a head lamp. I doubt your dragon would swoop down and fly off with me, I’m a bit old and tough.”

  “Be that as it may, folk have frozen out here.” She knew that perfectly well and felt chagrined that she’d been caught out. “As for the dragon, I’m driving her tribute up the mountain now, so she’ll do no-one harm.”

  “But I was told she only eats young ladies,” Ephemera said, her tone angrier than she intended.

  “If you was her size, you couldn’t get by with such paltry fare and no more can she. No, this time of year, she needs her flock.” He looked down at her, his eyes rimmed with iced lashes. His mouth was hidden in his similarly icy gray beard. “You come lookin’ for that lass as was taken, didn’t you?”

  “My niece,” she said shortly. “Poor child.”

  “Now then, I shouldn’t worry too much about that,” he said slowly.

  “You would if she were your niece or daughter or granddaughter,” she said.

  “Yes, maybe, but I have my doubts about what happens there. I’ve heard tell of some of the dragon girls bein’ seen in other villages and further afield, long after they were carried away.” He chewed on his mustache for a moment, losing a few small icicles. “Can’t think why dragon wants those girls, anyway. Scrawny little things, most of ’em. No more than a bite or two.”

  Ephemera thought sadly that Verity would be the exception to that observation.

  Toby in Drague

  Except for his fortunate choice in a traveling companion, Taz, who brought her own furnace with her, Toby would have frozen on the trip to Drague. Resting in the curl of Taz’s body, however, he was almost too warm.

  He had always thought of Queenston as his home, a good place full of good people who tried to treat others properly, but recently, this notion was not working out for him at all. Even if they didn’t hang him, he realized that it was no place for a dragon of sense and sensitivity like Taz. He had no fear of being recognized in Glassovia. His face was not well-known and Taz had grown so much that she’d be unrecognizable even to him had he not witnessed her transformation first hand.

  She flipped her tail impatiently, knocking one side out of the enclosed boxcar in which they were riding. She was three times the size she had been in the iron yard. Her new diet of fresh meat agreed with her.

  The train stopped for three quarters of an hour while the engine dragons were fed, kibble and water loaded, and passengers got off to stretch their legs while new travelers boarded.

  Taz’s nose shot into the air and she bent her head to peer around the boxcar door.

  “What is it, girl?” he asked, but after a burst of gas she settled back down again.

  One of the most convenient feat
ures of dragons was that because of their penchant for internal combustion, they had very little waste to eliminate. Most of it was expelled as gas, either used to create the fire they were so well known for or great sulfurous farts. The latter weren’t such a problem for kibble-fed dragons, but Taz lately turned the air yellow with her spectacular eruptions following a proper carnivore’s hearty meal.

  It seemed forever until the train lurched forward and he settled back against Taz’s side. Her warmth came in handy later when the train stopped in the middle of a snowy forest. For a while, Toby just huddled in the drafty car with his own living heater. He slept, only vaguely aware of some agitation near the front of the train. Then they were moving again, and it wasn’t until they were several miles down the track that the train once more stopped. He heard voices as people left the train again.

  When the train began moving, it didn’t stop until it reached Drague. The Glassovian capital was no tiny village outpost such as those he’d seen along the way, but was surrounded by the walls of an ancient city. A castle stood in the middle of it all and that made him very nervous, given his recent acquaintance with the lowest level of the Queenston castle.

  When he jumped from the car into the confusion of the train yard, Taz made an inquiring sound in her throat and looked around the noisy depot before leaving the boxcar.

  When she took off, soaring over the city wall, Toby figured she was hungry and needed to hunt. Fine for her, but he did not quite know what to do with himself. He wandered the cobbled streets, trying to get his bearings.

  The newer, broader streets were laid out in a grid but interlaced with blocks that were warrens of dwellings riddled with tiny alleys and paths.

  Just as he thought he’d have to sleep on the street that night, he spied a sign with a familiar emblem on the sign—a hot air balloon. He didn’t speak the language, so with a few charades, he demonstrated how adept he was at sewing and sealing hot air balloon envelopes. As soon as the proprietor figured out what he was saying, he hired Toby at once. His was not a skill widely cultivated.

  He spent his evenings and early mornings outside the city walls, scanning the skies, but Taz did not return. The longer he spent in the city, the more he picked up the language and in the pubs, he heard tales of wild dragons in the mountains. One had carried off a girl from the train just ahead of him, according to the scuttlebutt in the pubs.

  Regretfully, he decided Taz must have joined the wild dragons and he was now on his own.

  It saddened him, but she would probably be happier among her own kind and if she wasn’t, she would find him. In the meantime, it would be easier for one man to escape unwelcome attention than a man and an increasingly large dragon. He still wished to learn what the saboteur’s business was here.

  So when the snows grew heavy, he discontinued searching for Taz beyond the castle walls and instead, spent more time in the rough fellowship of the pubs, where he found food and drink as well as news and possibly his quarry. As winter passed and the melting snow made the city streets a river of slop, one night he ducked for cover inside a better quality establishment than he usually frequented, and there he saw both men he sought. Why had the saboteur remained in Drague for the winter? What business could have kept him so long?

  They were deep in conversation with two other men, one of them a short, gruff looking fellow with grizzled whiskers. He spoke in a whisper that could be heard two tables away.

  “Most likely she’ll be dead now,” he said. “When we first tried to find the girl in the village just above where the avalanche started, the old aunt babbled on about them giving her girl to their dragon.”

  The saboteur asked, all innocence. “Why would she suppose they’d do a thing like that?”

  Whiskers whispered, “She reckoned if they had a great beast running off with people, better it take a stranger than a girl they knew. Murderous heathens.”

  “I’ve arranged for special passage for our party on the westbound train in three days’ time,” said the saboteur’s other companion, a florid prosperous-looking man with a good suit with no mends or faded spots and a solid gold pocket watch. “And I understand there is a balloon maker in town. If the girl is in the dragon’s cave, the quietest way to approach would be with a balloon. It’s said the dragon sleeps in the winter and it’s likely we could drop down into the crater, enter the cavern on foot, either kill or bind the dragon and haul off her hoar—rescue the girl, if she’s still alive, using the balloon.”

  Toby couldn’t contain himself. He had met the saboteur so briefly and what now seemed so long ago that he felt he risked little chance of recognition. He rose and approached their table, head bent humbly and his cap in his hand.

  “Sir, I work in the shop where the envelopes for the balloons are made and I am acquainted with the making of gondolas as well. Also, I’ve some experience piloting if you’ve need…”

  “Just the fellow!” said the grizzled whisperer.

  The well-dressed toff regarded Toby through a pince nez and offered his hand. “Sir Archibald Blunt, young man, and kind of you as it is to offer your services, this is a rescue mission involving a savage beast and if we don’t return alive and you do, you won’t be paid and likely the balloon will be lost.”

  “But did you not say a young lady might lose her life if we don’t try, sir?” he asked as ingenuously as possible. “Mustn’t let that happen.”

  “She’s likely already been eaten,” Sir Archibald said, “But she’s gentry and her people must know for good and all what’s become of her.”

  “Then I’m your man, sir.”

  “Good. Now all we need is a dragon to fire it.”

  “I believe the dragons in this area not belonging to the railroad are still wild ones, my Lord,” the grizzled man told him.

  From the next table an exotically dressed gent with a dancer’s flourish of his beringed hand, spoke. “You are all so spoiled with your dragon dependency.” He was unapologetic about eavesdropping. “In my land, we employ another method of air travel rather than these clumsy balloons, but I admit, with the weather here, flying on a carpet is too exposed.”

  “No problem, sir,” Toby replied. “There’s other ways to fly my kind of craft—less convenient, of course, but still may be done when no dragon of suitable size is available.”

  He thought that even if Taz were there she now might be too large to perform her former job. He would just have to learn to do without relying on her company and her warmth and strength.

  When he finished the balloon, complete with handmade envelope in brilliantly colored silks stitched in stripes, he packed it and when his party was ready to leave, bundled it aboard the train. They traveled westward until they reached the place where they said the avalanche had stopped the train the previous winter. As Toby unloaded his creation, he spied the outline of something in the air far too big to be the greatest of hawks.

  Chapter 24

  Taz Under the Big Top

  Taz hated to leave Toby, but the boy seemed determined to stay in the smelly place teeming with loud voices, bad smells, and hard surfaces. She saw nothing to hunt except humans, but they were not, she told herself sternly, appropriate prey. Toby was a human, after all.

  Now that she was bigger and stronger, she could do all sorts of things she’d never been able to do in the last city she’d lived in.

  She soared above the buildings, and flew right over the ancient wall, and above the sleeping fields, now occupied by tasty sheep and cows. Later, she could hunt wild game in the wild woods and to the mountains beyond where her kind flew free, but first, a snack.

  Although people had sometimes in her presence referred to stories in which the preferred diet of wild dragons consisted of gently-bred young maidens and crunchy armored heroes, the truth was that the ability to flame was offset by a loss of any scents less pungent than the smoke lingering in one’s nostrils, or any taste whatsoever, actually, since the flames made everything uniformly hot.

  S
he had no taste buds at all, but found some textures were more pleasing than others in the enjoyment of her kill. Part of the pleasure of consuming wild game was the hunt and chase, but the meat was tougher and stringier, whereas lovely grass-fed grazing animals were tender and juicy.

  A great number of cloudlike white blobs dotted the landscape beneath her wings, and she circled them in a mighty swoop. One blob, she noticed, had wandered up over a hill near a grove of trees, where it stood all alone, waiting, though it didn’t know it, for a rendezvous with death.

  What she did not notice was the shepherd and his dog dozing beneath one of the trees on top of the hill, or that the dragon-smelling wind her wings pumped toward the herd, alerted them. The sheep bleated and scattered, though the one beneath her simply looked up, chewing, and apparently thinking, “Oh, look, a dragon. How curious.” The shepherd and his dog reacted more violently.

  The dog barked and growled, threatening, “Not with my herd, you don’t, sister!”

  The shepherd pulled the hook off his crook, revealing a pointy bit at the end.

  Taz had never seen such a thing and glided down for a look. The shepherd flung it at her, pointed end first.

  Taz was wondering why he would do something like that and watched, fascinated, as the long stick hurtled toward her, until suddenly it struck her. A sharp pain flashed through her as it pierced the membrane of her right wing and then hung there, stuck in her wing with the staff end dangling while its weight tore at her wing. She squalled flame, starting a fire that occupied the shepherd while she escaped, hurt and still very hungry.

  The injured wing, impeded by the spear, hampered her flight, causing her to list to one side, unable to fly straight ahead. She staggered over several fields before pain and exhaustion forced her down, rolling on the ground, crying as the spear tore her wing even more.