by Philip Reeve
Coming out of the shippen, closing the hurdle carefully behind him and latching it shut, he turned to see the last light of the day shining on the spire of the new church. Gargoyles leaned leering from the tower’s sides, all with forked tongues and lizard faces and bat wings, as if thoughts of the dragon had kept creeping into the heads of the stonecutters while they were carving them. It must be like that, thought Ansel, to live in dragon country. Whatever the time of day, whatever the time of year, you would be thinking always of the dragon. It would be there constantly, just under the edges of your other thoughts. It would get into your dreams.
Behind the church the mountain hunched huge and bruise-black into the clouds. Not hard to see how it came by its name. Those five sharp peaks were like the horns and spines of a sleeping dragon; those long walls of cliff and scree were its flanks and its folded wings. The Dragon’s Hill.
And as he stood there looking at it, a sound reached him, blown on the wind. A yowling, caterwauling cry, echoing off icy rocks and the floors of frozen corries. Ansel felt his heart stop and start again. The noise caught him by his throat and pushed him back against the shippen wall. A man passing on his way to the landgrave’s kitchens stopped and looked toward the mountain and quickly crossed himself. “Lord God, defend us from the dragon,” Ansel heard him say.
THEY STAYED IN THE LANDGRAVE’S GUEST QUARTERS THAT night and went on at dawn, damp with holy water, the windblown blessings of the town’s priests echoing in their ears. Word of the dragon hunter’s arrival had spread swiftly, and despite the cold a crowd gathered to see them out of town. For a while a band of excited children and a good few grown-ups too ran after the riders, shouting questions and warnings about the beast on the mountain and laying wagers among themselves about what Brock’s chances were. But they did not stray far beyond the town walls.
Soon Ansel and his master were riding alone up a road that wound uncertainly across the steep foothills, forever twisting back upon itself, as if it were having second thoughts about going too near the mountain. Every few miles a crude stone cross marked the way, and other crosses showed on the steep hillsides, made from wood and hammered into the thin turflike fence posts in an effort to nail some goodness to this hard, cold country. The woods of beech and birch gave way to black stands of pine, with sometimes a cleared meadow between them. Then even the pines thinned out, till there were just a few, standing like tattered standards between the crags. Jackdaws slid past on the breeze, watching the travelers with their icy blue eyes. Their cries clanged off the rocks. At last, in the hour before dusk, the road heaved itself over a stone ridge as sharp as a dragon’s spine and let them down into a valley where buildings clumped at the edge of a tarn.
The village was no more than a huddle of huts. Thatch was heaped above their log walls in hopeless mounds, giving them the look of cowpats that had fallen from a great height. If Ansel hadn’t known better, he might have thought they were dragon spoor. Around them women were working, white headdresses bobbing like gulls as they turned to watch the riders. On strips of near-vertical field, men were at work with picks and mattocks, clearing rocks, or maybe gathering more to add to the wavering stone walls that reached up the slopes behind the village. A clumsy fishing boat bobbed on the tarn, batted this way and that by the cat’s-paws that chased across the water.
“This is the place,” said Brock, urging Snow downhill toward the village as a gaggle of children started up to meet him. Then, seeing the shabby figure who came with them, “Oh, God’s bones! What’s he doing here?”
The man was a mendicant friar, a traveling holy man who went from place to place, praising God and living on whatever he could beg from the villagers who welcomed him. You would think pickings would be thin in that starved mountain country, but the friar looked healthy enough: a stocky, cheerful man with bat ears and a scrubby tonsure. Raspberry-red boots pierced with patterns of little holes flashed beneath his dowdy habit. He held up his arms when he recognized Brock, shouting, “God be thanked! Our prayers are answered! A soldier of Christ is come to deliver us all from this evil serpent!”
The village children gaped saucer-eyed at the newcomers. Some took the friar’s hint and fell on their faces by the road, thanking God in reedy voices.
“Don’t you know who this is?” the friar called, turning to shout over the children’s heads at the men and women of the place, who were leaving off their work and coming to greet the riders. “This is Johannes Von Brock, the famous dragon killer! God has granted him the strength to keep good Christians safe from creatures of Satan like the one that haunts your mountain! Make him welcome! The Lord has heard our prayers!”
The villagers clustered around the horses, reaching out to touch Brock’s boots, and even Ansel’s, as if they thought some of the dragon hunter’s luck and virtue might have rubbed off on his boy. Wary, weathered faces split into smiles. Village maidens blushed and dimpled. Pointing fingers jabbed toward the mountain, and a dozen eager voices started telling Brock of places where the dragon had been seen.
“Enough! Enough!” Brock held up his hand to quiet them. His eyes flicked back and forth across their hopeful faces, lingering on those of the prettier girls and women. “My squire and I will sleep here tonight, and tomorrow we’ll ride out to settle your dragon. But our road has been hard. Later I’ll be glad to hear whatever you can tell me of the beast. But first I need a place to rest, stabling for my horses. And a word with Father Flegel,” he added, with a stern glance at the friar.
The headman’s house was quiet once the family who lived there had been hustled out to allow the dragon hunter some privacy. Quiet, at least, if you didn’t count the odd fart from the cows who shared it, or the constant subdued mumblings of the entire population of Knochen, who had gathered around outside to see what would happen next.
Ansel went to fetch water, and came back to find Brock deep in hushed, angry talk with the friar. The friar shut up fast when Ansel entered, but Brock flapped a hand, motioning to Ansel to come closer. “The boy does not have the power of speech. You can say what you like. What brings you here, Flegel?”
“Father Flegel,” said the friar sulkily.
Brock looked down at Ansel, who was pouring water into a bowl for him to bathe his feet in. “Flegel was a monk until they expelled him for his heretical views and filthy habits,” he explained. “Now he shambles from place to place as he pleases, selling indulgences and fraudulent relics….”
“The shinbone of St. Ursula was not fraudulent!” grumbled Flegel.
“And nor was the little finger of St. Martin, I suppose,” said Brock, “or St. Anthony’s jawbone — you’ve sold three of those, to my sure knowledge. You’re a leech, Flegel. You’re God’s lamprey. The mystery is, what you are doing in this scoured-out country.”
Flegel gathered his robes about him, straining for dignity. “I go where God summons me,” he said. “And anyway, I heard that you were traveling in this region. That told me these villages must be full of frightened, superstitious fools. Why, I’ll go there and soften them up for Brock’s coming, I said. He’ll be glad of me. And so you should be, Brock. I caught a couple of their sheep on my way, gutted them and left them near the fields, where they were soon found. You should have heard these fools howl, Brock! They’re convinced that the dragon did it. It seems a shepherd from this place vanished on the high pastures back last summertime, and it’s left them all as jumpy as a bag of frogs.”
“You didn’t kill the shepherd, I take it?”
“Brock! Don’t joke about such things! As if I, a man of Christ, would … No. The man was killed by bandits, probably, passing through from one valley to another. Or wolves. There must be a hundred ways to die upon a hill like this without any need to blame a dragon.”
Brock nodded. “Have you ever climbed a mountain, Flegel? Right up, I mean, not just scuttling through the passes. It’s another world up there. Endless ice, and snow, and terrible rocks, and the cold sharp enough to flay the flesh off you.
Storms of wind and snow that can blow in suddenly, in any season. Maybe the poor fool froze, or tumbled down a chasm.”
Flegel spread his hands and grinned. “I know, I know, but try telling that to these peasants. Whenever anything goes awry here, it is always their dragon they blame.” Brock gave his snorting laugh. He pulled his feet out of the cooling water and dried them on the hem of Flegel’s robe and said to Ansel, “Go and find that headman. Let him know we’re ready now to eat, and hear his stories.”
WHITE PORRIDGE, BLACK BROTH, GRAY SALT MEAT. THE villagers laid the best food they could before the dragon hunter, and it was as colorless as the mountain they lived on. They hadn’t much left at this end of winter. Their flat barley beer left a taste of rust in Ansel’s mouth. The headman said, “If we had known of your coming, my lord, we’d have killed a pig.”
“Kill it in the morning,” said Brock, through a gristly mouthful of old mutton. “We’ll feast when I come back with the dragon’s head.”
He seemed content, thought Ansel, watching him as he ate and drank. The whole village was watching him, gathered around the small table in the headman’s hut. They stood in a ring and watched wide-eyed, mothers pushing their children to the front, as if they’d never seen a man eat before. Between bites, Brock grinned at them encouragingly. He winked at the children and eyed up the women like a fox in a dovecote. When his plate was empty he pushed the table aside and stretched out his long legs in front of him so that the light of the peat fire danced on his tall shiny boots. “Now, tell me about this beast of yours,” he said.
Ansel was shoved aside in the rush as villagers pressed forward to tell the newcomer their own version of the dragon story. There was an eagerness about them that he didn’t like. They had a sly way of looking at Brock when Brock wasn’t looking at them, as if they had some secret they were keeping to themselves. But maybe he was just imagining it. Brock did not seem to notice, certainly. He sat leaning forward in his seat, his face intent, granting them all his attention as they told him their tales of the dragon.
“It has a face like a cat —”
“Like a stoat —”
“Like an owl —”
“It cries like a buzzard —”
“It took ten cattle last winter from the field up there, behind the village —”
“It ripped the roof off a barn to get at my milch-cow —”
“It ate all the sheep on the summer pastures, and when we went looking for them we found only bones!”
“Father Flegel said that it took a shepherd too,” said Brock.
The villagers nodded. “He had gone high on the mountain. Too high …” said one.
If Brock had hoped to goad them into greater terror by reminding them of the lost man, he was disappointed. Talking of it made them seem sober, almost shamed. They shuffled back from him, hanging their heads, looking down at their rag-wrapped feet or slyly sideways at one another’s faces.
“This mountain has long been the habitation of dragons,” said Flegel dolefully. Ansel guessed the friar was feeling peeved that the villagers’ attention had been stolen from him by Brock. He seemed to puff up like a toad when their eyes turned back to him. “Why, Marcus Aurelius himself, the emperor of Rome, when he came riding through these high passes at the head of all his legions, heard tales of great serpents living on the heights. Of all the dragons of all the mountains of the earth, the one that haunts this mountain is the oldest and most wicked.”
“Well, it won’t be haunting here for much longer,” Brock said firmly. “Tomorrow at first light I shall go up into the high places, and find your dragon, and put an end to it. And to ensure my victory, I shall be taking Father Flegel with me.”
Ansel saw Flegel turn and stare at Brock, aghast. “Me?” he squeaked. “But I am just a poor friar, I cannot make such a journey; I am infirm and filled with feebleness. The spirit is willing, you understand, but the flesh is weak….”
“There’s certainly plenty of it,” muttered Brock, glancing at the friar’s fat belly.
“No,” declared Flegel, “I shall stay here. But fear not, for my prayers shall go with you….”
“God will help you climb, Brother,” said Brock, with a playful grin. “How much more powerful will your prayers be if you can hurl them into the very maw of the beast? What am I, after all? Just a soldiering man, with a knack for killing dragons. But if this particular dragon is as old and evil as you say, I shall need a man of God at my side.”
The villagers mumbled their agreement. Ansel felt guilty when he looked at them. Hope was softening each winter-worn face like butter soaking into hot bread. They believed in their dragon, and they believed Brock and Flegel were going to deliver them from it. Their belief was so strong that it was hard not to be swept up in it. Ansel kept forgetting what Brock had taught him, and started to share in the gusty excitement that was filling the hut. But when he looked at Brock he remembered. No such thing as dragons.
The press of bodies pushed him sideways, cramming him up against two girls. One was pretty, the other plain. They snatched at Ansel, eager for anything belonging to the dragon hunter. “Have you seen him fight dragons?” asked the pretty one, gold-haired, dimply. She had wrapped herself up in embroidery and lace and ribbons like a gift for Brock. “Were you there?”
“He can’t answer you,” said her friend, sharp-nosed and sallow. “Haven’t you heard? The boy can’t talk. The last dragon his master fought was so terrible that just the sight of it was enough to rob him of the power of speech.”
“Poor child!” said the first, pushing Ansel’s hair from his face, kneading his cheeks like dough. “Is it true?”
Ansel stared up at her, then nodded. He didn’t dare deny it. He didn’t know if the sharp-nosed girl had made up that detail herself or if it was something that Brock had told her. He felt as if he were drowning in lies. He pulled away from the horrible kindness of the girls and groped his way through the fog of peat smoke and the reek of bodies to the doorway.
Out he went into the night. The clouds had cleared. A hard, curved fang of moon dangled above the shoulder of the mountain. It spilled its white light down the snowfields. It glittered on the frosty ground between the huts.
Ansel let out a long breath like a plume of smoke into the chilled air and started to walk uphill toward the byre at the top of the village where Brezel and Snow were stabled beside Flegel’s old nag. The thing that one of the villagers had said about the dragon ripping off a barn roof to take a cow had made him uneasy for the horses, even though he knew it had been only a story. Other stories were still being told in the hut; he could hear the blur of voices behind him as he walked. Beyond them, down in the timber, wolves were crying, faint and far off.
He was nearing the byre when he heard another sort of cry. It was the same long, terrible sound that he had heard the night before, but it was closer now. The wolves heard it too; their howls stopped suddenly, the way birds fall silent in a wood when they hear something that frightens them. But what would frighten a wolf? Ansel lifted his eyes up to the hard crown of the mountain, searching among those moon-washed peaks for — what? Black wings? A belch of fiery breath? How could the dragon cry, if it was only a story?
For a moment he felt the liquid fear of yesterday gathering, rising up, ready to wash through him again. He calmed himself. No such thing as dragons. That’s what Brock said, and who was he to doubt Johannes Brock? That yowling had just been a night bird, a wildcat, a gale of wind blustering through some hole in the rocks up there….
He listened, waiting for the noise to come again. It didn’t. Instead he heard, from somewhere close at hand, another sound. Soft sobs and snuffles. Someone crying.
He went toward a low, half-derelict hut. He’d passed it in daylight when he led the horses up, but thought it abandoned and deserted. Now, in the blue dark, he could see fire-glow lapping through chinks in its log walls. The crying came from inside, helpless, heartbroken.
Ansel lifted the flap of goa
tskin that covered the doorway. Smoke stung his eyes, smearing his view of the hut’s interior. When he blinked the tears away he could see a woman sitting by the hearth, looking up at him in surprise through tears of her own. He couldn’t tell how old she was. Not old, he thought, but her long, loose hair was graying and the winds of the mountain had tanned and lined her face. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her nose was red too. She tried to stop her sobs when she saw him, but they kept heaving out of her, jolting her whole body.
Ansel couldn’t turn away. It was as if she’d hooked him with those wet black eyes of hers.
“You came too late, you and that dragon hunter,” she said. “My child’s gone.”
Ansel watched her mouth move, and wondered what she meant. Had the dragon taken her child? But there’s no such beast! Was she the mother of the dead shepherd, the one Flegel reckoned bandits had killed? He shook his head. I don’t understand. I can’t help you.
“They gave her to the dragon,” said the woman — or rather keened it, like the starting of a song, each word one note higher than the one before it, rising to another choking sob. “I gave gold to the friar to pray for us, but they said God has deserted us, and they took her up the mountain and left her for the dragon. My baby, my child …”
Ansel shook his head again. He thought of the princess in that painting of St. George, and tried to imagine those friendly villagers chaining a child up like that, dragging her up among the crags and leaving her there, an offering to the beast. They’d not do such things, would they? Not that kind old headman? Not those gnarled farmers and their rosy wives? But then he thought of the sly, secret looks he’d seen them give each other, and the sense he’d felt that they were hiding something. He remembered what the landgrave had said. There had been a time when Knochen village had sacrificed a girl each year to keep the dragon on the mountain quiet. If they were scared enough — and they were scared enough — perhaps there was nothing they’d not do.