by Philip Reeve
“It’s lies!” squeaked Flegel. “Don’t you see? She’s stark mad, and now she’s twisting me into her stories!”
The girl shrugged. “He couldn’t have stopped them anyway,” she said. “They fear the dragon more than God now. They’re wild with the fear of it.”
“There are no such things as dragons,” said Brock gently.
“Oh, there is, sir,” said the girl. (And if Ansel hadn’t known better, he’d have believed her, the sure way she said it. He had to remind himself that Brock knew better than a mad mountain-peasant girl.) “I saw it,” she said. “I saw its cold old eye look in at me through that chink in the wall. Yellow it was. Like a cold flame.”
Suddenly, from outside the cave, there came a terrible roar, deeper and longer-lasting than the thunder. It made the cave floor tremble. It shook small pebbles down from the roof. Everyone started up, confused by the sound and by the frightened stamping and snorting of the horses. Brock grabbed his sword. Flegel crossed himself, mumbling prayers. Ansel imagined great scaled feet pulling the stones of the crags asunder, a dreadful head nosing toward the smell of people and horses. In the front part of the cave the horses whickered, barging against each other in their fear, knocking a stone from the low wall that separated their lodgings from the humans’ quarters.
Outside, for an appallingly long time, the roaring and tumbling and rattling rolled on and on, fading slowly to a last bounding clatter, a final crunch.
“Landslide, over among the crags somewhere,” said Brock, relaxing. He grinned at the girl. “This is a hard old mountain, but there’s no worm on it. It was a wolf that peeked in at you, my dear. So we’d best prop those baulks of timber across the door again, and keep that fire alight.”
HER NAME WAS ELSE, AND IT HAD COME AS NO REAL surprise to her when she found herself being marched up the mountain by her neighbors and tethered to a tree as dragon food. Her luck had turned bad before she was even born, and it showed no sign yet of ever coming good again.
First there was her mother: not a village woman but a traveling tinker from over the mountain somewhere. From her, Else got her black, unruly hair and those thick black eyebrows that met across the top of her nose.
Then there was her father. A kind enough man, and he knew the mountains better than anyone, but too thoughtful; ideas sprouted in his head like weeds and left no room in there for common sense. Everyone knew they were a bad-luck family, and when he vanished on the mountain, that just confirmed it. They started to keep clear of Else and her mother, just in case the bad luck rubbed off on them. The blue-eyed woodcutter’s boy from the village down the valley, who used to pay so much attention to her when she went down with her mother to church, wouldn’t even look at her after that. She heard the other girls talking about her. They were remembering how strange she was, how she fell into daydreams and fancies. How, when she was smaller, she’d come down delighted from watching the sheep on the mountain and said she’d seen angels blowing past in the sunlight, high over the crags.
After her father died, there was no one to help when the winds of January tore off half the roof. Out in the cold on a ladder, making repairs as best she could with her numb, blue fingers, Else could feel her neighbors’ eyes on her. She could feel their thoughts worming toward her at night, when the dragon’s cries rebounded off the crags and men lay awake wondering whose sheep, whose cattle would be found ripped and gutted in the morning.
She knew why they looked at her. She knew what they were thinking. If blood had to be spilled again to quiet the dragon, like it used to be in the olden days, if someone had to be offered up to the restless and hungry spirit of the mountain, then who better than the daughter of the man who’d woken it? Flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. Who else but Else?
When the friar arrived she’d thought at first it might be all right. Her mother had given him gold to make him stay in the village, the same fat gold coins she’d once brought to Else’s father as a dowry. She’d told her neighbors, too loudly and too confidently, that the holy man’s prayers would drive the dragon back into its hole. And they’d welcomed him, of course. They were glad of help from any quarter, any god, by then. But it hadn’t stopped them glancing sideways at Else, or holding those quick, muttered conclaves that went quiet when she walked by. It hadn’t stopped them from barging in through the door curtain one morning while Brother Flegel was sleeping off the feast they’d fed him, and dragging Else away. The women trussed her in her Sunday clothes, and the men carried her like a parcel away up the mountain, as high as they dared. There, on the high pasture, they’d roped her to that tree and left her.
And right till that moment, when they tugged the knots tight and scurried away, too ashamed of themselves to say anything or even meet her eye, right until then Else had half thought that it really was her fault. She wasn’t clever. She lived in the village like a fish lives in water, knowing nothing else. If all her neighbors blamed the dragon on her father and said her death would be the thing to quiet it, well, they must be right, mustn’t they? That was why she hadn’t screamed or bitten or struggled when they came for her, and why she’d felt so oddly ashamed at her mother’s struggling, her mother’s screams.
But up there on the mountain, with the hard bones of the tree digging into her back and the ropes gnawing her wrists and the wind booming past her, she’d started to wonder. She couldn’t have deserved this, could she? She squinted into the sun as it rose over the crags, and watched the sky for dragon wings. A queasy question started nagging at her. What would it feel like, to be eaten?
Moments like that, in stories, were when the handsome prince came riding up to slay the beast, save the maiden, and carry her home to his castle. But there was a shortage of handsome princes up that mountain. And if one had happened by, his white charger would have snapped its dainty ankles on the scree, and he would hardly have bothered unsheathing his shining sword to save an unbeautiful farm girl like Else. If she was to be rescued, she reckoned she would have to rescue herself.
So she wriggled and writhed till one hand came free of the rope. She fumbled her little short knife out of the pocket of her shirt. She used it for cutting switches when she was minding the sheep, but it worked on ropes as well, eventually, though it took such a time for the blade to gnaw through the damp hemp that she was sure the dragon would be upon her before she was finished. Sawing at the rope around her ankles, she kept expecting to look up and find it watching her, patient, claws crossed, stifling a yawn.
But it wasn’t.
Pounding across the squelchy pastures to the shepherd’s shelter, stumbling over the bones of butchered sheep, she expected wingbeats, a sun-blotting shadow, and then the claws like meat hooks driven through her, yanking her into the sky.
But they never came.
She reached the shelter, ran inside, and crouched there in the shadows, shivering. She had been there ever since. She had made a fire from the heap of heather roots that was piled up in a corner, and eaten the sour brown apples that some herdsman had stored there in the autumn and forgotten to take down with him when winter closed the high pastures. She listened to the wind and the sounds of the mountain. She listened to the dragon slithering about outside, waiting for her to come out.
Was it real, or was it something not-quite-real? Not really real, like those gorgeous, golden angels she’d seen when she was a little girl, dancing on the wind above the mountain? She couldn’t be certain, so she decided it would be safest never to leave the cave again.
Now she kept to her corner, watching Johannes Brock and his wordless boy build the fire up, watching the pitiful Father Flegel try not to meet her eyes. She had wondered at first if Brock might count as one of those handsome princes. But he wasn’t that handsome and he wasn’t a prince and although that sword of his looked fine and shiny, she didn’t think it would make a dent in anything as big as the beast she’d heard in the night, rubbing its armored flanks against the outsides of the shelter.
But she was g
lad he was there all the same, him and his ragtag group of followers.
Because maybe when it came back, the beast would eat one of them, instead of her.
She slept, and Brock watched her. He was wondering what he should do with her. If he took her back with him to Knochen, she’d give the game away for sure, and tell the villagers he’d killed no worm upon their high pastures.
If he had been another sort of man, he would have made sure she never left the mountain. It would be easy enough to cut her throat and bury her deep under scree stones, where no one would find her bones. To say, if anybody ever asked, that the dragon must have eaten her. But Johannes Brock had never done violence to anyone. As a young man, riding to his first war, he had dreamed of striking down God’s enemies left and right, but when he actually found himself in the middle of that battle, smelling the blood and hearing the cries of the hurt and dying all around him, something changed in him. He couldn’t use his sword, not even to defend himself. He only survived that fight because no blade or arrow tip pierced his armor.
Afterward he rode away alone, too shaken to face his comrades or ever to return to his own lands and explain his cowardice to his family. He’d become a wanderer instead, and turned at last to dragon hunting, fighting enemies that never bled or cried for mercy, mainly because they didn’t exist. So he did not even think of silencing Else with his knife.
Anyway, he decided, it would be impressive, wouldn’t it, to bring her back down to Knochen? Maybe she would go along with his story. She had no reason to love her neighbors, after what they’d done. Perhaps she’d be glad to help him deceive them.
The girl was sleeping now. Ansel too, and Flegel of course, snoring like a wood saw. The horses slept standing, heads hanging down. Brock wrapped his traveling cloak a little tighter around him and pillowed his head on the saddlebag with its swaddled skull and soon he was sleeping too.
If anything bellowed that night, prowling outside upon the mountain, it went unheard amid the louder bellowing of the storm.
ANSEL AWOKE TO THE RESTLESS SNORTING AND WHINNYING of the horses. No sound of wind. Gray morning light seeped through the chinks in the wall at the cave mouth. The tempest had blown itself out in the night.
He sat up. The others sprawled about the hearth where they had fallen asleep. Flegel was still snoring wetly, bundled so deep in skins and blankets that only his red boots showed. The girl called Else had squirmed herself into an alcove in the cave wall and tugged a fleece across it, to keep the cold out or hide herself from dragons’ eyes, or Brock’s and Flegel’s, or all three.
Ansel got up and stretched. He mumbled his morning prayer. The stones he had slept upon had filled his body with nagging aches. He needed to piddle but Else being there made him shy, even though she was asleep. What if she woke?
At the front of the cave the horses stamped and snorted fretfully, tugging at their tethers. Ansel supposed that a cave was not a natural place for them. He went to calm them, slapping their necks, smoothing his hand down their long velvet noses. They nudged and nuzzled him, and ate up the bunches of dry grass he held out for them, but they stayed nervous. He went past them, pulled the door curtain aside, nervously checked the world outside for waiting wolves, and went out.
Sunlight lay on the meadow and on all the crags that watched over it. At some point in the night the rain had turned to snow. Swags and slashes of it lay about on the brown grass, almost too bright to look at. Higher up, on the crags and on the ridges above them, everything was dazzling white. The world felt fresh-made.
Ansel walked in among a tumble of large boulders that lay a short way off. Ravens rose from a sheep carcass and circled, cawing. Their shadows went flicking over the stones while Ansel opened his breeches and watched the steamy yellow stream go winding downhill between his boots. He was just lacing himself up again when a stone fell somewhere behind him, racketing down from rock to rock across the face of one of the crags that ringed the valley. It was followed by a spattering rush of dislodged snow. Ansel looked around without thinking. His eyes went up and up a mossy cliff, up to the sharp summit where the stone had come from.
An animal was perched there, watching him.
Ansel stared at the creature and tried to find a word for it. He tried to make its shape fit the shapes of creatures he had seen before. Lizard? Bird? Maybe it’s a corkindrille? Maybe it’s nothing but a trick my eyes are playing?
(It’s a dragon, said his heart, stilled to a whisper inside him. But there were no such things as dragons.)
It didn’t look a bit like the skull in Brock’s bag. Its head was a short, brutal blade, freckled with hard black scales, the spiny ridges over its eyes as rough as pinecones. A pulse throbbed in the soft leather folds of its snaky throat. Its body was as big as the body of a small horse, and armored all over in scales. The scales were longer on its shoulders and flanks and wings. They were so long that they weren’t really scales at all, but feathers, ruffling silently in the wind. The wings were folded up close under its chest, and at the end of each wing three blue-black talons glittered like dark glass. The larger talons of its feet clutched the rock’s edge.
“It’s a dragon,” Ansel’s body told him. “It’s a dragon,” said each hair on the nape of his neck, bristling.
A growl bubbled softly, deep in the sound box of the creature’s chest. The eye it aimed at him was sulfur yellow. It opened its mouth, and its teeth were icicle white and sharp as nails and its tongue was a pink spike. As it launched itself off the crag toward him, Ansel saw the long tail lash out behind it, striped like a serpent and frilled with feathers.
He ran backward through the rocks, stumbling, scattering sheep bones, bleached ribs crunching under his boots. He turned and fled uphill toward the shelter. He could hear the thing coming after him. The wind whirred in those weird feathers. A mad shadow swept over him and spread black wings across the shelter wall as he threw himself through the low door, letting the curtain of hide flump shut behind him. He fell forward into a confusion of rearing, neighing horses, maddened by the fierce scent that Ansel had brought in with him.
“Ansel?” said Brock, awake, heaving himself upright, rubbing at the bruises of the night.
Something hit the front of the shelter like a storm of wind, scrabbling claws and a rasp of scales on stone and a long, bitter screech of animal frustration.
“Christ!” Brock shouted. He reached down for his sword and started tugging it out of its scabbard. Flegel came awake too, demanding to know what was happening. Else’s eyes peeked out from the shadows of her hiding hole. The horses screamed, and something else screamed too, a hard, jagged scream, like some huge and evil bird.
“What in Christ’s name was that?” asked Brock stupidly, sword out, back against the wall.
“A wolf?” asked Flegel, almost hopeful.
“Dragon!” mouthed Ansel, scrambling up amid the stamping hooves, the spattering dung. He flapped his arms like wings in a frantic mime. He tried to show them its huge jaws, and its claws, and its feathered tail. “DRAGON!” But Brock and Flegel didn’t understand him. Only the horses knew, barging and jostling him as they turned this way and that, desperate to escape the cave as it filled with dragon scent. Brezel pulled free of his tether and pushed deeper inside, knocking Ansel down again.
Something hard was grating along the outside of the shelter wall. The bars of daylight that raked in through the chinks between the stones were put out one by one. Between the shrieks of the horses, Brock’s steady cursing and the querulous demands from Flegel, Ansel thought he heard loud, snorting breaths. He crouched in the hoof-trodden mud and dung behind the wall, and saw that sulfur-yellow eye stare in at him through a gap between two stones. The black pupil widened as the creature looked into the shadows of the cave. Ansel, nailed by a beam of sunlight slanting through a higher opening, saw his own face mirrored in it, and the answering blackness of his wide and wordless mouth.
Like a mailed fist banging on a door, the hungry creature slamm
ed itself against the wall of stones. The stones shifted, grating against each other. Scraps of dried moss, stuffed into crannies long ago to keep the weather out, came feathering down around Ansel where he crouched. He couldn’t move. He felt as if he had grown roots. He could only wait there, watching, while the creature drew itself back and struck again. Harder this time. The whole wall wobbled. A largish stone, sprung from near the top, thudded into the mud not far from Ansel. Sunlight dazzled through the gap it left. The next blow dislodged a little avalanche of stones, which rattled down the outside of the wall, and the beast outside jumped back, snarling.
A strong hand held Ansel’s arm and hauled him bodily backward. He looked up. Brock.
“What’s out there, Ansel? What is it really?”
“Dragon!”
Brock understood him that time. Maybe he’d already guessed, so it was easier for him to read the word in the shape Ansel’s mouth made. He looked toward the cave mouth, brighter now with those stones gone from the wall’s top. “It can’t be,” he said. “It can’t be! There is no such beast….”
The dragon seemed to want to prove him wrong, for it chose that moment to thrust its head in through the curtained entrance. Its eyes were as big as eggs, as yellow as yolks. Its mouth opened unbelievably wide, and its voice filled the cave. Ansel crammed his hands over his ears. He saw Flegel do the same. At the back of the cave, the girl Else was a shuddering huddle under her sheepskin. When the roaring stopped, Ansel could hear her screaming, a thinner, higher sound than the sound of the horses. Flegel’s gelding had snapped its tether now, and he and Brezel were pushing as deep into the cave as they could, heads up and ears back and eyes wide and white.