No Such Thing as Dragons

by Philip Reeve

  Brock’s mare, Snow, turned circles on her halter, kicking out at the dragon with her hooves. She caught it a blow on its scaly nose that jolted its head sideways. It hissed in pain and snapped at her, but couldn’t reach; its body was too big to fit through the entrance. It pulled back, and the hide curtain flopped down into place again.

  For a moment all was quiet, or at least quieter. Snow snorted and stamped. Flegel whimpered. Else stopped screaming and peeked her eyes over the edge of the fleece that hid her with a look in them that said, I told you so. Brock looked at his sword, as if he were measuring it against the dragon’s armory of hooked teeth.

  “You told me there were no such things as dragons, Brock,” Flegel was saying sullenly. “You said there were no such things….”

  Brock shook himself. He was very white, and the sword he was holding shook steadily in time to the shaking of his hands. In a quiet, wondering way he said, “They were telling the truth. Those villagers. They weren’t the fools we thought.”

  “But you said —”

  The dragon drove itself against the wall like a battering ram. Sunlight splashed in as the big stones fell. One hit Snow just above the root of her tail and she collapsed, whinnying shrilly, struggling to rise on legs that would not work. The dragon thrust its head and forequarters in through the gap it had made. Brock ran at it, cursing, brandishing his sword, but Flegel’s horse, rearing up in terror, knocked him sideways with flailing hooves. The dragon’s jaws scissored shut on Snow’s neck. Her head plunged, wild-eyed, snorting out bloody foam. The dragon snapped her spine with a quick, irritable twitch of its head. She shuddered, and grew suddenly heavy and slack, head lolling and legs tangling as the beast wrestled her back through the wreck of the wall.

  Brock scrambled up and shouted something. He waved his sword.

  Flegel was on his feet too, maybe reasoning that he was safe till the beast finished devouring Brock’s mare. He raised his hand, two fingers crooked, two raised in blessing, calling on God and His Saints to smite the Evil One.

  The dragon took no notice of either of them. It dragged the dead mare a little way downhill and perched prissily over her, holding its long tail out stiffly behind it for balance as it started to eat. It tore the carcass open with its claws and jaws and stuffed its greedy head inside. Snow’s innards steamed in the sunlight.

  Brock scrambled over the tumble of stones that had been the wall. Ansel ran to the saddlebags and fetched his coif and helmet, then went after him, very scared, but wanting to see what would happen. He pushed the mail and helmet at his master, and Brock grunted and took them and crammed them on his head without ever taking his eyes from the dragon. He walked forward, and Ansel watched. The dragon stopped eating for a moment and looked up at them. Its face was a red knife. Brock and Ansel didn’t seem to interest it. It went back to its meal, and its crunchings and slurpings echoed off the cliffs above the cave.

  “That’s my horse!” shouted Brock. “That’s my horse, you worm!”

  He ran downhill, his armor a mirror, all sunshine and blood. The sword swung up to strike. The dragon, with an exasperating, lazy grace, hopped away. One flap of those unlikely feathered wings carried it twenty feet. It crouched on a rock, head low, tail out like a battle lance, big armored feet set wide apart. It roared, and its bellow slammed off the cliffs and raised crows from the crags a mile away.

  Brock ran at it again. This time it flapped toward him. The flash of the sword frightened it and it veered aside without biting him, but its tail came around hard and struck him across the shoulders, throwing him down into the grass.

  “Brock!” shouted Flegel, watching from just inside the cave.

  Brock rolled over in the grass. He had dropped the sword. Ansel ran to where it lay. He picked it up, surprised at its weight, and dragged it to where Brock was getting up. “Good boy,” said the dragon hunter, taking it, pushing Ansel behind him. But the dragon had lost interest in them again. Long-legged, folding its wings and bringing its clawed hands up against its chest, it stalked back to its prey. Ansel and his master stood and watched as it tore at the mare’s carcass, sometimes lifting its head to gulp down a morsel, sometimes watching them with those yellow eyes. Once it paused and lifted its tail and let out a loud fart. When there was nothing much left of poor Snow but bones and sinews and her hollowed hide, it suddenly took flight, flapping away across the valley. It flew clumsily, like a thing not made for flying. After each beat of its wings it seemed about to fall, until another thick, effortful beat heaved it upward again. At last it was hidden from them by the bald crags.

  Ansel looked at Brock. Brock looked at Ansel. For once the dragon hunter seemed as dumb as his servant. Into their silence fell the hard voices of the ravens, which were wafting down to pick at the dragon’s leavings.

  BROCK SHOVED HIS SWORD INTO THE GROUND AND SAT down beside it, all the straps and buckles of his armor creaking. Ansel went a little way away and was sick into the blowing grass. He was feeling dizzy and light-headed. Even walking felt strange. The valley, the mountain, all looked as it had the day before, but the world was changed. He’d never really believed in dragons. Even before Brock shared his secrets, when Ansel had felt so fearful of the dragons he claimed to hunt, he hadn’t really believed. He’d imagined Brock’s dragons as being the way dragons were in stories. He hadn’t imagined the stink of one, the jut and ripple of all the bones and muscles working under its hide, its animal presence.

  A feather blew across the ground to him. It was not a crow’s. Too long, too hard, too tapering. The quill that had rooted it to the dragon’s flesh was black, and hard as flint. In all his life, he’d neither heard nor dreamed of dragon feathers.

  Flegel came running past him, looking up at the sky to make sure the beast was not coming back. “Brock!” he shouted. “Brock! It was real! You said such things were just in stories!”

  Brock looked up at him. “I thought they were,” he said. “I never …” He looked toward the crags where the worm had vanished. He was doing what Ansel had done when it first appeared, trying to force the creature in his memory into the shape of some other, more natural beast: a lizard or a huge bird. But it would not fit. Not even he, Johannes Brock, who had wandered in far-off countries and dukes’ menageries and seen spotted cameleopards and armored unicorns, had ever seen a thing like that outside a picture. He shook his head, numbly rebuilding his world around this new truth. “It was a dragon, Ansel! Merciful Christ, it was a real, live worm! It ate Snow! Poor Snow …”

  They stood and looked wonderingly at the place where the creature had squatted, at the mare’s splayed wreckage and the blood soaking into the ground.

  “I wonder why it didn’t breathe its fire on us?” asked Brock.

  “Because I cowed it with my prayers,” said Flegel. “It would have savaged you for sure, if it had not heard me calling upon Christ and the Holy Virgin.”

  “So it was you who saved me?” Brock glanced at him. “I wonder you didn’t call upon Our Lord to strike it dead, while you were at it.”

  “There is only so much, Brock, only so much a sinner like me can do against the powers of the Evil One. Oh, Brock, let us go down off this mountain before it returns!”

  “Go down?” Brock seemed barely to be listening. He was feeling a sort of excitement he hadn’t known since he was a young man, hurrying off to the wars with his head stuffed full of stories. One by one he’d proved them to be lies. Chivalry and love and the goodness of God, none of them were more than idle tales, told by fools to keep their fears at bay. And he’d thought monsters were just stories too, until he saw his dragon. He stood and watched the crags that had hidden it and he thought, I faced it. I am not a coward. I faced it, and if I met it again, when I was ready for it, I could kill it. I could avenge poor Snow. I could really be Brock the worm slayer at last. And it was like a strange, sweet, half-remembered taste to think of his sword in the beast’s heart. Was this God’s plan for him? He looked back quickly over all the accid
ents and bad decisions that had led him to this moment and this particular mountain, and wondered if there had been a meaning to it after all. Johannes Brock, Christ’s champion against the Powers of Evil …

  “Brock?” said the friar.

  Brock looked around. He said, “It caught me off guard. I shall be ready for it next time.”

  “Next time?” wailed Flegel, hopping from foot to foot, sweaty with fear. “Brock, we have escaped its jaws once, with the good Lord’s help. It would be folly to go seeking it again! Let us go down off this accursed mountain. Find yourself a few strong men in the foothills if you want to fight the creature.”

  Brock considered that. “A lance would be useful,” he admitted. “Or a heavy spear, the sort you’d use for boar. Wolfhounds to track it, and men to help me skin it, or to drag the carcass down …”

  “A most wise notion!” said Flegel, eagerly. “Come back with hunters and hounds and wagons. Bring priests. Bring the bishop. Bring an army if you must. But don’t bring me! Let’s go down, Brock.”

  But Brock just stood there, staring at the crags. “The stories were true, Flegel,” he said. “They were all true….”

  Ansel left them and walked back to the shelter, looking up frequently all the way. He would never trust the sky again. He tried not to think about Snow. He thought instead of the girl, Else, whom Brock should have believed. She had not yet emerged from the shelter. Ansel picked his way over the wrecked wall and went to the back of the cave, reaching out to pat and stroke the two shuddering horses that were hiding there, crammed as close to the rear wall as the low roof would let them. When they were calm enough to let him past, he found Else looking warily at him out of her hole.

  “I told you it was real,” she said.

  Ansel flapped his hands and pointed, trying to show her that the dragon had gone. She knew that anyway, from the way Brock and Flegel were talking outside and no one was being eaten, but she stayed where she was. Every time she blinked she could see that angry, open mouth with its lines of teeth. The dragon had branded itself on her eyes like the sun.

  After a while Flegel and Brock came back into the cave. It seemed that Flegel had won the argument. “We’re going down,” said Brock, and stood at the cave mouth, watching the crags, while Ansel hurried about rolling blankets and stowing bags. Saddling the horses seemed to calm them a little; they did not shy too much when he led them outside. A flake of black swooped overhead, making him cower, but it was only a crow.

  With Snow gone, Brock would ride Flegel’s horse, and Flegel would ride Brezel. Ansel didn’t bother feeling bitter about being made to walk. He was only a servant, after all, and that was the way of things. All he cared about was getting off the mountain. He went back into the cave to let Else know that they were leaving. She watched him doubtfully while he mimed riding and drew the steep downward road in the air with his hands. At last he coaxed her out.

  “Why don’t you speak?” she said.

  Ansel didn’t have a mime for that. He shrugged, and spread his palms.

  Else sneezed. Squeezing into that cranny had left her bruised and grazed. The damp felt of her ruined festival clothes seemed stiff as armor. She flinched from Ansel’s touch when he reached out to help her over the stone tumble. Didn’t he know she was a mountain girl who’d been clambering over clitters and screes long before he was even born? Maybe he was simple as well as silent….

  In her irritation she almost forgot the dragon until she was over the stones and stood blinking in the sunshine. She had forgotten how wide the sky was. You couldn’t watch all of it, not all the time, could you? And even if you could, there were so many crags and clouds for a dragon to hide behind….

  She shuddered, and then, wanting Ansel to think it was just the cold, she wrapped herself in a fleece, which she had brought with her from inside the cave, knotting the ends across her chest like a shawl. The wind stirred the greasy wool. She imagined the breeze carrying her scent to the nostrils of the dragon, wherever the dragon was.

  It would return, she knew that. Now that it had found food in the cave, it would be back for more. Better to go down the mountain with the hunter and his boy and the fat friar. Better to go down the mountain with their horses. The dragon would take the horses first, and then the men. There was a chance, with all of them to distract it, that she might get back to her mother’s house alive.

  What she would do then, where they would go, she couldn’t think. There wasn’t room in her head for thoughts like that, while she was on the mountain. Up here the dragon coiled heavily in her brain, and left no space to think of anything except how to escape it, and what it would be like if she didn’t. How it would feel to be seized and torn into pieces, like that poor horse …

  Brock and Flegel had not waited. They were already riding downhill. Else and Ansel hurried after them, glancing up at the crags as they went, afraid of every shadow and each odd, sunlit rock. But Ansel told himself that the dragon had fed. Now that Snow was in its belly it might sleep for hours, maybe for days. From what he’d seen of it, the beast was just a big, fierce animal. He’d looked into its eyes and seen nothing but hunger there. It had shown no sign of wit, or power of speech. It was not some magic mountain monster. Not Lucifer in a lizardy disguise. Just an animal, and that meant that he could guess at how it would behave. It couldn’t be so very different from a dog or a cat or the old mangy dancing bear that showmen had brought to his father’s tavern that time. It would sleep when it had fed.

  But he could not think of a way to tell Else that without using words.

  They caught up with the riders down in the valley’s miry bottom, where runnels of water rilled through the bog grass. Else scrambled across the wet places from rock to rock, and Ansel followed her, while the nervous horses wallowed knee-deep, their hooves belching and sucking in the black muck. Together they went toward the ridge and the lone tree where Else’s neighbors had tied her. They were so busy watching the heights above them that they didn’t notice the tree was gone.

  ANSEL WAS THE FIRST TO GUESS WHAT HAD HAPPENED. He ran ahead of the others, up the steep bend of the sheep track to the place where the tree had stood. The tree was gone, and so was half the crag that had towered behind it. Bare, wet soil and tumbled rocks were strewn all down the mountainside. Deep drifts of loose stones, including a granite boulder the size of a small ship, had buried that shelf-wide path which they had crept along the day before.

  It surprised him that a mountain could alter so, and in so short a time. He’d always thought of mountains as being dependable things, hard and unchanging. But water and ice had been working at the rocks of the crag since the world was new-made, and last night’s rain had finished the job. A landslide, thought Ansel, recalling all the crashing and clattering they had heard in the night.

  “I don’t think God wants us to leave this mountain,” said Brock, reining in Flegel’s horse and studying the stones that barred their way. He didn’t sound alarmed, simply intrigued.

  “It’s not God’s mountain!” Flegel said. “This is Satan’s work! He wants to feed us to his serpent!”

  Ansel looked at the huge rock barring their path. Flegel said, “We’ll never get the horses over that.”

  “We’ll lead them around it, then,” said Brock.

  Above the big rock, tumbled stones and smaller boulders and masses of loose, wet earth stretched steeply upward. Roots stuck out of the ground, and little streams were starting to find their way down, cutting gullies for themselves through the soil. Ansel imagined leading Brezel and the other horse up that slithery slope, and down again on the far side. Once they were past the rock they would be on the path again. But could it be done? The horses were still nervous. If they reared up on that loose stuff and lost their footing, they might fall into the chasm, and take the rest of the party with them.

  Brock turned to Else. “You know this mountain, girl. Maybe you know of another way down?”

  Else shook her head. Then she said, “There’s
a way my father told me. I never seen it. It’d mean going back. Back up there.”

  “Oh no,” said Flegel. “No, no. Back into that beast’s hunting runs? No!”

  “Be quiet, Flegel!”

  Else went on. “You go across the high pasture and on up a path that winds through the crags. There’s a lake up there, he told me, very high. And beyond the lake more crags, and a gap in the crags, and a way down to the glacier. And on the far side of the glacier there’s a path leading down the mountain. But we can’t go that way. You’d never get your horses over the crags. Anyway, no one goes that way now. Because of the dragon. It nests up there somewhere.”

  Brock looked at the sky, considering. Above him the mountain was tugging fresh shawls of cloud around its summits. Curtains of rain or snow blurred the distances. The only sounds were the small rattlings and chitterings of stones bounding down the slope as the landslide went on settling.

  “We’ll try this way,” he said at last.

  “We could leave the horses behind,” ventured Flegel.

  “We’re not leaving more good horses for that worm,” said Brock, swinging himself down from Flegel’s mount and starting to lead it up the rockfall. “With the horses under us we still have a hope of being safe back at Knochen by dusk. Leave them behind and we’ll be caught on the mountain when night comes down again. Is that what you want?”

  Of course it wasn’t. Who’d want to be in that place in the dark, thinking each night noise the approaching dragon? Flegel scrambled down off Brezel, and Ansel took the reins from him and started to follow Brock up the fresh scree, coaxing the nervous pony after him. Stones scattered downhill past him, dislodged by Brock’s boots and the hooves of the horse. A big rock rattled down, missing Ansel by only a handsbreadth. His own feet were sliding on the loose shale too, trying to carry him back down between each step. Brezel whickered and tossed his head, jerking his reins and almost pulling Ansel over. Behind him, Flegel and Else were starting to climb, looking up at him nervously each time a larger stone went trundling past them. Flegel kept up a steady murmur of complaint. “Why did I let him lead me up here? Men are like dogs, that’s why; there are those that lead and those that follow, and he is one of those who leads, and I am one of those who follow….”