by Philip Reeve
Ansel shook his head and grinned.
The girl tied up her headscarf, which had come undone, spilling her greasy hair across her face. She looked at the crags again, narrowing her eyes suspiciously, as if the rocks were the faces of people she didn’t quite trust. “It’s gone,” she said. “Maybe you killed it. It might have bled to death by now, after that gash you made in its tail. Sliced it like a sausage! It can’t fly anymore, at least. It’ll crawl away somewhere and die. You’re the dragon killer, not old Brock.”
Ansel shook his head. He thought he’d most likely only wounded the dragon. He thought he’d probably only made it angry.
He stood up and walked off a little way, wallowing through the deep snow. He had not gone far before a hole opened up in front of him. He peered over its edge, down into the heart of the glacier: a cold glass world of fluted blue ice and frigid shadows. If their makeshift sledge had carried them another few feet they would have plunged into it. His heart beat quickly just looking at it, imagining that plunge. He looked around. All over the surface of the glacier he saw similar gashes and pitfalls, and sinister dips and hollows in the snow where more lay hidden. From high above they’d looked no more than shadows. He’d thought they might sledge all the way on the old shield; now he saw they’d have to walk. And night would soon be drawing on again, and they had no food.
The triumph he’d felt at seeing off the dragon turned sour. It wasn’t only the worm that was trying to kill him, it was the mountain as well. And the mountain was worse than the dragon, because the dragon wanted to eat him, but the mountain wanted nothing at all.
But Else seemed almost cheerful. He wondered if the downhill rush had left her light-headed. She hummed a tune, tearing strips from the hem of her felt dress to hold the remnants of her shoes on to her scabbed and frostbitten feet. “We can go down from here,” she said. “We can creep our way down the glacier to its snout. There is a lake there, and another below it, and a river going down into the valley.”
She stood up, and took his hand, and they started walking, crunching across the snow, slithering over the steep ridges and short, sudden drops that stretched over the surface of the glacier-like frozen waves. “We won’t go back to Knochen,” she said, as she limped along. “Not after how they treated me. We’ll send word to my mother, and we’ll all go together to the lowlands. She’ll take care of you, Ansel, when she hears how you looked after me. Ansel the dragon killer.”
She smiled at him, looking hopeful for the first time since he’d known her. She was still smiling when the dragon landed behind them in an explosion of flung snow. It came down heavily and almost fell as it landed, claws skittering on the ice. Else screamed, and on either wall of the valley the snow answered her, white streamers pummeling down between the stark crags. But they were far away, and the dragon ignored them. It ignored Else too, and came stalking through the snow at Ansel, who tried to back away. But a yielding feeling underfoot warned him that he was no longer standing on firm ice but only on a skin of frozen snow that blizzards had spun across the mouth of a crevasse.
He looked down, and took another step back, interested to see what would happen. There was a soft crump from somewhere beneath him as a mass of snow detached itself from the underside of the snow-skin and plummeted into some enormous blue depth.
Else had gone quiet, watching, huddled against the snow twenty feet away, half hidden by the snow that the dragon had scattered as it landed. Ansel knew that she was keeping very still and silent in the hope that it would eat him instead of her, and he did not blame her, because he also knew that if he had been in her place he would have done the selfsame thing. He looked at her and at the dragon. He thought that if he was going to fall, he might as well try and take the dragon with him. He remembered Else saying, “Ansel the dragon killer.” Perhaps she would get back to the village, or the town, or somewhere, and tell people what he had done. And he and the dragon would lie together in the heart of the glacier, and it would bear them slowly downhill toward the lowlands, and one day in a hundred years or more, someone would find their bodies in the lake of melted ice at the glacier’s snout and they would know that the tales of Ansel the dragon killer had been true.
It gave him comfort, of a chilly sort.
The dragon paused and watched him carefully, as if it suspected him of plotting something. But he knew that it couldn’t resist him. Brock had been right: You needed live bait to trap a worm. It didn’t have to be a girl, though. Anyone would do.
He flapped his arms at the dragon. He hooked his fingers into the sides of his mouth and pulled them wide and poked his tongue out. He started to dance, and only stopped when he felt another chunk of snow peel off and drop into the emptiness below. A small, sinister hole opened with a whispering sound between his feet. He looked down at it, and almost missed seeing the dragon as it ran at him.
It came fast, head down, wings folded, wary of taking to the air with its broken tail. It covered the space between them faster than Ansel would have thought possible, and just before it reached him the snow beneath his feet gave way, and he and the dragon went down together.
BROCK WAS NOT DEAD. HE WAS STUMBLING THROUGH THE blank white world the blizzard had left, keeping as much as he could to the lee of rocks where the snow came up only to his knees and not his hips. He had lost his sword. “Ansel!” he called, and “Else!”
As the last flurries of the blizzard had faded around them he had watched the dragon, and the dragon had watched him. It must have heard Else’s screams, he thought, and been on its way toward them when the blizzard overtook it. Its ugly snout was white with crusted snow, and more snow had packed the grooves between its scales the way it packs sometimes between the stones of a wall. He looked into its yellow eyes and said as bravely as he could, “In the name of St. Michael and St. George …”
His voice trembled with cold and fear. The dragon, as usual, said nothing. It flapped its wings like a tent in a breeze. Groggily, Brock started to grope his way toward the same discovery that Ansel had made the day before. This wasn’t the Devil’s creature. It was just a creature.
It lunged without warning and he swung the sword as its long head arrowed toward him. The blade rang on scales hard as flint, and the shock jolted the sword’s hilt from his frozen fingers. The dragon shrieked, drawing clumsily aside. Brock remembered how it had used its tail as a weapon at their first meeting, and guessed what was coming, but was too sluggish from the cold to avoid it. It hit him in the side of the head, a jarring blow that laid him in the snow. He tasted blood. He had bitten his tongue.
The dragon snorted angrily, but it did not approach him. Perhaps the remains of his armor confused it and made it think he was not edible. Or perhaps it was afraid he’d sting again. Blood drizzled from a gash on its snout, showing suddenly scarlet as the clouds parted to let a thin wash of sunlight through. Brock’s sword shone dazzlingly, planted upright in a snowdrift like Excalibur. The dragon flinched its head around to look. It went forward cautiously, shaking the snow from its claws at each step. It sniffed the sword. Then, tilting its head sideways, it took the blade between its teeth.
Brock watched it, too dazed to stand or even call out.
The dragon did not look at him again. It lifted the bright sword, opened its wings, and took clumsily to the sky. Its wingbeats raised a small new blizzard of powdery snow from the crests of the drifts as it soared over Brock and away.
After a while he managed to lift himself. The buffeting the beast had dealt him had left his neck stiff and his tongue swollen, but he had no other wounds. He thought of Else and Ansel, and felt suddenly ashamed of what he had done. Where were they? he wondered, looking around at the fresh whiteness of the snow. Had the dragon come upon them in the blizzard? Or were they hiding somewhere? Hiding from him now, as well as the beast, and he couldn’t blame them for that. He cursed himself. He was supposed to be their protector. Small wonder that God had not granted him victory over the dragon….
The
re was no trace of their tracks in the new snow. He blundered across the mountaintop calling out their names. “Else! Ansel! Forgive me!”
There was no reply, only the endless echoes bounding away over the snow and ringing back at him from the black rocks. And then, from over the hill’s edge, the cry of the dragon.
He stopped, frozen there like an iron statue, listening. It came again, and then again, and mingled with it he thought he heard Else’s shrill screaming.
He turned, trying to tell which was echo and which the true sound. It seemed to be coming from the other side of the ridge. He scrambled toward it, feeling with one hand for the knife in his belt, which was the only weapon he had left.
He pushed his way between snow-crusted rocks and stood at the top of the screes, looking down. Below him on the glacier a flake of color showed, the only bright thing in the world. Else’s dress. He went downhill toward it, slipping and stumbling, tumbling for long stretches, battering and buckling his armor and bruising the flesh beneath it. “Else!” he shouted. “It’s me! Brock!”
Else looked up and saw him coming. She was not afraid. She was in too much pain to be afraid. When the dragon landed beside her she had thrown herself backward and her ankle had caught in a fissure of the ice that lay beneath the snow and been wrenched around. Broken, she feared at first. A bad sprain at best. And she’d lain there and watched Ansel face the dragon, and the two of them fall down together into that black hole, which opened under him in the snow, and she’d thought that there’d be no way down the mountain for her now. So she was not afraid of Brock. She raised herself up and watched as he came toiling toward her, a tiny figure growing slowly larger, shouting out every few minutes, “Else! Forgive me! I was wrong to use you so. My hatred for the dragon made me mad. You must believe me; I would never have let the creature harm you….”
Else decided to forgive him. If it were really only the two of them left alive upon that mountain, then it would be foolish of her to hold a grudge.
“Where’s Ansel?” Brock asked, when he drew nearer. “The dragon — have you seen the dragon?”
And Else just pointed at the chasm, to show him where the two of them had gone.
ANSEL HIT BLUE ICE, HARD ENOUGH TO KNOCK ALL THE wind out of him. Hit blue ice and slithered, grabbing for handholds where no handholds were, pummeled by snow crashing down on him from above. He came to a stop twenty feet down, cradled in a crook of the ice, gawping up at the distant sky. Half of the snow ceiling had collapsed, letting daylight shaft down into the crevasse. The ice walls curved away from each other, filled with deep fissures and strange blue shadows. From overhangs trailed icicles taller than Ansel, and as he watched some of them fell, shattering with a sound like handbells.
He lifted his head cautiously, and looked for the dragon. It had fallen past him and lay in a deeper part of the crevasse, wedged tight, one sail-like wing stretched upward so that it looked like the wreck of a small boat. It lay very still. The fall has killed it, he thought exultantly, and then immediately began to doubt, because it was so much bigger and fiercer and more alive than he was, and the fall had not killed him. He listened hard for a long time, but he could not hear it moving.
What he heard instead was a voice from up above him, calling his name.
“Ansel? Are you down there, boy?”
He looked up. Brock’s head was poking over the ragged brim of the crevasse, looking down at him. “Thank Christ!” cried the dragon hunter when he saw Ansel’s face lift toward him. He turned his head and shouted to someone out of sight — Else, presumably — “He lives!” Then, looking back at Ansel, “I have the rope yet. We’ll lower it….”
He vanished, and a smatter of dislodged snow came down in Ansel’s eyes. By the time he had wiped them, Brock was back, paying out the rope. Ansel moved carefully, standing up on the treacherous ice and reaching up with both hands to touch the rope tip as it came jerking down. When I touch it, he thought, I’ll be as good as saved.
But it was not to be that easy.
“First the worm,” called Brock.
Ansel thought he’d heard wrong. The scalloped ice walls made strange echoes. Had they twisted the sense of Brock’s words somehow? Surely his master could not mean —?
“The dragon,” said Brock, very slowly and clearly. He pointed at the place where it lay. “You don’t think I’ll go back to that sneering landgrave without my trophy, do you? Not after the trouble I’ve been to. Get a rope around it, boy.”
Ansel looked at the dragon. He sniffed, and smelled its animal smell, which had already begun to taint the cold, clean air. Whether it was alive or dead, he wanted nothing more to do with it. But Brock was his master, and Brock was the man on the end of the rope. He could see no choice for himself except to do as Brock asked.
He edged his slippery way down to it, hoping that it lay too deep for the rope to reach. But the rope was long. Brock shifted along the crevasse edge up above him and dangled it down just above the dragon. Ansel caught the end. The dragon’s head was turned away from him, and he was glad of that. It was lying across two big hummocks of ice in such a way that it was quite easy for him to pass the end of the rope under it and around and under again and knot it tight.
“All right, boy,” said Brock. “Now climb up. I’ll need you up here to help me haul the beast up, won’t I? Come on, Ansel; you can do it easily. Climb.”
Ansel couldn’t do it easily, but he managed. Numb hands clenching on the wet rope, he dragged himself up the sheer face of the ice, and when he was nearly at the top, Brock and Else both reached over and caught him and heaved him over the edge, back into daylight. Afternoon sunlight lay on the snow. It was cold still, but it seemed warm to Ansel after the ice depths he had come from.
“And now for the dragon,” Brock said.
They braced themselves against the rope, half afraid that the beast’s dead weight would drag them down into the chasm along with it. But it came up easily: a weight to be sure, but not near as heavy as Ansel would have guessed. Hollow-boned, he thought. Like a big bird. A little straining, and it came up over the chasm’s edge, tail first, wings flopping open like a Christmas goose.
It was only then, as it lay before them in the sunlight, that they saw that it was still alive. A faint, steady smolder of hot breath came from its nostrils; its scaly chest rose and fell. Ansel, remembering how he had trussed it up, and how easily it might have woken and bitten his head off, turned away to be sick. Else, scrambling backward on her bottom with her hurt leg dragging, said almost angrily, “Kill it! Kill it! Kill it!”
Brock didn’t need her advice. He drew his knife and stepped up to the dragon, wondering where best to strike — the throat? The heart? And then, slowly, the look of determination faded from his face and he lowered the knife again.
“Kill it, sir!” insisted Else.
“Not here,” said Brock. Cutting a fathom from the rope’s end, he wound it around the dragon’s snout and knotted it tight. He cut another length and bound the beast’s feet together, hobbling it. Else and Ansel stood and watched him.
He tightened the last knot and looked back at them triumphantly. “Not here. People might not believe it. If I take back its head, men may say it’s just the head of a corkindrille or some such. Such tricks have been known, I believe. No, I shall kill this dragon in the square of the town, with the landgrave and the bishop and all their people looking on.”
“And how will you get it to town, sir?” Else said sullenly. “Expect us to drag it there, I suppose?”
“It’s light,” said Brock. “You felt how light it is. We’ll build a sledge from pine branches. It’s all downhill from here. We’ll pull the animal behind us, over the snow. When we get lower you can run ahead and bring help from the village.”
“I can’t run anywhere,” the girl said.
“Ansel, then.”
And what if it wakes up while we’re dragging it on this sledge? thought Ansel. What if it wakes up and finds it doesn’t much
care for being dragged on sledges? And he looked at Else and saw that she was thinking the same thing. But not Brock. Brock was walking around his prize, checking his knots and looking like a man who knew that God had been on his side all along.
WHEN THE PEASANTS OF KNOCHEN SAW ANSEL COMING down the steeps behind their village, they thought he was a ghost. And to be fair, he did look like one, ragged as he was, and wild-eyed, and with all those scrapes and bruises showing up the pallor of his face. Even when he drew near and they could see his shadow and hear the way the small stones rattled under his unghostly, stumbling feet, they still hung back from him. They’d not expected to see any of Brock’s party again, not since the pack pony Brezel came clattering back alone down the mountain the day before, mad-eyed, bloody, frothed with sweat. They’d kept well away from that pony, most of them, sure that it would bring bad luck, and now they kept well away from Ansel. It seemed to them that the only way he could have survived on the dragon’s hill was by selling his soul to Satan. And maybe he’d promised his new master their souls too….
It was Else’s mother who broke their silence. Maybe she thought her luck couldn’t get any worse. She was the one who’d taken care of Brezel, calming and combing him and bathing his wounds in salt water. Now she ran to Ansel. “Did you see my girl on the mountain?” she asked him as she reached out to grab him by both shoulders, gripping them tight to reassure herself that he was real. She touched his hands, his face, lifting his hair, staring at the grazes on his forehead. “Did you see my Else?”
Ansel stared back at her. He was a bit dazed to find himself the center of so many people’s attention. His world had narrowed to just Brock and Else and the dragon. He had forgotten there were so many others. He looked at Else’s mother, and then realized what she had asked him.