by Donn Kushner
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room, in which he had many books: mostly the so-called chap-books sold for a penny or so by peddlers. He read these for company, and taught the children to read as well, until such time as they took on their elders’ attitude and became ashamed to visit him.
The rat had often watched the old man and his books through a hole in the plaster of the wan of his attic room. He explained to Nonesuch (hat the waDs had many tunnels and passages, through which he could readily crawl. He could watch the family’s activities without being seen; which was just as well, since they would have smoked him out or sent a ferret after him. Only the grandfather saw his bright eyes in a crack in the wall one day; but he told none of the others. Instead, he left out scraps of bread and cheese from his own supper and shut out the family cat.
In return, the rat kept the old man’s room clear of earwigs and cockroaches, who would have nibbled at the chap-book pages. Then, when the grandfather taught the children to read, taught them how letters were put together to make sounds, the rat watched from his crack in the wall. Sometimes, indeed, he imagined that the grandfather placed his lesson books so that he, the rat, could see them. Because he was a curious but patient animal, he had learned to read much more quickly than the children. He believed the grandfather knew how much he had teamed. During the last few months of his life, the old man would often read aloud from his chap-books. These stories, the Fables of Aesop, were the ones the rat still loved best. He told Nonesuch the story of the fox and the crow, and of the frogs who chose a king.
After the old man’s death, the family tossed his chap-books down into the cellar. The rat had been reading them ever since. Now he was the proud guardian of his own library;
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he knew many stories he could not have learned otherwise.
In the following days, the rat was very eager to share with Nonesuch the stories he had read. He told him of a knight who travelled in magic lands, performed marvellous deeds, and married the emperor’s daughter, and other stories of brave knights who rescued beautiful maidens and helped the poor. The dragon thought of the knights he had seen, who had certainly helped no one but themselves. “If you could only read,” the rat said, “you could learn many such stories by yourself.”
“If I could read, I could choose any book I wanted,” Nonesuch replied. “I’d prefer that. Why shouldn’t I read?”
“Why not, indeed?” the rat said. “I’ll teach you.”
This took only a few days. It might seem an unbelievably short time; but you should remember that many animals must learn things much faster than humans can. The rat, at the age of seven, was already full-grown, even past his prime. And Nonesuch, in the present year, 1665, was over two hundred and fifty years old. He was already full of his grandmother’s wise sayings and more experience of the world than any human could possess. Besides this, he had been sleeping for two centuries inside a book that had contained all the learning and love of Brother Theophilus and other good and wise men. So that. once the rat had told him the names and sounds of the different letters and showed him how they were put together, he began to read as if he had always known how. It disturbed him that the spelling of words was sometimes irrational - as English spelling was, and still is — but he accepted this as the sort of thing to be expected from a human invention.
Of course, he tried to read his own book inside the box. At first he was almost afraid to look at it, lest its stories turn out to be as frivolous and unlikely as those of the chap-books. But
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he soon realized, almost with relief, that though he liked the sounds of the words, he could not understand them. The words were Latin, a language he did not know. Though many of the monks in the abbey had spoken to each other in Latin, Brother Theophilus had used English in Nonesuch’s presence, probably realizing that he was an English dragon.
He was happy to note that the people, and the animals, in his book were much more beautiful than those in any of the books or broadsheets in the cellar. The dragons seemed especially beautiful. None of them, he was sure, would act in a way that would bring discredit to his race.
One evening the rat came to him and whispered, in great excitement, that he had been listening to the birds on the rooftops. A rumor was going around that far to the north, in Sherwood Forest, where the famous outlaw Robin Hood had once ruled, the situation was again as it had been before man ever came there. There were no traps, no ferrets or dogs, no plagues or wars, only a few friendly, harmless forest creatures. Many of the birds were flying there.
‘ ‘I have been thinking of going to find such a place myself,” the rat told him.’ ‘Indeed, I will go: its pull is so strong that I can stay here no longer. More than likely I will die on the way. But you could come with me. It would be company for both of us, and you could look out for danger better than I. And drive it away, too, if it came near. One day we could live peacefully in the beautiful forest and never see the inside of a cellar again.”
Nonesuch looked around him at the dead, dusty cellar. Even at this great distance, it seemed that he could smell the clean woodland breezes. He flew up to the window and looked at the empty street outside. He let his eyes sweep the cellar floor. They came to his box and stopped there. Voices seemed
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to be calling to him: voices of the words inside the pages - though he still did not understand these words. There were smaller, clearer voices, which must be the little dragons painted in the book, calling to him too.
‘ ‘I can’t go,” he told the rat sadly.’ ‘I must stay here with my treasure.”
“Your treasure?” The rat seemed puzzled, then he nod-ded his head. “Of course, all dragons have treasures; I read if somewhere. So the books were right about that, at least.”
“My treasure is different,” Nonesuch told him.
‘ ‘It must be,” the rat agreed.’ ‘You yourself are hardly c usual dragon.”
Still, he said, he would make the trip to the north, to th( great forest. His eyes shone. “I have read about so man} adventures that now it is time for me to undertake one of m;
own. Since you will be here in the cellar, I will often think of it Otherwise, I would be glad to forget it, books and all.”
Nonesuch had gone back inside his box when the rat let the cellar for the last time.
CHAPTER X
A FIERY DRAGON
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THE FAMILY OF WEAVERS NEVER RETURNED TO THE
house. What Nonesuch had dreamt and the rat had seen from the window was the great plague, the “black death,” which had Idled more than one-quarter of the population of Europe three centuries before. It had struck again and again since, and was now mak-ing its last appearance in the streets of London. For safety, the weavers had dedded to leave the city for the north, near Bamet, where they owned a small shepherd’s hut, and wait out the plague there. Many Londoners were leaving the city at this time, often carrying the plague with them. All the members of the family died of it in the isolated hut where they had hoped to find safety.
Nonesuch slept; the years slipped by. The plague came to an end; the great city licked its wounds and buried its dead. Many Londoners regarded the Great Fire that destroyed so much of the city in the next year, 1666, as a final cleansing. The fire narrowly missed the weavers’ house-very narrowly indeed: the house was right in its path but, unaccountably, the flames swerved aside just before they reached it. A second
cousin of the head weaver took possession of the house but, fearing it might still contain the miasmas of the plague, refused to live in it. For the next hundred years the house was leased as a low hotel, then as a tavern, then as a warehouse for a firm of ironmongers. None of the tenants bothered to clean up the cellar properly.
In the eighteenth century, a gentleman with a spacious house in a more fashionable part of London and an estate in Scotland bought the house to use the old showroom as a laboratory for studying the new science of chemistry. His prudent steward gave the c
ellar a good cleaning, burning most of the trash. He brought up Nonesuch’s box, which he took for a black block of wood, to serve as a support for laboiatory apparatus.
Nonesuch awoke from a dream of a fiery lake to the sound of human voices. The accents were quite new to him. Even from within his box the air smelled different than it had when he had last been awake:
no longer moldy and dusty, but sharp and disturbing. There was a bubbling sound, too, which he could not identify.
A door opened and shut as the humans left the room. After a time, Nonesuch began to push out the plug of wood from his box. A new coating of paint, which had been laid on two months before, had sealed it shut. He had to grab one end of the plug in his teeth and jiggle it back and forth before it was loose enough to be forced out.
As he squeezed out of his hole, Nonesuch was surrounded by a draft of hot air. His box lay on a wide table beside an iron
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brazier full of burning charcoal. A metal rod rose from the box to support a fat polished-brass vessel with a curved, tapering neck that sat in the center of the charcoal.
Nonesuch flew up, away from the heat, and circled the contraption curiously. But someone might come’in at any moment. He dropped to the table top again. Further down the table was another brazier with another bubbling flask. A sec-ond table was covered with brown and green bottles, boxes, piles of paper, and two upright charts with strange symbols. On one wall was a large picture of a golden dragon swallowing its own tail. From holes in the dragon’s breast, drops of black blood fell into the foreground of the picture.
Before Nonesuch could examine this picture more closely, the door opened and a beam of light swung over the table. He flattened himself on its surface. A sandy-haired man in a brown coat, with a tartan neckerchief above his collar, entered the room clutching a full pile of books in his arm. These blocked his vision, so that even when he turned he would not be able to see the little dragon. Nonesuch realized this immediately;
he flew low over the table towards a fireplace with a bright coal fire, and hid behind a massive fire-iron shaped like a grinning dog.
The man arranged the books on a shelf, grumbling to himself as he looked at each title. “Mair o’ his lairdship’s folly! The Properties of Matter m five volumes! Pagan nonsense!” He knocked the books’ dust from his hands and left the room. All grew stffl again, except for the breathing of the fire at Nonesuch’s back. He looked at the flames.
You may know that if you stare long enough at a fire you can see many different shapes in it. Sometimes the flames look like groves of trees or standing lines of people. They may seem to rise from burning houses or burning cities. The sparks look
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Hke snowflakes faffing upwards. The upper levels of the fire can seem to move like flocks of birds. Or, if you look very closely, you can imagine you see small dragons hovering and dancing in the flames.
This was what Nonesuch saw now: a dragon in the flames, indeed a dragon that was part of the flames, so that it was impossible to say where the flames ended and its body began. Though the dragon’s shape stayed the same as it flew happily back and forth, its size did change. In the yellow, or least hot, part of the flame the dragon was smallest. When it flew to the hottest, blue zone of the flame it grew, so that its wings spanned almost three inches.
Nonesuch watched the dragon for some time without daring to speak. If he did so, he thought, she might blend completely into the flames and vanish. She was more sprightly than he had ever seen her: as happy as only a creature can be that has found its true element. But she looked infinitely old too, glowing wisely in the fire, with an eye so bright that Nonesuch could scarcely look at it.
“Hello, Grandmother,” he said at last.
His grandmother did not answer him immediately; but he could tell from the expression on her face, from the way that her flight became more elegant and precise, that she knew he was there. Indeed, she must have known it before he saw her. She had been waiting for him to speak. She hovered skillfully over a burning coal, flapping her wings to settle down on it. “So, here we are again, you and I, just as in the old days.” She nodded towards the back of the fireplace, which, Nonesuch now saw, was of rough stone, arched like the roof of a cavern.
But it wasn’t really as in the old days, he thought. They had both changed, he in his way almost as much as she. Many
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years had passed since their days in the cavern above Serpent Grimsby, and many adventures. He had been out in the world of men, in that very world his grandmother had so distrusted. Now, he thought, there were things he could teach her, if she would only listen to him. But he kept his voice very respectful as he replied, “Not exactly the same: I’m a good deal older now.”
‘ ‘And wiser too,” his grandmother answered.’ ‘I can see that for myself. Though not as wise as you might be.” She chuckled, with a silvery, hissing sound.
Nonesuch decided to let that comment pass for the present. His grandmother might think otherwise soon. “How did you come here, Grandmother?” he asked.
Again she laughed. “Oh, I can go anywhere now! Since the unimportant part of me was burned away, I am lighter than air. If I explained how I was made, you wouldn’t understand it yet. I am only visible from inside a fire. You might think of me as pure flame; that would fit your present level of comprehension.”
“You can only live in fire?” Nonesuch asked, distressed.
“I can only be seen in fire; I can live where I like. But I have seen enough from within fires too; there was a change of religion in this country a few years ago — not to bore you with the details - and humans tend to burn each other at such times.”
His grandmother became very thoughtful. • ‘One occasion sticks in my mind,” she said, flying upward again while her red eyes shone. “Two old men in long robes, whom they burned by the gray walls of Oxford, their seat of learning as they called it; they had learned to burn each other there, at least. The old men could have run away, it seemed, or said some words that would have saved themselves. But they would do neither. That would not have been consistent with their
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natures. They almost welcomed the fire. One of them told the other to be brave, because they would light such a candle together that it would never be put out. I wondered what he meant.
“They were both true and brave, I thought. I was almost tempted to turn the fire aside for them-though they wouldn’t have liked that. If they had seen me, they would have taken me for their Devil.
“But I found that all this was filling my mind with too many thoughts of humans; since then I’ve kept away from them. I’ve avoided their traps. I’ve travelled light.”
Very light indeed, Nonesuch thought. His grandmother had become a creature without any substance that he could understand.
‘ ‘I can turn fire aside, you know,” she added with modest pride. “See!” She spoke to the flames and they all roared up into a far corner of the fireplace, so that for a moment his grandmother disappeared.’ ‘When the flames were approach-ing this house, some years ago, I spoke to them and they turned aside. I didn’t want you to be disturbed.”
‘ ‘I had a good sleep,” Nonesuch said gratefully. “Besides that, you protected my treasure.”
“That too,” she told him. “Your book. You seem to be guarding it well, small as you are.”
“You saw my book? How could you have seen it?”
Again his grandmother laughed.’ ‘I’ve been with you for a long time. I was there to watch your Brother Theophilus mak-ing your book.” Nonesuch stared at her as she hovered in the flames. “That was a fine time you had, so close to humans. You took a great deal of trouble over them.”
“I had to,” Nonesuch told her stiffly. “They were my people.”
‘ ‘Careful there! You’ll have more than enough to do if you
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go on that way. But you left them behind in the end. You flew away in time, like a proper dr
agon.”
Nonesuch thought of the people he had known. “I was sorry to leave them,” he said at last.
“There’s no need to be sorry. There will be others and much the same. Humans do tend to repeat themselves over the centuries. There’s no end of them, but only a few dragons;’
Nonesuch looked away to consider what she had said. His eye was caught by the picture on the wall, the picture that showed a dragon eating its own tail.’ ‘What dragon is that?” he asked.
His grandmother stared at the picture and hissed angrily. ” That’s no dragon at all!” she snapped.’ “That stupid picture represents a misconception of the alchemists, a seedy bunch even for humans. I spent some time in one of their ‘laboratories’, and I can tell you that you have never seen such muddlers, such incompetents.”
She looked again at the picture of the dragon eating its own tail with such fury and fire in her eyes that Nonesuch almost expected to see the picture burst into flame. “They said that dragons represented the material, imperfect part of matter that had to be destroyed to change ‘base’ metals such as lead into ‘noble’ ones like gold.” His grandmother hissed. “Can you imagine humans regarding dragons as imperfect?
“No,” his grandmother told Nonesuch, who by this time was perched on the dog-headed fire-iron, listening to her with as complete attention as he had done long ago in the cavern, ‘ ‘we dragons know about the nature of matter. We know that matter is nothing, unless there is a dragon to watch it. Now I have mingled so with the elements that I begin to understand their ways. I suppose I could change lead into gold if I saw any reason to do so.