Dragonbreath

by Ursula Vernon

“Fair enough,” said Danny, grinning like a shark himself. “C’mon, Edward! Let’s go see the weird fish!”

  “Sure,” said Edward. “There should be about an hour left on the breath mints. Grab a fin . . .”

  “Atlantis is real?”

  “Very real, and very determined to stay lost,” said Edward. In the distance, tough-looking merfolk with bristling crests patrolled the battlements. They carried spears and harpoons. Wendell could feel their hostile stares even from so far away.

  “Can we—” Danny began.

  “Afraid not.” Edward put on an extra burst of speed.

  Two burly mermen emerged from the city and began to swim toward them. Wendell tensed, and even Danny looked a bit alarmed. But after a few moments, the mermen turned back around.

  “They’re not going to hurt us,” said Edward, “but they want to make sure we don’t get any closer. As soon as somebody shows up and puts them in danger of being the found city of Atlantis, they throw him in the dungeon and feed him to the lobsters.”

  “You can feed somebody to lobsters?” asked Danny.

  “You can when the lobsters are twenty feet long, sure . . .”

  Wendell twitched. “They sound unfriendly,” he said faintly.

  “Let’s just say that tourism is not one of their major industries.”

  ARRRR . . . TREASURE

  They left the mermen behind and continued across the ocean bottom. The sea floor here was flat, sandy, and largely featureless, the way that Wendell and Danny had always pictured the bottom of the ocean.

  Something loomed up on the horizon. It was much smaller than the city of Atlantis, but a lot closer. “Ooo!” said Danny, pointing and hopping excitedly (as much as one can hop when tucked behind the flipper of a swimming sea serpent). “Is that what I think it is?”

  There was a definite smile in Edward’s voice. “I thought you might like that. . . .”

  It was a sunken ship. The mast jutted up at an angle, the yardarms broken and slimed with algae. There was a gaping hole in the side of the ship. It looked cold and lonely and long-dead.

  “Ohmygodthatisthecoolestthingeverarealpirateshipcanwegoseeitcanwecanwe!?” gasped Danny on one breath. Danny’s hoard consisted of a couple of bottle caps and most of a roll of quarters, all tucked into his mattress. But a whole sunken pirate ship? It was a dragon’s dream come true.

  “Sure,” said Edward, changing direction with a flick of his tail.

  “There aren’t any sharks in it, are there?” asked Wendell warily.

  “No, no,” said Edward. “Well . . . not big ones anyway.”

  They swam at the opening in the side of the ship. Edward lowered his flippers and let the two boys swim forward.

  Everything was slimy. What didn’t have slime had barnacles and mussels and shellfish. It was no longer possible to read the name of the ship under the coating, and the dim interior of the ship looked more like the coral reef than like anything made by people.

  “Was this a pirate ship?” asked Danny excitedly.

  “I don’t think so,” said Edward. “It’s too wide, and the masts—what’s left of the masts—weren’t tall enough. I think it was probably a merchant ship.”

  “Was it sunk by pirates?” Danny had never been one to let go of a promising idea.

  “That’s possible,” Edward admitted. “Or a storm. It certainly didn’t hit a rock in this area, anyway . . .”

  Wendell put a hand on a crusted plank and watched a crab skitter away. It was hard to tell what things were, under their coating of ocean debris. Irregular shapes might have been old barrels or trunks, or merely broken boards. They could have been surrounded by chests of gold doubloons and it would have been impossible to tell.

  The giant steering wheel lay off to one side, still recognizable under the slime. A broken hole in the deck showed where it had come crashing down, but it was impossible to tell if that had happened during the wreck, or some time later. One of the cannons lay on its back in the corner, barrel pointed upward. Judging from the suspiciously clean area around the muzzle opening, something was living inside the cannon, but Wendell wasn’t about to go stick his snout in and find out what.

  “Could there be treasure inside?” Danny asked.

  “Not anymore,” said Edward with the guilty air of one who knew exactly where the treasure had gone. (Sea serpents are not quite dragons, but they like to keep a hoard around just the same.) Danny snickered.

  The small dragon swam inside the ship, followed by the nervous iguana, and as much of Edward as would fit.

  “There’s another room in here,” said Danny, peering down into a dark rectangle edged irregularly with mussels. Because the ship lay on its side, the doorway was nearly horizontal.

  “That’s the hold,” said Edward. “Well . . . was the hold. It’s where they kept the cargo.”

  Wendell joined him at the opening to the hold and looked down.

  Wendell was just about to say something along the lines of “Well, nothing to see, then,” or “Maybe we should go back,” when Danny grabbed the edge of the doorway, kicked both feet and his tail, and swung into the darkened heart of the ship.

  “Dude!”

  “Ooo! Wendell, man, you gotta see this!”

  Wendell gritted his teeth, but he couldn’t very well back down. He lowered himself, rather hesitantly, into the dark.

  It wasn’t actually dark. The area where he and Danny swam lay in deep shadow, but a good chunk of the ship’s keel had rotted away on the far side, and beams of eerie blue light streamed through. The light seemed to dance and move, like a curtain of crystal beads. It didn’t look quite right—

  “Look out!” said Wendell, suddenly realizing what he was seeing. “Jellyfish!”

  “Jellyfish?” asked Danny. “Where?”

  “Neat!” said Danny, starting forward. Wendell tackled him from behind.

  “Hey!”

  “They’re poisonous, idiot!” snapped the iguana, who was starting to think the sea cucumber had been the least of his worries. “If you brush up against the tentacles, they sting you!”

  Danny halted. “Like bees?” He wasn’t fond of bees, after that one incident with the hose and the lawnmower. The people at the emergency room had been awfully sarcastic. Sure, he’d been in three times that week, but it was for three completely unrelated incidents! It could have happened to anybody!

  “Like bees,” said Wendell, who knew all about the incident.

  “How do you know that?” asked Danny.

  “How do you not know that?”

  “You know, if you’d mentioned that when I asked you about the ocean the first time, we could’ve avoided this whole trip . . .”

  Wendell rolled his eyes and swam upward into the main bulk of the ship. Danny came up behind him.

  “Jellyfish?” said Edward when they told him. “They didn’t used to be there. I’ll have to keep that in mind . . .”

  IT’S VERY, VERY DARK IN HERE

  The sunken ship was long out of sight when the ground seemed to open up, becoming deeper and rockier. It was strange to look over the edge of the cliffs—Wendell’s gut insisted that he was at a great height and about to fall. Wendell told his gut to shut up. He’d never been scared of heights. Apparently being scared of depths was something else again.

  The darkness pressed in on them as the angler fish swam away. Unlike regular dark, this was thick and suffocating and alive. Even though the breath mints kept air pouring into their lungs, the two surface dwellers found themselves gasping.

  Something soft and slimy brushed Wendell’s tail, and he yanked it in with a yelp. Danny floated in the dark with apparent nonchalance, but Wendell was pretty sure that the bubbles floating upward in the dark were full of futile smoke.

  Maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

  “Hang on . . .” said Edward. “I can make a light, I think . . . I’m just not sure what will happen if I do.”

  Wendell pressed in close agai
nst the sea serpent’s scaly side. “What might happen?”

  “Things down here are attracted by light,” said Edward, sounding distracted. “They don’t see it very often. I’m not sure who might show up . . .”

  “There’s so many of them!”

  “They’re not aggressive . . . mostly . . .” said Edward soothingly. “They’re just interested in the light.”

  “They’ve got an awful lot of teeth . . .” said Wendell.

  “Well, to be fair, so do we,” Danny pointed out, and grinned toothily at one of the fish.

  It goggled at him. So far as Danny could see, it didn’t have any teeth at all, just a huge flat sucker mouth.

  “What’s that one?” he asked. “And that one . . . and that one over there . . . and . . . whoa! What’s that?”

  Danny felt terrible. Mostly because the giant tentacle wrapped around him was making his ribs creak with strain, but there was definitely some guilt in there too. He’d dragged his best friend off on a wild adventure, and now they were going to get hideously smooshed and eaten, possibly not in that order.

  It was one thing to bring Cousin Edward along—Edward was mythological, after all, and was used to this sort of thing—but Wendell was an iguana. Epic tales of heroism and disaster were notably lacking in iguanas. His best friend just wasn’t cut out for high drama.

  The giant squid raised them up, one in front of each eye. Its eyes were huge and glassy, as emotionless as dinner plates. It appeared to weigh the two of them thoughtfully, then it lowered the tentacle containing Wendell. The sheaf of tentacles opened, and Danny caught a glimpse of a giant chomping beak.

  It was going to eat Wendell.

  Wendell screamed in the purest of pure panic.

  If only I could breathe fire, Danny thought miserably. I’d roast this big squid so fast ...

  Smoke drifted from his nostrils as he struggled helplessly against the tentacle. It was like a band of rubbery steel. There was no escape. He and Wendell were squid food.

  If only I could breathe fire!

  Wendell saw the beak moving toward him, and his scream promptly climbed up the register until bats could probably hear it.

  Danny took a deep, deep breath, felt the air fizzing in his lungs, and tried to concentrate on all the things his father had told him about breathing fire. He couldn’t remember any of them. All he could think of was Wendell getting dragged toward that massive beak, and the fact that it was all his fault.

  His lungs were burning. He was holding his breath. His sinuses felt like they were packed full of pepper.

  Danny opened his mouth and felt something happening—something way down in his throat, something that felt halfway between a sneeze and a hiccup. He coughed twice—and breathed fire.

  As Wendell later said, it would have been a really impressive, heroic moment . . . if they hadn’t been underwater at the time.

  As it was, though, the fire turned immediately into steam when it hit the water, scalding Danny’s snout and making him squeeze his eyes shut with a yelp. Two smaller bubbles shot out of his nostrils. It was like sneezing lava.

  He didn’t quite roast the squid, but still, it was enough. A massive bubble of steam boiled out of Danny’s mouth and smacked the squid directly in the eye.

  The squid made a keening noise even higher pitched than Wendell’s scream, and flailed its tentacles wildly. Dragon and iguana were thrown free.

  “Help!” shouted Wendell, thinking quickly. “Edward, help!”

  Danny would have shouted too, but the inside of his mouth felt broiled. He touched his tongue carefully to his lips and winced. It was almost exactly like when he tried to eat pizza that was too hot and scalded the roof of his mouth. Except this feeling went most of the way down his throat.

  “Ow . . .” he said.

  “EDWARD!” screamed Wendell, who apparently had lungs like an opera singer.

  Edward made a loop out of his body and pulled the exhausted dragon and iguana under a flipper. “When I couldn’t draw it off, I knew I’d need to get help. Kraken aren’t very common, but they’re nasty.”

  “We saw,” said Wendell faintly.

  “Actually, they’re delicious,” said the whale. It was twice the size of the giant squid. Edward looked like a garter snake next to it.

  “This is my friend Eee!aee!(click)ee’ee’aiiee- (click!)1,” said Edward.

  “Gotta show those squid who’s boss,” said Eee!aee!(click)ee’ee’aiiee(click!). Its hide was mottled gray green in the dim light, and patches with barnacles like scales. One stroke of its immense tail sent such a ripple through the water that Wendell and Danny had to cling tightly to Edward’s flipper to avoid being carried off by the wave.

  LAND HO!

  It took a surprisingly short time to reach the surface again, but it couldn’t be soon enough for Wendell. The iguana climbed out on the dock, assisted with a bump by Edward, and flattened himself on the boards with a noise that wasn’t quite a whimper.

  Danny nobly decided not to notice his friend’s display and turned back to his cousin. “Thanks for everything, Edward! That was great!”

  “I’m glad you enjoyed it,” said Edward, dipping his fins.

  A noise came from Wendell that sounded vaguely like “muttermuttersharkgrumblemuttergiantsquid—”

  Edward looked at Danny. Danny looked at Edward. They both looked at Wendell. They looked back at each other. They shrugged.

  “C’mon, Wendell,” said Danny, heaving a sigh. “Let’s get you home before you melt like a little tadpole.”

  “I am not melting,” said Wendell with great dignity. “I am freaking out. There is a difference.”

  “If you say so,” said Danny, letting out a long smoky sigh. He got an arm under Wendell’s shoulders and hauled him upright.

  By the time the bus rumbled into view, Wendell had regained his composure and was pretending that he had not just been clinging to the dock as if it were a security blanket. And he definitely hadn’t fallen down and kissed the sidewalk. Absolutely not. Anybody who said differently was asking for trouble.

  Danny didn’t bring up the ground-kissing, at least for the moment. After all, he still felt terrible about getting his friend tangled up in a giant squid tentacle. (The next time Danny needed to blackmail the iguana for something, mind you, he had some excellent material. He’d be working on his imitation of Wendell kissing the sidewalk for a long time to come.)

  “So,” said the iguana, hanging over the back of one of the seats. “You think you got enough material for your paper now? Because if not—”

  “Oh, relax,” said Danny. “Are you kidding? I could write two papers! Maybe three.” He frowned. “Possibly four, but I’d have to include some of the unbelievable stuff . . .”

  “‘How I Nearly Became Fish Food,’ by Danny Dragonbreath,” said Wendell snidely.

  “I may leave that bit out.” Danny frowned down at his claws. “Mr. Snaug would never believe it anyway.”

  “Just as long as we don’t have to do this again . . .”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll write it up tomorrow morning, it’ll be fine . . .”

  Wendell’s glare could have melted concrete.

  “Oh, come on, it’s not like the squid actually ate you . . .”

  Wendell’s glare intensified. Diamonds would have gone soft and runny under that glare.

  Danny heaved a sigh and puffed out a little bit of smoke. “Fine, fine . . . I’ll do it tonight . . .”

  “Dad!” said Danny, coming down the stairs the next morning. “Dad, I did it! I breathed fire! Only once, but I did it!”

  “That’s my boy!” said Mr. Dragonbreath.

  Mrs. Dragonbreath opened one eye and said, “Yay. Fire. Woo,” then fell back asleep at the table. For her at this hour, this reaction was the equivalent of throwing confetti and bringing in a marching band. Danny beamed.

  “Here you go, champ. Try it again.” His dad brandished a slice of bacon on a fork.

  Danny inhaled. Som
ething between a sneeze and a hiccup . . . something right down at the bottom of his throat . . .

  The resulting belch made the bacon flap gently and rattled the kitchen window, but did not produce any flames.

  “That’s not quite it,” said Mr. Dragonbreath patiently. “Try it again. Think hot thoughts.”

  Danny screwed up his snout in concentration. He hadn’t been thinking hot thoughts yesterday. He’d been terrified out of his mind, seeing the tentacle wrap around Wendell, and hearing the iguana shrieking. He tried to remember just how scared he’d been.

  Something happened in the vicinity of his stomach. Danny tried to exhale, choked, and burst into a smoky coughing fit.

  “Well, you’ve definitely got something happening down there,” said his father, pounding him on the back. “Just can’t quite get to it yet. But I’m sure if you apply yourself . . .”

  Danny stopped coughing long enough to sigh.

  He tried breathing fire several times on the way to the bus stop, but all he managed was the smoke-filled cough. Still, it was better than nothing. He’d done it once. Surely he’d be able to do it again . . . eventually.

  BULLY UP

  “So he liked the paper, then,” said Wendell. “Good.” He surveyed the A with grim satisfaction. “Because I’m never, ever going back to the Sargasso Sea . . . or going with you anywhere other than the library for research.”

  “Oh, come on.” Danny tucked the paper under his lunch tray as they walked to a bench. “You gotta admit, there were some fun bits. Remember when that sea cucumber was all . . . bleh . . . and—”

  “I don’t have to admit anything.”

  Danny might have continued the argument, but a vast form loomed up in front of them. And the form had one hand wrapped up in a bandage.