“Yeah,” said Hank. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“You don’t know anything about me either,” I said, picking up a strip of torn upholstery fabric and braiding it into my makeshift rope.
“I know about your mother. You know if we get out of here, they’re going to arrest her, right?”
“Because you’ll press charges. I know.”
“She tried to kill us,” he said.
“I know!” I shouted back at him. My voice echoed off the walls.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just hurting. I’m a jerk when I’m hurting.”
I walked over with my rope and board. He explained about making sure his leg was straight, padding the board and putting it under his leg, tying it so he still had circulation. I tried to keep my fingers gentle on his skin.
“Where are you going to go?” he asked.
“You mean because I can’t go home?” I shrugged my shoulders. “My dad would probably let me stay with him, although I don’t know if he’d like it. He didn’t exactly fight Mom for custody. But then, my mom steamrollered over him pretty much all the time. Or I guess I could couch-surf.”
There was a long pause. I looked over at him and saw that he was either asleep or unconscious.
Not sure what else to do, I looked around for the rest of the parts to my flashlight. I found two small screws fairly easily and inserted them into cardboard. A paper clip attached to one screw. Then I pulled out two wires from the back of the television and wrapped one around the negative end of the battery and the other around the paper-clip-less screw.
I was almost ready.
The final part needed a working light bulb. I found one broken and two burnt-out ones in the pile of refuse. Luckily, the Science Museum covered fixing those too. It wouldn’t have been hard, except for the dim light.
Basically, the filament usually breaks so that there is no longer one clean connection. But the ends are pretty springy and flexible. So you just spin the bulb and wait for them to catch again. Unless the break is really bad, they usually will.
When I put the bulb back into my bootleg flashlight, it burned bright, stinging my eyes. For the first time in what feels like months, I could finally see.
“Wow,” Hank said blearily. I hadn’t realized he woke up again. “Not a lot of girls know that stuff.”
I grinned. “I’m a good person to be trapped in a sewer with.”
“Yeah,” he said.
In the light, I could see that despite the hollows of his cheekbones and the blue bruises around his eyes, Hank was the kind of guy you looked at twice. He had a nice mouth.
I felt suddenly self-conscious. “Where is it?” I asked Hank. “Can you give me a map to this dragon?”
“You still don’t believe me, do you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Maybe it’s a dragon. Maybe it’s some other kind of animal. It’s still got to keep getting fed and obviously you can’t go feed it.”
He sighs and traces the directions on the dirt of the floor. I roll the remaining bulb to get the filament to attach and shove it in my pocket.
The odd thing about light is how it makes distance different. The sewer looked narrow, navigable now that I could see it. It wasn’t a labyrinth full of monsters, just a dirty tunnel.
I carefully picked my way along, according to Hank’s scratchy map. In one of my hands, a length of sharpened pipe hung, like a sword.
As the light splashed along the walls, I wondered about my mother. If there really was something in the tunnel that I can’t explain, did that mean that her magic was real? Did it mean that my mother, in her crappy apartment, could call down the gods? Even a crocodile—even an alligator—was so unlikely it seemed mystical. Even that would be hard to explain.
That thought lasted until I came to the dragon.
Hank was right; there was no other way to describe it. It had the triangular shaped head of a cat, a long sinuous neck, and a thin black lizard’s body. Its eyes reflected gold when the flashlight caught them. It let out a long hiss and something that might have been a curl of smoke escaped from its mouth.
I took a step back, holding up the pipe. The dragon watched me, but didn’t advance.
Was this what my mother saw? Was this the thing that pushed her over the edge? I had no idea how I could be looking at this thing, how it could be real, but I understood suddenly the desire to co-opt a mythology that would explain it away.
The dragon sniffed the air and let out a little sound, like a cry. Then it took a few steps toward me.
I realized then what I’d failed to really see before. The dragon wasn’t full-grown. I mean, I could see right away that it was smaller than they were in the movies—about the size of a very large horse—but when it moved, it was with kittenish unsteadiness.
Without the flashlight, I would have run. But with it, I stared in fascination as the dragon wobbled up to me, tongue flicking out. I winced and put out my hand. It sniffed, breath hot on my skin. Maybe it really could breathe fire.
“You hungry?” I asked it.
The creature startled and skittered back at the sound of my voice. It was afraid. Of me. Of us. I wondered where its mother was, whether she might be nearby, a larger and more dangerous monster. But if she wasn’t…
Past the creature, I could see the metal steps attached to the tunnel wall. The ones that Hank said would let us get up to the surface. If I made a loud enough sound and was fast enough, if the creature really was a little timid, I might be able to kill it.
Hit it hard enough and then just keep hitting.
The dragon butted its head against my thigh abruptly. It was stronger that it looked and I staggered back from the weight. It bumped me again. I thought of sharks—the way they are supposed to knock into things before taking a bite out of them.
“Hey,” I said, gripping the steel rod tighter. “Stop it!”
The creature looked up at me with its strange eyes—unreadably animal. I reached down gingerly to touch its head. Its skin felt warm and slightly damp. As I rubbed my fingers down its neck, its eyes drifted closed and it turned to show me the long length of its vulnerable throat.
Hank went in front, climbed the ladder and banged on the bottom of the manhole. I’d already taken care of the dragon.
It took a while, but Hank’s screaming and shouting finally brought three guys out of a nearby pizza place to crowbar up the manhole. They said an ambulance would be on the way, but that was the last thing we wanted.
The sunlight was so bright that it made us shade our eyes. Seeing ourselves reflected in the store window, our cracked lips and wild hair, our dirt-stained skin, I couldn’t help thinking that we must look not quite human ourselves.
I wasn’t sure I quite felt human, either.
“Ready?” Hank asked.
I nodded.
Poor Sobek totally panicked when Hank and I hauled her up. Good thing I had her wrapped pretty tightly in one of those burlap coffee bags. She’d mostly shredded her way out of it by the time we dumped her on the asphalt, but at least we got her out of the sewer. We’d woven a collar for her out of scraps of cloth and string, so even though she was freaking out, we were able to tug her into the shade.
Like I’d said to Hank in the tunnels, we couldn’t leave her there. Her mother was gone. Someone had to be responsible.
“Got any money?” I asked. “I would kill for that cheeseburger.”
We pooled our cash and I walked a few blocks to a fast food restaurant that said I had to walk over to the drive-up window, since I was too dirty to be served inside. I didn’t care. When I brought back the food, we split it evenly. Three ways.
The dragon gulped down her burger in seconds and started chewing on the wrapper. She seemed pretty adaptable. And she sure was cute.
“What now?” Hank asked.
“You better go home. You need someone to look at that ankle. Besides,” I said, “you’ve got charges to file.”
“You co
uld come with me,” Hank said gravely.
“Thanks,” I said, shaking my head. “But I can take care of myself.”
“I know that,” he said. “You idiot. Do you really think I don’t know that?
I shrugged my shoulders.
“But you don’t have to face everything alone,” he said and grabbed hold of my arm. Even though we were dirty and tired, when he kissed me, everything else kind of faded away for a moment.
A rumbling truck passed, brakes screeching. We pulled apart, not quite looking at one another. Sobek tucked her face against his thigh and shivered.
I grinned. “I’m not alone. I’ve got Sobek.”
“She’s not so scary in the daylight, is she?” Hank said, with a laugh. “Certainly not scary enough to live up to that name.”
My eyes were starting to adjust to the sun.
I rubbed the bridge of the dragon’s nose, where she liked to be petted. “She’s going to grow so big that she doesn’t have to be afraid of anything.”
So are we.
King Dragon
Michael Swanwick
Michael Swanwick’s first two short stories were published in 1980, and both appeared on the Nebula ballot that year. One of the major writers working in the field today, he has been nominated for at least one of the field’s major awards in almost every successive year (he may have been out of the country in 1983 and 1986), and has won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial, and the Locus awards. He has published nine collections of short fiction, seven novels, an appreciation of Hope Mirlees, and a Hugo Award-nominated book-length interview with editor Gardner Dozois. His most recent book is collection The Best of Michael Swanwick. He is currently working on a new novel featuring his itinerant duo, Darger and Sir Plus.
Swanwick’s 1993 novel The Iron Dragon’s Daughter features elves in Armani and dragons as jet fighters. A dark, technological and brutal tale, it is an example of what Swanwick labeled “hard fantasy” in his essay “In the Tradition”. The story that follows appeared in 2003 and is part of his novel, The Dragons of Babel, published by Tor Books. Set during a Vietnam-style war in Faerie, it introduces that novel’s protagonist. As Swanwick said in an interview, “He goes off to a much stranger place than his native Faerie, toward adventures I hope will be satisfying to the fantasy reader while at the same time being a subversion of all that is good and decent in fantasy!”
The dragons came at dawn, flying low and in formation, their jets so thunderous they shook the ground like the great throbbing heartbeat of the world. The village elders ran outside, half unbuttoned, waving their staffs in circles and shouting words of power. Vanish, they cried to the land, and sleep to the skies, though had the dragons’ half-elven pilots cared they could have easily seen through such flimsy spells of concealment. But the pilots’ thoughts were turned toward the West, where Avalon’s industrial strength was based, and where its armies were rumored to be massing.
Will’s aunt made a blind grab for him, but he ducked under her arm and ran out into the dirt street. The gun emplacements to the south were speaking now, in booming shouts that filled the sky with bursts of pink smoke and flak.
Half the children in the village were out in the streets, hopping up and down in glee, the winged ones buzzing about in small, excited circles. Then the yage-witch came hobbling out from her barrel and, demonstrating a strength Will had never suspected her of having, swept her arms wide and then slammed together her hoary old hands with a boom! that drove the children, all against their will, back into their huts.
All save Will. He had been performing that act which rendered one immune from child-magic every night for three weeks now. Fleeing from the village, he felt the enchantment like a polite hand placed on his shoulder. One weak tug, and then it was gone.
He ran, swift as the wind, up Grannystone Hill. His great-great-great-grandmother lived there still, alone at its tip, as a grey standing stone. She never said anything. But sometimes, though one never saw her move, she went down to the river at night to drink. Coming back from a night-time fishing trip in his wee coracle, Will would find her standing motionless there and greet her respectfully. If the catch was good, he would gut an eel or a small trout, and smear the blood over her feet. It was the sort of small courtesy elderly relatives appreciated.
“Will, you young fool, turn back!” a cobbley cried from the inside of a junk refrigerator in the garbage dump at the edge of the village. “It’s not safe up there!”
But Will didn’t want to be safe. He shook his head, long blond hair flying behind him, and put every ounce of his strength into his running. He wanted to see dragons. Dragons! Creatures of almost unimaginable power and magic. He wanted to experience the glory of their flight. He wanted to get as close to them as he could. It was a kind of mania. It was a kind of need.
It was not far to the hill, nor a long way to its bald and grassy summit. Will ran with a wildness he could not understand, lungs pounding and the wind of his own speed whistling in his ears.
And then he was atop the hill, breathing hard, with one hand on his grandmother stone.
The dragons were still flying overhead in waves. The roar of their jets was astounding. Will lifted his face into the heat of their passage, and felt the wash of their malice and hatred as well. It was like a dark wine that sickened the stomach and made the head throb with pain and bewilderment and wonder. It repulsed him and made him want more.
The last flight of dragons scorched over, twisting his head and spinning his body around, so he could keep on watching them, flying low over farms and fields and the Old Forest that stretched all the way to the horizon and beyond. There was a faint brimstone stench of burnt fuel in the air. Will felt his heart grow so large it seemed impossible his chest could contain it, so large that it threatened to encompass the hill, farms, forest, dragons, and all the world beyond.
Something hideous and black leaped up from the distant forest and into the air, flashing toward the final dragon. Will’s eyes felt a painful wrenching wrongness, and then a stone hand came down over them.
“Don’t look,” said an old and calm and stony voice. “To look upon a basilisk is no way for a child of mine to die.”
“Grandmother?” Will asked.
“Yes?”
“If I promise to keep my eyes closed, will you tell me what’s happening?”
There was a brief silence. Then: “Very well. The dragon has turned. He is fleeing.”
“Dragons don’t flee,” Will said scornfully. “Not from anything.” Forgetting his promise, he tried to pry the hand from his eyes. But of course it was useless, for his fingers were mere flesh.
“This one does. And he is wise to do so. His fate has come for him. Out from the halls of coral it has come, and down to the halls of granite will it take him. Even now his pilot is singing his death-song.”
She fell silent again, while the distant roar of the dragon rose and fell in pitch. Will could tell that momentous things were happening, but the sound gave him not the least clue as to their nature. At last he said, “Grandmother? Now?”
“He is clever, this one. He fights very well. He is elusive. But he cannot escape a basilisk. Already the creature knows the first two syllables of his true name. At this very moment it is speaking to his heart, and telling it to stop beating.”
The roar of the dragon grew louder again, and then louder still. From the way it kept on growing, Will was certain the great creature was coming straight toward him. Mingled with its roar was a noise that was like a cross between a scarecrow screaming and the sound of teeth scraping on slate.
“Now they are almost touching. The basilisk reaches for its prey…”
There was a deafening explosion directly overhead. For an astonishing instant, Will felt certain he was going to die. Then his grandmother threw her stone cloak over him and, clutching him to her warm breast, knelt down low to the sheltering earth.
When he awoke, it was dark and he lay alone on the col
d hillside. Painfully, he stood. A somber orange-and-red sunset limned the western horizon, where the dragons had disappeared. There was no sign of the War anywhere.
“Grandmother?” Will stumbled to the top of the hill, cursing the stones that hindered him. He ached in every joint. There was a constant ringing in his ears, like factory bells tolling the end of a shift. “Grandmother!”
There was no answer.
The hilltop was empty.
But scattered down the hillside, from its top down to where he had awakened, was a stream of broken stones. He had hurried past them without looking on his way up. Now he saw that their exterior surfaces were the familiar and comfortable grey of his stone-mother, and that the freshly-exposed interior surfaces were slick with blood.
One by one, Will carried the stones back to the top of the hill, back to the spot where his great-great-great-grandmother had preferred to stand and watch over the village. It took hours. He piled them one on top of another, and though it felt like more work than he had ever done in his life, when he was finished, the cairn did not rise even so high as his waist. It seemed impossible that this could be all that remained of she who had protected the village for so many generations.
By the time he was done, the stars were bright and heartless in a black, moonless sky. A night-wind ruffled his shirt and made him shiver, and with sudden clarity he wondered at last why he was alone. Where was his aunt? Where were the other villagers?
Belatedly remembering his basic spell-craft, he yanked out his rune-bag from a hip pocket, and spilled its contents into his hand. A crumpled blue-jay’s feather, a shard of mirror, two acorns, and a pebble with one side blank and the other marked with an X. He kept the mirror-shard and poured the rest back into the bag. Then he invoked the secret name of the lux aeterna, inviting a tiny fraction of its radiance to enter the mundane world.
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