Wings of Fire

by Jonathan Strahan

Glassop shrugged. Sometimes no answer was the best answer. The dragon paused midway between the back doors and the podium and seemed to paw the ground, fixed the woodwinds on risers of the Tarrytown Symphony with a dim and preoccupied pair of eyes. Fulkes banged the baton on the empty music stand, said “Wood-winds, woodwinds!” until all of them stopped. Glassop rested his violin on his knee, looked at the middle-aged conductor whose life was edged in disappointment, Glassop supposed, married to an heiress and conducting a semi-professional orchestra in Westchester when his real ambitions lay somewhat to the south. Once as an as-sistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic he had filled in for Boulez at a children’s concert, but that was a long time ago.

  “Woodwinds,” Fulkes said, “that is not the way that this very sinister passage is played. You must make legato, must lead the way toward the flugelhorn!”

  “Dragons,” Schmitt said. “They were rumored to be in the forests of Riga when I was a young man. Of course I am not a young man now, my friend. Do you smell that beast?”

  Glassop inhaled delicate draughts of air, thinking of his grand-son, Zeke, and what he would make of a dragon in the orchestra hall. Probably the boy would be as matter of fact as Schmitt or perhaps as oblivious as Wilkes. Children nowadays were exposed to too much sensation, murders on the MTV, dragons were nothing to them. The one at issue pawed the tiled floors and then sat gracelessly on its haunches, fixing Fulkes’ back with an insistent and compelling expression. It might have been holding an oboe for the degree of attention it now showed.

  “This is a most sinister symphony,” Fulkes said. “Vaughan Williams composed it in 1958, in the last year of his life. He was eighty-six years old and not feeling very well and he looked, in the words of Colin Davis, like a sack of bricks. We must acquaint ourselves with a man who thought of himself as being on friendly terms with death, who saw death, so to speak, as a disheveled guest in his own home, perhaps an elderly acquaintance who himself looked like a sack of bricks. Later on it is time for the middle strings to plumb the nature of the north region, but now the woodwinds must grace-fully usher the old fellow in. Do you understand?”

  Glassop shrugged, and stared over at the fourth stand firsts where, on the inside, sat Gertrude whom he loved. Gertrude had come to the Tarrytown Symphony only as a means, she said, of fill-ing up the hours while her children slowly dismantled her life but Glassop thought that he knew better, that he could look deeply into her very soul. Thirty years younger than he and most of the string section of this orchestra of refugees from Communism or decadence or retirees from capitalism, she had she said a mature and loving heart and no prejudice at all against second violinists or older men. If her husband and children were only to die, she had told Glassop once in the sacramental confines of the rear booth at the college coffee shop, she would genuinely consider his offer, his aching need. Of course this was not likely at any time in the foreseeable, but then again you did not know.

  Gertrude looked over at him, said something. Dra-gon, Glassop lip-read expertly. Do you see the dra-gon? She made a circle of her right thumb and forefinger, gripped the bow, raised it, pointed to the far aisle. Am I cra-zy? Glassop lip-read. Is that a dra-gon?

  No, Glassop motioned with his head, then nodded yes. No, you are not crazy. Yes, that is a dragon. He did this twice to make sure that the message could not be confused. Gertrude sighed, shrugged, raised the bow again. Are we the only ones? she said. To see it? To see the dra-gon? Glassop shrugged. Who knew? It was enough to manage your own perceptions, let alone account for those of others. I don’t know, he mouthed back to her. Now it was her turn to shrug, and then turn a page of the score as if in dismissal. Well, that was what the emotion of pure love got you at sixty-seven. If he were lucky he would, with the Greek philosopher, have the beast taken from him soon enough. In the meantime, he had the assurance from Gertrude who was the recipient of his earnest if unavailing passion that he was not mad, that he had indeed glimpsed a dragon in the aisle. Perhaps others had, too. Perhaps the entire orchestra had grasped the situation but was remaining very calm. That was the nature of the Tarrytown Symphony. These were people who had, most of them, been through a great deal, much displacement, the fulcrum of dispossession had had its way with two out of three of them and a dragon in orchestra hall was at this time among the lesser of their concerns.

  “That is good enough,” Fulkes said. “We try again now. From the beginning of the movement, please. Remember, should we get that far that the last movement is attaca, you must make the audience feel the transition rather than see it. Vaughan Williams died just three weeks after the premiere and the night before Boult made the recording. We will endeavor now not to do the same.”

  Glassop put the fiddle under his chin, listened to Bamett’s snare drum, watched Leonard Zeller put the clarinet through the opening phrases. What was it like for Vaughan Williams in that last year? Glassop wondered. Eighty-six years old, still writing symphonies, did he see dragons? English music was full of moats, castles, knights and unicorns, surely there must have been room for a dragon there. The Czechs had goblins and water sprites, dour Scandinavians like Schmitt were concerned largely with dwarfs. But dragons were kind of hard to place, not really nationalized in the way that most myths were. Glassop followed Fulkes’ baton, was cued in, played his way through the grim answering theme.

  The dragon rose suddenly to all fours and bellowed, then raised its front legs to rear to a surprising height, perhaps half the distance to the roof of the orchestra hall. The sound was surprisingly high, fluted, not what one would associate with a menacing beast. However, it stopped the woodwinds cold and broke down Solomon before he could raise the flugelhorn. There was no question now of the visibility of the dragon or the attention of the Tarrytown Sym-phony. The players were indeed fixated upon the situation. Fulkes turned, stared into the auditorium, then whirled back and faced them. “Oh, my,” he said, “oh, my, it is very large.” He grasped his chest, pounded it in an odd rhythm, then dropped the baton. “I think I am going to faint,” Fulkes said. “It is a great, a surprising strain.”

  The dragon wandered toward the edge of the stage, perched on the floor then right under the second violins, closest to Glassop. At the fourth stand on the outside, Glassop had the most privileged of vantage points, he could stare the animal down eye to eye and at the same time maintain some perspective. “Oh, my,” Fulkes said, lunging to the right, then the left. “I have never seen anything like this.” He fell to his knees, crept around the podium, found the baton and lurching into a half-crouch fled the podium, lunging through the firsts at hobbling speed and exiting behind the curtain. There were sounds of consternation among the bassi and two of the firsts at the rear stand rose to follow Fulkes, possibly to check upon his health, but otherwise all remained calm. Glassop stared at the dragon, an elongated and amiable crocodile with large, fixed eyes and a peculiarly generous expression around the mouth. The beast exhaled and the smell of flowers wafted its way to Glassop, filling his nostrils with sweet and ancient odors.

  “Oh, what a grand circumstance,” Schmitt said, entranced, holding his violin with two hands against his belly and looking at the engaging beast beneath them. “Magic,” Schmitt said as if having returned from the land of the fiords that very morning. “It is magic.”

  Glassop put his violin slowly, firmly on the floor. Magic, he thought, Schmitt was right. The quality was of magic. Seen from this angle the beast was enormous yet somehow accessible. Peacefully it exuded its floral scent and then Glassop extended his hand to touch a scale, the dragon licked Glassop’s hand with the greatest and gentlest of attention. Glassop felt a strange and wondrous peace filling him.

  He stood carefully, making sure that he did not bump his violin, a simulated machine-made Amati worth perhaps twelve hundred dollars but of some sentimental meaning and went to the podium, mounted it slowly and stiffly. The Tarrytown Symphony—old men, older men, middle-aged women, a few people of indeterminate age and of course his belove
d, harried Gertrude—stared at him. The rear stand first violinists had followed Fulkes and there were a few gaps in the woodwinds and bassi but the body of the seventy-three member orchestra remained on stage. Glassop found himself filled with an odd and persuasive joy, something unlike anything he had felt in these many years. He looked at the dragon—which was now submit-ting to Schmitt’s scratchings and whispered confidences—for courage and then he looked at Gertrude who gave him her most attentive and dedicated coffee-shop smile and then he addressed the orchestra.

  “At eighty-six,” Glassop said, “Ralph Vaughan Williams, the great British composer who Colin Davis described as looking in his dotage like a sack of bricks experienced wonders, knew wonders, composed in that eighty-seventh year of his the greatest of his nine symphonies and lived to hear its premiere. He heard wonders, saw dragons, saw lovely and mythical beasts against the screen of his consciousness, wrote a fierce and humorous commentary. Can we do less? In our own near-dotage can we ask less of ourselves than did Ralph Vaughan Williams?

  “Come,” Glassop said, feeling massive, solid, feeling the full locality of himself and basking in the sudden and expanded breath of the dragon, “We will make music together. In E minor we will make such sounds as Ralph Vaughan Williams heard from the fen, as he moved toward the far region. Gertrude,” Gloss said, “I truly love you, wreckage that I am, I confer upon you the benison of my understanding and my simple, unadorned, insubstantial passion.” He raised the baton. “From the beginning,” Glassop said, “we will start the E Minor symphony from the beginning with its earnest, descending theme and we will move on and on through its thirty-seven minutes of steady grandeur. Celli, prepare to lead.”

  Glassop, no longer a refugee, raised his hands. The music sighed from the celli. Behind him Glassop could hear the sound of the dragon’s heart as it opened its joyous mouth to emit fire, the pure fire ascending from its living breath and in the arch of Gertrude’s bow Glassop dreamed that he could see the mysterious fen, the walking stick of Ralph Vaughan Williams, the splendid old man himself as riding the fire of the dragon he sped toward eternity.

  —in memory of Sir Adrian Boult

  The Dragon’s Boy

  Jane Yolen

  Jane Yolen is the award-winning author of more than 300 books, mostly written for children. Known as the “Hans Christian Andersen of America”, she is a professional storyteller on the stage, has been an editor, and is the mother of three grown children, and the grandmother of six. Her best-known work, the critically acclaimed Owl Moon won the prestigious Caldecott Medal in 1988. Her fiction has won the Christopher Medal (twice) the Nebula (twice), World Fantasy Award, Society of Children’s Book Writers (twice), Mythopoeic Society’s Aslan (three times), Boys’ Clubs of America Junior Book Award, and she had a National Book Award finalist. Six colleges have given her honorary doctorates. Her works for adults include the powerful holocaust fantasy Briar Rose, and the Great Alta trilogy. Some of her short fiction has been collected in Once upon a Time (She Said). Her three children all work in the book business. She’s waiting to see if any of her six grandchildren will follow.

  It was on a day in early spring with the clouds scudding across a gray sky that the boy found the cave. He had been chasing after Lord Ector’s brachet hound, the one who always slipped her chain to go after hare. She had slipped him as well, leaving him lost in the boggy wasteland north of the castle walls. He had crossed and re-crossed a small, meandering stream, following her, wading thigh-deep in water that—he was painfully aware of it—would only come up to the other boys’ knees. The reminder of his height only made him crankier.

  The sun was high, his stomach empty, and the brachet had quit baying an hour earlier. She was no doubt back at the kennel yard, slopping up her food. But she was his responsibility, and he had to stay out until he was sure. Besides, he was lost. Well, not exactly lost but bothered a bit, which was a phrase he had picked up from the master of hounds, a whey-colored man for all that he was out of doors most of the day.

  The boy looked around for a place to get out of the noon sun, for the low, hummocky swamp with its brown pools and quaking mosses offered little shelter. And then he saw a small tor mounding up over the bog. He decided to climb it a bit to see if he could find a place where he might shelter, maybe even survey the land. He’d never been quite this far from the castle on his own before and certainly had never come out into the northern fens where the peat-hags reigned, and he needed time to think about the way home. And the brachet. If the mound had been higher, he wouldn’t have at-tempted it. The High Tor, the really large mound northwest of the manor, had somewhat of an evil reputation. But this hillock was hardly that. He needed to get his bearings and sight the castle walls or at least a tower.

  He was halfway up the tor when he saw the cave.

  It was only an unprepossessing black hole in the rock, as round as if it had been carved and then smoothed by a master hand. He stepped in, being careful of the long, spearlike hanging rocks, and let his eyes get used to the dark. Only then did he hear the breathing. It was not very loud, but it was steady and rumbling, with an occa-sional pop! that served as punctuation.

  He held his breath and began to back out of the cave, hit his head on something that rang in twenty different tones, and said a minor curse under his breath.

  “Staaaaaaaaaay,” came a low command.

  He stopped. And so, for a stuttering moment, did his heart. “Whoooooooooo are you?” It was less an echo bouncing off cave walls than an elongated sigh.

  The boy bit his lip and answered in a voice that broke several times in odd places. “I am nobody. Just Artos. A fosterling from the castle.” Then he added hastily, “Sir.”

  A low rumbling sound, more like a snore than a sentence, was all that was returned to him. It was that homey sound that freed him of his terror long enough to ask, “And who are you?” He hesitated. “Sir.”

  Something creaked. There was a strange clanking. Then the voice, augmented almost tenfold, boomed at him, “I am the Great Riddler. I am the Master of Wisdoms. I am the Word and I am the Light. I Was and Am and Will Be.”

  Artos nearly fainted from the noise. He put his right hand before him as if to hold back the sound. When the echoes had ended, he said in a quiet little voice, “Are you a hermit, sir? An anchorite? Are you a druid? A penitent knight?”

  The great whisper that answered him came in a rush of wind. “I am The Dragon.”

  “Oh,” said Artos.

  “Is that all you can say?” asked the dragon. “I tell you I am The Dragon and all you can answer is oh?”

  The boy was silent.

  The great breathy voice sighed. “Sit down, boy. It has been a long time since I have had company in my cave. A long time and a lonely time.”

  “But… but… but.” It was not a good beginning.

  “No buts,” said the dragon.

  “But…” Artos began again, needing greatly to uphold his end of the conversation.

  “Shush, boy, and listen. I will pay for your visit.”

  The boy sat. It was not greed that stayed him. Rather, he was comforted by the thought that he was not to be eaten.

  “So, Artos, how would you like your payment? In gold, in jewels, or in wisdom?”

  A sudden flame from the center of the cave lit up the interior and, for the first time, Artos could see that there were jewels scattered about the floor as thick as pebbles. But dragons were known to be great game players. Cunning, like an old habit, claimed the boy. Like most small people, he had a genius for escape. “Wisdom, sir,” he said.

  Another bright flame spouted from the cave center. “An excellent choice,” said the dragon. “I’ve been needing a boy just your age to pass my wisdom on to. So listen well.”

  Artos did not move and hoped that the dragon would see by his attitude that he was listening.

  “My word of wisdom for the day is this: Old dragons, like old thorns, can still prick. And I am a very old dragon. Take care
.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Artos, thinking but not saying that that was a bit of wit often spoken on the streets of the village nestled inside the castle walls. But the warning by the villagers was of priests and thorns, not dragons. Aloud he said, “I will remember. Sir.”

  “Go now,” said the dragon. “And as a reward for being such a good listener, you may take that small jewel. There.” The strange clanking that Artos had heard before accompanied the extension of a gigantic foot with four enormous toes, three in the front and one in the back. It scrabbled along the cave floor, then stopped not far from Artos. Then the nail from the center toe extended peculiarly and tapped on a red jewel the size of a leek bulb.

  Artos moved cautiously toward the jewel and the claw. Hesitating a moment, he suddenly leaned over and grabbed up the jewel. Then he scuttered back to the cave entrance.

  “I will expect you tomorrow,” said the dragon. “You will come during your time off.”

  “How did you know I had time off?” asked Artos.

  “When you have become as wise as a dragon, you will know these things.”

  Artos sighed.

  “There is a quick path from the back bridge. Discover it. And you will bring me stew. With meat!” The nail was suddenly sheathed and, quite rapidly, the foot was withdrawn into the dark center of the cave.

  “To-tomorrow,” promised the boy, not meaning a word of it.

  The next morning at the smithy, caught in the middle of a quarrel between Old Linn the apothecary and Magnus Pieter the swordmaker, Artos was reminded of his promise. He had not forgotten the drag-on—indeed the memory of the great clanking scales, the giant claw, the shaft of searing breath, the horrendous whisper had haunted his dreams. But he had quite conveniently forgotten his promise, or shunted it aside, or buried it behind layers of caution, until the argument had broken out.