Dragon's Eye

by Christopher Stasheff

  He, too, was a symbol, Czerny realized. He had always known it in an abstract sense, the way he had known that the Impressionists were working with light and that the cubists were trying to discover the meaning of geometry and express a mechanized world. The girl was right, he thought as he gained altitude. Symbols were important, and if they were changed they were changed forever.

  And then Czerny saw it and smiled, high in the sky where no one could see him. He dipped a wing, turned a cartwheel over the castle. The tanks. He couldn't defeat them with attack. But he could turn his own failure around. He could defeat tanks with art.

  Pleasure flooded him. His scales sparkled dark turquoise-green flecked with gold in the sunlight. He belched fire overhead from sheer joy. He never noticed that below people watched his flight and saw one more symbol of Prague, unfettered and free.

  The plan was so simple, but Czerny had never tried to get materials or do any art before. He had always collected and criticized. He had never tried to paint. And so when the woman behind the counter at the shop asked what size brushes he wanted, and if he wanted sable or horsehair or nylon, he was confused.

  "A big brush," he said finally, looking at the claw that covered most of the counter. "The biggest one you have. And two gallons of paint."

  The woman pushed her glasses up her nose. "Paint, What kind of paint? Wall paint? Oil or latex? Or do you want metal paint, or acrylics."

  This at least was safer ground. "Metal," Czerny said firmly. "Can you mix up colors for that?"

  The woman sighed heavily. "What color do you want?" she asked.

  Czerny hung his head. He had thought about it all day, from the moment he had returned to St. Vitus' to his resolve. He had looked around the castle, the fine blue-grey of the walls, the glowing hues of the paintings in the cathedral, and had decided that none of them would do.

  Red, of course, was a bad color now. Czerny was sorry for that. He thought red very pretty. But now it just meant Russians, and so that was not possible. All the bright jewel colors were too rich, too important, he thought. The idea was to make the tank silly, laughable, manageable. Light blue maybe? That would be like the sky. Or orange? Orange was a silly color sometimes. But it made Czerny think of fire.

  A boy in a school uniform with a red scarf around his neck came into the store and inspected the selection of watercolor papers. The boy was chewing loudly, blowing large bubbles and then popping them with a loud crack.

  The gum was pink. Hot blinding pink, a color no one could mistake. A color no one could ever take seriously. Czerny smiled and whistled to himself. "That color," he told the woman. "Like his candy."

  The saleswoman cleared her throat. She did not approve of the choice. Czerny didn't care. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. After a lifetime of loving art he was going to make art. He was very excited and a little scared.

  He took the paint cans and the brush the woman set out. '"Wait a minute, you have to pay for those," she yelled as Czerny squeezed himself through the door. "Stop, thief," she yelled as he jumped into the darkening sky. Didn't she know the tradition, that the castle would cover his expenses? Except for art work, of course. That was his alone.

  It was hard to paint in the dark, Czerny thought. In fact, it was hard to paint at all. The brush did not fit comfortably in his claw. The paint spattered everywhere, some of it speckling his belly scales and toes. The paint did not go on evenly. It ran over the vertical planes and pooled at the base.

  Czerny nearly gave up more than once. But then he remembered the tanks coming up the hill. This time he was going to defeat this one, this time he would win. He was going to erase his old shame and overcome his fear.

  This was HIS tank, in HIS city. He had slept far too long.

  Besides, he told himself, it gave him a better appreciation for the artists. He had always loved the paintings. Now he could understand a little of the effort it took to make them. His arms became sore from the unaccustomed back-and-forth strokes. The paint smelled bad, and he could feel it coating the inside of his nostrils. It made him want to belch fire and burn it out very badly, and once or twice in the course of his work he did just that. But he was very careful to turn away from the partially painted tank and the empty buckets around it. "Very flammable," the labels on the cans had said.

  In the dark he couldn't tell if he was getting the color even, or if it was streaked. He was worried that the dark green and the red star underneath would show through. But there was no way for him to tell.

  When the sky lightened enough for him to make out the outline of the castle across the river, he knew he was finished. He stretched his wings and his neck from the night's labor, picked up the paint cans, and flew back home. He threw the empty paint cans into one of the worksheds before taking his place on top of the cathedral and tucking his head under his wing for a well-deserved nap.

  Czerny awoke to a furor. Russian soldiers were marching down the streets at double time. People were tittering behind their hands, laughing behind the Soviet backs. Czerny took a lazy loop overhead to see where they were all going.

  They were headed to Soviet Tank Drivers' Square. Already Tank 23 was half repainted olive green. It didn't quite match the other tanks in the square.

  "You will pay for this," said a Soviet officer. "You can't do this to us."

  Around him the crowd just laughed. And Czerny laughed too. He was terribly sorry to see the tank painted green again. It was very nice in pink, a kind of postmodernist statement, he had thought.

  "If we ever catch who did this, he's going to jail," the officer growled.

  Czerny folded his wings over the pink spots on his belly. He had tried to wash them off, but they stuck firmly to his scales. He didn't want to go to jail, not that he thought the Soviets could hold him anyway. He just didn't want to find out.

  By the time evening fell and the people gathered in front of the National Museum, the tank was completely green again. But through the throng in Wenceslas Square, dancing to the rock music that broke though when no one was making speeches, everyone was talking about the pink tank.

  "I don't know what it is to them," someone in the crowd said. "What's the big deal?"

  Czerny whistled through his teeth. It was a big deal indeed. There were Soviet troops cordoned around the whole of Wenceslas Square tonight that hadn't been there before.

  "The big deal is that they take us seriously," someone else answered. "We're not afraid any more. They know that. And if we're not afraid of them they can't win."

  Czerny thought about that. Maybe it was true. He still wished the tank was pink, that the Russians were gone. He wished he had his Picasso back. He wondered what Pablo would have said about the tank. Maybe even Picasso would have thought it was art. Or had been art. It was only a green tank now.

  And Czerny thought he had lost again. He had made people proud, but he had also made the enemy angry. And he hadn't destroyed even a one of them. They were all going to take Prague back and his city would never be the glorious center of art it had always been before.

  It would just be one more satellite state without a soul. Czerny looked down at the crowd and began to weep.

  And then, as his great tears fell splashing onto the pavement, he saw a group of men in overalls with paint cans. They were grey-haired, most of them, and dignified. They looked like they should be wearing uniforms or suits. They walked very straight and the overalls were crisply pressed.

  Each one carried a can of bright pink paint and a brush. They marched in line as if they were a military band. Out of Wenceslas Square they led the crowd, down into the Metro.

  Czerny followed them. He had never been in the Metro before. Great long caverns, the dragon thought this was a better place than the cathedral vault. The sides of the station were decorated with metallic colored hands.

  But he didn't have long to admire tunnels as fine as any dragon could desire. The men in overalls led the crowd briskly. They took the line to Andel Station, whe
re everything was faced in pink marble, and they were only a few blocks from Soviet Tank Drivers' Square.

  Russian troops ringed the monument now. Czerny was surprised as he looked at their faces. They were tight, afraid. Czerny thought that some of the boys in uniforms with the red star cap pins looked like they might cry. He felt sorry for them.

  The men in overalls began painting Tank 23 bright bubblegum pink as the crowd cheered.

  "Stop that," a Russian officer came over to challenge the painters.

  But the men in overalls weren't at all perturbed. The man closest to the officer stopped painting and pulled an identity card out of his back pocket. "People's Congress," the man said, smiling. "We have immunity, I believe." And then the congressman turned back, dabbing bright pink paint on the turret.

  Czerny felt a giant lump in his chest, like balefire only bigger and harder like it was going to burst out of him. Pride. He had done it. Just like the dragons of Paris and Britain, who had always thought he was too lost in art to be any real use. But he was just like them. He could save his city, too. But he could save it by being exactly what he was, the Dragon of Prague. The one dragon protector who understood art better than war. After all, sometimes art won.