IGMS - Issue 24

by IGMS

  "What was that?" I asked. We'd heard wolves howling a few nights ago. This was different.

  "Probably a dragon."

  "Do you think we'll see a dragon?" I asked.

  "Mercy, I hope not."

  "Is it true the Indians ride them?"

  "I shouldn't think so. Dragons are bigger than houses and wilder than wolves."

  "Do you think we'll see Indians?"

  "Oh, I don't think so."

  "But isn't this Indian country?"

  "They'll move further west," she said. "They'll have to, now that white folks are coming."

  I thought about that a moment and then asked, "Will they be angry about having to move?"

  "That's why we brought the Reverend."

  "What happens when they get all the way west? There's an ocean, they can't keep going forever."

  "Go to sleep, Hattie," she said again, and this time she used a voice like she meant it.

  We were heading into Kansas territory. Papa said the Indians here were called the Osage, and they were a race of giants, with the shortest of their men at least as tall as Papa. Joe Franklin, one of the men traveling with us, said they ate human flesh, and then laughed, showing his missing front teeth. Mother frowned at him, and he tipped his hat to her and rode off to the other end of the wagon train.

  When we camped each night, before the Reverend blessed our circle, it was my job to fetch water. That evening, I thought about what Adeline had said, and decided to see if I could do a blessing, too. Standing in the creek bottom, I closed my eyes and stretched out my arms. "May the Lord bless the land I stand on," I intoned, trying to talk like the Reverend. "Lord, let us feed on Your truth. Send Your sacred blood to purify us and strengthen us and send Angels of War to guard us with their fiery swords --"

  "Nice try, Miss Cartwright." My eyes flew open; it was Joe Franklin. "You trying to protect yourself from anyone in specific?" He grinned at me. "I didn't think I'd scared you that bad today."

  I turned my back on him, my ears burning. I could feel the magic humming around me; it had risen, but it hadn't really done anything. "I'm not scared."

  "No?"

  In truth, Joe Franklin made me nervous. He liked to tell stories that weren't proper, like the one about how he'd had his teeth knocked out in a brawl. I started back up the path with my bucket. "Excuse me," I said, since he was blocking the path.

  He stepped out the way, still grinning. "I could carry that for you," he offered.

  "No, thank you, I am perfectly capable of carrying it myself."

  "Suit yourself."

  Back at the camp, Papa and Reverend Dawson had their heads together over some papers. They talked through the evening -- Mother had Adeline bring Papa his dinner -- and I wasn't surprised when we didn't go anywhere come morning. The men rode out, and Mother told me they'd decided we'd come far enough west and were looking to find the best place for our town. We camped there for two days, while they thought about it, and finally on the third day they moved us a half-mile up the creek, and Reverend Dawson blessed the new town. They dug a hole, and he buried a bag he'd brought with him from the east, and all the men helped fill in the hole, a little at a time. Then above the hole they put a sign saying town of blessing.

  Papa took us out riding that afternoon. The creek led up to a river not too far away, with trees we could cut to build our houses. The prairie stretched wide around us; it would be easy to get lost here, down in the grass.

  "This is an ugly place," Adeline said. "I miss Ohio."

  "This land will never love us," Papa said, patting her on the arm. "Not like it loves the Indians. But we'll teach it to serve us well enough. We've got seeds, and livestock, and there's good hunting here -- even those dragons! Not that you'd want to eat a dragon, but think how little dragonskin goes into a pair of dragon leather boots, and think how much those cost."

  Adeline sniffed. "Yes, but what good will that money do us here? There's nowhere to spend it!"

  "Oh, that's true now. But more wagon trains are on their way. And once Blessing is up and running, even more people will come. It'll be a real town soon enough, and we won't have the troubles we had in Ohio." Papa had been in business in Ohio -- well, really, he'd been in several businesses in Ohio. None of them lasted very long. "Things will be grand here," Papa said. "You'll see."

  Adeline pouted a bit more. I looked out at the prairie again, and pointed to a thin line of smoke rising up from the prairie that stretched west from Blessing. "What's that?"

  There was an encampment of Osage Indians less than two miles from Blessing. Papa told Mother they hadn't realized that, when they picked this spot for the town. The Osage might have been off hunting, so our men saw no smoke from their fires when they were scouting.

  But it was too late to move the town now. They'd buried the relics and put up the sign; they didn't have another bag. Mother was coldly furious, and Adeline wept in the wagon, saying she was frightened.

  Adeline had always been made of softer stuff than I. When we were little and a boy at school left a snake on the desk Adeline and I shared, she screamed and ran away. I was the one who grabbed the snake by its tail and dropped it down the shirt of the boy who'd left it for us. Still, she hadn't ever been a fainting hysteric. The longer we stayed, the jumpier she got.

  "What does the Reverend's magic smell like, Hattie?" she asked one night as we were going to bed.

  "I thought you didn't want me talking about it."

  "Does it smell different than it used to?" she asked.

  It did, actually. "You can smell it?" I said, surprised.

  "No!" she said. "Of course not! It's just --"

  "You can smell it," I said.

  "What if he led us here on purpose?" Adeline said. "What if he's working with the Indians, what if it's a trap?"

  "Don't be ridiculous," I said, and pulled the covers over my head. She didn't say anything more, but I heard her inhale a long breath, then another, like she was trying to smell the magic.

  A week passed. I held my tongue and fetched water and carried it around to the men as they worked. Adeline was supposed to help, but she said it was too frightening to go down to the creek bottom, so it all fell on me. Fortunately, Joe Franklin was busy cutting wood, so I didn't run into him in the creek bottom again, but I had to tolerate him grinning at me over the ladle when I offered him water.

  I was terribly tired by late afternoon, and at first I didn't notice the long shadow moving in the grass as I was hauling the bucket out. Then I thought maybe it was Joe Franklin. But when I turned to look, I saw a dragon, crawling in the grass toward me.

  I saw it for just an instant, so close I could have reached out to steal one of its crest feathers. It was scarlet and gold, with scales on its belly and its long, snake-like neck, and soft down rippling along its wings, which were folded to let it creep along on the claws on its wing tips. Its mouth opened, and I could see rows of long, sharp teeth.

  I drew in my breath to scream, turning toward camp hoping to see anyone at all, even Joe Franklin, but my mouth was dry and all that came out was a croak. I turned back and the dragon was gone. Instead, I saw an Indian wearing a dragon-skin cloak, which he slipped off his shoulders and left on the ground at his feet. He took a step forward but held up his empty hands to show he had no weapon. "I won't hurt you," he said in English.

  He was tall, as tall as Papa, but not a giant, and his head was shaved except for a bit in the back, and a feather -- one of the dragon feathers -- stuck out of his hair. He wore no shirt, and had designs painted on his face and body. I was so relieved that he was just an Indian, rather than a dragon, that I answered him.

  "What do you want?" I said.

  "I bring a message for your people," he said. "Will you carry it?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "We belong to this land. You do not. You need to leave."

  I laughed out loud. "They're not going to move the town on my say-so," I said. "The men picked the spot. Do you think they'r
e going to pack up and go back to Ohio?"

  "That is my message," he said. "Will you carry it?"

  "Yes, but --"

  "That's all I ask," he said. He picked up his cloak and walked away, back toward the Osage camp.

  I carried my bucket up to our camp -- our town, they said I should call it, but it still looked like a camp. My father and Reverend Dawson were looking over papers again. "Papa?" I said softly, my bucket still in my hands.

  "I'm rather busy right now, Hattie."

  "There was an Indian at the creek who wanted me to tell you something," I said.

  He laid his papers down. "An Indian approached you?" He shot an accusing look at Reverend Dawson.

  "Yes, Papa, an Indian man."

  "What did he want?"

  "He said that he wanted me to carry a message."

  "Yes?"

  "He said this land is theirs and not ours, and we have to leave."

  They burst out laughing and I said, "I told him no one was going to leave. I said. But he said --"

  "It's all right, Hattie," Papa said, clapping me on the shoulder. "You did well to come to us. I don't expect you'll see him again, but if you do, tell him my message for his people is that the clever ants are the ones that get out of the way when the buffalo are coming."

  I didn't see the Indian again -- at least not right away. But it was clear enough we weren't going anywhere. The Reverend renewed the blessing every night and every morning, and for a time, the building and planting continued undisturbed.

  Then one of the men went out hunting and didn't come back. His horse didn't come back, either. He was just gone, vanished into the prairie. Joe Franklin was furious about it; he hadn't even been friends with the man, but kept saying it could have been any of us. He wanted to teach the Indians a lesson.

  "You're safe as long as you stay near the town," Reverend Dawson said. "He was probably eaten by a dragon."

  "The dragons don't eat anyone the Indians don't tell them to eat," Joe Franklin said. "Everyone knows that."

  "We're not strong enough yet to take on the Indians directly," Reverend Dawson said. "Show some patience."

  He ordered the men to stay in pairs, when they went out, so they could watch each other's backs. No one else disappeared, and we all relaxed for a bit.

  Then the dragon came.

  Adeline saw it first -- way, way up in the sky, so high up it was barely a dot. But then it circled down toward us, and first it looked like a bird, and then it looked like a really big bird, and then it was low enough that we could see the sun glint off the scales on its enormous neck. From here, the downy feathers on its wings looked like scales as well, and I tried not to think about the dragon I thought I'd seen down by the creek. This one was a darker red, with glinting orange on its neck. The tips of its wings were yellow.

  "It can't come close enough to hurt us," the Reverend Dawson said.

  No one was listening. It wasn't exactly that they didn't believe him. It was more that they could see the dragon, and how big it was, and how big its claws were, and how sharp its teeth were. And they couldn't see the magic. Even I couldn't see it, though I knew it was there.

  Around and around it circled, lower and lower. It was Adeline who started the panic -- Adeline only ran as far as our wagon, and hid under a blanket, but there were others who started to run, or who grabbed horses and took off at a gallop.

  "I can't protect you!" Reverend Dawson shouted. "If you leave the town, God's mercy will not shelter you!"

  Mother stood frozen but Papa never doubted. He ran into the wagon to drag Adeline back out. I think he had some idea that if he could force Adeline to calm down, the others who were running away would come back. When Papa brought her out, Reverend Dawson grabbed her around the waist and shouted, "By the Power of Christ's purifying blood, I banish the demon of fear! I banish the demon of panic! I cast out the demon of disobedience . . ."

  The dragon swooped down. One of the men from the wagon train must have gotten just far enough on his horse to be outside the protection of the blessing. We saw him when the dragon rose again with the man in its teeth. I could see the man's legs kicking, like a chicken's right after you slaughter it.

  "Stop," Adeline screamed. "Make him let me go, he's going to give us all to the dragon," and too late, we all saw a knife in her hand.

  We laid Reverend Dawson's body next to the Town of Blessing sign. Mother dosed Adeline with laudanum and left her to sleep in one of the wagons. She'd been mad with fear, Papa said; it wasn't her fault. Perhaps the Indians had bewitched her, which wouldn't be her fault either.

  Six of the people from town had run when the dragon came. Three slunk back, quiet and ashamed.

  "What are we going to do now?" I asked my father. I could hear the hum of the magic still, but it would fade soon, without Reverend Dawson renewing it. Other wagon trains might be coming, and they surely had magicians of their own, but we'd never last that long.

  "We're not going to leave, if that's what you're thinking," Papa said. His arm tightened around me. "We're never going back. This land is ours, now."

  "But without the Reverend Dawson --"

  "We don't need the Reverend Dawson. We have you."

  "Papa, I tried once to do a blessing, on my own. I couldn't do it."

  "That's all right," he said. "Wait till tonight. When we bury the Reverend. You'll understand then."

  Papa sent me to bed, but then woke me when the moon rose. Mother slept next to Adeline, ready with another dose of her medicines if Adeline stirred. Papa led me out to the Town of Blessing sign, where the Reverend's body still lay. Someone had built a fire, and the men were gathered in a circle.

  "What's the girl doing here?" one of the men asked.

  "Oh, she belongs here," Joe Franklin said, and grinned. "Unless you want to turn around and go back to Ohio."

  "Who has the knife?" Papa asked.

  "I've got it." Joe Franklin handed it to Papa. "Did you tell her what's going to happen?"

  Papa shook his head. "Sit quietly, Hattie, and do exactly as I tell you." He raised his knife over the Reverend, and then gave me another brief look. "Don't scream," he added.

  I covered my mouth with my hands as Papa plunged the knife into the Reverend's chest, used his fingers to crack open his ribs, and carved the heart from his body. Papa laid the heart on a slab of wood and cut it into pieces.

  He picked up the first piece, and ate it. Then he speared another piece with the knife, and offered it to Joe Franklin, who stuck it in his mouth and chewed. One by one, every one of the men ate a piece of Reverend Dawson's heart. One piece was left, and Papa picked it up in his fingers. "Open your mouth, Hattie," he said.

  "I don't want to," I said, my voice shaking.

  "Do you want to be a proper magician, like the Reverend was? Or do you want to be a puny little witch all your life? Eat the heart."

  I closed my eyes and bit down. It was salty and tough, and I actually swallowed it without gagging.

  When you eat the heart of a magician, some of his power passes to you. In my dreams, Joe Franklin was the one explaining, even though it was my father who told me these things before sending me back to my bed. Of course there are things that make it work better. If you kill the man yourself, for instance. Shame it wasn't you that drove the knife in, if we had to lose the Reverend.

  "Why not have Adeline eat it, then?" I asked.

  A weak, sniveling, useless little bit like your twin? he said. No, Hattie. If anyone's going to bless the town and have it stick, it's going to be you.

  Papa shook me awake at dawn and led me to the Town of Blessing sign. I folded my hands and listened for the magic. Reverend Dawson had always spoken his blessings out loud, but I thought now that wasn't strictly necessary. I closed my eyes and told it to shape itself around us: keep out dragons, keep out Indians, keep out malice and misfortune and everything else Reverend Dawson had mentioned in any of his blessings. I heard it all fall into place like musical notes form
ing a chord.

  There, that's done, I thought, and then looked around at the expectant faces of the men surrounding me. They couldn't hear it. So I cleared my throat and said, "God bless us and keep us safe, for ever and ever, amen."

  "Do you think that really worked?" one of the men asked Papa.

  "It worked," I said.

  Papa gave me an appraising look and said, "I think that should keep us as safe as the Reverend's blessings, yes."

  The dragon came again a day later.

  It couldn't get through my blessing, any more than it could get through Reverend Dawson's, and this time no one ran away, but it drove Adeline fair mad and Mother had to dose her to make her sleep again. Afterward I saw Mother measure the medicine in the bottle and sigh deeply. "It won't last long, not at this rate," she said to Papa.

  I was sitting with Adeline when she woke. "The dragon's gone," I told her as she stirred.

  "I hear them laughing," she muttered.

  "No one's laughing at you," I said. "They know you're just frightened. But you need to control yourself when it comes next time."

  "I hear the dragons when I sleep," Adeline said.

  She was hearing my magic, I thought. Even if she didn't want to admit it. "If you just admit you can smell the magic, maybe I can help you," I said.

  She came fully awake then and gave me a haughty glare -- her old self again. "You know it's not ladylike to talk about these things," she said.

  I sighed and stood up. "I'll send Mother in to sit with you, since you're feeling better," I said.

  I sat down outside in the shade, and Papa came to sit beside me. "Tell me again about that Indian you saw," he said.

  "He didn't look very old," I said. "He was tall, and had a shaved head with a feather, and he said --"

  "I remember what he said. Did he walk right up to you?"

  "Yes, by the creek. I turned around and he was standing there." I decided not to mention the dragon. Papa would think I was as crazy as Adeline.