Paint Your Dragon

by Tom Holt

  ‘Hooray,’ said Chubby wretchedly to himself. ‘I guess I’ve landed this really big contract.’

  It was a dirty, rotten job ...

  Plink! A tiny globe of lime-rich water dripped from cavern roof to floor.

  ... But someone’s got to do it. Apparently. Ouch! Jesus, but this stuffs uncomfortable.

  Traditional security guard, substantial art collection. Whoever drafted that advertisement had probably spent some time in the estate agency business, learning in the process the art of making statements that are almost but not quite downright untrue.

  The art collection was housed in a cave two hundred feet below the Pennine Hills and consisted of about three hundred tons’ weight of gold tableware; very old, very vulgar and extremely unpleasant to lie on. Cold. Hard. Lots of handles and knobs and scutcheons to dig into you.

  Plus, of course, the alluring prospect of being woken up just as soon as you’ve dropped off by some amateur hero with weapons, desperate courage and a fleet of lorries outside the cave mouth with their engines running. It was as bad as being a guard dog, and he didn’t even have a little bowl with his name on it. The job, the dragon decided, sucks.

  ‘Hello?’

  The voice was still some way off; high-pitched, almost feminine. A ploy, thought the dragon, and a piss-poor one at that. Pound to a penny it’s some muscular git in tin overalls making his voice sound funny to put me off my guard. He breathed in, savouring the mellow warmth of his own breath.

  ‘Anybody home?’

  Only one way he can come and that’s straight through that hole there. Just let him poke his head through, and his mates’ll have to carry him home in an asbestos bag.

  ‘Here you are.’ The head, as he’d predicted, appeared. But it was female. There was no helmet, no nodding white plume. The dragon was so surprised he swallowed his breath and got hiccups. Nasty ...

  ‘Are you,’ said the female, ‘Mr Wayne Popper?’

  The dragon looked at her.

  ‘My name,’ she went on, ‘is Marjorie Evans. Inland Revenue.’

  A tiny flare of green fire spurted from the dragon’s right ear, evidence of the rather complex and horrible ear-nose-and-throat difficulties he was currently experiencing. ‘Is that so?’ he croaked. ‘Look, I do have a certain discretion in these matters, so I’m going to count up to five and then - Oops, ah, shit, do excuse me, please.’ For a few moments, the darkness of the cavern was illuminated by the sort of firework display you generally only get to see when there’s an important Royal wedding.

  ‘Bless you,’ said Miss Evans, instinctively fumbling in her bag for a tissue. ‘Sorry, you did say you are Mr Popper?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ replied the dragon, confused. ‘Now get the hell out of here, before I incinerate you.’

  ‘I’ll take that,’ replied Miss Evans briskly, ‘as a Yes.’ She straightened her back, took out a notebook and looked around, miming seeing the gold for the first time. ‘Well then,’ she said. ‘What have we here?’

  Inside the dragon’s brain, a debate was raging. The traditionalists were saying, You fool, here’s a blasted hero, well, all right, heroine, come to nick the goodies, so why the hell don’t you just torch her PDQ and have done with it? In another part of his brain, his loyal opposition was arguing that actually she’d given no indication that she was here to steal anything, she wasn’t armed, she’d even offered a tissue when he sneezed. So what? retorted the traditionalists. So I don’t want to carbonise her, replied the opposition. She hasn’t done me any harm. Chicken, taunted the old guard. No, replied the other lot, dragon; same number of wings, but bigger and twice the legs.

  ‘It’s a pile of gold,’ replied the dragon, in the meantime.

  ‘Is it really?’ Miss Evans was writing in the book. ‘Could you possibly explain to me how you came by it?’

  ‘Um,’ said the dragon. ‘I’m, er, looking after it for somebody else.’

  As the woman looked at him, non-aggressive, pacific, even smiling slightly in a mildly cynical way through thick-lensed spectacles, the dragon was aware of a feeling he hadn’t had for so long he could only just put a name to it. It disconcerted him, no end.

  He felt like he was in trouble.

  ‘Really,’ said the woman. ‘And might I ask who this other person might be?’

  This, said the ruling majority in the dragon’s brain, is crazy. One little puff and she’s ash. No sword. No armour. And it isn’t even my treasure. So why do I feel as if I’ve just been caught with my talon in the biscuit tin?

  ‘A friend,’ the dragon mumbled, not sure where the words he was saying were coming from. ‘Or rather, a bloke I met in a pub, didn’t catch his name. Just look after this lot for me, he said, won’t be a tick.’

  ‘I see.’

  That was all she said. I see. In the old days, when the dragon took to the air, the roads leading in the opposite direction were clogged with nose-to-tail handcarts. He hiccupped again. ‘Gesundheit,’ said the woman.

  ‘Um,’ said the dragon, his vocal chords sandpaper. ‘Is there a problem?’

  The woman closed her notebook, clicked her biro and put them both away. ‘Mr Popper,’ she said, ‘let me be frank with you. I have to say I’m not really very happy with your story I don’t have to tell you, defrauding the Revenue is no laughing matter.’

  For some reason he couldn’t account for at all - the unfamiliarity of the concept, perhaps, or the bewildering lack of terror on the woman’s part - the last three words she’d spoken were perhaps the most unnerving things he’d ever heard a mortal say. When you consider that they were competing against such strong contenders as Take your ten thousand archers round the back of the hill, we’ll attack from here with our twenty thousand cavalry and If he had any idea what we’djtist put in there, he wouldn’t be drinking it, maybe you can get a vague glimpse at the dragon’s complete bewilderment.

  ‘Allright,’ he said. ‘I’m not Mr Popper. I just work for him.’

  The woman smiled. It was, actually, quite a pleasant smile. In her spare time, she probably made fur-fabric mouse bookmarks. ‘I had already guessed that, Mr ...’

  ‘Dragon.’

  ‘Mister Dragon.’ She pulled out the notebook again. ‘But there is such a thing as being an accessory, you know. I really would urge you to co-operate with us.’

  ‘Sure.’ A minor seismic event, last echo of the hiccups, ,wafted blue flame out of the dragon’s left ear; if only, snarled his subconscious, I could accidentally sneeze at her, all they’d ever find would be charcoal. And I wouldn’t even have done it on purpose.

  But no sneeze came, and the dragon had to suffer the indignity of listening to himself telling the woman everything he knew about the job - Mr Popper’s enormous property deals, payments made in gold for, what had he called it, fiscal convenience, all kinds of things he scarcely understood himself - while she wrote carefully, nodded and mhm’d, then closed her notebook, thanked him very politely and left the way she’d come.

  A moment after that, he inflated both lungs and blew the biggest flare of extra-hot red fire he’d ever managed in his life. It melted the walls of the cavern, but it didn’t reach Miss Evans; he could hear her inch-and-a-half heels still clippety-clopping along the winding tunnel. Thanks to his belated efforts, however, the hole in the wall was now almost sealed off and he couldn’t get through to press home the attack.

  ‘Shit!’ he roared. ‘What’s happening to me?’

  Nobody said anything, but his deranged imagination made him believe that, in the dying echoes of his own roar, he heard a mocking voice asking him whose side he was on.

  ‘Quite soon,’ Bianca said, ‘I shall have had enough of this.’

  ‘I think you ought to tell someone,’ Mike replied, calmly folding the tarpaulin which, removed a moment or so ago, had revealed Saint George returned and the dragon gone. ‘There’s two possible explanations, and one of them demands that we believe in the existence of a practical joker with access to
helicopters and heavy lifting gear, who’s capable of swapping enormously heavy statues round in the centre of Birmingham at dead of night without anybody noticing.’

  ‘That’s absurd.’

  ‘Obviously. Therefore,’ Mike continued, ‘we’re dealing with the boring old supernatural. You’ve got to tell someone, otherwise it’ll invalidate your insurance.’

  Bianca scowled. ‘That’s absurd too,’ she said.

  ‘Tell you something else that’s absurd, while I’m at it,’ Mike responded, shoving the folded tarpaulin into a cardboard box, ‘and that’s bloody great statues playing hide and seek with themselves in a public place.’

  ‘We can’t tell anyone,’ Bianca objected. ‘They’d never believe us. They’d lock us up in the nut house.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Mike shrugged. ‘At least then, this’d be someone else’s problem. Right now, I could fancy somewhere dark and cool with bendy wallpaper.’

  Bianca was silent for a moment, then she started to rummage in her toolbag. ‘I know one thing I am going to do,’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I’m going to chip off that ridiculous moustache.’

  Dismissed without references for gross breach of confidentiality, the dragon swished its tail dispiritedly and flew east.

  En route it had a run-in with three F-llls, hastily scrambled by a gibbering controller out of Brize Norton and armed with everything Father Christmas had left in the RAF’s stocking for the last six years.

  In due course the pilots ejected and, save for a broken leg and some bruises, landed safely. Most of the bits of aeroplane came down in the sea. Which, the dragon mused as it continued its flight, only makes the business with the tax woman all the more disturbing.

  ‘Guy,’ said Mr Kortright, having heard the tale, ‘believe me, you were right to trust your instincts. You just don’t tangle with those people, not ever. Shame about the job, but you did right. Besides,’ he added with a shrug, ‘there’s the morality of the thing to consider. The forces of Evil gotta stick together, right?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Mr Kortright gave him a puzzled look. ‘Evil,’ he said. ‘Your team. You represent the forces of darkness, and so do they. You go welshing on your own kind, you’ll never work in this business again.’

  From Colchester - Mr Kortright promised him faithfully to let him know as soon as anything suitable came up - he flew fast and high to the Midlands, found his plinth and parked. Getting out of the cavern had used up most of his fuel supply, and dealing with the aircraft had polished off the rest. He was tired, and upset, and he needed a rest.

  Evil? What did the little creep mean, Evil?

  George woke up.

  Deep down in the very marrow of the stone, his head hurt. He felt sick. What, he asked himself, would come up if I was? Probably gravel.

  There was something underneath him. Slowly - moving his head was a wild, scary thing to do, comparable to setting off in three small boats to find the back way to India - he looked down. He looked up again, rather more quickly.

  Oh God, he said to himself. Please let me be hallucinating.

  A tentative prod with a toe persuaded him otherwise. Horribly solid. Sphincter-looseningly real. And I’m directly above it!

  He waited. When the dragon didn’t make a move, he risked breathing. Still no reaction. With extreme diffidence he reached down and prodded with the point of his sword. Chink. Nothing. It was only a statue, nothing more.

  Fuck that, George reflected, so’m I. And people who live in marble overcoats shouldn’t prod dragons.

  He waited a little longer, each second dragging by like a double geography lesson. He wasn’t at all sure that he understood how this statue business worked, but either the dragon simply wasn’t at home, or it was waiting for him to make a move. In the latter case, staying put was simply prolonging the inevitable. He braced himself, took a deep breath and jumped.

  The ground rushed up to meet him like a long-lost creditor; he landed, swore and rolled. His head protested in the strongest possible terms. The dragon didn’t move. He stood up.

  ‘Gotcha!’

  He had now, of course, shed the marble and was back in a conventional human skin; but not for very long, because Bianca’s voice and the slap of her hand on his shoulder made him jump out of it. He said ‘Eeek!’ and turned white, all in an impressively short space of time.

  ‘And where the hell do you think you’re going?’

  His brain reported back off sick leave and mentioned to him that the creature holding his arm was not a dragon so much as a defenceless girl. That’s all right, then. He put the palm of his hand in her face and shoved. Then he ran.

  A moment later he was lying on his nose; a state of affairs he was able to trace back to someone grabbing hold of his feet. ‘Gerroff!’ he screeched. ‘There’s a bastard dragon after-’

  Then Bianca hit him on the head with a two-pound mallet.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘Maybe,’ said a guest, ‘they’re being thrown out for antisocial behaviour.’

  He was looking at a long, scruffy coach, state of the art passenger transport from around the time Bobby Charlton was England’s leading goal-scorer, which was spluttering patiently in bay 3a of the bus station in Hell.

  ‘Quite possibly,’ replied a fellow guest, who happened to be on his tea break. ‘Look what they’re wearing.’

  The first guest, also on his tea break, peered. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I see what you mean.’

  As a matter of fact, these two guests were always on their tea break. In life they’d been builders, and the cruel and unusual punishment reserved for them in the afterlife was that they’d be allowed out as soon as they’d had a quick brew; two thousand years of frantic slurping later, the meniscus on their cups was, if anything, half a millimetre higher up the china than it had been when they arrived.

  Everybody, no matter how depraved or evil they may be, is entitled to a holiday, and the first three weeks in August are traditionally the time when the staff of Hell, your cosy, centrally heated home from home under the ground, get to pack their suitcases, dig out their plastic buckets and pitchforks from the cupboard under the stairs, put on silly hats and get away from it all. They choose August because - well, you know what the beach is like then. They feel more at home that way.

  ‘If so,’ observed the second guest, ‘I reckon we’ve had a lucky escape.’

  His colleague nodded vigorously, his eyes fixed on the white denims, broad-brimmed hats, synthetic buckskin fringes and spangled waistcoats of the party boarding the coach. Not, of course, that either of them had anything against country music as such; in its place, they’d be the first to declare, it was all very fine and splendid. Except, of course, its place was - most definitely - here. So far, the Management hadn’t twigged this. When they eventually did, they’d be able to maintain the same uniquely high standard of torment (BS 199645; always look for the kitemark) while saving themselves a fortune on pitchforks and firewood.

  Had the guests been a few yards closer to bay 3a, they’d have been able to read the poster prominently displayed in the coach’s back window. It read:HELL HOLDINGS PLC

  STAFF COUNTRY & WESTERN CLUB

  ANNUAL OUTING

  Nashville Or Bust!

  ‘Okay,’ George said. ‘It’s like this.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ Bianca interrupted, switching on the pocket dictating machine. ‘I want this on tape.’

  George looked at her. ‘What’s that little box thing you’re playing around with?’ he said. ‘Look, there’s no need to get nasty.’

  Bianca explained, as briefly as she could, about tape recorders. Perhaps she didn’t express herself very well because George made a couple of high-pitched noises and renewed his pointless struggle with the stout ropes that attached him to Earth Mother VI, the most solid piece of statuary in Bianca’s studio. Playing back the tape just seemed to make things worse. She sighed and slipped it back in her pocket.

/>   ‘You were saying,’ she said.

  Once upon a time (George explained), long ago and far away, in a remote land called Albion, there was a dragon.

  In fact, there were a lot of dragons. And that wasn’t a problem for the people who lived there, because they’d long since based their entire economy on dragons; they ate dragon, wore dragonskin, used the wing membrane to make their tents and burned the bones for warmth. And, since there were more than enough dragons to spare - great herds of them roamed the empty moors, grazing placidly and from time to time accidentally setting fire to hundreds of thousands of acres - there was no reason why the system shouldn’t work for ever.

  That, however, was before the coming of the white men and the iron horse.

  Ancient Albion called them the white men because they wore white surcoats over their armour; and the horses weren’t actually made of iron, they were just covered with the stuff to protect them from arrows. The newcomers were knights, followers of the code of chivalry, searchers for the Holy Grail. They’d been slung out of their own countries for being an insufferable nuisance and had headed west.

  When they arrived in Albion they decided it would do nicely and they set about getting vacant possession. The natives, however, were no pushover and the white men were getting nowhere fast when one of their leaders hit on a sensible, if drastic, course of action.

  The natives, he argued, live off the dragons. Get rid of the dragons and you get rid of the natives.

  Of those wild, exciting frontier days many stirring tales are told; many of them about the greatest dragon-hunter of them all, Dragon George Cody, who singlehandedly cleared all of what is now Northern England, Wales and Scotland of dragons. He it was who first justified the clearances by saying that the knights stood for good and the dragons stood for evil, and, in his own terms, he was right. The knights were, after all, soldiers of the Church, ultimately searching for the Grail, and the dragons were getting in the way and, by deviously getting killed and eaten by the locals, giving aid and comfort to the hostile tribesmen. Besides, George pointed out, dragons burn towns and demand princesses as ransom.