by Tom Holt
‘Of course not,’ Karen snapped. ‘No, honestly,’ she added. ‘Not him.’
‘Ah. Well. Serves you right.’
‘What do you mean? How can my best friend stealing the only dragon I’ve ever really cared about from right under my tail serve me right for getting you kidnapped?’
‘All right, it doesn’t.’ The adjutant-general smiled fondly. ‘I was just trying to help you make sense of it, that’s all. Utter garbage, of course, but you’ve always been gullible.’
Karen’s jaw dropped. ‘I have not. Have I?’
‘Sure you have. You’ll believe anything anybody tells you.
Like, for example, how gullible you are. You aren’t really, of course.’
‘Aren’t I?’
‘Yes,’ her father replied. ‘And no.’
Karen made a tutting sound. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘that’ll do. Why do fathers take such pleasure in teasing their children?’
‘Malice,’ the adjutant-general replied. ‘Are you all right?’
‘No,’ Karen replied. ‘But so what, I never was. I’m as right as I usually am. How about you?’
‘I’m always right, it goes with the territory. Come on,’ he said, ‘we’ll go home, make a list of what needs doing in the morning, and stop off at the Silver Lining for a game of thunderball. How does that sound?’
‘Fine,’ Karen said gratefully, giving him a hug.
‘And then you can tidy your room.’
‘I will not. Dad, I’m nearly four million years old—’
‘Yes, and your room’s still a tip. At your age, you shouldn’t need to be told.’
‘No, but Dad—’
‘Sweetheart,’ said the adjutant-general tenderly, ‘shut up. All right?’
‘Yes, Dad.’
They left a wake behind them across the sunset that was visible in Wagga Wagga.
By the time Neville reached civilisation, or at any rate the outskirts of Canberra, his feet were killing him and his back felt as if it was trying to hacksaw a way out through his shoulder blades. Typical, he thought. Everybody else gets a lift home, by truck or dragon. Me? I end up walking. In the desert. At night. In Marks & Spencers mocassins.
A lorry, one of those vast Australian monsters that was as long as a dragon and twice as noisy, whirled past him and his outstretched thumb, kicking up dust. As soon as he was sure it was too far away for the driver to hear, he swore at it, volubly and with great imagination. Then he returned to his sulking and moping. How, for instance, was he going to get back to Shepherds Bush, with no money, no passport, no ID, no friends in Australia he could call on for help, even if he had the money for a phone call, which he hadn’t—?
‘Want a lift?’
He hadn’t heard the van pull in beside him. He looked up, just as the smoked-glass window rolled down, revealing three men in dark glasses and identical grey suits. They looked so ominous as almost to be a parody, as if they were on their way to a fancy-dress party as Nameless Thugs.
‘You bet,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’
He limped round to the side door and slid it open. Sure, these people had all the signs of being either state-registered assassins or confirmed psychopaths, but after the time he’d spent in Mr Willis’s bunker, all he felt was slightly dewy-eyed with nostalgia. ‘Going far?’ he asked.
‘We’re not sure,’ said one of the men. ‘Actually, maybe you could help us. We’re looking for a second Iverson’s koala.’
‘Yes,’ Neville. ‘Right.’
‘A female,’ the man went on. ‘We’ve got the male already.’
‘Of course,’ Neville said. ‘But you need two of them. A pair.’
‘That’s right,’ the man said. ‘You see, we’re licensed zoologists hired by Sydney Zoo as part of their endangered species preservation project, and—’
‘You’re dragons, aren’t you?’
The van stopped dead, in the middle of the road. ‘Somebody told you,’ the man grumbled.
Neville shook his head. ‘No, it wasn’t that.’
‘What was it, then?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Neville replied. ‘The earnestness, maybe. The grim determination to get the job done, do your duty. Also, probably most of all, the unique air of doziness that’s the hallmark of your species. Once you know what to look for, it’s as if you’re going around with a neon sign in your hat.’
‘Oh.’ The three men exchanged glances; then, slowly, took off their dark glasses. ‘No point wearing these any more, then,’ one of them said.
‘So,’ Neville asked cheerfully. ‘It’s a pity you boys missed the battle. It was fun.’
‘Battle?’
‘Paddy Willis. The bunker. The crown prince of the . . . Forget it,’ Neville said, ‘it’s something you should hear about from your own people first, believe me. So, if you didn’t come out here for the battle, what are you here for?’
The three men held a quick whispered conference, the upshot of which appeared to be that they reckoned it was safe to tell someone who could spot dragons a mile off anyway. ‘There’s going to be a flood,’ said one.
‘A flood? Get away.’
‘Straight up. You see, the adjutant-general of the north-west’s been abducted, presumably by humans, and we’re making preparations in case they refuse to give him back and we’re forced to retaliate.’
‘By flooding the Earth.’
‘Yes,’ the dragon admitted. ‘But flooding the Earth in a responsible and environmentally friendly manner. That’s why we’re collecting, like, two of each kind.’
‘I see,’ Neville said. ‘OK, but has it occurred to you that if you only take two of each kind, you’re going to end up with a gene pool the size of a footbath? I wouldn’t call that responsible exactly, except in the sense of responsible for.’
‘Oh.’ The dragons looked at each other. ‘What, you mean we should go for, say three? One male, two female? Or two pairs?’
‘At least. In fact, in your place I’d be thinking three pairs of each, absolute minimum. Four for choice. Five, even better.’
‘Oh, wonderful,’ a dragon groaned. ‘It’s bad enough trying to find two Iversons’s bloody koalas. Ten of the little buggers—’
‘And not just any ten,’ Neville pointed out. ‘Otherwise there’s still a serious risk of over-representing any one genome. No, what you need is ten random Iverson’s koalas; you know, sourced from different locations, make sure they’re not all part of the same extended family unit . . .’
‘Really? Oh no.’
‘’Fraid so,’ Neville said. ‘That’s unless you want all future Iverson’s koalas coming out like a load of North Carolina hillbillies; you know, interbred, not quite all there in the brains department, terrible taste in music—’
There was a long silence. ‘He’s right, of course.’
‘It’s our duty,’ said another. ‘As custodians of the species.’
‘Fuck.’
In the warm darkness of the back, Neville grinned maliciously, right up to the moment when he realised the van was turning round.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘where are you going?’
‘Back to where we’ve just come from,’ a dragon said. ‘We’ve got work to do.’
‘Yes, but—’
And we’re behind schedule enough as it is. Damn,’ the dragon added. ‘There’s always something, isn’t there?’
‘All right,’ said Neville. ‘But if you’d just like to stop and let me out—’
‘No time,’ the dragon said. ‘Sorry. If we’re going to stand any chance of reaching Cootamundra by dawn—’
‘I was kidding,’ Neville shouted. ‘Making fun of you. Pulling your serpentine plonkers. Now stop this van and let me get out.’
‘Of course you were,’ a dragon said sadly. ‘Doesn’t alter the fact that what you said was absolutely right.’
‘On the nose.’
‘Hit the nail fair and square on the head.’
‘It was drivel,’ Neville scr
eamed. ‘I was making it up as I went along.’
‘Really? You aren’t half clever, for a human.’
‘In any case,’ added the dragon in the middle, who’d had his eyes closed for the last forty-five seconds, ‘I know who you are: you’re Neville the weatherman. There’s a file on you back at Data Central. Says here you’ve devoted your whole life to proving the existence of dragons. Hey, you must be pleased to bits you ran into us.’
‘That’s lucky,’ another dragon said. ‘If you like, you can tag along for the ride. Give you a chance to study us in depth. And in return, you can help us find Iverson’s koalas.’
Neville sank back against the rear compartment wall, head in hands. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I guess I’ll have to tell you myself. You’re wasting your time. There will be no flood.’
‘Really?’
‘Really. The adjutant-general has been found and released. The guilty party has been dealt with, and the king of the north-west has decided to take no further action in the matter. Accordingly, you can pack up koala-hunting and go home.’
The middle dragon shook his head. ‘No, we can’t,’ he said.
‘Fuck it, didn’t you hear me? The crisis is over, there isn’t going to be a flood. So—’
‘I believe you,’ the dragon replied soothingly. ‘Really and truly I do. Makes no odds. We’ve had our orders, and until we get new ones we’ve got to carry them out.’
‘Duty calls,’ confirmed his right-hand colleague.
‘Exactly. You see,’ the middle dragon went on, ‘it’s not our job to interpret the orders, or try and follow the spirit rather than the letter, or figure out for ourselves what the orders would’ve been if our superior officer had known all the facts. We do as we’re told.’ He shook his head. ‘There’s no room for imaginative thinking on active service.’
They were as bad as the nutters in the bunker; only worse. Neville tried banging on the partition a few times, but all he managed to do was hurt his frail human hands, as the van drove on into the darkness of the night and the desert; just him, three loons and all the torments of starvation and dehydration his mind’s eye could conjure up. Shortly before dawn, it rained—
(‘Call that rain?’ sniffed a dragon, as the windscreen went opaque under a sheet of water. ‘If I tried to serve up that back home, I’d be on a charge so fast my feet wouldn’t touch. Look at it, will you? No swirls, no pattern, no grain.’)
—but not for long; the sun came out, and then it was nothing but blue skies and golden sands, as far as the eye could see.