by Unknown
“Go on,” urged the cobbler. “Try them on.”
Nyla chewed her lower lip for a moment. Then she reached out to take one of the shoes from where it nestled in the silk. She gave a soft cry at what happened when her fingers touched the shoe. It was like touching something warm and alive. The shoe seemed to shudder under her fingers, and Nyla almost dropped the shoe. But the feeling was not unpleasant. Not at all. In fact it was as comforting as picking up her pet hamster. The shoe seemed to want her to pick it up.
Is that was magic was like? Was it that way for everyone?
Nyla held the shoe, turning it this way and that. At close range the shoe did not seem to be that badly damaged. The holes in the sole no longer seemed to go all the way through. The heel wasn’t ground down quite as much as she thought. And not as many of the stitches were frayed as had initially seemed apparent. How strange.
“Try it on,” coaxed Bucklebelt.
Nyla did so, and to her surprise and delight, the shoe fit perfectly. Even though it had been crafted for a human princess, it seemed perfectly suited to her Monkey foot. She eagerly reached for the other one and put it on as well. Like the first, it was less weathered and battered than she thought, and it fit like a dream.
“Let me help you down,” said the cobbler, and he lifted Nyla to the floor. “Now, try walking in them. But be careful…the magic may wake up at any time.”
Nyla took a single step, and suddenly the cobbler and his stall and the whole market was gone. She yipped in fear and surprise as she turned and looked around to see that she stood by the east gate of the Emerald City.
“But I…” She backed away from the grim-faced guards who stood at the gate. But as she took that backward step, suddenly she was in a meadow of wildflowers that grew inside the west gate. It was impossible. A single backward step had taken her all the way across the Emerald City.
She turned her head but was very careful to keep her feet where they were.
She was close to the yellow road that curved and snaked its way back into the heart of the City. That road ended at the market square. Nyla knew that she had to go back to Mr. Bucklebelt’s stall, but how to get there if every step took her too far?
In her consternation she took a half-step, and suddenly she stood in front of the cobbler’s stall. He still sat on his stool, and he wore a great grin, which stretched from ear to ear.
“Ah-ha,” he said with a chuckle, “and is that a great princess I see before me wearing dragon-scale traveling shoes?”
“I—I—I…”
“That’s exactly what I thought you would say.”
“These are amazing!”
“Now,” he said with bright eyes glowing in his face, “do you see how a person wearing these shoes could go anywhere? Even all the way across the Deadly Desert?”
“Yes,” said Nyla, almost hopping with delight and wonder. “Oh, yes!”
Then she stopped, and her smile faded.
“But…even if I could cross the Desert, how would I ever find the last silver dragon?”
The cobbler chuckled again and went once more to the chest. He rummaged around until he found a scroll tied with silver cord. He undid the knot and carefully opened the scroll to show that it was a map of such great age that it crackled and seemed on the verge of falling apart. It showed a map of the Land of Oz, with the Emerald City in the center.
“This map was made by the great-great-great-great-great-ten-more-times-great-grandson of the cordwainer who made the dragon-scale shoes. See here? That dot is the town square right here in the Emerald City with the four major countries around it. All around Oz was the broad gray waste. To the Gillikins of the north, it was the Impassable Desert; in Munchkin Country to the west, it was the Shifting Sands; the Quadlings of the south called it the Great Sandy Waste; and to the Winkies of the east, it was the Deadly Desert, which is also what it is generally called here in the Emerald City.”
Beyond that desolation were other places, though, and Nyla had never before seen a map that gave names to those nameless and forgotten places. The Kingdom of Ix, the Land of Ev, the Vegetable Kingdom, Mifkits and Merryland, and others. Most fearsome of all was the Dominion of the Nome King, and even Nyla and her people had heard dark things of that terrible place. But the spot that was marked with an X was to the far southeast.
The Country of the Gargoyles.
“Oh dear!” whispered Nyla. “Must I go there?”
“If you want me to fix the dragon-scale shoes, then go you must, and go now.”
“Now?”
“The shoes are awake,” said the cobbler. “But they are not strong, and if you don’t hurry, they will soon fall asleep once more.”
Twenty-six different reasons why she was sure that she should not do this occurred to her, but Mr. Bucklebelt pressed the map into her hand and gave her the gentlest of pushes toward the southwest.
Before Nyla could utter a single one of her twenty-six very good reasons, she was no longer in the market square. Nor in the Emerald City nor even in the Land of Oz.
She stood under a sun so hot that it made her gasp, and on sands that were hotter than a bread oven. All around her the flat and lifeless sands stretched away.
She was in the middle of the Deadly Desert.
-4-
Nyla took in a huge breath, intending to scream her head off—because finding yourself alone in the middle of the Deadly Desert is really an appropriate reason to scream one’s head off—but the air was so hot that it scorched her mouth and throat. She did scream, but it was so tiny and high-pitched that even she didn’t hear it.
There were bones in the sands. Human skulls and the rib cages of animals and some bones that she couldn’t tell what they were from. There were even gigantic bones and Nyla wondered if these were the bones of dragons, or of great fishes that once swam in the Sea of Shallasa.
Nyla felt herself suddenly growing very drowsy and weak and she realized with horror that the terrible heat of the desert was already sapping her strength and her life. She tried to flap her tiny wings, but all they did was tremble and flutter uselessly.
She managed to murmur a single word as she stumbled forward.
“Southeast.”
The Desert wind blew past the spot like a hot scream, but there was no one there to hear it.
-5-
When Nyla opened her eyes she expected to see that unrelenting Desert stretched out all around her, but a cool breeze blew across her face and the ground beneath her feet was covered in green grass. Flowers grew upward on long stems that towered over her like young trees, and butterflies as big as kites danced from blossom to blossom.
“Oh dear,” said Nyla. “I must be dreaming…”
“We are all dreaming,” a voice behind her said. “Everything is a dream.”
Nyla yelped and whirled and then stood quite aghast.
For a moment she was quite sure that a house had just spoken to her. It was huge—many times as high as Mr. Bucklebelt’s market stall—and covered all over in plates of polished metal. A chimney smoked at an odd angle.
However, it was not a house at all, and the smoking chimney was not a chimney.
It was a dragon.
A dragon that was as big as a house, with a tail that lay threaded through the grass like a giant snake. A long, long neck rose higher than a chimney and smoke puffed from nostrils that were bigger than feast-day dinner plates. The whole thing, from the tip of the tail to the crest of horns on its massive head, was coated in silver metal. In plates and ringlets, in shingles and in sequins. But as the beast breathed, the metal expanded and contracted the way an animal’s hide would, for this metal was clearly alive.
And yet…
Nyla could see that the metal around the dragon’s face was tarnished with great age, and many of the scales and plates were cracked and uneven. The eyes of the dragon were large and red, but although they may once have been fierce, now those eyes were rheumy with age and sickness.
It
broke her heart to know it, but Nyla could tell that this great silver dragon was dying. Even though it was a dragon and not at all a monkey, it looked like her grandpoppa had looked before he climbed into the great tree that leads all the way up to the stars.
“You…you…you…” she said, but that was the only word her mind could think of.
“I…I…I…what?” asked the dragon.
“You’re a dragon.”
The red eyes blinked once and the big head turned to look at its tail and its bulk. “Why, yes. It appears I am. Now how about that? It took a monkey from who knows where to tell me that I am a dragon, when all this time I thought I was a teapot.”
“That’s not what I meant!” insisted Nyla. “It’s just that I’ve never seen a dragon before.”
“Clearly. But, to be fair,” said the dragon, “I have never seen a talking monkey before who didn’t have wings.”
“I…I do have wings,” said Nyla, and she felt the sting of shameful tears in her eyes.
“Let me see them.”
Nyla turned and showed him the tiny wings that sprouted from the brown fur of her back. She fluttered them and then her wings and her shoulders slumped.
“Oh my my my,” said the dragon, and Nyla thought she heard real sympathy in the beast’s booming voice. He sat there in the green field, his silvery body shining with reflected sunlight as fleets of white cloud sailed above his head.
“Do you have wings?” she asked, craning to see over his bulk.
“Alas, my wings are gone,” he said heavily.
“Gone? What happened to them?”
“They broke off,” said the dragon and Nyla thought that he looked a little embarrassed. “You see…when I was a much younger dragon I had wings so huge, so great that the shadow of them would darken this entire field. I needed them, you see, because I am made of metal and metal is very heavy. Other dragons had smaller wings, like the corn dragon, who weighed very little, or the fire dragon whose body was filled with hot gases. I was always the heaviest of the dragons, but in my prime I could fly. Oh…how I could fly! I would climb up the side of a mountain and hurl myself into the wind, and my wings would spread out all the way to the horizon on either side and when I beat my wings the world shook and trembled. I would fly high and high on my wings until the world was nothing but a pretty blue marble below me. Ah…ah, those were the days. Those were lovely days,” he said sadly, “but they were long ago. Over the years I kept growing and growing until I was so big that my wings could not even lift me. One day, as I stood atop a mountain preparing to fly, I wondered if I had become too big, too old, and too fat for my wings. But I leaped into the air anyway. My wings beat once, twice, and then I heard a crack and a clang like the breaking of a thousand swords. Down, down I went, tumbling over and over—me, the big, old, fat dragon and the broken pieces of my wings.” He sighed.
“That must have been terrible. Did it hurt much?”
“Hurt? No, I’m made of metal and I don’t feel pain. Not in the way flesh-and-blood creatures feel pain. But I suppose it did hurt here.” He touched one claw to his chest. “To know that I would never fly again was a terrible thing. I wept for days and filled pools with tears of liquid silver.”
“I’m so very sorry,” said little Nyla. “But at least you did fly and you can remember flying.”
The dragon nodded. “And here I am lamenting the loss of my wings when here you are, a little child who should have a lifetime of flying ahead of you, and not even a moment of that joy is open to you. It is I who feel sorry for you, my dear.”
Nyla sniffed back the tears that formed in her eyes. “It’s okay,” she said bravely. “I’ve known for a long time now that I’ll never fly.”
“A ‘long time,’” echoed the dragon. “You are not two handfuls of years old and I can’t even count the millennia of my life. When I was full-grown the mountains were not yet born and the Desert was a new sea in which the first fish swam. I pity myself like an old fool.”
“No! You’re a dragon,” said Nyla. “The very last of dragons. I came all this way just to see you and I will remember this moment forever. It is the greatest honor of my life.”
The dragon smiled. “You are very kind to say so. Tell me, though, why did you come on such a long journey? And where did your journey begin?”
So Nyla told the dragon everything, from her own decision to go out in search of traveling shoes, to her meeting with Mr. Bucklebelt, to the astonishing speed with which her new shoes carried her across the burning Desert sands. The dragon listened with the patience of a dragon and it studied her with the shrewd intelligence of a dragon. Then it bent low to study her shoes.
“Ah,” he said. “Those are truly my scales. I recognize them.”
“You do?”
“A dragon cannot forget its own scales, my dear. We know each and every one of them just as you know every hair on your body.”
“But I don’t! There are too many and besides they fall out and new ones grow.”
“Alas, not for dragons. Our scales may grow larger as we grow, but they do not fall out and if one is somehow lost, it is never replaced. See here.” He coiled his tail around where they stood and she could see that there were several patches where scales had been lost. The skin beneath was also silver, but it looked much more like the skin of a crocodile than that of a dragon. “Once when I was sleeping a long winter’s sleep a thief snuck in and scraped off enough scales to…well, to make a pair of magic traveling shoes.”
“Oh no!” Nyla immediately took off her shoes and held them out to the dragon. “I had no idea that these scales were stolen from you. How horrible! How unfair! Here, please take them back.”
The dragon peered at her. “Are you serious? You have come here to find more scales and yet you’d give all of them back?”
“Of course I would,” said Nyla. “If they were stolen from you then they belong to you.”
Smoke curled up from the silvery nostrils as the dragon studied her. “Do you understand what you offer? If I take back my scales then your traveling shoes will be only ordinary shoes. And in the condition they’re in they won’t want to take you traveling anywhere.”
She nodded slowly. “I…I know.”
“You’d be trapped here. On this side of the Desert. Far away from your family and the trees where they live.”
“Yes…but I could never keep something that was stolen…especially something stolen from your poor tail! Besides…my dadda always told me that the Winged Monkeys are good people. We give our word and never break it, and we never act unjustly.”
“Ah,” said the dragon, “if only all races upon the earth held to such values then the sun would shine on a happier world.”
Nyla stood, still holding out the shoes.
The dragon extended one claw and delicately touched one of the sequin scales. “You offer a great gift to an old dragon to whom you owe no obligation. You are willing to make a sacrifice that was unasked of you. Noble indeed are the Winged Monkeys of Oz. Even those with little, little wings.”
With his claw, the dragon gently pushed the shoes back. “Take them, my girl.”
“But…”
“And here…” The dragon used the same claw to scrape a line of scales from his tail. They fell like silver rain. “Take these as well. Take them to your cobbler and let him remake those shoes. It is a pity to see something so perfectly intended look so incomplete.”
Tears sprang into Nyla’s eyes and she could barely speak as she gathered up the scales. Then the dragon handed her a piece of silvery leather.
“Wrap them in this and put them in your bag,” he said gently.
Nyla did as she was told and then she rushed forward and hugged the foreleg of the big creature—for the foreleg was all she could reach.
“Thank you, thank you!” she said excitedly. “Now Mr. Bucklebelt will be able to repair the shoes and I’ll be able to travel everywhere and see everything. I’ll go to places I could never go eve
n if I had full-sized wings.”
There was sadness in the dragon’s eyes, though, when she stepped back from him. “Now listen to me, little Nyla, for there are two things that you must know, and one may break your innocent heart.”
“What is it?” she asked, aghast.
“The cobbler will be able to repair those shoes, but magical shoes are unpredictable. These were made for a special purpose and for a certain person. Once they are repaired the shoes may no longer fit your tiny feet. The shoes may also want to find the feet for whom they were made. Magic is a wondrous thing, but it isn’t always a nice thing.”
Fresh tears burned in the corners of Nyla’s eyes but she fought them back.
“And what is the other thing?” she asked in a tiny, fearful voice.
“There is a different kind of magic in the world, and it’s older and more powerful than sorcery or witchcraft. It’s a magic that comes from the world itself. I will whisper one secret about it to you.” He bent down so that his metal lips were an inch away. “Goodness,” he said, “is always rewarded. Not always in ways you can see, not always in ways you know or expect, but this world loves goodness. It is a thing that many people think is as rare as dragon scales, but believe me, little girl of the trees, goodness shows everywhere.”
Nyla tried to think of how to respond to that. A hundred questions crowded her tongue at once, but the dragon straightened and shook his head.
“The shoes are not yet repaired and the magic that’s in them is starting to fall asleep. I can feel it in my scales. Put them on, little Nyla, and run, run, run for home before there is no magic left to carry you over the burning sands.”
Nyla did as she was told, and even though she could feel the power of the shoes, it was indeed drowsy.
“Thank you, Mr. Dragon!” she cried. She clutched her leather bag to her chest. “I hope your kindness is rewarded a thousand times.”
He winked at her.
“Run away, little Monkey,” he said. “Run for your life.”