Dragon Book, The

by Gardner Dozois

  “I don’t have to listen to you,” she said, holding herself very straight. She turned back to the crevice, where she could get away from him.

  Behind her, the deep rumbling voice said, “If you try to escape, I will definitely eat you.”

  She spun toward him. “But I want to go home. You should let me go home.”

  At that, he gave off a burst of furious heat and exhaled a stream of green fire. She dodged him and ran toward the crevice.

  One huge forepaw came down directly in front of her. When she wheeled, his other paw came down, fencing her in.

  “You can’t leave!”

  She put her hands over her ears, the roar shaking her whole body. The ground trembled under her. He was lying down, curled around her. She lowered her hands. He was calm again, but his great scaled bulk surrounded her. Only a few feet away, the enormous eye shut and opened again. “Tell me a story.”

  So she had to escape. During the day, she followed the seams and gullies worn into the cliff, hoping to find another way out, but they all pinched out or ended in falls of broken rock. Once, in the shadows at the back of a defile, she found a skeleton, still wearing tattered clothes—a cloak with fur trim, and pretty, rotten shoes, even rings on the fingerbones.

  The bones were undisturbed. Whoever this was, however he had gotten here, he had never even left the cave.

  She had left the cave. She found herself a little proud of that.

  One evening, after she told him a story about some adventures of the Prince as dragon, she turned to go back into the crevice, where she usually slept. Before she could reach the cliff, he caught her lightly with his forepaw—the long curved claws like tusks inches from her face—and tossed her backward. She stumbled off across the beach, wondering what she had done wrong. The other paw met her and sent her reeling back. She whirled, frightened, her hands out, and he batted her around again. His head suspended over her watched her with a cold amusement. He was playing, she realized, in a haze of terror, not really hurting her. She caught hold of his scaly paw and held tight, and he stopped.

  But he did not let her go. He reached down and took her between his long jaws, gently as a mother with an egg. She lay, rigid, her breath stopped, between two sets of gigantic teeth, the long tongue curled around her. He lay down, stretched out, and carefully set her on the sand between his forepaws. He put his head down on his paws, so that she lay in the hollow under his throat, and went to sleep.

  She lay stiff as a sword under him. Something new had happened, and she had no notion what he might mean by this. What he might do next. Yet the cavern under his throat was warm, and she fell asleep after a while.

  The next day, he dove into the lagoon and was gone, and she began to search from one end of the cliff to the other for a way out. She went back through every crevice, tried to chimney up the sides, and crawled along the top of huge mounds of rubble. Always, the space came to an end, the cliff pressed down on her, dark and cold.

  She crept back out to the sunlit lagoon again. The beauty of it struck her, as it always did, the water clear and blue and dark at the center, and paler in toward the shore, the tiny ripples of the waves, the cream-colored sand. The sky was cloudless. The cliff vaulted up hundreds of feet high, sheer as glass.

  As she stood there, wondering what to do, the blue water began to whirl, eddying around, and the dragon’s great head thrust up through the center of it, a white fish between his long jaws.

  He saw her, and came to her, cast down the fish, and breathed on it with the harsh fire of his breath, and then, as usual, stood there watching her eat it. She was hungry and ate all the pale, flaky meat. Being close to him made her edgy. She had thought of a good story to tell him, with a long chase through a forest, and the dragon’s escape at the end. She could not look at him, afraid of what she might see brimming in the great red eyes.

  He sat quietly throughout the story, as he always did. She had learned to feel the quality of his attention, and she knew he was deep into this story. She brought it to an end and stood.

  His head moved, fast as a serpent, and he caught her between his jaws. He laid her down on her back between his forepaws. She lay so stiff her fists were clenched, looking up at the wedge-shaped head above her, and then he began to lick her all over.

  His tongue was long and supple, silky smooth, longer than she was tall, so that sometimes he was licking her whole body all at once. She was afraid to move. He licked at her dress until it was bunched up under her armpits. His touch was soft, gentle, even tender; stroking over her breasts, he paused an instant, his warm tongue over her, and against her will, she gasped.

  He said, in his deep, harsh voice, “It’s only me, the Prince,” and chuckled. He slid his tongue down her side and curled it over her legs.

  She clutched her thighs together, but the tip of his tongue flicked between them, into the cleft of her body. She shut her eyes. She held her whole body tight, as if she could make an armor of her skin. Her strength was useless against him.

  But nothing more happened. He slept, eventually, his head over her. She dozed fitfully, starting up from nightmares.

  In the morning, he went off as usual, and she searched desperately along the cliff face. At the waterfall, she stood in the tumbling water, thinking of his tongue on her, wondering what else he would do.

  Behind the streaming water, she noticed a narrow crevice.

  She stepped into it, behind the water, and saw that the slit in the rock angled back into the dark. She pressed herself into it. Water ran three inches deep along the bottom of the crevice. As she worked her way back, and the dark shut down around her, her hands along the walls on either side passed through sheets of water coming down.

  She came to a place where the gorge divided in two, one side running to her left, one to her right. It was totally dark. She stood still a while, her mind blocked with fear, and then she realized that there was water trickling over the toes of her right foot, and the other was dry. She followed the water.

  The crevice walls came so close together that her nose scraped in front and the back of her head scraped behind her. The tunnel twisted, turned. In the dark, she fumbled along, her heart thundering. She should have brought water. Food. She should have planned this. Thought ahead. Was it night, now, was it dark out, as it was so dark in here? Blindly, she crept forward through the crevice in the rock. She could not go back now. He was back there by now; he knew that she was gone.

  The tunnel narrowed and kinked. In the kink, for an instant, she could not move, buried there in the belly of the cliff, caught in the wedge of the stone, and she almost screamed. Instead, she made herself relax. There was water running over her ankles. She had only to follow the water. She pushed slowly, gently forward, most of her body stuck fast; but her foot moving, then her thigh, her hip, until she worked her way around the bump in the rock.

  The tunnel widened. It began to climb upward, twisting and turning, but always up in the dark, until she was helping herself along with her outstretched hands. Then the climb came to an end in a blank rock wall, with water spilling down its surface.

  She felt her way along the rock wall, found a place where she could climb, and went up. Her hands groped ahead of her for holds, and her feet pressed against the rock. If she fell from here, she might die. Break her leg. Die slowly. Then, reaching up, she realized that she could see her hand.

  She followed that grip into brighter light. She could see where to put her hands now, and the stone was warm. Above, beyond the edge of rock, was pink sky: the sun just going down. She pulled herself the last few feet up to the grass beside the pool of water, and lay down, exhausted, and closed her eyes, and slept.

  SHE had nothing to eat, but the spring had come; the meadow was full of mushrooms, and the trees of birds’ nests and eggs. She walked a whole day and much of the night, through a brilliant full moon, before she came at last to the high road where it came down from the mountain passes and veered toward the sea. It was deserted. E
ven from its crests, she could not see the coast. Off toward the ocean, a plume of thick black smoke clotted the air; she wondered if the farmers were burning off their fields for the spring planting.

  She walked on, eating whatever she could find—roots, nuts, even flowers and grubs. On the third day, she came on some travelers, who gave her some bread.

  They were surprised to find her walking alone; they said, “Be careful, there are robbers on the highway. The Duke has gone south to a war, and there is no law.”

  “And raiders on the sea,” said another. “Be careful.”

  So she watched out for strangers, walking along, but she thought that she was near her own village and looked for the path down to it. She wondered what she would find there—if anything were left there. She wept once, thinking of Marco. But she was still walking along the high road, her feet sore, and every muscle aching, when someone shouted, and a skinny boy bounded down out of the rocks toward her.

  “Perla! Perla!”

  It was Grep, who had rowed third oar on Marco’s boat at Dragon’s Deep. She laughed, astonished, her hopes surging.

  Grep bounded around her, laughing. “You’re alive! You’re alive! Come, hurry—Marco will—”

  “Marco,” she cried, running down the steep path beside him. “Marco is alive?”

  “Marco, Ercule, Juneo, me,” he said. They slowed to a crawl under a fallen tree. “Everybody else went down in the storm.”

  “The storm,” she said, startled.

  He put his finger to her lips. “But you’re alive!” He laughed again, joyous, as if nothing else mattered. “Come on—” He ran out ahead up a short, steep slope and onto the flat top of the sea cliff, shouting.

  “Look here, everybody! Look here!”

  She stood there, looking around her. She knew this cliff, which had stood behind her village. Now on its narrow height stood a cluster of huts inside a ditch—half as many huts as the old village, and now from each one, faces peered out.

  And she laughed, delighted, and stretched out her arms, and they were running toward her, her sister, all tears, and her friends.

  “Perla! Perla! You came back!” She flung herself into their arms, and for a while nothing mattered.

  “Where are the men?” she asked, in her sister’s hut. Her sister set a piece of fish before her, a slab of bread, and she reached greedily as a child for them.

  “They’re out,” her sister said vaguely. She said, “The few there are. Marco has been the saving of us.”

  Perla looked around the hut, smaller than before, stoutly made with stone footings, a withy wall domed overhead, and covered with straw. There was only one bed, and that small. Her eyes went to the doorway, where half a dozen children hung in the opening, watching her wide-eyed.

  She turned to her sister. “Are your children—”

  “I lost my little girl in the winter. It was hard.”

  “Oh, no. Your husband?”

  “He’s dead,” her sister said. She picked up the knife again, to cut the bread. “Do you want more? We have plenty of food.”

  “But—he didn’t go with us to Dragon’s Deep,” Perla said.

  “He died when Marco took the men up to the highway,” her sister said. She laid the loaf down on the board and hacked off another slab. “That’s how we have lived, Perla, we rob the highway. And, at last, we have enough.”

  Perla gave a shudder, horrified. “Until the Duke comes,” she said, but she remembered that she had heard that he had gone away.

  “Why should we not?” her sister said. “Have we not been everybody else’s prey?” Her eyes glittered. “When the Duke comes, Marco will have a plan. Marco always has a plan.” She thrust out the piece of bread. “He brought me this bread. The men all follow him, and he makes sure all of us widows are fed. Just obey Marco. Everything will come well.”

  Perla took the bread. “I hope you are right.”

  Later, when the men came back, they gathered together in the evening. The men saw her and cheered, and Marco came and hugged her, and she endured also the sweaty hugs of Ercule, and they all shouted her name. “How did you get home? Where have you been?”

  She sat down in the circle to tell them her story. They had built a bright fire, and all their faces shone in the light. She began, “You remember how we set off to the north, to Dragon’s Deep, to fish there. Because the Duke had come and stolen all our food.”

  They murmured, agreeing, and looked at one another. Marco, beside her, leaned forward, a little frown on his face. She fought off the feeling that he was not liking this.

  “And we got there, you remember, and the fish were thick as grass on the meadow, and we hauled in one great catch—”

  “And then the storm came,” Marco said.

  The listeners gave a louder rumble of agreement, and Ercule called out, “One boat after another foundered.”

  Juneo said, “The sky was dark as night, and the lightning flashed—”

  “No,” Perla said, astonished.

  “I made it to the shore,” Grep said. “I don’t know how, and then I saw Marco trying to carry Ercule in, and Juneo hanging to both of them, and went to help them.”

  “No,” Perla said.

  “We don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Marco said, and the other men loudly agreed with him again, and the women gestured and nodded and agreed, and Perla sat there dumb and amazed.

  They sang some songs, which she had known from her babyhood, and she came near tears to hear them. Then someone told the old story about how Pandun had gotten his eye put out, looking through the hole in the bathhouse wall at the women.

  After, she saw Marco to one side, and went to him. He wrapped his muscular arms around her again. “I’m glad you’re back. I was sure you were dead.” He kissed her hair.

  “Marco,” she said, “what is this about a storm?”

  “We were wrecked in a sudden storm,” he said, smiling. “I don’t know how you got through it. I really don’t know how I did.”

  “Marco, there was a dragon.”

  He laughed. “You don’t say. Aren’t you a little addled, maybe, from all that time alone? That must be it.” He pressed his lips to her forehead. “There. See? Ercule is watching you. Go to him, he’s missed you too.”

  “I hate Ercule,” she burst out.

  “Well, you’re going to marry him,” said Marco. He was still smiling. Nothing seemed to bother him. She supposed if he had already swallowed the storm story, then he was ready for anything.

  She said, “What about the Duke?”

  “Hah,” he said.

  “My sister told me what you’re doing.”

  His eyebrows jacked up and down. That at least ruffled him; his face tightened. “I had four men left and a dozen families with children,” he said. “And it was my fault, Perla. I took them there. You were gone. Lucco. All the boats but one. Lost in a storm.” He took a deep breath, drawing back into the shell he had made for himself, the one that smiled all the time. He smiled. “So I did what I had to do. And so will you. Ercule is very useful to me. I want you to marry him.” He leaned over and laid his cheek against hers and walked away.

  More like a dragon than a Prince, she thought, nearly in tears again. She had not come home after all. She crept back to her sister, to find a place to sleep.

  During the following days, she drowned herself in work, making her own house, bringing up stones and withies from the deserted village on the beach. The trail up the cliff was steep and hard, but well-worn, and the other women helped her. During the day, the men went off. She was afraid to ask what they did, but they did not take out the only boat left, which lay always on the beach in the lee of the rock, its nets rotting on the sand. They brought back stories from the highway, gossip, news. At night, when they returned, Ercule came on her.

  She held him off for several nights, pushing, shoving, angry, making him shy, but she saw Marco talking to him. After that, he was bolder, he forced her to kiss him, and the n
ext night, while he kissed her, he grabbed her breast in his hand. She wrenched away from him and went inside. It was just past the full moon, and the light shone through the holes in her dome-shaped roof, which had not yet been thatched over. She saw him come in, saw his toothy grin, and could not stop him.

  The next day, he went off with Marco somewhere, and she sat inside the hut and cried. Her sister came and sat by her and patted her shoulder. But when next the men came back, they had bread and meat and blankets and a cask of wine, and it was Ercule who sat beside her, and she could not keep him off.

  She was afraid to tell stories, and without the constant telling, the stories stopped coming to her.

  One late afternoon, Grep rushed in from the path, leading a stumbling, exhausted stranger. “He was on the sea trail,” he said to Marco. “I thought you should hear him.”

  The villagers had all come out to see what was happening, and the stranger staggered into their midst. He was in rags, his face hollow with thirst and grief. One of the women went quickly to him, brought him water, made him sit, and comforted him. The others gathered around him.

  He said, “I never saw them—I was asleep—I woke up to find the place burning. Everybody’s gone. Everybody’s gone.”

  Marco said, “Where?”

  The stranger said the name of the next village up the coast. He was devouring bread and cheese and milk. The widow beside him had already claimed him, whether he knew it or not. His mouth full, he went on, “I hid in the cesspit. The whole village burnt to the ground. When I got out in the morning, everybody was gone, or dead.”

  Perla thought, Not him, then. Not him. He hunts in the daylight. But her heart leapt.

  “You didn’t see them?”

  “That’s how I lived. If I’d seen them, they would have seen me.”

  Ercule said, “It’s that same bunch who took San Male.”

  “Maybe,” Marco said. “When did this happen?”

  “Two days ago,” the stranger said. “The night of the full moon.”

  Marco gave a short grunt. He turned to Ercule. “I think there was a full moon the night they took San Male. Go up on the high road, ask around.”