A Dragon-Lover's Treasury of the Fantastic

by Margaret Weis

  “I asked whether he assumed all dragons had hearts as sensitive to softening as his own. He answered, ‘Let men speak of the sensitivity of the dragon’s heart. All I can vouch for is the sensitivity of our ears! Or how else do you think we come to speak the languages of all beasts, little master? Mount upon my back now and let us go. I have had you all to myself for much too long.’”

  So Saint Willibald and the dragon departed the treasure cave. They left by tunnels wide and high enough for the worm to pass comfortably, even with Willi on his back. Once on the surface, the dragon took to the sky. Saint Willibald was sure that they were being conveyed directly up to Heaven, after the manner of Elijah, and he cried out to be spared yet a while, that he might complete the conversion of the dragons.

  The dragon is reported to have said, “Dread not. I would not let Heaven have you.” With these reassurances, the beast swooped low beneath the moon and sailed on leathern wings across the entire Villa Sabinus. Fire poured from its jaws, engulfing the fair building, the withered gardens, and the lady Lucrecia, who came running from the portico, driven by an unhealthy albeit natural desire to learn what all the racket was about.

  Saint Willibald voiced a wordless cry of protest to see the lady meet such an end, her whole lithe body blazing more brightly than her wonderful hair. Gazing down a second time, eyes full of pity and terror, he noted that his awful mount had showed some restraint: the dragon’s fire had spared the crabbed porter. Even as man and monster sailed farther up the towers of air, the old man executed a caper of joy hard by the trinity of bonfires that had been the villa, the garden, and the lady. Something long and flexible appeared to spring from the aged servant’s lower sacral region, and great black shadows in the semblance of wings unfurled themselves behind his wizened body. He reached into the smallest of the conflagrations and pulled out a small, white spark which he thrust into a leather purse at his side. The spark in question ejaculated an almost human wail of dread and despair before being plunged into that more than midnight darkness.

  Saint Willibald pondered well all that he had seen, and concluded that our senses are all harlots, not to be trusted. He berated the dragon severely for the sin of Wrath and the kindling of Lucrecia Posthuma. The worm turned his huge head over one sloping shoulder, admitted that he was truly sorry for his late transgression, and asked the saint whether he had lied in the matter of Divine Mercy for sins repented? Chastened by the beast’s natural theological facility, Saint Willibald granted him prompt absolution. Then the dragon wheeled off to dexter and bore the saint away.

  But whither went they? That answer, no man knows, least of all myself. I venture to assume that my ancestor did take a wife of his own, at some juncture, or else how to account for my mother’s insistence that we are the last of his legitimate line?

  My mother is dead. The saint’s legend alone survives, with about as much truth to it as we place in legends. It is said that the converted dragon did indeed carry Saint Willibald to the mountain fastness which was the ancestral home of all his race. There the saint affected the wholesale salvation of Dragonkind entire, by the same means he used on his initial reptilian convert. He likely married afterward.

  The spirit of Doubting Thomas, ever among us, might raise the objection that were all this so, we should hear no further tales of cities destroyed, maidens ravished, and would-be heroes made exempla of “ashes to ashes” by the draconian breed. Faith must answer here that either these instances (frequent though they be) are the work of heretic worms, or else that surely the transgressing dragons are heartily penitent afterward and as entitled to absolution as the next man.

  Thus ends the chronicle, may Saint Willibald intercede for me. I do not doubt that it will be his doing entirely if some day the heathen Norsemen, like the dragons, whose images grace their warships, embrace the True Faith. Who better than the patron saint of well-meaning ignorance to give mayhem, murder, destruction, and despoliation an eternal excuse and ready forgiveness? They will still be barbarians, but they will be our barbarians.

  Alas, I shall not live to see that day. They will slay me with the others, in the wrong God’s name. From the wrath of the Norsemen, dear Lord, deliver us, but from the best intentions of our fellow creatures—dear Lord, art even Thou that powerful?

  I, Brother Leo, append these words in testimony to a miracle.

  And it came to pass that when our abbey was in peril of the Norsemen, may God destroy them utterly, there came out of the East a great roaring sound, and a great fire, and the rushing of many wings. And lo! There were dragons.

  And the worms did descend upon the ships of the Norsemen, consuming them to ash, albeit by happenstance their fires likewise devoured two thirds of the abbey lands and buildings. And the creatures did set their mighty feet upon the earth and enter into the chapel proper, from whence they did extract some portion of the alter plate and convey the same way with them across the sea to preserve it from future raiders. Let no man of faith doubt their good intentions.

  Yet there shall come no more brigands to these shores, for among the ruins of our late scriptorium was found this very scroll, miraculously preserved within a clay water jug only seven strides from the charred remain of our late Brother Theobald, through whose offices we have been vouchsafed knowledge of that saint who has surely this day been our salvation.

  Our abbot agrees that we shall henceforth be the Abbey of Saint Willibald. Under his especial patronage we shall be eternally protected by the power of the fiery worms whose conversion he effected. The scroll of Brother Theobald shall be our chiefest relic, as shall the saint’s bones, which a planned pilgrimage to the German lands shall surely discover soon, by revelation.

  It is to be hoped that Saint Willibald’s bones shall not require quite so much scraping as Brother Theobald’s parchment before they may be shown to the general public. There appear within his tale of the blessed Willibald’s life some sentiments unsuited to a truly pious frame of mind. Praise God, these are nothing that a little judicious removal of dried ink and insertion of more appropriate phrases cannot amend.

  May Saint Willibald strengthen my hand and eye for the holy labor before me.

  A DRAMA OF DRAGONS

  Craig Shaw Gardner

  “A good magician should always subscribe to the highest purposes, and nothing should dissuade him from these lofty goals, except, perhaps, that he has to eat, and it is nice to put a little away for retirement.”

  —from The Teachings of Ebenezum

  Volume III

  I could no longer bring myself to gather firewood. My world had ended. She hadn’t come.

  I sat for far too long in the sunlit glade where we always met. Perhaps she didn’t realize it was noon; she had somehow been delayed; her cool blue eyes and fair blonde hair, the way her slim young body moved, the way she laughed, how it felt when she touched me. Surely she was on her way.

  But I didn’t even know her name! Only her interest in me—a magician’s apprentice. She’d once called magicians the closest things to play actors she knew in this backwater place, said she’d always admired the stage. And then she laughed, and we kissed and—

  A cold breeze sprang up behind my back. Winter was coming.

  I gathered what logs and branches I could find and trudged back to my master’s cottage.

  In the distance I heard a sneeze. My master Ebenezum, no doubt one of the world’s greatest magicians until an unfortunate occurrence involving a demon from the seventh Netherhell. My master had succeeded in banishing the foul creature, by far the most powerful he had ever faced, but his triumph was not without its costs. From that moment onward, Ebenezum found that, should he even approach something of a sorcerous nature, he would fall into an immediate and extended sneezing fit. This malady had put something of a crimp in Ebenezum’s wizardly career, but my master was not one to accept defeat easily. Just this moment, he had probably made another attempt to read from one of his magic tomes. Hence the sneeze. Why else?

&nbs
p; Unless there was something sorcerous in the air.

  Perhaps there was another reason besides my mood that the world was so dark around me, another reason that she hadn’t met me as we’d planned. The bushes moved on my right. Something very large flew across the sun.

  I managed the front door with the firewood still in my arms. I heard the wizard sneeze. Repeatedly. My master stood in the main room, one of his great books spread on the table before him. I hurried to his aid, forgetting, in my haste, the firewood that scattered across the table as I reached for the book, a few miscellaneous pieces falling among the sneezing Ebenezum’s robes.

  I closed the book and glanced apprehensively at the mage. To my surprise, Ebenezum blew his nose on a gold-inlaid, dark blue sleeve and spoke to me in the calmest of tones.

  “Thank you, ’prentice.” He delicately removed a branch from his lap and laid it on the table. “If you would dispose of this in a more appropriate place?”

  He sighed deep in his throat. “I’m afraid that my affliction is far worse than I imagined. I may even have to call on outside assistance for my cure.”

  I hastened to retrieve the firewood. “Outside assistance?” I inquired discreetly.

  “We must seek out another magician as great as I,” Ebenezum said, his every word heavy with import. “Though to do that, we might have to travel as far as the great city of Vushta.”

  “Vushta?” I replied. “With its pleasure gardens and forbidden palaces? The city of unknown sins that could doom a man for life? That Vushta?” All at once, I felt the lethargy lift from my shoulders. I quickly deposited the wood by the fireplace.

  “That Vushta.” Ebenezum nodded. “With one problem. We have not the funds for traveling, and no prospects for gaining same.”

  As if responding to our plight, a great gust blew against the side of the cottage. The door burst open with a swirl of dirt and leaves, and a short man wearing tattered clothes, face besmirched with grime, staggered in and slammed the door behind him.

  “Flee! Flee!” the newcomer cried in a quavering voice. “Dragons! Dragons!” With that, his eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed on the floor.

  “I have found, however,” Ebenezum said as he stroked his long, white beard, “in my long career as a magician, Wuntvor, if you wait around long enough, something is bound to turn up.”

  (2)

  “Dire creatures from the Netherhells should always be faced directly, unless it is possible to face them some other way, say from behind a bush, in perfect safety.”

  —from The Teachings of Ebenezum

  Volume V

  With some water on the head and some wine down the gullet, we managed to revive the newcomer.

  “Flee!” he sputtered as he caught his breath. He glanced about wildly, his pale blue eyes darting from my master to me to floor to ceiling. He seemed close to my master in age, but there the similarity ceased. Rather than my master’s mane of fine, white hair, the newcomer was balding, his hair matted and stringy. Instead of the wizard’s masterful face, which could convey calm serenity or cosmic anger with the flick of an eyebrow, the other’s face was evasive; small nose and chin, a very wrinkled brow, and those eyes, darting blue in his dark, mud-spattered face.

  “Now, now, good sir,” Ebenezum replied in his most reasonable voice, often used to charm young ladies and calm bill collectors. “Why the hurry? You mentioned—dragons?”

  “Dragons!” The man stood somewhat shakily. “Well, at least dragon! One of them has captured Gurnish Keep!”

  “Gurnish Keep?” I queried.

  “You’ve seen it,” Ebenezum murmured, his cold gray eyes still on our guest. “’Tis the small castle on yonder hill at the far side of the woods.” Ebenezum snorted in his beard. “Castle? ’Tis really more of a stone hut, but it’s the home of our neighbor, the Duke of Gurnish. It’s a very small dukedom. For that matter, he’s a very small duke.”

  Our visitor was, if anything, more agitated than before. “I didn’t run all the way through Gurnish Forest to hear a discussion of the neighborhood. We must flee!”

  “Gurnish Forest?” I inquired.

  “The trees right behind the hut,” my master replied. “Surely the Duke’s idea. Everyone else knows the area as Wizard’s Woods.”

  “What do you mean, Wizard’s Woods?” the newcomer snapped. “This area is Gurnish Forest. Officially. As Gurnish Keep is an official castle!”

  “ ’Tis only a matter of opinion,” Ebenezum replied, a smile that could charm both barbarians and maiden aunts once again upon his face. “Haven’t we met somewhere before?”

  “Possibly.” The newcomer, who was somewhat shorter than my master’s imposing frame, shifted uneasily under the wizard’s gaze. “But shouldn’t we flee? Dragons, you know.”

  “Come now, man. I wouldn’t be a full-fledged wizard if I hadn’t dealt with a dragon or two.” Ebenezum looked even more closely at the newcomer than he had before. “Say. Aren’t you the Duke of Gurnish?”

  “Me?” the smaller man said. His eyes shifted from my master to me and back again. “Well—uh—” He coughed. “I suppose I am.”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so? I haven’t seen you since you stopped trying to tax me.” Ebenezum’s smile went to its broadest as he signaled me to get our guest a chair. The duke obviously had money.

  “Well, this whole situation’s a bit awkward,” our honored guest said as he stared at the floor. “I’m afraid I feel rather undukeish.”

  “Nonsense. A run-in with a dragon can unnerve anyone. Would you like some more wine? A nice fire to warm you?”

  “No, thank you.” The duke lowered his voice even more than before. “Don’t you think it would be better if we fled? I mean, dragons. And I’ve seen other things in the forest. Perhaps if your powers were—” The duke coughed again. “You see, I’ve heard of your accident.”

  Ebenezum bristled a bit at the last reference, but the smile more or less remained on his face. “Gossip, good duke. Totally blown out of proportion. We’ll deal with your dragon in no time.”

  “But the dragon’s taken over Gurnish Keep! He’s immense, bright blue and violet scales, twenty-five feet from head to tail. His wings scrape the ceiling of my great hall! And he’s invincible. He’s captured my castle and beautiful daughter, and defeated my retainer!”

  Beautiful daughter? My thoughts turned to the girl of my dreams. Where had she gone? What had kept her away?

  “Only a child!” the duke cried. “No more than seventeen. Fine blonde hair, beautiful blue eyes, a lovely, girlish figure. And the dragon will burn her to a crisp if we don’t do his bidding!”

  Blonde? Blue? Figure? I had a revelation.

  “Come now, man,” Ebenezum remarked. “Calm down. It’s common knowledge that dragons tend to be overdramatic. All the beast’s really done so far is to overwhelm one retainer. 1 assume you still only had one retainer?”

  She hadn’t deserted me! She was only held prisoner! All the time she and I had spent together, all those long, warm afternoons, that’s why she would tell me nothing of herself! A duke’s daughter!

  The duke glared at my master. “It wouldn’t be like that if my subjects paid their taxes!”

  A duke’s daughter. And I would rescue her! There’d be no need for secrecy then. How magnificent our lives would be!

  A fire lit in Ebenezum’s eyes. “Perhaps if certain local nobility were not so concerned with extending the borders of his tiny dukedom—” The wizard waved his hands and the fire disappeared. “But that’s not important. We have a dragon to evict. As I see it, the elements here are quite ordinary. Dragon captures castle and maiden. Very little originality. We should be able to handle it tidily.”

  The duke began to object again, but Ebenezum would have none of it. Only one thing affected his nose more than sorcery—money—and the smell of it was obvious in the cottage. My master sent the duke outside while we gathered the paraphernalia together for dragon fighting.

  When I had p
acked everything according to my master’s instructions, Ebenezum beckoned me into his library. Once in the room, the wizard climbed a small stepladder, and, carefully holding his nose, pulled a slim volume from the uppermost shelf.

  “We may have need of this.” His voice sounded strangely hollow, most likely the result of thumb and forefinger pressed into his nose. “In my present condition, I can’t risk using it. But it should be easy enough for you to master, Wuntvor.”

  He descended the ladder and placed the thin, dark volume in my hands. Embossed in gold on the cover were the words “How to Speak Dragon.”

  “But we must be off!” Ebenezum exclaimed, clapping my shoulder. “Musn’t keep a client waiting. You may study that book on our rest stops along the way.”

  I stuffed the book hurriedly in the paraphernalia-filled pack and shouldered the whole thing, grabbed my walking staff and followed my master out the door. With my afternoon beauty at the end of my journey, I could manage anything.

  My master had already grabbed the duke by the collar and propelled him in the proper direction. I followed at Ebenezum’s heels as fast as the heavy pack would allow. The wizard, as usual, carried nothing. As he often had explained, it kept his hands free for quick conjuring and his mind free for sorcerous conjecture.

  I noticed a bush move, then another. Rustling like the wind pushed through the leaves, except there was no wind. The forest was as still as when I had waited for my afternoon love. Still the bushes moved.

  Just my imagination, I thought. Like the darkness of the forest. I glanced nervously at the sky, half expecting the sun to disappear again. What was so big that it blotted out the sun?