Sofria slumped down between Pietra’s eyes, staring at the hut. She could hear voices and movement. She wanted to ask Pietra what it thought the thieves were doing, but it had said ‘stay perfectly quiet,’ so she said nothing.
A thumping sound, more talking, then the splintered door swung open and the three men she had seen before came out. They were arguing. “And I tell you again that we can’t sell it now, with the fair here. Everyone would know where we got it,” said a stocky gray-haired man.
“Just a few things, so I’ve got coin to spend at the fair,” wheedled the youngest man, with tangled dark hair and a face smudged with dirt.
“Leono says no, we don’t do it,” said the third man, medium sized and wearing a stained smock. “Move on out now, let’s get home so no one knows we been here.”
The youngest man, his mouth pursed obstinately, led the donkey off and the oldest pushed the door shut behind them.
After waiting quietly for the thieves to get some distance away, Pietra hopped over to the door. It shot out its tongue, grabbed the door, and pulled it open.
“That’s a good trick,” Sofria told the dragon.
One of the hut’s walls had collapsed inward, and there were gaping holes in its roof. The floor was dirt, now quite muddy and churned up.
“They didn’t do a very good job of hiding their takings,” said Pietra.
Sofria looked around, but couldn’t see the bundles from the donkey anywhere in the tumbledown hut. She was about to ask Pietra what it meant when it hopped over to where the wall had collapsed into the hut. With its tongue, it lifted the piece of wall, made of sticks with straw and dried mud flaking out from between them, enough to show Sofria a pit hidden beneath it.
“There’s more here than they brought in just now,” said Pietra. It carefully pushed the crumbling wall up until it stood propped against one of the remaining walls. “Look there.”
The hole was lined with coarse cloth so the bags of goods wouldn’t get dirty. There were bundles of clothing, rolls of cloth, pots, and wooden plates. Sofria saw a green shawl and thought of the woman who had given her the ribbon. Wouldn’t it be lovely to exchange that tattered old shawl with this bright new one? And that roll of cloth. There should be enough there for clothing for all Betani’s children.
“Can we take some of it?” Sofria asked. “I want to give it to people who have helped me.”
“Don’t you want anything?”
“Papa Matteo would notice and take it away to sell.”
With Sofria directing, Pietra hooked the cloth, the shawl, and a man’s cap from the pit with its tongue. It flipped the goods back up over its head to Sofria, who arranged them carefully along the dragon’s neck so nothing would fall when they flew. Then it carefully replaced the fallen wall the way the men had left it, and went back outside.
The rain had stopped, and Sofria worried that she wouldn’t get back to her place in the plaza in time to collect more coins. She didn’t want her day of adventure to end with a beating from Papa Matteo. They were over the city before she wondered how she would get her gifts to the women—and the cap to the man who had been feeding the pigeons.
“I can’t keep these things with me,” she told Pietra, gazing down at the people in all their colorful clothing crowding the streets now that the sun had come out. “Papa Matteo will take them.”
“I’ll get them to the proper people.” Pietra circled over the Duke’s Palace, then followed the street to the Cathedral plaza.
“How do you know where to take them?”
“I see and hear much, up there on the Guild Hall’s roof.”
When Sofria slid from Pietra’s back to the cobbles in front of the Guild Hall, she left the shawl, the bolt of cloth, and the cap behind. Once Pietra had returned to its place, she could see the cloth, one edge flapping gently in the breeze, still draped across Pietra’s neck.
That night, lying on her mat with the other girls, Sofria imagined Pietra flying across the city. The dragon found the lodgings where Betani and her children lived, eased their door open with its tongue, and set the bolt of fabric inside. The old woman who had given the ribbon to Sofria lived in an upper room, and she slept so close to her open window that Pietra could spread the shawl across her. The man who fed the pigeons was a baker, and Pietra left the new cap on the counter in his shop.
When the fair opened, the city became a different place. The plaza was quieter; most people, including the storyteller and the puppet show, were at the fair. The old woman with her new green shawl brought Sofria a bit of cheese, and Betani stopped by every evening after she delivered the laundry she had washed, to tell Sofria of what she had seen at the fair in the few moments she had been able to attend.
Sofria and Pietra flew over the city every day, but for very short flights. They circled the fair to watch acrobats and jugglers, see the strangely-dressed merchants from all across the land, and listen to the music wafting up from far below.
“There are farms, towns, and cities beyond Tarnisi that we can visit when we have more time.” Pietra circled the fair once again and veered off to go back to the plaza.
“I’ll need a warm shawl if we do that,” said Sofria. “It gets cold high in the sky, especially when it’s raining.”
“We could go back to the thieves’ hoard. There should be something warm there.”
The next day when rain started misting down Sofria and Pietra flew to the tumbledown hut in the forest. They landed in the clearing just as the young man with the tangled dark hair came out of the forest whistling, with an axe over his shoulder. He nearly fell over backward when he saw Pietra. “A demon from hell!” he screamed, and swung his axe at the dragon.
Pietra hopped backward, raising its wings to keep them out of the way of the axe. Sofria held on tight to the ribbon around the dragon’s neck, thinking, Why can that man see us? But when she was imagining people not seeing them, it had been crowds of people, the people in the city. Whatever it was that made people not see Pietra once it left the roof of the Guild Hall, it must not work here. Or she had been careless. The other children at Papa Matteo’s lodgings teased Sofria about being careless.
The young man ran at them again, swinging the axe. Its wicked sharp edge caught Pietra’s wing tip, and a piece shattered off.
Pietra tried to hop into the air, but it had backed too far into the forest, and its wings caught in the branches above them. The dragon shook itself, and Sofria lost hold of the ribbon about its neck. She slid to the ground near a tree’s trunk and her hair tangled in bushes growing at its base.
Just as the axe came down again, Pietra hopped forward, so the side of the axe’s head bounced off its rounded shoulder. Sofria yanked her hair free from the branches and began crawling, making sure she was not in Pietra’s path as it hopped out of the way of the axe.
A branch she grasped to pull herself along came free of the leaves and twigs littering the forest floor. It was twice as long as her forearm and rather stout, so she held onto it as she awkwardly pulled herself forward.
She could not fight the young man—he moved fast, and she couldn’t even stand up. But the heroes in Osanna’s stories often used trickery. The next time the man lunged toward Pietra, Sofria shoved the branch in between his feet, tripping him. The axe flew from the man’s hands as he flung his arms out to catch himself, and the blade came down right between Pietra’s bulging eyes.
While the man was down, Sofria dragged herself quickly to him, and rolled to one side so she could prop herself up on an elbow. With the branch in the other hand, she smashed its knobby end down on his head. He moaned and twitched, then lay still. Had she killed him? She did not want to kill him, but he was attacking Pietra.
Sofria used the branch to push herself to a sitting position and turned to look at Pietra. The axe had hit the dragon in the middle of its head and shattered it. Pietra’s wide mouth and eyes were in pieces on the ground, with the axe lying atop them.
“Pietra!” Sofria scr
eamed. She crawled forward, pulling herself up on one of its webbed feet, and touched the side of its neck. It no longer felt like soft, warm skin—it was stone, cold stone, a headless body of a monster crouched in the forest. Sofria sobbed, leaning against a stone knee, all her hopes of adventure shattered along with her only friend.
The sun breaking through the clouds reminded her that she had no way to get back to the city. She could die out here in the forest. There was no way for her to get food, and it would take days to crawl as far as the edge of the fair. There were blankets and clothing—maybe even food—in the hoard of stolen goods in the hut behind her, but without Pietra to lift the fallen piece of wall, she could not get to them. If the thief she had hit woke up to find her here, he would probably kill her. She should leave quickly, as he was starting to groan.
The red ribbon was still tied around Pietra’s neck. It was rather grubby by now, and even more frayed than when Sofria had received it, but it might be her only link with Pietra now. She untied it, and was about to put it into her pocket, when she decided that she wanted Pietra to have it after all. She started searching through the grass, picking up pieces of Pietra’s head and finding where they fit, with the thought that maybe she could hold them together with the ribbon. All the while her memories of the many times she had talked to Pietra, and flown on its back, played through her head.
She got Pietra’s head re-assembled, though there were still small pieces of stone missing, powdered into the grass beneath the dragon. She wound the ribbon around its jaw, trying to hold the wide mouth together, keep the bulging eyes from slipping downward. She ran her fingers along the cracks, smoothing them.
The young man groaned louder and struggled to push himself to a sitting position. Sofria crouched low behind Pietra’s body so the man couldn’t see her. He put a hand up to run through his hair, where he probably had a knot the size of a goose’s egg, and opened his eyes. He looked straight into Pietra’s shattered face.
With a terrified scream, the man wavered to his feet and stumbled off into the forest, leaving his axe behind. Would he bring his companions back? She did not want to stay here long enough to find out.
Sofria turned to say goodbye to Pietra. She reached out to touch its shattered face and saw that the break lines were closing up, almost as if they healed.
“Pietra,” she whispered. She ran her fingers along the breaks, feeling them smooth out and fill in. Moments later Pietra’s wings began to twitch, and then the dragon shuddered and blinked its eyes. Sofria had never noticed before that the eyelids moved up when its eyes closed.
“Pietra!” She flung her arms around the dragon’s neck and began sobbing again, in relief and joy this time. One of its wings came down to shelter her until she sat up and wiped her face on her sleeve.
“Hmmmphg.” Tears turned to giggles as Sofria realized she had bound Pietra’s mouth shut. She untied the ribbon and the dragon opened and closed its mouth, blinked a few times, and then cautiously shook its head. “Sofria, what happened? I felt myself shatter.”
“That man hit you with his axe. Then I hit him with a stick, and when he woke up he ran away.”
“But how did I . . . ?” Pietra tilted its head sideways, lifted its front legs and looked at its feet. Then it peered up toward its wings, spreading them to their fullest span. “I am whole. I am not shattered.”
“You were, but . . . I think this ribbon is magical, Pietra! When I tied it around your head, it put all the pieces back together.”
Pietra laughed—a shaky laugh, but with a note of the booming amusement it had shared with her when she asked if it was a dragon. “That would be the way it worked in one of Osanna’s stories.”
Hearing Osanna’s name reminded Sofria that she must get back to the city. The sun moved westward, and she had no coins for Papa Matteo today. “We should go back,” she said.
“We came to get you a shawl, and that we shall do.” Pietra hopped to the hut’s door and pulled it open. It took but a moment to prop the broken wall up, and then Pietra did something Sofria had not expected. With tongue and front legs it gathered up the heavy cloth lining the pit into a great bag, which it pulled out of the hole. “See if there is rope in here,” it directed Sofria. She pawed through the bundles and packages until she found one tied with rope. She untied it, dumping the contents of the bundle in with everything else without even looking at it.
“Now find yourself a shawl.” She had seen one—a pretty blue one, with beads at the hem—and quickly found it and draped it over her shoulders. Pietra bunched the top of the cloth together again. “Take this rope and tie up the top good and tight, so I can carry this big bundle with my feet.”
She did that, weaving the rope through holes she found in the cloth and knotting it tightly. Then she tied the ribbon around Pietra’s neck again. It dragged the big bag of goods from the hut, leaving the wall propped up and the door open.
“Let’s fly!” said Pietra. Sofria pulled herself onto its back and held onto the ribbon as it pushed upward with its strong hind legs. Between its front feet it held the bundle.
Sofria leaned over Pietra’s head, between its eyes, and looked down at the forest below them. She stroked the soft skin that did not feel like stone. All there were to show for the dragon being shattered were some thin lines, like scars, across its face.
At the edge of the forest Pietra found a great tree, taller than its neighbors, and hung the bundle from a high branch, close to the trunk so it couldn’t easily be seen. Then the dragon glided across the city toward the plaza.
Remembering how the young man had seen them, Sofria thought very hard about not being seen as they flew over shops and houses, the Duke’s Palace, and a church not nearly as fancy as the Cathedral. Sofria slipped from Pietra’s back at her usual place on the plaza as the sun sank behind the Guild Hall.
She had just pulled her cup from the pocket under her skirt when she saw Papa Matteo across the plaza near the Cathedral steps, talking to a man. When she lifted her arm to run her fingers through her hair, tangled from branches and flying, she remembered the pretty blue shawl over her shoulders. There was no time to hide it. Papa Matteo turned, saw her, and strode across the plaza toward her.
“Where have you been, girl?” he bellowed.
All thought fled from Sofria’s mind. He had come to the plaza before she got back with Pietra. He knew she had not been in her place. What could she tell him? “I had to pee,” she blurted.
“I would have seen you if you were at the gutter.” Papa Matteo stood over Sofria, tapping a stick he held in his right hand against his left fist. His gaze moved up and down her body, then he reached out with the stick to lift the shawl from her shoulders. “And where did you get this?”
“It was a gift.”
“Why would anyone give you a gift? You’re a broken, worthless piece of trash.”
“I am not worthless.” The caution that usually kept her silent had left her today. “I bring in coins for you every day. What do I get for that? Many times you don’t even feed me, and you beat me for things that aren’t even my fault.”
“Don’t sass me.” Papa Matteo raised the stick.
Sofria lunged for the stick. Caught off guard, Papa Matteo wasn’t holding it tightly, and she wrenched it from his hand. Remembering the man in the forest, how she had hit his head, she brought the stick down with all her strength on Papa Matteo’s right arm. He howled and cursed when it hit, and seized the stick with his left hand and pulled it away from her. Though not regretting what she had done, Sofria cowered, hoping he wouldn’t hit as hard using the left hand.
“You worthless beast!” he screamed. “I don’t need you. No one needs you.” He lifted the stick again . . . and it was seized from behind and pulled away from him a second time.
“Leave that child alone!” Betani stood there, holding the stick out of Papa Matteo’s reach. Behind her crowded many more people, all of them glaring at Papa Matteo.
A huge argument began,
with people shouting, and Papa Matteo cursing. Sofria sat up straighter, listening as Betani told Papa Matteo that he had no claim on Sofria, and she wouldn’t allow the child to live another day with such a bully. With the crowd booing him, Papa Matteo strode off across the plaza, holding his right arm close against his chest.
“Thank you for watching out for me,” Sofria said to Betani, her voice shaking more than she had thought it would.
“I never liked the looks of that man,” the stout woman said. “I was sure he beat you.”
“Yes.” Sofria found she was shaking all over. Papa Matteo was gone, but now what would she do? Could she live in the forest, and have Pietra bring her food?
Most of the crowd had left now, laughing at how they had got the better of Papa Matteo. Betani turned toward the fountain, and Sofria saw that the woman’s three children sat there, probably to keep them safe if there was fighting. Betani waved at them to come, and they did.
Ercoli, the boy, pulled a little wagon behind him. The youngest girl was riding in it, but when they reached Sofria, the child hopped out. “I washed every scrap of clothing and linen in my neighbor’s house,” said Betani, “and he built this for me. Do you like it, Sofria?”
There was a cushion in the bottom, made of some of the cloth Sofria and Pietra had left at Betani’s house. “May I?” Betani asked. Sofria wasn’t sure what she meant, until she reached toward Sofria, and the girl realized Betani wanted to lift her into the wagon.
“Of course,” said Sofria, breathing quickly, excited and scared both at once.
When she was settled in the wagon to Betani’s satisfaction, the woman said, “Would you like to live with us? We don’t have a lot, but it sounds like it’s more than you are used to.”
“Live . . . with you? I think I would like that. I can pay my way. You can bring me out here every day, same as Papa Matteo did.”
A Dragon and Her Girl Page 24