by Philip Reeve
The slope grew steeper. The going was achingly slow, but at last Brock was almost at the top; he would be rounding the big rock soon, and starting down to the path on the far side. Ansel’s boots sank deep into wet soil, squeezing up water. He heard his master slip and curse up above him and stepped aside just in time as a big, jagged boulder came slithering down the slope, dislodging scores of smaller stones as it went past. He calmed Brezel and stumbled on, trying not to think about the chasm behind him. Instead, he wondered how they would be received in the village when they let it be known they had not killed the dragon. Or maybe Brock would keep quiet about that. Maybe he’d flaunt that old corkindrille skull as he’d planned, and tell them he had slain their worm, and let them work out for themselves that they’d been cheated when he was safe and far away. Else had no reason to like the villagers, so she might go along with the lie. Maybe Brock would let Else and her mother travel with him. Maybe they could all go away somewhere, somewhere with no mountains and no dragons….
Something large and dark came sliding silently down the scree slope. Ansel leapt aside again, and realized as he tugged Brezel after him that it was only a shadow.
But a shadow of what?
Brezel reared up suddenly, snorting in fear, dragging his reins out of Ansel’s hand.
“It’s come!” screamed Else.
The dragon soared over them. Ansel could hear the wind hissing through the long feathers that spread like fingers from the edges of its wings. Its lizard head glared down at him, letting out a long cry, and echoes kicked back from all the rock faces, as if there were a dozen dragons all crying out in turn. The noise stripped all the thoughts out of Ansel’s head and panicked him into a flailing sort of run. He scrambled and struggled uphill, but he went nowhere, for the scree was slithering downhill as fast as he could run up it. Brezel went past him, wading against the stone tide. Ahead, Brock was battling to control Flegel’s panicked horse, which was bucking and plunging, dislodging huge sections of the slope.
Ansel screamed silently. The speed of the shifting ground was increasing. He was running as fast as he could, but he was still being carried backward, downhill, toward the place where the ground ended and there was only a long drop to the river and its jaggedy rocks.
Beside him, with a long groan, the giant rock that had barred their way started to shift. It came at him diagonally across the scree face, a storm of lesser stones racketing ahead of it like small, gray, scampering animals. He saw Else throw herself out of its way, scrabbling crabwise across the slope. Everything was moving now, earth and stones and rocks and roots all rushing like water downhill toward the lip of the chasm. Overhead the worm soared, confused by the sliding ground, trying to decide which of those struggling shapes it should dive on.
Flegel’s horse came crashing sideways down the scree toward Ansel, baring its big teeth, yawning in terror. It was almost on top of him when a bounding rock knocked its feet from under it. Ansel heard the sharp snaps of its cannon bones breaking, and the dreadful shrill neighing as it went under, pummeled and pounded in the surf of stones. He ran on the spot, clawing over the rocks as they rumbled beneath him, watching the big one slew slowly toward him. Above it somewhere was Brock, capering like a carnival clown to keep his balance. Above him the whole mountainside seemed to be stirring and shifting as more boulders started to slide. And above the mountainside the dragon wheeled, but Ansel had lost sight of it, and had no time to look for it, for the big rock was rushing at him. At the last instant he flung himself sideways out of its path. He landed on wet earth beyond the landslide’s edge, and lay there facedown, listening to the stone crushing smaller stones beneath its bulk as it went past him, and then the sudden silence as it tipped over the chasm’s edge. A heartbeat later he could hear it again, booming and shattering its way down toward the river far below.
He turned to look for Brezel. He could not see the pony. But then he could not see much of anything; a curtain of dust hung over the hillside. Swooping through it came the dragon, cracking its serpent’s tail like a striped whip. It saw Ansel sprawling there below it and screeched in triumph. The noise froze him to the earth as it swept down on him. It landed a little way off and came quickly at him over the rocks with its wings and its neck outstretched, its snout badly painted with Snow’s dried blood. Then it veered away, screeching. Something had struck it hard on the side of its head.
Else was standing up among the scattered rocks nearby, readying a second stone. Father Flegel, crouching close to her, shouted, “No, girl! You’re just making it angry! Let it eat him!” But Else ignored him, and flung the stone anyway. Her aim was deadly. She’d practiced stone-throwing when she was smaller, minding her father’s goats on the high meadows. Several times she’d driven off wolves that way, and she’d killed one once. Her stone flew true. It bounced off the dragon’s nose, and the dragon flinched and yelped, scrabbling backward over the rocks with its wings held out wide like a cormorant’s.
For a moment, Ansel thought Else’s stones were going to drive it off. If it was only used to hunting sheep and goats, it might be startled by prey that fought back. Its head weaved from side to side, studying the girl. The black nostrils flexed and snuffled, scenting. Ansel could hear Flegel’s tremulous prayers, and he realized with some spare portion of his mind that the noise of sliding rocks had ended. The landslide was over.
“Go away!” screamed Else. “Flap off, worm!” Another stone flew at the dragon, but this time it jerked aside and the stone missed. Again it made the same grim, bubbling growl that Ansel had heard earlier, before it sprang at him outside the cave. Again, Ansel felt himself go rigid at the sound, but this time he was not the dragon’s prey. It darted at Else and the friar, half flying and half running over the rocks. Else stooped for another stone but Ansel knew she would not have time to throw one. Flegel knew it too. He shoved her and sent her sprawling in the dragon’s path. “Take her!” he screamed, as he turned and fled.
To the charging animal Else must have seemed to vanish, falling down behind the rocks. It soared past her, drawn by Flegel’s flapping cloak and habit, by the shrill screams he let out as he ran. He twisted his head and looked back over his shoulder and saw it speeding after him. “It was her!” he squealed. “Have mercy! Eat her, not me!”
The friar ran fast, but the dragon was faster. The friar scrambled up the scree, but the dragon had wings. It soared across the last few feet that separated them. It lunged its bear-trap head forward on that long muscled neck and snatched him off the ground like a thief swiping a fat purse. Flegel let out a bubbling scream. His legs flailed, his red boots running desperately on air as it dragged him awkwardly into the sky. He screamed again, then stopped abruptly. The wingbeats of the dragon echoed away up the valley, fainter and fainter, until there was only silence.
I’M NOT SURE ANY MORE THAT IT IS A DRAGON,” SAID BROCK, sometime later.
They had climbed back from the place of the landslide and were looking out across that high valley again, toward the shepherd’s cave with its worm-breached wall. They had found an overhanging crag that gave them a faint sense of shelter, but they all knew that if the dragon wanted them it would have no trouble taking them.
“It has only two legs, and breathes no fire, and whoever heard of a dragon with feathers? Perhaps it is a wyvern, or some other, lesser kind of worm.”
“Who cares what it is?” Else said tetchily. “All worms are much alike, I’d reckon, when you are inside their bellies, and that is where we’re going to end up, isn’t it? The next time it comes it will take us.”
Brock ignored her. He was studying the mountain, looking up past the rocky crags around the valley to the snow and ice of the heights above. “Where does it make its nest?” he wondered.
Ansel sat trying to stop shaking, and wondered how long it would take Brock to understand that he was not a dragon hunter anymore, but a dragon’s prey. He kept thinking of Father Flegel, and how surprised the friar had looked when the creature’s j
aws clamped around him. And Brezel, who had simply vanished, probably carried away down that slow river of stones. Poor Brezel! Ansel felt that he could have saved him somehow, or at least tried to save him. He should have done something….
They were a miserable sight, the three of them. The horses were gone, and so was their road home. When the dust of the landslide settled they had seen how the track they had hoped to travel down had been swept away: Only sections of it remained, interspersed with deep fissures where whole sections of the cliff face had collapsed. Among the rubble they had found the smashed body of Flegel’s horse, and had retrieved the rope and a few blankets and one of its saddlebags. Otherwise they had only the clothes they sat in.
Brock said, “Well, we won’t be going back down by Knochen, that’s for sure. The landslide has seen to that. We must go higher before we go down. That is what God wants of us. No doubt that is why he spared me at the landslide, and let the worm take poor Flegel, who was so full of doubts…. If we’re to get off this mountain, we’ll have to take the path you spoke of, Else.”
The girl was pressed tight against the rock wall they sat beneath, shivering faintly, watching the afterimage of the dragon, which had not yet faded from her eyes. Her hands kept kneading the fabric of her dress into tight bunches, smoothing it out and then kneading it again. But she felt Brock’s eyes on her, and looked at him, and saw his smile. It seemed to warm her a little.
“Your father’s path,” he said. “The other way down. How do we find it?”
She pointed across the valley to the crags. “Up there,” she said.
Her finger wavered and trembled. It took them all a moment to make out the steep, raked ledge that crept up across the cliffs and screes, like a crack on a wall.
“But we can’t go that way,” she said. “Because of the dragon …”
“I will defend us from the dragon,” said Brock. “Do you think God would let it harm you? Have faith. He has brought me here to kill it.” He smiled at Else and Ansel, touched by the way they watched him, the faint looks of hope on their wan young faces. They made him feel strong, and proud of his strength. He was their protector. He was the one they looked to to lead and defend them.
He sniffed, and gripped his sword’s hilt, and looked at the sky. “When it comes again I’ll be ready. I’ll kill it, and we’ll walk down the pass to the town and show its head to the landgrave and the people there.”
He set off across the valley, leaving Else and Ansel to follow, lugging the blankets and the one remaining bag.
When the King of France sent his chamberlain to scale a high mountain, he let him take along three holy men, a carpenter, and the royal ladder man, with ladders to lash to its hard-faced crags, and wood and ropes and pins. When Johannes Brock set off up the Drachenberg, he had only one young girl and one still younger boy. They took no scaling ladders, and barely food enough for one lean meal. And King Charles’s man had made his climb in summertime, in good weather, not in that day’s dim, brownish light, which kept dying into darkness as clouds blew over the crags.
This is madness, thought Ansel, pulling and heaving and tugging and levering himself up the steep way between the rocks, feeling like a beetle on a wall. This is madness, he thought again, searching for his way in the blind whiteness of a snow shower and seeing nothing but a confusion of gray shadows, with the shadows of Brock and the girl creeping on through the midst of it. When Else looked back at him, her face was white as whey, and he knew that his must look the same. White and weary with the unending fear of that unending day.
It was madness. Mountains weren’t meant to be climbed. But what else could they do? There was no way down on that side of the Drachenberg. They had to reach the other. They had nowhere to go but up. So they plowed on, grazed and aching, chilled through, shuddering, making their way out onto impassable ledges and edging back, creeping like rats up impossible chimneys, hands freezing, toes freezing, hearts freezing. And the snow-dusted world unfolded in white and black below them as they rose.
In places the path died away entirely, and they had to make their own way up pocked black slopes of steeply sloping rock, finding their way from foothold to foothold. Before they attempted the first of those, Else said that they must rope themselves together. “That’s what the men do if they have to come up this way, looking for strayed sheep. Then if one falls the others can take his weight, and pull him up to safety.”
Brock ordered Ansel to fetch out the coil of rope they had been given by the villagers. They each looped it around their chests and knotted it as best they could with their numb fingers, and when they crept onward up the rock the rope stretched between them. Ansel doubted it would do much good — he couldn’t see himself and Else being able to haul Brock back up if he fell — but it was good to feel the rope tugging and tautening as the others made their own way up the rock above him. It helped him to believe that he was not quite alone when the next snow shower came swirling off the mountain.
He stopped when the snow closed in, and Else stopped above him. They clung to the cliff and tried to shelter, turning slowly into snowmen as the flakes crusted on their clothes and hair. But after a few moments the rope jerked taut and they were forced to start climbing again. Ansel’s fingers grew numb groping for handholds on the freezing rock, and then began to burn with a mysterious, agonizing heat. The wind teased streamers of snot from his cold nose. “Come on!” shouted Brock’s voice, bellowing down at him from high above. “If the worm finds us on this cliff it will have us like three eggs in a basket.”
Ansel looked up at Else through the slackening snow. She said nothing, but she made a quirking movement with those black, black brows of hers, and he knew she agreed with Brock. He let her go ahead, and climbed after her. She was slower than him, so sometimes his face was on a level with her feet and he could see the way her felt boots were starting to come apart, baring her bloody, blistered heels. He knew she must be in pain, but she did not speak of it, and he thought that was brave of her.
But Brock kept climbing, tireless. He could picture the dragon’s lair somewhere above him, a cave in a crag, the rocks around it scattered with bones and droppings. Maybe there would be gold in there, like in the old tales. But it wasn’t the thought of the gold that pulled Brock up the mountain. It was the worm itself, and the chance it offered him of turning all his lies into one startling truth. Brock the worm killer, he thought. Johannes Von Brock, the dragon slayer …
The wind howled and hooed, trying out unnerving dragon noises. It was cold enough to crack rocks, thought Else, struggling along behind the armored man. Maybe the breath of dragons wasn’t fire at all, but searing ice. And maybe this was how the dragon caught its prey, by luring men like Brock so high that they were too weary and weak to fight it when it found them.
They were halfway up another blank-faced cliff when the snow returned. This squall was even heavier than the last, the feathering flakes blotting out everything. Even Brock was forced to stop, and Ansel clung miserably to the rock face, chilled through and shivering, fearing that at any moment his dizziness and his frozen fingers would conspire to make him topple off. Sometimes the wind slackened, and he could hear Else weeping with cold and weariness above him.
At last even Brock had to admit that they needed a place to hide and rest. They came to a hole that ice and water had scooped out of the mountain’s side, and they crept into it. It was as cold as a tomb in there, but it was warmer than being outside in the wind. They sat side by side, like birds on a branch. They pushed close to each other, each hoping that the others might be warmer. The snow had stopped, but the sky was quickly growing dim. While they’d been climbing the short day had spent itself. Sexton-black, the night buried them.
“What if the dragon comes again?” asked Else.
“The worm hunts by daylight,” Brock said. He was as bruised and shaken by the climb as either of the children, but he knew that he must not let them see it. They were depending on him. Besides, he told himself,
they were still alive, weren’t they, the three of them. Just as poor Flegel would be, if only the friar had listened to him. He had the measure of the dragon now.
“A beast that hunts by day won’t hunt in the dark,” he said. “It’ll be snug in its nest somewhere. We’re safe enough till morning.” He tipped his head back against the stony wall and was soon asleep, leaving Else and Ansel to listen to his snores and think about all the other beasts they knew of, like cats and spiders, owls and wolves, which were quite as happy to hunt by day as by night.
“What do you think it will feel like?” asked Else, just as Ansel was drifting into sleep himself. “When it eats us? Will it hurt? Will we die quick, or will we be alive still when we go down its throat?”
Ansel couldn’t answer her, of course. He snuggled a bit closer to her, and that seemed to satisfy her. A little later he heard her breathing slow, and thought, She’s asleep, and wondered if he should try to stay awake, to watch and listen for the dragon. But almost before the thought was formed he was asleep himself. Exhausted by the cold and the climbing, he slept so deeply that he would not have noticed if the dragon had fluttered down to perch beside him. It wasn’t like real sleep at all. It was as if tiredness had battered him senseless.
ANSEL AWOKE IN LIGHT. THE SUN HAD RISEN OVER A BONY knob of the mountain and was shining into his face. He remembered where he was, and why. He scrambled up, but there was no sign of the dragon. He was surprised at how high they had climbed. The valley lay far below him. It was still night down there. Day began a few feet below his perch, above the shadow of that eastern spur, which stretched along the crags like a tidemark.
