Dragonbreath

by Ursula Vernon

  “I think we may wish to beat a strategic retreat,” said Wendell. He tossed the remains of his lunch in the trash and headed for the door.

  “You said it,” said Danny.

  THE PLAN

  “So what are you going to do?” asked Wendell a few hours later as they walked toward the bus.

  “About Big Eddy? I dunno. Apparently the fork didn’t do much, but the potato salad bit him pretty good . . .”

  “No, I mean about the paper. Did you talk to Mr. Snaug?”

  “Yes, and he was totally unreasonable!” Danny said, flailing his arms wildly. Smoke drifted from his nostrils—he couldn’t breathe fire, but he could occasionally manage a little smoke when he was flustered. Wendell wrinkled his snout and coughed.

  “Smoke . . .” he muttered.

  “Right, sorry.” Danny fanned the smoke away with one hand. He opened his mouth, then paused, distracted. There was a small hole under the chain-link fence around the school, where the metal links had been bent back. The tips of the chain had yellow goop on them, and there was a rather slimy yellow trail leading into the storm drain. It was almost exactly what you’d expect from the escape tunnel of a rogue potato salad making a break for freedom. Danny smiled.

  Danny leaned over a bit but couldn’t see anything. How long could a potato salad live in the sewers, anyway? What was the natural habitat of a potato salad?

  “So what are you going to do?” asked Wendell again.

  “Hmmm? Oh!” Righteous indignation reclaimed his attention. “He told me to rewrite it by tomorrow! And to actually learn something about oceans this time! Can you believe it?”

  “He’s a monster.”

  “Don’t think that just because I’m having a crisis, I can’t tell when you’re being sarcastic, Wendell.”

  Wendell tried to look innocent. It is not a look that comes easily to iguanas. Danny punched him in the shoulder.

  “So what are you going to do?” Wendell asked, rubbing his arm.

  “I don’t know yet. But I’ll think of something before tomorrow morning.”

  By the time they had arrived at Danny’s house, neither of them had come up with a plan. Danny had suggested hoping for a snow day. Wendell had pointed out that it was mid-April. Wendell had then suggested that Danny go to the library and actually read about oceans. This idea was met with the contempt it deserved.

  The Dragonbreath house looked much like all the other houses on the block. It had nothing to suggest that the reptiles living there were semi-mythical, except for a faint clinging scent of charcoal, and a number of scorch marks on the ceiling.

  “Moooooom!” Danny scooped a cookie up off the kitchen counter. “I have to write a paper about the ocean!”

  His mother, who was much more a mid-afternoon person than a morning person, was no longer hunched over her coffee looking murderous. Now she was wearing a large flowered apron and humming tunelessly. She turned away from the dishes, wiping her hands on a towel, and smiled at them. “Hi, Danny. Hi, Wendell, so nice to see you. Have a cookie.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Dragonbreath,” said Wendell politely, and took a cookie.

  “I don’t know anything about the ocean,” Danny complained through a spray of cookie crumbs.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full, dear. Have you talked to your cousin Edward?”

  “Cousin Edward’s an ocean?” Danny raised a scaly eyebrow. “Why was I not informed of this?”

  Wendell rolled his eyes. Danny’s mother, having had a lifetime to develop an immunity to Danny’s sense of humor, merely said, “No, dear, he’s a sea serpent. He lives in the ocean—that’s why he always comes here for Thanksgiving. It’s so hard to cook underwater.”

  Danny froze, half-eaten cookie forgotten in his hand.

  “Uh-oh,” said Wendell, recognizing the sudden gleam in his friend’s eye. He frantically looked around for something to hide behind.

  “That’s a great idea, Mom!”

  “Oh, dear . . .” Wendell wondered if he could make it to the front door.

  “We’re off to sail the seven seas!”

  “That’s nice, dear,” said his mother, turning back to the dishes. “Call if you’ll be late.”

  “C’mon, Wendell!” said Danny, grabbing his friend’s collar as he rushed for the door.

  Wendell sighed. That was the trouble with being Danny’s friend—you were prey to his sudden enthusiasms. The young iguana’d never really had a chance.

  AHOY!

  “So,” said Wendell, resigned to his fate. “How are we going to find your cousin?”

  “Always with the questions, Wendell. We’ll take the bus.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why this bus goes to the Sargasso Sea?” Wendell asked as the bus chugged along. It was newer than the school bus and sounded much less like an animal was dying horribly somewhere in the engine block.

  “Not really, no . . .”

  In a surprisingly short time—at least, surprising to Wendell—the bus pulled up to a rickety dock. Gray, peeling wood extended out across soupy green water, webbed with weeds that looked like enormous strands of snot. Wendell shook his head in disbelief.

  “Wow. For once, it actually looks like you said it would.”

  “Hey, mythical stuff I know . . .”

  “Has this always been here?” Wendell asked the bus driver as they got off.

  The bus driver, a large chameleon in a blue uniform, just flicked out a long tongue and licked it over her eyelids, snagging a fly in the process. Danny stepped off the bus.

  “Of course it’s always been here,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s the Sargasso Sea. It’s been here for like forever.”

  “I just sorta . . . expected I would have seen it before . . .” said Wendell. He had somehow maintained a fairly solid grip on reality despite being Danny’s friend, but there were limits.

  “Well, you’re seeing it now.” Danny waited until the bus had pulled away, then hurried across the street. “C’mon. The seaweed holds stuff up. Try not to fall in, though.”

  The warning made sense as soon as Wendell stepped out. The dock apparently wasn’t attached to anything. Boards floated loose, in a haphazard trail out across the water. In a few places, gaps had been filled in with old barrels, crates, and a rusted Stop sign.

  Danny skipped across the debris, barely paying attention to his footing. Wendell gulped and put out a hesitant foot. The board dipped under his weight. He quickly pulled his foot back. “Unnngh . . .”

  “Come on . . .” Danny’s voice floated back to him. “We don’t have all week, Wendell. The paper’s due tomorrow!”

  Wendell gritted his teeth—he had sixty-eight of them—and stepped out onto the seaweed. He very slowly, very carefully began to tiptoe from board to board. “Eeee . . . eeee . . . eeeee . . .”

  It took him twice as long to pick his way across the dock as it did Danny. The dragon was nearly dancing with impatience by the time Wendell finally arrived at the end of the dock.

  The last stretch of dock was actually anchored to a set of pilings, and didn’t move nearly so alarmingly. He resisted the urge to fall flat and kiss the boards. Danny would have never let him hear the end of it.

  They waited. A seagull landed on the surface of the seaweed with a gloopy splash.

  “Maybe he’s not home,” said Wendell hopefully. He wasn’t entirely certain he wanted to meet a sea serpent. Danny was his best friend, and Danny’s mother was awfully nice, but the iguana wasn’t always sure about semi-mythical people in general. You never knew when one would turn out to eat iguanas.

  “He’s a sea serpent,” said Danny. “This is the sea. Where else is he going to be?”

  “Don’t sea serpents ever—Yeerrk!”

  DANNY TOLD HIS COUSIN ABOUT HIS SCIENCE PAPER, AND HOW HE HAD TO LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT THE OCEAN BY TOMORROW, OR GET AN F.

  MINTY FRESH

  “The ocean, huh?” Edward scratched his head with a flipper. “Well, I coul
d tell you quite a lot about it . . . but it’d be a lot more interesting just to show you.”

  “You mean we could go underwater with you?” asked Danny, his eyes shining. “That would be awesome! Wouldn’t it, Wendell?”

  “Err,” said Wendell, and then “Oof!” as Danny elbowed him in the ribs. “Um. Yeah. Awesome.”

  “Wait right here,” said Edward, and sank back into the slimy green water.

  “I really don’t know about this, Danny,” said Wendell as soon as the sea serpent was gone. “I mean—”

  “You can swim,” said Danny.

  “Yeah, but I’m not a fish! I don’t have gills!”

  “I’m sure Cousin Edward wouldn’t have suggested it if he didn’t have a plan. Besides, what can possibly happen?”

  Wendell thought of a half-dozen things, discarded most of them as unconvincing, and then finally said, “Sharks.”

  “Sharks?”

  “There might be sharks.”

  “That would be awesome!”

  Wendell heaved a sigh that seemed to come from the tip of his tail, and resigned himself to a watery grave.

  “Here,” said Edward, poking his long snout out of the water again. “Have one of these.”

  “Breath mints?” asked Wendell. “Do we have bad breath?” (Since Edward’s breath smelled like rotten catfish, this struck him as rather presumptuous.)

  “No, these are a different kind of breath mint. They give you breath for a couple of hours.” Edward clapped a flipper on the small iguana’s shoulder. “And they’re minty fresh!”

  Danny had already popped one into his mouth. Wendell followed suit. It tasted . . . fizzy. He felt as if spiders were dancing inside his lungs, wearing mint-flavored tap shoes.

  “All right, then! Grab a flipper and hold on!”

  The water was dark and shockingly cold. Wendell opened his mouth to yelp, and felt bubbles escaping.

  Oh no! I’ll drown!

  Except . . . he wasn’t drowning. His lungs were heaving in and out, and air was somehow pouring into them, possibly carried by the tap-dancing spiders.

  “Wow!” said Danny. “These breath mints really work!” Bubbles emerged from his mouth and spiraled upward. Craning his neck, Wendell could see a dim, flickering green light overhead, where the sun filtered through the seaweed.

  “They’ll keep you from getting the bends too,” said Edward. The sea serpent angled his head downward and began to swim with broad strokes of his tail. Wendell and Danny clung to his out-stretched flippers. Water rushed past their faces like wind. The seaweed spiraled down around them like long columns of slimy ribbon.

  “What are the bends?” asked Danny.

  “The bends are a thing that happens to divers,” said Edward, still swimming downward. “See, when you go really deep, the weight of all the water presses down on you, and you kinda squish a bit. It’s okay, though, because people squish pretty well.”

  Wendell tried to imagine himself squishing, and turned a slightly paler shade of gray green.

  “But when you swim back up again, you come unsquished,” the sea serpent continued, “and people don’t unsquish nearly so well. So if you come up too fast, you get little bubbles in your blood, like a can of soda.”

  The sea serpent leveled off and began to swim sideways, undulating like an eel. Passing fish stopped to goggle at them.

  “So then if you try to come up with fizzy blood, it’s like shaking a can of soda, only inside your body.”

  “Oooh! Neat! Do you explode?”

  Wendell thought privately that Danny sounded way too excited about this prospect.

  “Well, it’s not quite that bad, but it’s still awfully bad for you.”

  “See?” said Danny enthusiastically, twisting to look at Wendell. “We’re learning something already!”

  “Oh . . .” said the iguana. “Yay.” An enormous fish loomed off to their left. It was nearly the size of their school bus, so Wendell was relieved to see that its mouth was nowhere near large enough to swallow an iguana or a small dragon. “So do fish ever get the bends?”

  “Some of them do,” said Edward. “A lot of fish live way down in the crushing deeps, and never come up at all.”

  Something about the phrase “crushing deeps” made Wendell’s spine tingle.

  “Oooh!” said Danny. “What’s it like down there?”

  A shrug rippled down the sea serpent’s side. “Dark. Cold. Heavy. Full of some strange fish.”

  “Can we go there?”

  “Oh no,” moaned Wendell.

  “It’s really not that interesting,” said Edward, winking at Wendell. “A friend of mine is a sperm whale, and he can dive a mile and a half straight down, but whenever I go with him, there’s not really much to see.” He considered for a moment, his fins drifting in the current. “Of course, it might be because I’m with a gigantic predatory whale . . .”

  Danny laughed. Wendell hunched down behind Edward’s flipper and tried to look unappetizing.

  The sea serpent cruised on through the deep green water, then started to rise toward the surface. Danny and Wendell could look down and see the sea floor beneath them. It didn’t look flat and sandy, the way that Danny had always pictured—instead it was rocky and craggy, with seaweed draped over the stones like moss.

  “Now this . . .” said Edward, sounding pleased, “this is much more interesting!” He pointed forward with a flipper. (Unfortunately it was the flipper that Wendell was clinging to, and the iguana squeaked as he was whipped back and forth.)

  Far ahead of them, the sea floor suddenly erupted into a riot of color and motion. It looked like an underwater carnival had been set up among the stones.

  “Ooooh. . . .” said Danny.

  “A coral reef! Wow!” said Wendell.

  “I thought you didn’t know anything about the ocean,” said Danny accusingly.

  Wendell sniffed haughtily at him, an effect somewhat spoiled by the bubbles drifting from his nostrils.

  Edward grinned. He had teeth as long as Danny’s arm, the sight of which sent small creatures on the seabed diving for cover. “It’s a coral reef, yes. I think you’ll enjoy it. . . .”

  The reef was alive with fish—great schools of tiny, brightly colored fish, big goggle-eyed loners, pairs of fish marked like tropical birds, and drab, solitary eels. Danny and Wendell hardly knew where to look first.

  “The fish seem nervous about something,” said Wendell. Many of the smaller fish were diving for cover whenever the three of them came near, and the bright schools were roiling and flickering in a decidedly alarmed manner.

  “Sorry,” said Edward sheepishly. “That’s because of me.” The sea serpent tried to make himself look small, which was an entirely lost cause. “Here, you guys go on . . . I’ll move off a bit.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea . . . ?” Wendell began, but Danny pushed past him.

  “Pfff! Don’t be such a worry wart, Wendell. It’s not like the fish breathe fire.”

  By the time the iguana had thought up a really good reply to this, his friend was halfway across the reef, harassing an octopus. Wendell gave up, nervously waved to the distant Edward, and swam to join Danny.

  “Look!” said the dragon excitedly. “It can change colors!”

  The octopus obligingly turned purple, then white, then purple with white stripes.

  Wendell was forced to admit that this was indeed pretty cool. The octopus waved a tentacle smugly and added green polka dots.

  “Bet you can’t do plaid!” said Danny.

  It blinked several times, then screwed up its eyes and gritted its beak. Danny and Wendell leaned forward, fascinated. Colors split and scattered across its skin.

  With an almost audible pop! the stripes wavered, straightened, and turned into a quite respectable plaid.

  Danny and Wendell cheered. The octopus flapped a tentacle at them, looking dazed, then turned a rather dull pink and crawled away under a rock.

  “That was aw
esome!”

  Wendell pawed the last of the sea cucumber’s guts out of his ears. “What? You want even weirder fish? It wasn’t enough getting nearly eaten by a shark and barfed on by a—sea—slug—thing—”

  “Actually, sea slugs are something else again,” said Edward helpfully. “That was a sea cucumber, which is an invertebrate—”

  “I don’t care!” Wendell tried to throw his hands in the air, realized too late that he was underwater, and flailed rather aimlessly instead. Danny had to grab his tail to haul him back down to the reef. “There could be all kinds of monsters down there!”

  “Well, of course there could be,” said Danny. “What’s wrong with that?”

  It occurred to Wendell that he was talking to a dragon and a sea serpent, who might well be related to whatever sort of monsters were lurking in the ocean depths.

  “Besides,” said Danny, slapping the iguana on the back, “it’ll be an adventure! You worry too much! How long have you known me? Have I gotten you killed yet?”

  “A shark nearly ate us ten minutes ago!”

  “But it didn’t, did it?”

  He was doing it again, Wendell thought. Danny had this habit of sounding dreadfully reasonable, and then no matter what Wendell said, he sounded like an idiot, or worse, a wimp, and then before the iguana quite knew what was happening, he was doing something that would require firefighters, long explanations to his parents, or on one memorable occasion, sixteen stitches.

  Wendell adjusted his glasses, which kept trying to float off his nose, and sighed. The bubbles from the sigh slipped around the sides of his snout and went skittering off toward the surface of the sea. Wendell wished he could follow them.

  “If I get eaten,” he said grimly, “I am never speaking to you again, Danny Dragonbreath.”