by G. Wulfing
The Dragon’s Boy
Copyright 2016 G. Wulfing
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Table of contents:
The Dragon’s Boy
About G. Wulfing
The Dragon’s Boy
Prologue:
Landscape.
Blue and green, like an embroidered tapestry thrown and draped over the earth, like a rich quilt or lush rug, the land was spread out. In the mild, early morning light, a river gleamed like silver thread, winding between green hills. Beyond the hills the mountains rested, a deep distance-blue wash over the dark green of their forests. The sky above them was a soft pale blue; utterly peaceful. On the lower slopes of the foothills, and in the rolling green pastureland before them, small wood and stone houses clustered, and in one gentle fold in the land they gathered together to form a sheltered village. Hedges and grey stone walls wandered over the curves and into the little valleys, dividing dark brown ploughed fields from tawny ones of stubble and verdant ones inhabited by tiny white puffs of sheep and slightly larger brown spots of cattle. Lines of willows beginning to turn yellow marked the edges of streams. Small birds chirped and twittered. The air was dewy and crisp with the beginning of Autumn.
High on her hill, beneath an ancient pine wood that lay opposite the mountains and their foothills, a crimson dragon looked out at the land, noting again how beautiful it was. She wondered how long it would be before the people here, too, chased her away. She shifted her hind legs slightly where she sat, and winced. There was a gaping, unhealed wound in her left flank where a sword had bitten her.
The tapestry glimmered before her, blue and green and silver. It really was beautiful.
The dragon sighed.
I.
Despair.
Down in the village below the mountains, a boy stacked firewood against the side of a wooden barn, taking it from a cart while the black cart-horse dozed patiently in its traces. His uncle had told him to start collecting fuel for the Winter from the woods on the hills above the village. The boy had driven the cart uphill, gathered dead branches and chopped up an old log that he had found, and brought the load back.
The boy was an orphan. His name was Jack. He lived with his uncle and aunt, who appreciated the facts that he worked hard, only had to be told anything once, and rarely spoke. The other people in the village ignored him, mostly because of the last fact. He was strange; too quiet; a bit queer perhaps. He was harmless, wouldn’t hurt a snail, and did not seem to mind being ignored; so they ignored him. Occasionally, some of the other boys would mock him, but he never reacted and never had, so in general they left him alone.
Jack’s uncle kept pigs, and it was Jack’s job to clean out the sties. The pigs liked him because he was not loud nor boorish nor unsympathetic, unlike many of the youths in the village. Jack liked animals.
He patted the cart-horse’s broad black neck as he led the animal around to the front of the barn. Between them they backed the cart into its place, then Jack unhitched the traces and stood unharnessing the horse. Jack’s uncle was proud of his animals and took good care of them, calling each by name, while he and his wife frequently referred to Jack as ‘boy’, a custom followed by their children, who also used ‘Pigjack’; not really as an insult, just a label, a name. Jack answered to everything.
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Up on the hill opposite, under the edge of the pine wood, a creature who had been called far worse names lifted her weary, ragged wings. She was thin and ribby from hunger, having flown for three days and two nights from her last home, without finding anything to eat. Exhausted, she had half crash-landed on this hill, and had slept for a night and a day, then woken and dozed for another night. Now she had to find food.
She flapped several times, drawing her hind legs under her with a flinch of pain, then leapt into the air with a big downward stroke of her wings. She fluttered feebly before thumping to the ground, letting out a shriek as her hind legs collapsed underneath her. The sound carried out over the valley. The dragon hoped that no one had heard it.
She dragged herself back under the shelter of the pine wood that blanketed the crest of the hill and the slope behind her. There would be no food here, she could tell; it was the wrong kind of wood.
The dragon rested for a few minutes. She did not think she could last another day without food. There was no water on this hill, either. She had to move, and now, before she grew any weaker. There would be food in the village, but the dragon knew better than to try there. She must make for the forest beyond it, on the mountains.
She slithered out from under the pines again, her scaled tail dragging softly through the deep pine-needle carpet underfoot. Again she pushed upwards from the ground, again she thrashed with her stiff, weary wings. This time she managed to struggle into the air, and she flew off ungracefully to her right, parallel to the mountains, in order to avoid approaching the village. After a minute or two she turned and headed for the mountains, estimating that she was distant enough from the humans’ habitations not to be seen. As she flew, the small amount of energy that she possessed drained from her wings and body and she lost altitude, so that she flopped onto a slope considerably further below the tree-line than she had meant to. Collecting her rattled body, she crawled, panting, up the mountainside, past grey boulders, half-embedded in the turf, which littered the slope, and lay down, wheezing, in the shelter of the trees.
For a few moments she lay still on her belly, neck outstretched, her mind blank with exhaustion.
Then she dragged herself upright. Food. Was there any food here? She could smell water further up.
Before long she found the stream: broad, shallowish, and rocky bottomed, running away downhill to her right. There were huge rambling blackberry bushes growing at its edge – at last! The dragon ate every berry she could find that was black or even red. Her tough crimson snout nosed deep into the bushes, plunging in as far as her long neck would reach. Once she had combed through the berry bushes, she lay down in the stream, drinking again and letting the cold water numb her bruises; but it stung too much to let the water touch her wound.
After a while she clambered up onto the bank. As she heaved herself out of the stream, her tail struck the water with a splash that wet the blackberry bushes.
The dragon looked around at the woods. This place would do, for now, at least. She crawled away to look for somewhere to rest.
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For six days the dragon ranged the slopes of that mountainside, finding berries and wild apples and crabapples, drinking from pools and clear, fast-flowing mountain streams. She ate mushrooms and toadstools, even poisonous ones like the red, white-spotted fly agaric. She licked the tacky, sugary sap from tree trunks where branches had broken off, scraping up the hard-set dribbles with her sharp teeth, which left them sticky. She would scale the trunk like a cat, digging her curved claws into the bark and wrapping her long tail several times around the tree, and would cling there like an oversized lizard, to the consternation of the birds, stroking the sap meditatively with her tongue.
The dragon began to regain her strength; but as the days passed, the sword wound in her leg grew inflamed and sore; then swollen and buzzing; until finally it began to throb.
Now the leg was too painful to use, and the dragon limped slowly beneath the trees, impelling herself forward with only the toes of that foot. Climbing was now too d
ifficult.
The dragon had to roam far to find enough food to keep her alive. With a painful, almost useless leg, she could not do so. Within a few days, worn out by hunger, pain, infection and loneliness, she grew weak again.
The dragon had spent her entire life being harried from place to place by humans. They thought of her as a flesh-eater; a devourer of sheep and cattle; a poisoner of water; a breather of sulphur and toxic vapours. A deadly serpent; a loathsome Worm. A killer of lambs and maidens. A servant of the Devil.
Why, the dragon did not know. She had given up trying to understand decades ago. In the two hundred or so years that she had already lived, the dragon had not spent more than twelve years in one place. She would land, make a den or two and forage quietly; but however careful and secretive she was, sooner or later someone would spot her tracks, and the humans would come after her. Sometimes a swineherd, gooseherd, or shepherd, or a hunter or traveller, would catch a glimpse of her flying above a plain or across a mountainside, and soon there would be knights with their squires or hunters with their dogs tracking her. Sometimes a village would detect her living nearby, and there would be peasants armed with farming tools searching
