Fool's Gold

by Jon Hollins

  Study dragons. Will felt his knuckles clench, unclench. Clench again. Study the fuckers that took my farm from me.

  He breathed steadily, waited for his vision to broaden back from the pinpoint it wanted to become. He opened his hands, joined the others at the fire. Staring at this woman suspiciously wouldn’t help much. It was like his father used to say: A breeched calf didn’t turn itself around just because you gave it the stink-eye. You wanted to sort out a problem, you better just get elbow deep in cow vagina.

  His father, Will reflected, had not had much poetry in his heart.

  Still, the advice was sound enough. “I’m sorry,” he said, to Quirk, doing his best to keep his voice calm. “I’m still having some trouble with the bit where you actually study dragons.”

  “Really?” Quirk’s eyebrows lifted in what appeared to be genuine surprise. “Well, they’re fascinating creatures. And we still know barely anything about them. We haven’t a clue how they generate the fire they breathe. Some sort of flammable fluid secreted from a sac inside the cheeks or throat is the most likely explanation, but then how do they light it? And how do they even get off the ground? The sheer mass of them speaks against it. The ideal of course would be to get to dissect one—”

  “Dissect one?” Will wasn’t sure if he should laugh or shout in anger. “Of course. Just walk right up to a member of the Consortium and ask if you can slit them up the belly.” He put a hand to his head. “Gods. Study them? Have you ever even seen one? You don’t…”

  He trailed off as Quirk avoided his eye. It couldn’t be… But the facts were there in front of him, writ large in her body language.

  “Wait,” he said. “You study dragons and you’ve never even seen one?”

  “Well, I’ve seen… drawings,” said Quirk defensively. “And I have read some very detailed, albeit partial, descriptions of them. Though some did seem like they exaggerated a little.” She chuckled slightly to herself. “One of them described a creature over twenty feet long. Can you imagine? I mean, the flight mechanics are improbable enough for a creature half that size—”

  “Twenty feet?” Will cut her off again. “You think twenty feet is improbably long for a dragon?” His laughter felt almost hysterical. This was deranged.

  “Well, obviously,” said Quirk, shuffling back from the fire a little. “I mean just think of the thrust needed to get something…” And then she finally caught on. “You’ve seen a dragon? Actually seen one? Living?”

  “Seen one?” Will spat. “I’ve had my whole fucking life ruined by one.”

  “And it was over twenty feet long?” Quirk asked with, Will thought, a certain amount of callousness.

  “Great big varmints.” Firkin decided to chime in. “Rats of the sky, I say. If rats breathed fire and ate cattle, like.” A dreamy look entered his eyes. “Oh that’d be a rat, that would. I’d like one of those rats. Keep him as a pet and call him Lawrence.”

  The time had come, Will decided, to reveal certain truths to Quirk. “Mattrax,” he said, “the dragon who governs this northern tip of the Kondorra valley, which we are oh so lucky to be in right now, is fifty yards from snout to tail and considered runty for his kind. It gives him a shitty attitude, but it’s hard to pick out because all the dragons in the Consortium have shitty attitudes. They live in vast fortresses, surrounded by guards picked from the arse-end of humanity, who love nothing more than to go around beating their arbitrary rules into the people who live near them. And then every year they send out tax collectors to steal as much of your coin as they can simply so they can sit on it and feel fucking pretty. The only time they drag their sagging guts out of their caves is so they can steal a few cattle for a midafternoon snack, and literally shit on the people whom they govern. That is, in fact, a little game for Mattrax. To see how many people he can hit with a single bowel movement. As a species they are so comfortable with the idea of being evil overlords that they actually hold gatherings from time to time in the core of an active volcano. That is who you study. Tyrants. Arseholes with wings.”

  He was he realized, leaning forward into the fire. Spittle sprayed with his words, the rage in his gut boiling hotter than the flames.

  “They took my farm,” he said, and he felt his eyes sting. “They took everything from me. Everything. The farm my mother and father had built with their own hands.” The thought was almost too raw for him to utter. “And now I’m sitting in a cave that smells of dead bodies and shit.”

  Balur shifted uncomfortably. “Being sorry for that,” he said, tapping his stomach. “Raw goblin… Never be sitting well.”

  There was nothing but silence for a long time.

  “Well, the problem is,” Quirk said, sounding apologetic, “thaumatobiologists stopped going out in the field a hundred years ago or so. Self-preservation, really. There was a high propensity for them to be consumed by the subjects they were studying. In fact, if my research is correct, I’m the first thaumatobiologist to attempt the field study of dragons in approximately two hundred years.”

  There was, Will thought, an unwelcome note of pride slipping into her voice at the end.

  “No,” he said. “The problem is that you’re studying them, when really what we should be doing is killing them and selling them for parts.” The laugh that came up from him was an ugly, unfamiliar thing. That was something else Mattrax had given him. Bitterness. “At least,” he said, “that way I’d have enough money to pay off my taxes and get my farm back.”

  “In my experience,” Balur said, pulling a small steel flask from his belt, “if you are needing coin, it is best to be just taking it.”

  Will heard his bitter laugh again. It sounded no better this time around. “The only one with any coin around here is Mattrax.”

  Balur unstoppered his flask, swigged, and smiled, showing every one of his stained yellow teeth. “So be stealing from Mattrax.”

  Steal from Mattrax.

  Memory rushed over Will like a wave, carried him to another time, another place.

  It was a sunny afternoon. His back was pressed against a tree. There was a blue sky above his head. Birdsong and laughter. The memory was a collage of details scattered over a sketched in world. He was young. What…? Six? Perhaps seven? His father had sent him to pick up apples in the orchard before they rotted but he was shirking his duties. So was Firkin.

  The man was… Was he so different back then from the man Will had met in the cave? His beard was cropped more closely, perhaps. But his hair was still wild, though perhaps more in the way a hare is wild than a wolf. And the potbelly was yet to fully manifest. There was less gray and more brown about his temples. And the eyes… They stood out clear in the memory. There was a calmness there that no longer existed.

  Eighteen years ago. Barely any time at all, and somehow a lifetime as well.

  “It’s good here, Firkin,” Will had said, his voice reedy with youth, the words spat around a mouthful of apple.

  Firkin had nodded, taken the time to swallow his own mouthful before replying. “You da runs a good place.”

  “No.” That wasn’t what Will had meant. “This place.” He swept his arm expansively. “Kondorra. The valley.”

  He expected Firkin’s smile. Firkin had a smile that shone in rooms like the sun shone through the window. He had a smile that got in your belly and lifted it up like it could carry you away over the hills.

  But Firkin didn’t smile. Firkin grimaced instead. “She’s seen better days, Will. This valley has.”

  Will didn’t understand. But he didn’t want Firkin to know he didn’t understand. Firkin didn’t treat him like he was little. Firkin treated him like he was big. And Firkin was funny too. He told jokes that made Ma cluck her tongue. Will didn’t want Firkin to start thinking he was little and stop telling jokes.

  “Yeah,” he said instead. “But the dragons keep it nice.”

  He’d seen Mattrax once. And if he was honest it had been terrifying. The crashing of his wings. The roar of his voice.
The panic of the animals. His mother’s sharp shriek. The tightness in his father’s eyes. But afterward… Afterward there had been something magnificent about the vastness of the dragon, of knowing that he was theirs. Of knowing that he had chosen to take Kondorra and make it his special place.

  He knew about the gods, of course. His ma and pa had taken special care to make sure he knew Lawl, and his wife Betra, and their children, Toil, Klink, and Knole. But the gods got confusing with Cois who was Lawl’s daughter and Toil’s sister-daughter. And then there was Barph, the absent god, who was Cois’s son, but also her lover, and who was Betra’s daughter too.

  Will really didn’t understand Cois at all.

  But in the end it all came to the same thing: No god had manifested in Kondorra in years. That was what everybody had said. In contrast, Mattrax was real.

  Which all added up to considerable confusion on his part when Firkin cuffed him on the back of the head. “Don’t you ever be saying that. You hear me, boy?”

  Firkin’s eyes were glittering hard, and there were no smiles in him as he glared at Will.

  Will felt his lip start to tremble, felt tears pushing up behind his eyes.

  “Oh Cois’s cock,” Firkin said, rolling his eyes. “I didn’t mean…” He pulled Will to him in a rough hug. “And pretend I didn’t say that about Cois and her… his… pissing god. Oh and pretend I didn’t… You know what?” He held Will by the arms, and held him so he could look him in the eye. “The gods have abandoned this valley, so as long as you don’t tell your mother I said so, piss on the gods. Even though Cois would probably enjoy it.”

  Will didn’t know exactly what Firkin was talking about, but he knew his ma would do more than cluck her tongue at that. He giggled through his tears.

  “I’m sorry I had rough words for you,” said Firkin. “But you’ve got some things backwards there, and they rubbed me backwards, and some beasts don’t like that, if you follow me.”

  Will sniffed, and nodded. “I follow.” And that was mostly true.

  “You weren’t here before the dragons,” Firkin said. “And sometimes I forget that.” He let Will go, and grabbed another apple off the ground. He took a bite. “Not that it were all that,” he said, still chewing and spraying chunks of white apple flesh across the orchard in a way that kept Will smiling. “Lords will always be lords, and taxes will always be taxes, and nobles will always be colossal bastards all the world over.” He leaned in and nodded sagely. “They say you’re a bastard if you don’t know who your pa was, but if a man can tell you who his pa was eight generations back… that’s when you know you’ve got a real bastard.”

  Will’s tears were long forgotten by now.

  “No,” said Firkin. “It weren’t perfect, but it worked. People bitched and moaned. I bitched and moaned, for that matter. But we got by. Wasn’t no golden-age bullshit, like some will tell you—”

  Will giggled again.

  “—but it were all right.”

  Another grimace. “Then Mattrax and the rest of those…” He hesitated. “Well,” he said with another knowing nod, “maybe you’re not quite old enough for me to use the word that really describes those dragons. But they came along. And there was a fight.”

  Will was old enough to know that there had been a war. He’d seen the grave markers around the temple in the village. He’d heard the scraps of stories his ma exchanged with those who came to buy eggs and milk each morning.

  “Why’d folk fight, Firkin?” asked. He’d never quite understood that bit.

  “Well.” Firkin shrugged. “The nobles may be bastards, but they also know that if some great fire-breathing beast out of legend lands himself in the middle of a field that you should probably go stab him before he eats up too many of the farmers. That’s the idea about taxes, you see? The farmer pays them, and the noble uses them to pay the soldiers to stab stuff before it eats the farmer. We’ve lost that idea since Mattrax and his lot came along. Now the soldiers are more likely to stab the farmers. But that was the original idea.”

  “The dragons ate farmers?” Will had definitely never heard that before.

  “Mostly they ate the soldiers actually.” Firkin shrugged. “Touch of irony there.”

  “So what if they hadn’t attacked?” It seemed to Will that if this whole attacking thing happened then everyone would be happier, along with Firkin.

  “Well,” said Firkin, ruffling Will’s hair, “in that case the dragons would have gone and eaten all the nobles, and if there’s one thing the nobles like even less than dragons eating all the farmers, it’s dragons eating all of them.”

  Will had never truly considered what Mattrax ate before. Thinking about it now, he felt again some of the fear that he’d felt when he’d seen the dragon fly over him. And while he was mostly convinced Firkin was telling him a tall tale, given Mattrax’s size, the dragon could eat a person. Will shuddered slightly.

  “So pretty much the dragons ate the soldiers, and then they ate the nobles,” Firkin went on. “And somewhere along the way, the farmers started fighting too.”

  “Why?” So far it seemed to Will that nobody had actually been threatening to eat the farmers and the whole thing still felt a lot like a giant misunderstanding.

  “Because they were fucking idiots,” Firkin said, with a certain amount of feeling.

  Something about the way he said it felt odd to Will, even at six years old. “Did you fight?” he asked.

  Firkin shrugged. “Let me just figure out how to tell this, would you?”

  Will mimed buttoning his lips. Firkin laughed. Buttoning his lips always made Firkin laugh. And that made Will laugh, though he did his best to keep his lips shut.

  “So the farmers fought. And they did it because… Well, men and women get used to a certain way of living. And even if it’s not a great way to live, they’ll oftentimes fight to protect it. They get scared of a future they don’t know. Like a room you’ve never been in before and there aren’t any lights. So you stay in the room you know, where the lights are. You understand?”

  Will nodded. He understood enough.

  “And to be fair, when you know the next room has a dragon in it, then you’re probably smart to stay where you are,” Firkin said with a strange, sad smile. “And I think that back when they started out, the farmers really thought they had a chance. Gods still manifested in Kondorra from time to time back in those days. And they seemed to think that the great father Lawl, or the protective mother Betra, or hardworking Toil, or someone would come and deliver them from their woes. Even if all a god normally did when it was manifested was whore around and break bits of the world.” He shook his head.

  Will risked a question. “What’s whoring around?”

  Firkin looked at him and grimaced. “It’s… it’s a bit like running round all the farmhouses and sticking your finger in all the pies, and licking the finger in between without washing it. Except worse.”

  Will imagined every mistress of every household in a rage at him, and wasn’t entirely sure what could be worse than that. Still, he let the issue lie for now. Firkin’s story was a good one.

  “Did a god come?” he asked.

  “The gods did jack and shit, Will,” Firkin said and threw away his apple core so hard it broke in two when it hit another tree. “Not a sight nor a sound of them. Not even hardworking Toil, who some said was patron of this place. Not protective mother Betra. Not law-obsessed Lawl. None of them. The farmers got eaten up along with everyone else.”

  “All of the farmers,” Will asked incredulous.

  “Not all of them, you dolt,” said Firkin with a roll of his eyes. “I’m still here, aren’t I? Your ma and pa are still here. But enough.” His voice grew somber. “Enough got eaten up. Until we gave up, said enough, said we’d do whatever the dragons asked of us.”

  “What do they ask of us?” Will was trying to imagine Mattrax swooping down off a mountain and landing in front of his mother’s kitchen door, and demanding a pie from h
er.

  Firkin smiled, big and broad, and absent of all mirth. “Little things, Will. Little things. They asked us to live in fear. They asked us to give up anything we held dear whenever they wanted it. They asked us to live in poverty. They asked us to scrape by in the dirt when once we used to walk… maybe not tall, but not stooped either.”

  And Will thought again of the shadow in the sky, of the panic in the fields, and of his mother’s scream. And he thought of other things too. He thought of the times he had gone to bed hungry. He thought of the hours his father spent repairing rusting farm tools. He thought of the uniformed men and women who came each year and took away the small coffer of coins his father kept in the corner of the kitchen.

  And in his mind that shadow in the sky grew, and the sun didn’t shine so bright above his head.

  But above all, one thing troubled him. “Firkin,” he said, “why didn’t you fight?”

  Firkin gave another small sad smile. “Nobles aren’t the only one who don’t want to die,” he said.

  And that did seem reasonable to Will. So he switched to a new line of thought. “We should kill Mattrax now,” he said. The job had clearly not been done right when the dragons first came; he supposed it was up to him now.

  Firkin laughed out loud at that. Normally Will liked it when Firkin laughed. It meant something funny had just happened. But now he had an unpleasant feeling that the funny thing was him.

  “What?” he said. “He’s a bad guy. You said.”

  “Aye.” Firkin nodded. “And I’m glad you listened and you figured that out. But a lot better than us have tried to kill the dragons and they haven’t had much luck so far. And while I’m not so keen on being eaten up by a dragon, I’m even less keen on being flayed alive by your ma when I tell her how you’ve been eaten up.”

  And that did seem like reasonable logic to Will. But it also led to an impasse. There was a bad guy, someone to be defeated. In all the stories his ma and pa had told him, all the fairy tales and religious fables, the bad guy was faced down and eventually slain.