by Patty Jansen
Another jump.
It tossed its head, uttering a low growl.
There was something stuck in one of its nostrils.
“Come here,” Nellie said, reaching out her hand and taking a step closer.
The dragon raised its head and looked at her as if it had forgotten she was there.
“Come. It’ll get it out for you.”
The kitten wriggled from her grip and trotted up to the dragon.
The dragon lowered its head and sniffed the tiny kitten. But the sniffing made it sneeze again. The kitten jumped and scurried back to Nellie, its tail all fluffed up like a brush.
Nellie was so close that she could feel the warm air of the dragon’s breath.
Warmth could mean the difference between life and death in winter. She could survive until the morning without food or water, but if she couldn’t keep herself warm, she’d be dead by morning.
The dragon might well be her only chance of survival.
“Come,” she said again.
She touched the dragon’s snout, ready to pull her hand away. My, its breath was really warm.
It didn’t jerk back or try to snap at her hand, so she let it glide over the warm skin, coming closer to the nostril. Its ear twitched.
Her fingers probed into the nostril opening and met the irritating object. Nellie pushed her index finger and middle finger together to grab hold of it and pull it out. It was a splinter of wood.
The dragon shook its head so vigorously that its ears flapped against its neck. It blew out a cloud of warm air, then pushed its head into her hand, as if it were a kitten. She patted the warm snout.
The kitten jumped onto the dragon’s head and the dragon lifted it up.
Nellie found it hard to believe that such a creature was evil. Whatever Lord Verdonck and Madame Sabine had tried to do to it must have been bad.
“Those people must have terrified you.” She slid her hand over the smooth skin. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. People will want to kill you. You better go back into your box.”
But when she pulled out the box, the dragon shied back. It blew out a gust of hot breath.
“All right, calm down.” She put the box back into her bag.
A young voice said, “Whoa, look at that!”
A group of three children peeked out of an alley. They stood in the corner in the faint glow of the street lamp. They were street urchins in worn clothes.
“Is that really a dragon?”
“Don’t come closer,” Nellie called out to them.
“Is it dangerous? You better watch out, miss. It might eat you.”
She still had no idea what dragons ate. Especially this one, which had been locked inside a box for the best part of twenty years. It was a magical dragon, but it felt real and solid. It had to eat something to sustain itself.
“Oh, look at that,” another child said. “There’s a cute kitten on its head.”
The dragon lowered its head, blowing smoke over the street. The children laughed and squealed.
It seemed like the dragon was enjoying itself.
“Did you just fly here on the back of that dragon?” a girl said to Nellie, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. She remembered how both Princess Celine and Prince Bruno, as toddlers, had no trouble believing their mother’s stories about ghosts. Just like these kids had no issue with the fact that a dragon was in the street. They knew what dragons looked like. There were plenty of pictures of eastern dragons, and this was clearly one.
“That’s means you’re a dragon tamer!” the girl shouted, her voice excited.
The boy gave Nellie a suspicious look. “She doesn’t look like a dragon tamer. I don’t know any girl dragon tamers. Dragon tamers wear armour, not aprons.”
“Girls can be dragon tamers if they want.”
“They cannot.”
“Can so.”
“Children, please.” These kids would bring everyone into the street with their shouting. “The dragon needs a place to hide. Do you know one around here?”
The boy’s eyes widened. “I can ask my mum if the dragon can sleep in our shed.”
“Well . . .” Nellie wasn’t sure if the boy’s mother should become involved.
“Tell it to wait here,” the boy said. He ran off into the side alley.
Nellie didn’t like waiting here in the street. Even if the dragon wanted to stay with her, she didn’t want to be found with it; and besides, she was getting very cold. She walked into the alley where the boy had disappeared, and the other children followed her.
“My brother is stupid,” the girl said to Nellie. “Girls can so be dragon tamers.” She glanced at the dragon. “Can I touch it?”
“It’s a wild dragon. It may be dangerous.”
“That kitten doesn’t think so.”
“It’s a magical dragon.”
“I’m not scared of magic.”
“What’s your name?”
“Anneke.”
“Anneke, is your full name Johanna, after the queen?”
She pulled a face. “I don’t like that name. Nobody uses full names. Only nasty nobles.”
A couple of people were coming down the alley. It was very dark, and one was carrying a lamp.
A woman said, “Nellie?”
Nellie recognised the voice. “Mina! I was worried about what happened to you.”
She fell into her friend’s arms.
“You’re not the girl’s mother, aren’t you?” She was pretty sure Mina’s children were grown.
“Not me. But Bas was talking about a dragon, and I thought I’d better check this out.”
“I feared you were in the poorhouse after you got evicted from the church.”
“No, Never that place. It’s full of leery men and drunkards. I wouldn’t want to subject any children to that. But what about you? Little Bas tells me you have a dragon.”
“I wouldn’t call it mine. It’s following me around and creating a lot of trouble for me, but I don’t know that it will listen to me.”
Nellie stepped aside so that Mina’s light reached the dragon which had followed into the alley. The passage was so narrow that the dragon’s sides brushed the walls. Its head was fully in the pool of light from the lamp. The scales and comblike protuberance on its head gleamed in the low light. The orange eyes blinked.
Mina gasped. “My, you really do have a dragon.”
“You never believe us,” Anneke said.
“You are very good at telling fibs, young lady.” And then she turned to Nellie. “The dragon chose to be with you? Where did you get it?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Lucky we have a nice dry barn. It’s a bit cold, but it’s better than being on the street. Come with me.”
Mina took her down the alley, and the children followed. Nellie looked over her shoulder. The dragon was coming, too.
On the way, Mina told her that after Shepherd Wilfridus evicted the group from the church, Mina had asked a friend for help.
“Zelda is a wayfarer, and she knows all the good places to stay. She has saved all our lives and our dignity besides. Our only other option was the poorhouse.”
Mina led Nellie to a tall building on the right.
A plank of wood had once been a door, but it was rotten and the door had fallen off its hinges. Mina and the children pushed it aside.
The warehouse hall beyond was more than two floors high, lit by the flames from a lusty fire that burned in a fire pit in the middle of the floor.
It looked like this had been a stable for coaches and horses. There was even a hayloft above.
The people had put what meagre possessions they had salvaged from the church in the dark space underneath the hayloft. Planks of wood had been removed—and probably burned in the fire—to turn it from a stable into an area where people could sleep in the straw. In an adjacent pen stood a scruffy donkey.
Several people sat around the fire, most of them women
.
“Nellie!” one of them called out. Next thing, Jantien came running towards her.
Nellie took her friend into her arms. “Oh, I’m so glad to see you. Are you and the children all here?”
“Yes, all of them. I’m trying to get money to follow my husband to Florisheim. Zelda has jobs for us to do.”
Nellie glanced over her shoulder at the other women. She recognised some who had also been in the church. She didn’t know their names, but they were, like Jantien, ordinary citizens who had fallen on hard times.
The children looked at the dragon from the door.
It didn’t fit through the door opening and had stayed behind in the courtyard.
Some of the children were very small. A boy had taken a stick, which he swung at the dragon.
“Behave yourself!” Mina called. “Here is Nellie who was so nice to help us when we lived in the church. She does not want any of you to touch her dragon. It’s a dangerous magical creature.”
The children disappeared into the darkness anyway.
Most of the adults had also gone to the door. The women were not happy to see a dragon standing out there. One woman fell to her knees in prayer. Another went to the corner of the warehouse, got a broom, ready to defend herself.
“That beast has to go,” she announced. She was a sturdy type, not afraid to defend herself.
“I don’t think it’s dangerous,” Nellie said. Of course, the dragon could definitely be dangerous. “It seems to like the kitten, and it seems to like me, and I think it also likes children.”
The woman snorted. “To eat, certainly?”
“If it was hungry, it had many opportunities to do me harm, or to eat these children, or eat the kitten.”
A couple of women gathered up the children, who were all watching the dragon, much less scared than the adults. They ushered the little ones back inside. A little girl carried the kitten.
The dragon leapt across the courtyard like a giant cat and tried to squeeze into the door.
The sturdy woman hit its snout with a broom. Another slammed the piece of wood that served as a door in its face.
“Quick, put some heavy things behind the wood. It wants to come in.”
Two women barred the door with a broom and a stick. They were about to drag a bag full of firewood in front of the door when a bright glow oozed underneath the door. The very real dragon had turned back into a fire dragon. The women retreated.
“Evil magic!” one shouted.
The fire dragon flitted through the hall, frolicked up to the ceiling and landed in the hayloft. A shower of magic sparks blew up.
The dragon returned to its former size.
The sturdy woman climbed halfway up the ladder and yelled at the creature from her safe position. She still held the broom.
“Take it back outside!” she yelled at Nellie. “It’s gone to sleep. My children sleep up there and I’m not having them in the same place as that creature.”
“Mam, it’s a warm creature,” Anneke said. “I’m not afraid of it.”
The girl’s mother glared first at her daughter and then at Nellie. She was a coarse, heavyset woman with a strong brow and a severe bun at the back of her head with hair that had gone grey.
Nellie’s cheeks glowed.
“If that creature is going is to follow you around, you can’t stay with us.”
Mina said, “I think that’s unfair. Nellie has brought us food all the time. She says the dragon is just following her around. It’s not her fault it’s here.”
“But she still can’t stay. It will bring us into danger, that’s why.”
“It brought Nellie into danger to bring us food. She risked herself by taking things from the kitchen without the knowledge of the Regent. Are you going to be so ungrateful as to send her away?”
The woman glared at Mina.
“Nellie helped us when our life was hard. So now we will help her, dragon or no, and that is the final word I will hear about it.”
She looked around the group. The expressions in the faces of several women were not terribly friendly, but none of them said anything.
“So the kitten is the dragon’s real friend?” Anneke asked.
“I think so.” Nellie spoke softly, aware that all the women listened.
“Then I will bring the kitten upstairs.”
Anneke picked up the kitten.
“You will do no such thing,” her mother said. “Stay right here.”
“But Mam, she’s a dragon tamer,” Anneke said. “She came here on the back of the dragon.”
The woman said, “Is that so?” She gave Nellie a suspicious look.
And Mina said, “This is Agatha, the mother of Anneke and Bas.”
Nellie held out her hand. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Nellie.”
The woman gave another snort. She shook Nellie’s hand, reluctantly. “I don’t do all that magic stuff.”
“Me neither.”
“Good. Because I want none of that near my children.”
“She really is a dragon tamer, Mam,” Anneke said again.
“I don’t want to hear any more about it.”
“Can I take the kitten up to the loft?”
“What did I just tell you?”
“But Mam! Ewout is going up.”
One of Jantien’s boys was climbing the ladder, peeking up to the loft to spy on the dragon.
“I don’t care what Ewout does. Maybe his mother doesn’t mind him being struck dumb with magic. But I do. You and Bas will stay here.”
The girl started crying and Mina took Nellie to introduce her to the others.
“I’m sorry for creating trouble for you,” Nellie said.
“Don’t worry about it. Agatha is a little terse sometimes,” Mina said.
“I really don’t control that beast,” Nellie said.
“You’ll be fine. She’ll warm up to you. Let me introduce you to the others.”
Apart from Jantien, Nellie knew a few other people in the group.
Emmie and Lise were a mother and daughter who both used to work in the household of a well-off merchant family. Lise was twenty, and Emmie mentioned that her greatest worry was that, because they were poor, her daughter would never marry.
Gertie, Hilde and Josie had all lost husbands.
“He took off with a trollop from the harbourside,” Gertie said. “A whore, that’s what she is. Her boobs are bigger than mine, but I bet she can’t even boil an egg. Men are disgusting. Be glad you’re not married.” The latter to Lise.
Hilde’s husband had died of consumption. Like Mina’s, her children were older, but they had all left town.
Josie’s husband had gone missing at sea several years ago. She had lost her first and only child through illness.
Misfortune through hardship or illness was the glue that held these women together.
Koby hung out with them a lot. She was twelve, the eldest child in the group, but her face had already lost all her childish softness.
“Both her parents are dead,” Mina said in a quiet voice. “She has an uncle, but he doesn’t want to care for her. It’s very sad. I try to help her where I can, but she’s very closed to outsiders.”
Most of the children were Jantien’s. Ewout, the oldest, still stood on the ladder gawking at the dragon, and the dragon gawked back at him. He had gone a few steps higher, and his younger sister was right below him, while Anneke and her brother glared at them from where they sat.
Ewout said, “Yes, he likes the kitten.”
“He?” Mina said.
“It’s a boy dragon, hadn’t you noticed? He’s got . . .” He made a swinging motion in front of his lower body.
The children laughed and a few declared that they wanted to see it.
They all crowded at the bottom of the ladder. Jantien told them to take a peek, but not go to the top of the ladder.
Anneke crossed her arms over her chest and kept glaring at her mother, and Agatha pretended not to no
tice.
“And this is Zelda,” Mina said to Nellie.
The final woman in the group to meet Nellie was of tiny stature. She wore several layers of clothing of a foreign style, with big colourful patterns. A faded yellow scarf sat around her hair. The wisps that poked out from underneath were black. Her eyes were dark brown, like those of a cow, even if she had pale and freckled skin. Her face was sharp, with a rather big nose. And were those really golden earrings that poked out from underneath her scarf?
She looked Nellie up and down.
“Hmph, can you work?” She spoke with a curious accent.
“I’ve worked all my life. Depends what kind of work.”
“Do you know anything about donkeys?”
“Not really. I worked in households.”
“Ha! Washerwoman. That’s all people do around here. Wash, wash, wash. No wonder the water is so foul. Do you know about plants?”
“Herbs? A bit.”
“Good. You can come with me.”
“What? Now?”
What sort of strange woman was this?
“Ha! No. Tomorrow. We sell herbs. You come with me. It’s a good job. We have money to eat.”
Nellie glanced at Mina, but Mina smiled and nodded. “It’s all right.”
“Ha, all right. Of course it’s all right. I’m Zelda. I make the people better. Local woman say the herbs are good, so the rich woman believe the herbs are good. Woman feels better, gives more money. Ha.”
“What about the dragon, Zelda?” Mina asked.
“Dragon make us rich.”
“I meant how can we hide it?”
“Dragon makes poop. We can do much things with dragon poop. We can dry it, we can make it into a salve, we can make pills. Rich men will pay a lot because dragon poop makes them like a dragon, you know, in the bed. When the dragon does a poop, bring it to me, children.”
Anneke and Bas laughed. The other children came down the ladder to see what was so funny.
“What do we get when we bring you poop?” Ewout asked.
“Ha! You’re getting smart already. You get poop, we get money. We can buy sweets, no?”
The children’s eyes shone.
Mina still insisted, “But how can we make sure no one sees the dragon?”
“No one will see. Dragons are lazy. They sleep and sleep and sleep. They make much poop.”
