The Dragon Who Didn't Fly

by C. M. Barrett

  Applause rang out. Daria did have her uses.

  Undeterred, Malvern said, “I also propose that the Earther cult be banned.”

  “As long as they continue to work and obey all laws, we have no cause to do that,” Phileas said. “If they leave their work, assemble unlawfully, or put up illegal posters, they may, of course, be tried for those crimes—but the same may apply to any sect, including the Godlies.”

  Noswan, the Godly, looked alarmed. “I second the Guardian’s opinion.”

  Today Malvern was unquenchable. “I would like to bring up one more concern. May I ask, with the greatest respect and regret, what’s being done about the Chief Healer? So shocking that she’s gone over the edge.”

  “She, likewise, is so far breaking no laws,” Phileas said through gritted teeth, “but we are, of course, very concerned about her and wish to bring her back to a healing environment.”

  Phileas barely made it to his quarters before he had to collapse in a chair. “It was only the bloodthirsty emotions of the councilors,” he said to Romala, who held her hands over his forehead.

  “That’s not an only,” she finally answered, returning her hands to her sides, “and you weren’t adequately shielded against those emotions. I had to clean out huge volumes of them. You must rest.”

  “I want to see that girl, Serazina.”

  “And you will, as soon as you’re fully well.”

  * * *

  The following night, when Tara ran to meet Orion, she saw Sekhmet instead. “What are you doing here?”

  “Nice greeting.”

  “I’m always happy to see friendly cats.”

  “It could help those who think they’re too impure for the Quest to see that you’re not the emissary of sweetness and love.”

  “I have no sweetness and love for anyone who trashes my mother. Do it when I’m big enough, and I’ll knock you on your skinny black butt.”

  “Fur and whiskers, you’re like her, down to the foul mouth.”

  Tara raised her chin. “Don’t think for a minute that you can insult me by comparing me to her.”

  They hissed at each other for a minute before Sekhmet raised a paw. “Truce, please. It may disturb you to recognize this—it certainly disturbs me—but we are kin. We are also engaged in the Quest. If we can’t elevate our spirits higher than those of the bickering humans, of what use is our work?”

  “Fine words,” Tara said, “but my mother, who is an honest cat, has told me who started hostilities.”

  Sekhmet lowered her head. “Our beginning was difficult. However, I’m willing to seek some sort of understanding between your mother and myself. I doubt that we will ever be as litter mates, but with some mutual effort, we can learn to rub together well enough.”

  “Glad to hear it. I’ll believe when I see it.”

  “Remember that the Quest is based on believing before we see. My getting along with Emerald would be one of its minor miracles. But never mind that. For you and me to rub together is far more important. I can understand why you might be a little irritable at this point. I once lived with some humans for the educational value. The food was excellent, but they thought they owned me.”

  To hear Sekhmet talk like a cat with actual feelings made Tara feel somewhat less hostile. “They do have that habit. Why don’t they realize that an animal who walks into their lives can just as easily walk out?”

  “Well said. I had to show them how possible it was. Once I’d learned all I could, I left. I’m here to share some of that knowledge with you. Orion says you’re having trouble getting through to the female human.”

  “Serazina. It’s like trying to make contact with a grasshopper. Her emotions dart around so wildly I can’t leap fast enough to keep up.”

  “That’s how they are, but if this one is a sensor she should be more receptive.”

  “She’s so afraid of her gift that she tries to dilute it with garbage, thoughts the hungriest animal wouldn’t eat.”

  “What about when she sleeps?”

  “I’m not allowed inside their dwelling,” Tara said.

  “That’s inconvenient. I wasn’t allowed out, but I found a way. You can find a way in. Where does she sleep?”

  “See that window up near the top of the house?”

  “Yes, and look, a sturdy tree grows right outside it, with a big branch. Let’s climb it.”

  The branch led to an excellent view of Serazina’s sleeping place.

  “What does she lie on?” Tara asked.

  “It’s called bed. Humans in Tamaras have soft ones, very nice, but that bed looks hard. See her eyes moving? She’s dreaming. Let’s watch.”

  Tara carefully eased her way into Serazina’s mind. The girl ran through a very wet-looking place, with clumps of ferns and moss carpeting.

  “The swamp, I think,” Sekhmet said.

  A man chased her, slowed down by the folds of his robe. “I know your secret!” he shouted.

  “That must be the Guardian,” Tara said.

  “Yes. Now see if you can inject a different feeling into this dream. Help her feel brave, strong, proud of herself.”

  “Like a cat?”

  “We’re not looking for miracles here.”

  But Tara knew cat feelings best. She formed an image of Orion, sleek and strong, his tail and head high, strolling through the forest, the sun gleaming on his fur, his eyes golden suns.

  The girl stopped and faced the Guardian. “You can only exile me, and I would welcome a free ticket out of this place.”

  “But we don’t want her to leave,” Tara said.

  “No, but it’s good for her to face and conquer her worst fears. Now think of something positive for this Guardian to say to her.”

  Tara forced her thoughts to stalk an answer. The girl was kind-hearted; a plea might work.

  “Serazina, I don’t want to exile you. I need you to help me. I need you to help Oasis.”

  She paused, and Tara felt tension drain out of Serazina’s being. “How? How can I help?”

  The dream faded.

  “Excellent,” Sekhmet said. “I suggest you visit her every night. Another thing, humans sometimes allow their focus to leave their physical surroundings when they’re awake. Look for that happening and do what you did tonight.”

  “Thank you, Sekhmet. We rubbed together well tonight.”

  The black cat touched noses with her. “We did.”

  Shortly after Sekhmet disappeared, Serazina’s father left the house. After looking around furtively, he hurried down the road and cut through the fields.

  Tara was tempted to follow him, but Orion had warned her not to leave the Clare land alone. Instead, she napped until the father came back, a few hours later, smelling of the Green. She strolled cautiously toward him.

  “Pretty cat,” he said, stroking her with big, callused hands whose roughness felt a little like Emerald’s tongue. “Lovely wild thing.”

  He fell silent, though his hands kept moving, and so did his thoughts. Earth Spirit, wounded, Mother, no one must know. So afraid, but I must.

  Tara shivered. Serazina’s father was an Earther.

  * * *

  Serazina felt unusually rested when she woke up the next morning, almost as if her mind and heart had been massaged while she slept.

  “You’re looking cheerful,” Berto said when he came to pick her up for school.

  “And I don’t know why.”

  “Never question a good mood,” Berto said. “Just pray for it to last, at least through the final written exam.”

  They filed into the examination room and went to their assigned computers. The first set of questions that popped onto Serazina’s screen was about world geography, and she answered them easily. She exhausted herself struggling with the math problems and groaned when a series of essay questions came onto the screen.

  She had heard that in other lands, people read books that weren’t about history, philosophy, ethics, or how to repair a tractor. They w
ere stories, works of imagination, romances and mysteries. You could get a degree for reading that sort of thing. Maybe she would, in Tamaras.

  That thought made her able to face the essay questions.

  “Explain why Zena allowed Nathan to take formal leadership in the settling of Oasis.”

  That was easy.

  “Zena was an uneducated Etrenzian villager whose father was a snake charmer and sorcerer. Her status was further (and unfairly) lowered by her slavery in the harem. Nathan was descended from the royal lines of Etrenzia. His captors had originally intended to ransom him, but when they realized they’d killed off his immediate family, they sold him to the Emperor. He ended up as a gardener who had access to other slaves.

  “He assumed leadership and organized them into a successful rebellion. He and Zena married before the journey to what is now Oasis. It’s widely acknowledged that Zena was the moving force behind all aspects of Oasis society.”

  Someone else might have made the essay longer, by praising both Zena and Nathan for their foresight, but Serazina saw no point in lying. She moved on to the next question.

  “Why must we hate the dragon?”

  What? No teacher had ever talked about the dragon since early school days, when they’d run around like idiots, shouting, “Kill the Dragon!” Serazina had later learned that the exercise was designed as a useful release of emotions.

  No one talked about him much now. She didn’t think anyone even saw him. She wrote what she could remember from her childhood.

  “We must hate the dragon because he’s been our enemy since the first days of Nathansville. When the settlers from western Oasis saw him, they knew the dragon could trample all the fields in a single night or, worse, burn the crops with his fiery breath. He could start a fire in our village of Oasis West. Some people believed that he especially liked to eat small children.

  “Some people also believe that, although no sightings have been reported for a long time, he’s biding his time, waiting for us to relax our defenses. The Godlies say his existence means we have to be vigilant against the wasting disease of emotion. He seeks those most vulnerable. If we become weak as a nation, he will strike.”

  Serazina looked over the essay and hit, “Send.” What if her essay answer were true? What if he were waiting? She imagined the huge beast, his breath singeing treetops, his eyes a blazing red. Every dragon nightmare she’d ever had landed on her chest, and she could barely breathe.

  She tried to remember how she’d felt when she woke up: peaceful, safe, and happy. The gap between those feelings and her current fear was too broad to span, but she managed to slow her heartbeat and dull the teeth of gnawing anxiety.

  If only she could wake up happy every morning and stay that way. Was it so much to ask?

  It must have been, because when she got home, her mother was in a cleaning frenzy. The Guardian was coming to visit them in three days.

  Chapter 12

  No intelligent spider ever lingered too long in Fiola’s house, and by the third day of her furious cleaning, even the dust motes were afraid to circulate—except that dust motes weren’t alive and couldn’t think.

  Unless they could. During the past few days everything had seemed more alive to Serazina. The green of trees and grass nearly blinded her at times, and the deep blue of the sky was a coolness within her. Butterflies approached when she trailed her fingers in the air, and hummingbirds fluttered above her head, buzzing softly.

  She hovered at the edge of a cliff. If she would only leap from it, she’d find herself in a magical world where butterflies and hummingbirds spoke to her and where she had long conversations with the kitten. Why, when she’d never needed a healthy mind more, was such madness filling it?

  By the day of the Guardian’s intended visit, Fiola was spinning around the house like a sandstorm, and Serazina decided she had to escape before she screamed. She went to the pond and lay in the grass.

  I wish I were a cloud. I’d drift in the sky far above the earth, too far to hear people arguing or feel their hatred. I’d float from place to place, far away from Oasis and people who hate me for what I am. I’d disappear, and one day the Guardian would look up into the sky, wondering where I was, and I’d laugh in a cloud’s soft, fluffy voice and maybe rain on him.

  “Serazina!”

  Fiola came to the pond. “Get up. This is no time to be lounging around. There are a thousand things to be done. I’ve got to go into the city to find the ingredients I need to prepare food for the Guardian. The Guardian! Show some respect. You need a bath and a change of clothing. I expect you to look presentable by the time I come back.”

  “I will.”

  “Now.”

  “Mother, I have to prepare myself in my mind. Isn’t that the most important thing?”

  “Hmpph. Well, don’t spend too much time at it.”

  * * *

  From the shelter of the patch of woods, Tara and Orion watched the girl.

  “I’ve changed her dreams every night,” Tara said, trying to keep a whine out of her voice. “Her emotional balance gets stronger each morning, and the creatures of the air dance around her in encouragement. No matter how loudly I try to talk to her, though, she doesn’t listen. And even though she wants to conceal her thoughts from the Guardian, I have a better chance of bringing down an eagle. Orion, we’ve got to think of something.”

  “Tara, the answers come when you need them. Don’t let your new life with humans let you forget that. They do something called planning, which is worrying ahead of time.”

  “It’s so much harder to hear the Mother now.” Tara rested her head on her paws.

  “But She hears what you ask. We’re going to get the chance to study the Guardian before he comes here. He’s first holding a gathering in the building we saw called school. We’ll go there tonight and learn what we can about him. Then we’ll know what to do.”

  Tara rolled over on her back. “I feel much better, and you’re right about this worrying ahead of time business. Now that my mind is at rest, I think I know what we can do. Could I shield her mind from him and muddle his mind?”

  “That sounds like a possibility. Let’s keep on thinking. It’s always useful to have more than one direction in which to leap, and it’s especially useful to choose one that makes you stretch your mental muscles. What other ideas are coming to you?”

  Tara paused. “My thoughts are tangled as the strings the girl dangles before me.”

  “If you tell them to me, we can unravel them together.”

  “It’s been easy to introduce new images into Serazina’s awareness. Could I try that with the Guardian?”

  “That’s a bold pounce. Slow to a stalk. What could go wrong?”

  “We know his mind has been trained to resist anything that doesn’t agree with his thoughts. You guess that he has vulnerabilities, but I’m sure he guards them the way Emerald guarded us kittens. He might hold the girl responsible for showing him his longings. I’ll have to study him carefully.”

  “We both will. Back to the female. She is lying so peacefully right now. This might be a good time to give her a few visions of the Quest.”

  Just as Tara was about to say that was impossible, Serazina called out, “Kitty, kitty!”

  Tara spat. “Not even a name. I’m going to get through to her just so that I can be named properly.”

  “Kitty!”

  “Do you go when she calls?” Orion asked.

  Tara’s fur rose. “Am I a dog? From time to time I may stroll by her, but I’m never in a rush. I don’t want her to think she owns me, not for a few lousy scraps of fish. I’ve never been so humiliated.”

  Orion yawned. “You haven’t lived that long. Go to her, but keep your tail high.”

  Tara slowly ambled over to the girl. “There you are,” Serazina said. “I’ve been calling and calling.”

  Her voice was annoyed, but her hands weren’t. Tara purred at her touch, welcoming her seemingly endless capacity to
stroke and rub. If only the girl didn’t spew out such a distracting and annoying shower of thoughts, it would be easier to be around her.

  * * *

  Serazina flopped back on the ground. The jasper ring throbbed on her hand. She tried to pull it off, but her finger had swollen.

  She’d never be able to run away now. His hawk’s eyes would soar over the land, piercing dense thickets and stone to find her—

  Kitty climbed onto her stomach with a purr. Ah, that felt good. Serazina decided to lie here a few minutes, a few last minutes of freedom, a few minutes for pretending nothing terrible was going to happen tonight. She closed her eyes, and the kitten’s purr rumbled through her own body. Her breathing grew slow and deep. She supposed she was falling asleep, and it passed through her drowsy mind that Fiola was going to be angry, but mist swallowed that thought.

  It was very quiet. No footsteps rang on the road that passed the farm. Though people working in the fields called to each other, their voices were mere echoes from another world.

  The mist deepened, lifting her until she floated high in the sky, a cloud. Far below her people crawled, scurrying this way and that with no apparent sense of direction. The fields were carpets of fire, the forest a cool dark pond.

  Beyond the forest she descended into a world of green mist throbbing with the smell of growing life—and the dragon. She started to run, but he said, “Don’t be silly. This is just a dream.”

  He laughed, and she laughed at the sight of him. He was shaped like a pear, with a tiny head, sloping wings, and an enormous round belly. Who could fear a creature so ridiculous looking?

  He raised delicate paws in greeting. “Welcome,” he said in a low, rumbling voice. “Welcome to the world beyond the world, visible only to those who turn their eyes inward.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Good. Understanding is meaningless here. Join the dance.”

  He bowed awkwardly and linked his dwarfed arm with hers. His squat body moved with surprising grace as he twirled her around and around. Together they spun in widening circles as the trees bent down to watch.

  The clearing filled up with familiar figures: Johar and Fiola, Berto. The Guardian clicked his heels together like a young boy. The forest animals crept out of their hiding places, starting at the sight of humans. After a cautious pause they joined them. Deer soared over low hedges; squirrels sailed from tree to tree; birds wove circles in the sky. All things spun together, their outlines blurring, merging into a fluid One.