by Andre Norton
Kim shook his head. “The yellow dragon is a Lung, one belonging to the Emperor.”
“How can you tell?” Artie wanted to know.
“First, because it is yellow, that’s the color that only the Emperor could wear or use. Then, it had five claws on its feet, that makes it a Lung. But the one in the puzzle is Shui Mien Lung—that means ‘Slumbering Dragon,’ and it was not really a dragon but a man—a man who lived in China a long time ago. He was First Minister and General-in-Chief to the Emperor Liu Pei, and he had a sword the Emperor had given him with a closed-eyed dragon engraved on it. Then he did something big and brave and the people called him Slumbering Dragon—they even made up a song about him—” Kim talked faster and faster, glad to see he had their full attention now and that they seemed to believe all he said.
“A man, not a dragon.” Artie nodded. “Mine was, too—Artos Pendragon—he was a king and he had an important sword. But his dragon wasn’t on the sword, it was a big red banner. When the wind filled it, it looked like a dragon flying.”
“Mine was a real dragon—or once it had been a man and then it became a dragon—but it was bad. It had to be killed. They called it Fafnir. Sigurd King’s-Son killed it with the sword Balmung. Odin helped him—” Sig contributed.
“Sirrush-Lau was real, too,” Ras cut in. “It was horrible—like a big snake mixed up with an alligator, or one of those prehistoric monsters. The priests of MardukBel kept it in a pool in the temple and they were going to have it kill Daniel, only he figured out a way to kill it first.”
Kim’s head turned from one to the other as he listened eagerly. So he had been right in his guess that each had had a dragon, as different as the four pictures on the cover of the box. And he wanted to know more, all of what had happened to each of them. Pendragon, Fafnir, Sirrush-Lau—strange names. But probably to Sig, Artie, and Ras “Shui Mien Lung” sounded just as queer.
“The puzzle”—he brought them back to the immediate problem. “What’s going to happen to it if they come and take everything out of the house, maybe tomorrow?”
“You put the yellow dragon together, finished it this afternoon?” Ras wanted to know.
Kim nodded.
“Then you left it there on the table?”
“Yes. I thought it was late, that Mother would worry. Then—then I guess I just never thought of taking it apart. You know, it was so tight I couldn’t even see the cracks marking the pieces, or feel them.”
“We can’t go after it tonight.” Sig was walking from the bed to door and back again, as if he could think better when he was on the move. “Not tonight. At least I couldn’t get away to try that. I can’t even stay long here, the folks were talking homework when I left.”
Ras and Artie were nodding in complete agreement.
“So we’ll just have to leave it until after school tomorrow and hope that they don’t come to clear things out before then. But we’ll go after it together—after school—agree on that, you guys?”
They answered “yes,” almost together. Then Sig turned to Kim. “We want to hear your story, all of it. Maybe we haven’t much time tonight, but tell us what you can.”
So Kim began to talk, trying to make vivid to them the mistake of Ma Su, the cleverness and courage of Chuko Liang. However, there was a lot he feared he could not make them understand. When he had done Ras was leaning forward, staring at Kim, as if he saw not the other boy at all but rather what he had been describing. And Sig, back on the bed beside Artie, and Artie himself were spellbound.
“That Ma Su”—Ras spoke first—”was he ever stupid! Bet his head on being right and then went out and proved how wrong he was!”
“I don’t understand—really—why. Chuko Liang thought he had been wrong and why he wanted to give up everything,” Artie said slowly. “He—he really beat this Ssuma, didn’t he? And did it without fighting, too. Why did he say he had failed? Oh, I know what you say he said, that he made a mistake in picking the wrong guy for the job, so he was responsible. But that’s being pretty hard on himself—at least I think so.”
“It was the way they believed, the old Chinese.” Kim tried to make it clear. “They had a code they had to live up to. A lot of men didn’t, but the heroes tried the hardest and sometimes they did.”
“Yes,” Sig broke in. “Like Sigurd refusing to touch the treasure even when he had a right to it, after he killed Fafnir! He knew the treasure changed the man who took it, as it did Mimir, so he wouldn’t touch it.”
“What happened to Sigurd?” Kim demanded.
“A lot, but I won’t have time to tell you tonight,” Sig answered. “Tomorrow—listen, we went to the library today and we got some books. Me, I got a second one about Sigurd, not exactly the same story—Sig Clawhand wasn’t in it at all. That was me—Sig Clawhand—I was with Sigurd when he went to kill Fafnir, before that, too. And Ras, he got a book about Egypt, but there’s nothing about Meroë in it, so he has to get another one and keep on looking. Artie—he got a good one—about the real Arthur, not the King with the Knights and the Round Table and all that stuff. Now—maybe you can find out something about this Chuko Liang. If our heroes are real, then yours must be also!”
“And when we come home tomorrow we’ll all go together and get the puzzle.” Ras stood up.
Upon that they agreed and the three left. Kim went back to sit down at his desk and open his book. There was homework waiting. But it was very hard to concentrate on anything between the covers of a book now. He wanted to know all Sig could tell him about Fafnir, all Artie could about Pendragon, all Ras could report of the monster Sirrush-Lau—and to wait was hard. In fact, he was not sure as he closed his last book that he had really accomplished very much studying that evening.
“Those seemed very pleasant boys,” Mother commented at breakfast. “I am so glad you have found some new friends, Kim. Starting in at a new school as large as Anthony Wayne is hard enough, but to have to do it alone makes it worse. I know Mrs. Dortmund, and I have seen Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Brown at P.T.A. meetings. They all live so close”—she did not finish her sentence, but Kim guessed that she meant she was not worried so much any more about Kim liking the new house and neighborhood.
But he was impatient to get to the bus stop, so he hurried faster than he had in days to get out of the house and down the street.
“Hey! Wait up, man!” Artie’s voice was loud and Kim slowed as the other came down his walk still zipping up his jacket. They picked up Ras at the next corner and Sig halfway down the block, arriving at the stop all together.
There were no signs of life around the old house. But it was early, only seven thirty, and if the Good Will came to clean the place out it would probably be later.
“I sure wish this was Saturday!” Artie said.
“Well, it isn’t!” Ras answered him. “And we’ll just have to hope they won’t get here today.”
“We got about ten minutes maybe,” Artie urged. “Why can’t we sneak in and get it now?”
“With all of these hanging around to see us?” Sig pointed to the little kids, as well as two mothers who had escorted their own children and were waiting to see them safely on the bus.
They agreed gloomily that he was right. So they used the time to fill Kim in on their own adventures, until he got the accounts rather mixed, with all the interruptions of one or another who suddenly remembered something he just had to add, cutting into the middle of somebody else’s story to do it.
That Tuesday was the second longest school day Kim could remember—almost as long as the day before had been, when he had wanted to find out what the other boys were doing in the house. It dragged so that each period seemed to last about four weary hours. And when he finally climbed into the homeward-bound bus it was with the feeling that he had spent about a week cooped up in classrooms and halls.
He had had three classes with Artie, Sig, and Ras. And Ras and he had had the same lunch period and so managed to get seats together. But they dared not say too much about wha
t was uppermost in their minds for fear someone would overhear. It was a relief to be homeward bound and know they could get to the puzzle soon.
But the closer they came to their corner, the more they worried about what had happened in their day-long absence. Had the Good Will come and cleaned out the house? Kim really felt quite desperate as the bus swung around to let them off.
As one they turned to face the overgrown garden.
“No trucks here now, anyway.” Artie gave a sight of relief.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Ras pointed out. “They could have come and gone. We won’t know until we get inside.”
“Take it easy,” Sig warned. “We have to go under cover, behind these bushes, and keep out of sight. Don’t want anyone to see us and ask questions. But snap to it once we’re in!”
They ran, obeying his instructions, putting a screen of bushes between them and the open gate. Then they reached the back porch, Sig in the lead. He pushed up the window to slip inside, Artie nudging him along so he could follow faster.
“I don’t think they’ve come yet,” Sig heartened them as they entered. “All the kitchen stuff is still here.”
The same was true in the dining and living rooms. It did not take long to reach the puzzle room. But Sig stopped short inside the door, and Artie, Ras, and Kim pushed against him to get in themselves. A moment later they saw what had halted him.
There was the table and the chair. But the top of the table was bare. There was no completed puzzle of shining pieces, no glitter of color. Not even the box remained. There was nothing but the chair and the table, and a lot of dust, and a great many spider webs.
“I—I left it right here.” He tapped the tabletop with his finger. Then he stared down in complete amazement, just as Sig had shown at the door.
“It’s not here now,” Sig was saying. But Ras had moved over to Kim and stood watching him.
“What is it, man? What’s got you bugged?”
“Dust!” Kim pointed. “Look at all the dust! See, that’s where I just touched—I made a mark. But all the rest—it’s thick with dust! How—how could the puzzle have been here? How could we have shoved all those pieces around and not brushed the dust away?”
Ras leaned closer. “Hey, look here, you guys—he’s right! There’s sure a lot of dust. And you don’t get that much dust, even in an old place like this, just overnight. Even if someone took the puzzle away last night, there wouldn’t be all this dust on the table. Look, I can even write my name on it!”
And with a fingertip he printed G-E-O-R-G-E on the table’s surface.
“But,” Artie protested, his voice shrill, “I know it was right there—on that table! I saw it there—there was the silver dragon, and the blue one, and the red I worked—and a lot of yellow pieces—and the box—all right there!” He put down a finger in turn, stirring up more dust.
“I saw it”—Sig slowly nodded his head—”and so did you, Ras. And Kim was after us, he worked the last dragon. I know he didn’t make up that story—it fits. A different dragon, but the story was like ours. And we all know ours were true. But—the puzzle is gone—and the box—and all that dust—It just doesn’t make sense!”
“Maybe,” Kim said—he had been trying to think straight ever since he had come to the empty table—“maybe we weren’t supposed to keep the puzzle. Maybe it was only meant to be worked once.”
“But why?” Artie asked the question none of them could answer.
“Who knows?” was the best Ras could say. “Just this—I know what I saw, though it may be gone now. And I know what I did when I was Sherkarer of Meroë. Even if the puzzle is gone I am going to remember that.”
“Yes, and maybe Kim’s right,” Sig said. “Maybe we each were to have only one chance at the puzzle, and we had it.”
“But the dust—where did the dust come from?”
“How do we know? That old guy—the one who used to live here—he got queer things from all over the world. Maybe there was something extra queer about the puzzle—”
“Do you mean magic?” demanded Artie. “Magic—that’s silly, nobody believes in that but little kids.”
“Something like magic,” Kim returned firmly. “You’ve heard of mind reading, things like that. There was that TV program they showed last month—the one about people who knew about things happening a long way off at the same time they were happening. It doesn’t need to be the storybook kind of magic, it could even be a kind of magic, it could even be a kind of science we don’t understand yet. Look here—I’m Chinese, so I have an adventure back in Chinese history. You, Sig—what country did your people come from originally?”
“Granddad was German.”
“So—you have an adventure in Germany. And Ras—he has one in long-ago Africa, and Artie—did your people come from England?”
“Wales.”
“Well, Wales is part of old Britain. So we may just be living over things that happened to our great-great-great—about a thousand times back—grandfathers. That makes a kind of sense, doesn’t it? Anyway, the puzzle is gone—but Ras is right, we can keep remembering what happened to us. Maybe that was what was meant to happen, that we could remember.”
Artie was already on his way to the door. “No use staying here any more,” he said a little too loudly. “I don’t like the feel of this place now.”
He only put into words what the others sensed. The room which had once welcomed them now pushed them out, the house wanted to get rid of them. They hurried through its rooms to obey an order they had felt though not heard.
“I wonder where it went—the puzzle,” Sig said.
“We’ll never know,” Ras answered. “But I think Kim’s onto something—maybe we did have great-great-greats who did those things we did. And—I’m sure glad I had a chance to fit together Sirrush-Lau!”
Even Artie could only nod “yes” to that. He was not sure about what Kim had said. But—he wished it were true—he liked to think that Artos, son of Marius, namesake of the High King, was a great-great-great who had lived somewhere far back in time. Artos was real!
Sig flexed his hand. It was not pulled into any claw. But he could remember how it had been once—Sig Claw hand—Sig Dortmund—there was a tie there, he knew it.
Kim heard a rustling of the dead leaves through which they were tramping. But he marched to something else—the drums of Chuko Liang’s small, beleaguered army. He swung his book bag and for an instant or two he could almost believe its weight to be that of a sword in a red lacquer sheath.
TOR BOOKS
Reader’s Guide
Dragon Magic
ANDRE
NORTON
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The information, activities, and discussion questions which follow are intended to enhance your reading of Dragon Magic. Please feel free to adapt these materials to suit your needs and interests.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alice Mary Norton was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on February 17, 1912. Read to by her mother from an early age, she grew up loving books and began writing in high school. She published her first book, The Prince Commands, at the age of twenty. Norton wrote under a pseudonym, which she felt helped her gain footing in male-dominated publishing markets, and legally changed her name to Andre Alice Norton in 1934. She worked as a librarian, briefly owned a bookstore, and served as a reader and anthologist for publisher Martin Greenburg before devoting herself exclusively to writing. Norton’s work spans decades and literary genres—her list of books, stories, and poems numbering into the hundreds—though she is best known for her fantasy and young adult novels, including the Witch World series. Her Magic Books, including Dragon Magic, were largely written during the Vietnam era and feature young outsiders struggling to fit in and make sense of their worlds through fantastical journeys to times past. Norton received numerous accolades, including the Nebula Grand Master Award (1984), the Daedalus Award for Lifetime Achievement (1986), and the World Fantasy Convention Life
Achievement Award (1998). In 1997 “The Lady,” as she was known to her myriad fans, was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and moved to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where she lived until her death on March 17, 2005. Her last novel, Three Hands for Scorpio, was published by Tor Books in April 2005.
RESEARCH AND WRITING ACTIVITIES
I. Discovering Dragons
A. From the Greek myth of the Hydra to Kenneth Grahame’s 1898 tale of The Reluctant Dragon to the works of J. R. R. Tolkien and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, dragons have served as important characters and symbols throughout literature. Go to the library or online to learn more about mythological dragons, literary dragons, dragons in folklore and fables, or another literary dragon topic. Compile your research into an informative “dragon handbook” that may include a bibliography of dragon books, illustrated drawings of dragons from various mythologies, or a study of dragons in a given culture or time period. Create a colorful cover for your handbook.
B. The word “dragon” can be applied to mythical monsters, fierce people, large lizards, even personality flaws. Use a library or online resources to see how many definitions and usages you can find for the word “dragon.” And/or, find at least five famous quotations using the word “dragon.” Use this information to create a small illustrated poster with the heading “The Meanings of Dragon.”
C. Do you think the dragons of ancient legend and lore were real or imaginary creatures? Go to the library or online to find facts to support your opinion. Then, hold a debate with classmates or friends, supporting or rejecting this proposition: Real dragons once existed.
D. Using paints, colored paper, clay, fabric scraps, or other craft materials to draw, sculpt, or sew a dragon of your own imagining for display in your home or classroom. Create a label that includes your dragon’s name, place of origin, and any special attributes.
II. Fitting in, Fitting Together
A. Like the characters they become in their dragon journeys, the four protagonists of Dragon Magic seem to feel like misfits in their own communities. With classmates or friends, role-play a discussion between Sig, Artie, Ras, and Kim in which they try to explain their feelings at the outset of the novel.
