Lenna and the Last Dragon

by James Comins

  Chapter Two

  Remembering Airplane-land

  or, Will You Be My Daughter?

  “You expect me to believe your stupid story when you never believe mine?” snapped Binnan Darnan, kneeling on the oval rug inside the barn. “Has old Brugda turned into a witch now? Next you’ll be telling me there’s a ghost living in the big house attic. Listen, Lenna. You fell asleep and had a funny dream.”

  “Then where’s the boar?” Lenna whimpered, sitting on her butt with her elbows up on her knobby knees.

  “You didn’t finish looking for it,” said Binnan Darnan. “It’s still missing, I believe. You shouldn’t have given up.”

  “I didn’t give up!” snapped Lenna. “You think you’re the only one who works hard, Binnan Darnan? I see something strange and now I’m lazy and a dreamer? Is this it?”

  “That’s not what it is at all,” the black-haired girl replied. “You look for reasons to hate Brugda. That’s why you had this dream.”

  “It wasn’t a dream,” Lenna said sulkily. “I know it wasn’t. My dreams are always of a nice world where there’s no Brugda. That’s my dream. Always my dream.”

  Binnan Darnan sighed and folded her arms together, hunch. “What do you want me to do if I say I believe you?”

  “I don’t know what’ll happen now, Binnan Darnan,” said Lenna. “The boar’s dead. Lady Joukka Pelata will have to buy herself a new one. But look. If that black dragon comes tonight, it’ll be bad. I know it will. I saw it tear down the big house.”

  “Lenna, I have the dragonvoice. If there’s a dragon, I’ll talk to it. It’ll listen to me. I can make it go.”

  Gripping the colorless wool rug with a hand, Lenna scrumpled it and let it go again. She stood.

  “Sleep light for me tonight, would you?”

  “For you.” Binnan Darnan nodded, took Lenna’s hand and led her out through the footprints in the snow toward the kitchens. The sun had fallen past the horizon already, and a dull dusklight gripped the farm. A sliver of moon plucked dark green out of the treetops.

  Kaldi stood framed in the light of the doorway. In his big hands were a saucepan and a pair of bowls, stacked. He was tall, wide-shouldered, with a thin brown beard. Usually nothing could take the smile away from him, but tonight he looked concerned.

  “Don’t run off when you’ve eaten, okay?” he told them.

  Each girl took a bowl, and he poured out stew. They took spoons from the hook and sat on their cushions in the corner. Kaldi sat beside them. “Brugda told me what happened, Lenna. She wants to talk to you about it.”

  Eyes wide, Binnan Darnan tossed glances between them, wiping her chin with a hanging napkin.

  “What d’you think she’ll tell me?” asked Lenna, her spoon halfway to her mouth.

  “The truth, I imagine,” Kaldi replied, “or part of it. Run in to the sitting room and you’ll know for certain what she’ll say.”

  “The sitting room of the big house?” That was the special guest room, where everything had to look perfect and there weren’t any stains on the white carpet and you couldn’t ever touch anything.

  “I didn’t know you’d invented another sitting room in the barn, silly. Now scoot.” He turned to Binnan Darnan. “Brugda says you should stay inside by the door, just in case.”

  As Lenna hurried off down the hall, she could hear the little girl begging for the story. Ha.

  The sitting room was bay windows, tall white walls, white furniture with floral prints, a few silver sconces fitted with tall white candles, and a high ceiling that took up the whole front of the house. Brugda sat on an understuffed floral sofa across from Lady Joukka Pelata. The Lady sipped tea primly in a matching chair. She was the owner of the farm. She came down from her room a few times a week. In Lenna’s memory she had never left the house. This evening she wore a simple white frock with petticoats. Lenna thought her frock was a little too simple for such an important person. Joukka Pelata set her teacup in a small saucer.

  “Lenna,” said the Lady.

  The girl curtsied low to her.

  “Here, child,” said Brugda, gesturing.

  Lenna sat obediently on the floor where Brugda had pointed, just between the sitting-room chairs.

  “Your lady has a story for you,” the old woman said. “You’ll listen well, for a time of change creeps over us.”

  “Lenna.” Joukka Pelata’s voice had a far-away sound, soft and careful. It sounded as if the words were flowing down from some eternal drifting cloud to her small mouth. “There is much to say this evening. Where to begin? You weren’t brought into my household to look after pigs.”

  She let down a pale hand limply. It was cold and thin-boned. Lenna took it and looked up at her, wondering.

  “Nor are you here because your parents are dead. You are here for the same reason that my daughter Brugda is here.”

  She smiled at the girl, who frowned, suspicious. Brugda was the Lady’s daughter? But Brugda was a nasty old woman.

  “Do I seem too young, child?” Joukka Pelata went on dreamily. “To be mother to a matron?”

  Lenna shrugged, nodded.

  “I’m not too young,” the Lady said. “I’m older than I seem. Other than I seem. Many Powers of Magic dwell in our world, child, and I am one of the greatest.”

  Powers of Magic?

  Joukka Pelata held up her palm. A pale, hazily moving picture appeared above it. It was the same type of picture that Brugda’s colored rags had made. But the picture was different and wonderful. It showed Lenna in a dragonneer’s red jodhpurs, riding a dragon through the clouds. The girl’s eyes lit up. Dragons. Dragons talking to her, following her, letting her ride them. To touch the sky, to swoop and dive through the air on the back of a dragon ...

  “For a few minutes tonight, I may alter the world as I choose,” said Joukka Pelata. “I can give you what you want most in the world. I watch you, Lenna. I know how much you want to have the dragonvoice. To be a dragonneer. I can make it happen.”

  “Do it! Do it!” Lenna shrieked.

  “But there’s a cost to such a transformation.” The Lady looked down at her. “If you say no, I can tell you the story of who you are. I can tell you many things worth hearing. And perhaps you’ll become the great woman I see you to be,” Joukka Pelata said. “Or perhaps not.”

  “You’re letting me choose?” Lenna asked. Nobody had ever let her choose anything before.

  “That’s it,” chimed Brugda. She scrutinized the girl, frowning her eyebrows as if her eyesight had gone bad. “If you choose to be a dragonneer, you’ll still be hit when you do wrong. You might have an unhappy marriage to a servant from another farm. And Binnan Darnan would be your pig-girl.”

  Joukka Pelata gave Brugda a hard look from the corner of her eye. “You play reckless with the girl’s future, my daughter. Let her choose to stay or go.”

  The balding woman only smiled.

  “But a dragon will come and tear down the big house. I saw it.”

  “Yes, we’d lose the house,” the Lady said, airily, dismissively, twirling a hand, “and then the future would begin. Which would you prefer? The house? ... or the future?”

  “I don’t want the dragon to burn down the house,” said Lenna. “I don’t want bad things. But I still want to know.” She peeked out from under her hair and glared a little. Nobody ever told her anything worth hearing. “Will you tell me everything I ask about? Everything? Will you even tell me about my parents?”

  Brugda and Joukka Pelata shared a look. “We’ll say what we may say,” said the Lady.

  Lenna thought. Dragons dragons dragons filled her eyes as she sat. She would get new baby dragons every year. Pretty, spinning, happy dragons. She could lead them around the tower, and when they were big enough you could ride them and talk to them and understand what they were saying.

  And then she would never know all the things that she wanted to know. She might never find out about her parents.

  Her parents. She a
lways felt them lurking around in secret places inside of her, places she kept shut, except for those brief, painful moments when her youngest memories leaked out and drowned her. Lenna hadn’t been able to ask about them, hadn’t been able to talk about them, not ever, except sometimes to Binnan Darnan, and she was meddlesome and made up stories. Parents was a locked room inside of her.

  Dragons ...

  “I choose the story and the truth and the future. Are you sure you’d let your beautiful house get torn up just for me?”

  The two seated women said yes together.

  “Then I will.”

  “Good,” said Brugda.

  “Here, then, is your story,” said Joukka Pelata. She let the pastel picture fade from her hand in a puff of color. “First I will speak of magic. The Powers of Magic are great wizards. We wait in our sanctuaries around the Earth, stockpiling any magic the world can spare. We are collectors, storing the antiquities of the Earth. In our storerooms are all the different flavors of magic. We maintain the excess steam engine steam, the wasted electricity, the unspoken words, the feral dragons, the forgotten crystals.

  “When one of us has gathered up enough magic,” Joukka Pelata went on, “we can spend some of it to transform the world according to our desires. This transformation is called a Change. A Change is a time when the old magic drains away into the Earth, replaced by the new flavor of magic we’ve collected. Changes happen at regular intervals throughout history. Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison were the Powers of electricity magic. They fought each other to bring their competing styles of electricity into the world in the 1880s. Electricity magic replaced the steam magic that Queen Victoria had maintained for so long from her engineering lab beneath her palace. When electricity magic took over, all the steam drained away until there was barely enough to fill a teapot. Sometimes two magics exist side by side. My sister Nokinaata Pelata brought spoken-word magic into the world from her home in Nokia, Finland in 1991. Her telephones transformed electricity magic into spoken-word magic.”

  The Lady took a sip of tea from a white china cup. “More rarely, several Changes happen in a row. This world of dragons has only lasted for a decade, and already I’ve completed preparations to Change it, making it the shortest flavor of magic the world has seen since the French Reign of Terror.”

  “You’re going to get rid of all the dragons?” Lenna shrieked. It was the worst idea in the world.

  “When a Change falls,” the Lady went on, ignoring her, “ordinary people forget the old ways and learn the new ones without realizing anything has happened. Most people are dim and blind and forgetful. They fall asleep in a world of steam-power magic, they wake up in a world of electricity, and they forget what it is to live in a steam world. Only a few can remember.”

  “Like you?” Lenna asked her.

  “Like you,” Joukka Pelata replied, “and like Brugda. You both have the rare capacity to look beneath the illusion of magic to the thin world beneath. That circle she drew in the wood? It was a small cut in the fabric of magic, bringing the future to her eyes for a moment. If Kaldi or Talvi had stood beside you, they would have seen nothing but a dead pig. But you saw the magic, and you walked through it.”

  It wasn’t just a dead pig, Lenna fumed inside her head. It was my pig.

  Brugda poked her chin up. “We suspected your hands could move magic since we found you,” she said. “Now we know it.”

  “Hm. Okay. But why was I taken from my parents? From where?” she asked, rubbing her hand over the yarny white carpet.

  Joukka Pelata held forth her hand again, and colors emerged once again. The moving picture that appeared was unsettling. “Do you know what this is?” the Lady asked her.

  Hm. It was white and smooth and flying, sliding through a cloud bank. The word flybe was written in blue on the crooked tail.

  “It looks really familiar,” said Lenna, and it did.

  “Called an airplane,” said Brugda.

  Lenna frowned. “Airplane? I’ve heard this word.” As she watched, peering in at the faces in the tiny oval windows, the airplane faded away. There she was, a tiny splotch of yellow hair, much much younger, seated on the upper deck of a dragon’s howdah. The pavilion stretched from the dragon’s shoulders to halfway down its tail, strapped around its midsection by powerful buckles locked onto the dragon’s chest spikes. Flowing satin airshields directed wind away from the powerful sweeps of the dragon’s wings. The tasselled gold platform was lined with narrow upholstered seats. Tired people sat, flipping magazines, sipping cups of juice or beer, squeezing their knees together uncomfortably. The passengers drifted through the sky on the back of a liny silver dragon, one of the armor-scaled Belgian breeds.

  Looking closer at herself in the image, Lenna saw a colorful plastic geometric toy in her waggling little hands and a smile on her infant face. A man and woman in seats beside her were too small to see clearly, no matter how hard she squinted.

  Lenna shivered. “I forgot. Are those my parents?”

  “Mm,” said Joukka Pelata. “We watched the Change to dragon magic and brought to our house all the children who could see it. There were only two in the entire world.”

  Lenna thumped the carpet with a fist. “Binnan Darnan can do magic as well?”

  “When the Change from electricity magic to dragon magic came,” Joukka Pelata said, seeming to ignore the question, “airplane pilots became dragonneers overnight. They all discovered the dragonvoice instantly. All except Binnan Darnan. She could speak the dragonvoice in airplane-land, before there were dragons at all.”

  “But can she use magic?” Lenna demanded, frowning frowning. “Walk through spells and magic circles? Like me?”

  “Not all who see a thing can manage its ins and outs. Kaldi is no carpenter. Talvi is no cook,” said Brugda.

  “So I’m the only one in the world who has real magic?” said Lenna. “You should have said there was a present for me. This would have been better.” She nodded to herself.

  “Magic isn’t always such a gift, child. There are costs. There are always costs,” sighed Joukka Pelata. “Your magic means that all the Powers will want you as their own.”

  “Why?”

  “Times of Change make Powers blind,” said Brugda. “Only through us, we who see across the tapestry into the thin world, can the Powers of Magic remember what has gone before. Everyone forgets. Even the Powers themselves.” The old woman scooted forward on the sofa and leaned over Lenna. “They want eyes,” she whispered. “Yours are very good, as are mine. When the Change falls tonight, you and I will see everything, and we will remember. Binnan Darnan may remember somewhat. The others, nothing.”

  Joukka Pelata leapt suddenly from her chair and looked around. White wax streaked down the silver candlesticks. Flickering circles of light illuminated the shuttered sitting room. “Time is short,” she said. “A thing must be done. Will you be my daughter, Lenna?”

  Lenna blinked, startled. “Huh? Why?” She stretched her fingers out to her toes and sat up.

  “So you will always be my blood, even if you’re taught the magic of another.” Joukka Pelata’s voice fell. “All of them will be after you now, to make you theirs. And you must be my daughter, or you’ll get lost along the way.”

  “What about Binnan Darnan? Will she be your daughter, too?” Lenna asked.

  “I don’t have enough magic to spare for the both of you,” Joukka Pelata replied.

  As romantic as it was, being an orphan, Lenna wanted a mother. The decision was easy. “I’ll be your daughter, Lady Joukka Pelata,” she said.

  The thin woman’s arms reached outward. Memories flooded into Lenna’s mind like snowflakes:

  Spending time with Joukka Pelata, the lady of the house. Momma.

  Life in small luxury. Having a room of her own, a bed, toys.

  Thinking less of the servants.

  Alone in her room, playing games with paper dolls.

  Picking out a new ribbon for her hair every day. />
  Sneaking into Momma’s room, trying on the simple grown-up clothes.

  Wondering at the delicate crystals spinning on the table within.

  Visiting the dragon tower and watching the dance led by Binnan Darnan.

  Falling intoxicated under a love of dragons.

  Her mind filled with doublevision. For every second of her life, there were two memories: life as the pig-girl and life as a princess. She had a parent now. She wasn’t an orphan, but she used to be. Brugda was her big sister, now. Everything was confusing.

  The room moved, jerk! She wasn’t sitting on the floor anymore, but on the stiff sofa beside Brugda. Her brown servant’s dress redrew itself in better colors. Ruffles ruffled themselves around her shoulders, tickling. The sitting room was no longer unfamiliar. She had a big real bed in the attic now, and she never even had to touch prickly old straw. She could do anything she wanted. Brugda could only hit her if Momma gave her permission to, instead of hitting all the time, the way it used to be.

  As she sat, dazzled and perplexed, the big house smashed, as loud as screaming angels. Adrenaline shot through her forehead. The far white wall and its ceiling-high cabinet of fancy porcelain things tilted ponderously. The glass doors fell open. Fancy things crashed onto the wood floor and broke. Brugda scooped her up with muscles and carried her out through the servants’ quarters.

  When she looked back, Joukka Pelata was gone.