“Funny, now that my body has been destroyed and the skin is dribbling off my bones, to think my largest concern two weeks ago was a sneeze. Tell me something.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Why?”
“Why am I doing this?”
“We both know altogether well I am dying, and I will probably be dead by morning. You owe me no allegiance and as you’ve said, you don’t even like me. So yes. Why.”
I leaned back against the tree I was planning to re-climb shortly, and thought about the question.
“Not sure,” I admitted.
“Are you as old as she said?”
“How old did she say?”
“She said you were as old as the world.”
“That’s very poetic, but… guess it depends on your definition of the world. But I’m older than any civilization, and older than most races, and older than every language. I don’t know how old, but, pretty old.”
“Then you are a survivor.”
“That’s part of the package, sure.”
“A survivor would have left me yesterday. It was the smart thing to do. Do you no longer wish to be one?”
“It’s not like that. You know some people think I’m a god?”
“That follows, yes.”
“Sure, but I’m not.”
“Who would be qualified to judge?”
“Right, but… gods. Gods exist so all of this makes sense. Either they reward people for their suffering and senseless death, or they’re to blame for it. We create gods to understand the random and inexplicable, because even if people don’t get what’s happening and why, the god they believe in… well, he’s got a plan. It could be a terrible plan, but he surely has one. If I’m a god, everyone’s in trouble, because I don’t know why people suffer and die. I just don’t want it to be for my sake.”
“You’re upset because of my sacrifice.”
“The list of people who have died so that I could live is so long I can’t begin to name them all.”
“But I didn’t do it for you. I did it for the prophecy.”
I laughed.
“That’s not any better. If it isn’t a god out there with a plan, it’s a prophet with a peek at things to come. It’s all just another way to give meaning to something meaningless. Maybe I’m here because I’m tired of letting people kill themselves for my sake. Maybe it’s just that prophets piss me off. It’s probably nothing personal. I mean, you are a prick.”
Bruno smiled.
“I am. But thank you for being kind. If there is a place to go after this, and that place has gods in it, I will be sure to tell them you acquitted yourself well.”
He held up his left hand, which I gripped tightly. It was moist and sticky, and… well, pretty gross, and if I worried about things like disease I’d probably be really concerned. As it was, I probably could have used hand soap and a sink.
“I hope there is such a place,” I said, “even if it’s half-full of people I sent there.”
* * *
I didn’t climb the tree. Some combination of the hiking/carrying of Bruno and the lack of sleep from the previous night conspired to enable an outcome in which I dozed off against the trunk next to him, his clammy hand still in mine, and the open tin of sulfur powder still in my lap.
I woke up to the sound of something large moving through the woods. It was easy enough to pick out because the entire forest floor had gone silent.
Like I said before, jungles make a ton of sound; bugs crying; small animals running, climbing and slithering; trees creaking in the wind; moisture rapping against leaves; birds flying; bats flapping; and on and on. It’s always something, and it creates a sort of low, undifferentiated hum that after a while you don’t hear any more, right up until it stops.
What makes everything in a jungle stop what it’s doing and stay still can either be a large predator or an impending storm. If you ask me how a meerkat or a buzzard or a deer knows when a storm is coming (or an earthquake, they’re really good at that too) I couldn’t say, but that everyone knows when there’s a predator… that’s pretty obvious. The ones who can sense a predator are the ones who are still alive. The loud ones. who can’t tell, were eaten by the last predator to come through.
I knew enough not to move, but at the same time I had to move. I needed to know what had done this to Bruno. I mean, I was pretty clear that a banshee had done it. My question was, what the hell was a banshee?
I listened to them all day, in the distance, making that weird noise, and as much as I didn’t want to run into one after the beating Bruno got, I very desperately wanted to see what they looked like. Large, scary, monstrous things that can pulp a human-sized person do not just pop into existence, and the one story I had—where I heard them from afar on the Danish shores some fourteen hundred years ago—just wasn’t enough for me. If these things were real, they weren’t something new. They had another name.
But to know what that name was, I had to see one. Once I saw, I would know how to deal with it.
All right, probably not, but one thing at a time.
I let go of Bruno’s hand, set aside the tin of sulfur, and got to my feet as quietly as I knew how, which for the record is pretty quiet. It helped a lot that I was still barefoot, as I always traveled better off-road that way. You’d think after years of mostly having on footwear, the thick skin and calluses would have softened, but they never seem to.
I took a cautious step around the tree, had a look around, and another step. The forest floor was still dead quiet, but that could mean either that the predator was coming, or that it was right behind me. There’s always that risk.
Then I heard it, heading down the hill to my right. Big, moving on four legs, with another consistent with a tail. I took a couple of steps toward the sound to see about getting a good view of it before scampering up a tree when I realized my error.
Something big was on the way, all right, but something else was already there, behind me.
It was big too. It stood maybe ten feet away. Pale skin, almost translucent. What I thought the night before was that it was practically glowing in the moonlight, which I interpreted as paleness, but this was something more. The thing’s skin picked up what light there was and reflected it back in a white glow. I might have thought it was a ghost if I lived in a world where ghosts existed and also glowed.
I put it at no more than five feet in height, and with a body shape that only barely corresponded to a human one: there was a head and a torso, and arms and legs, but those component parts formed something closer to a pyramid than a person. There was a great deal of fat on its frame, most of it settling in the lower region. The shoulders and arms displayed an astonishing musculature, but the stomach and waist suggested a grossly overweight man. The parts didn’t match up.
The head looked like the top of a rocket. There was no nose, and no visible ears. The eyes were huge and black, the mouth closed and bearing an expression I couldn’t interpret.
I had no idea what I was looking at.
It seemed to have some dim idea of what I was, though. It stepped closer. As it moved from the tall grasses on those enormous, thick legs I saw what Bruno meant when he said it had no feet. It didn’t step, precisely; it glided. There were two legs involved, but they didn’t bend at the knee. Instead, some kind of cilium action going on down at the bottom, like there were hundreds of tiny toes helping it scamper along.
I say it although it had no clothing on and a breast-free chest, so I could have said he just as easily, and maybe I would have been correct about that, but this thing looked so alien—I wasn’t ruling out an extra-planetary explanation at this point, either—that there was no telling if the external indicators of species gender even made sense.
I didn’t know what to do, but it was coming my way, so I figured I had a few seconds to sort it out before trying to escape up a tree.
“Hello,” I said. “I mean you no harm. Um, greetings.”
I waved.
>
It stopped, looked at my hand for a second, and then opened its mouth to reply. By screaming.
I don’t know if the scream was all it had. By that I mean, maybe it didn’t have an indoor voice, and it was either scream or say nothing. I did know that in screaming, it revealed two rows of sharp teeth that were the sort of thing people have nightmares about for the rest of their lives, and that getting a good distance away from those teeth was a really great idea.
I turned to grab onto the nearest tree at around the same time the creature decided I was someone he wished to attack.
Fortunately—and I may never consider this a matter of good fortune again—I’d forgotten about the other large predator traveling through the forest.
It reached the scary pale thing before the scary pale thing reached me, and well before I made it to a tree. I decided then it was better to dive to the ground behind a trunk and next to Bruno and bear witness as two large beasts grappled with one another, especially since neither was focusing on me.
I was very lucky the second thing in the woods wasn’t another banshee. It was taller, and it didn’t glow in the light. It roared a lot, and growled, and acted as we all expect most large land animals to act in general. About half of that was for show, which is typical: animals don’t often combat for sport, and would rather scare off an opponent than engage with one.
There wasn’t a fight, in other words. The banshee quickly retreated, leaving my savior alone to do what it wanted with me.
I wasn’t going to escape up a tree to get away from this predator. I knew what it was and I was pretty sure it could get at least ten or twelve feet up a tree before I could climb past the ten or twelve foot point, and it was possible it could even climb a tree if it really wanted to.
It growled a low, lizard growl and walked on four legs toward me, claws uprooting clumps of grass. An oblong head showed off rows of teeth nearly as impressive as the last guy’s.
It headed my way. I knew what it was, and I knew how to kill it, but I needed a sword and a lot of help and I had neither of those.
It was a dragon. And it wasn’t supposed to exist.
11
Dragons never got as big as houses, they couldn’t fly, and they didn’t breathe fire. They also weren’t self-aware, in the way that people (and goblins, and elves, and even pixies) were. They were large land animals, megafauna lizards that went extinct a while ago because they never got along with anyone, including each other.
Or rather, I thought they went extinct. The last dragon I saw was in France in the plague years, and I know that one didn’t go on to lead a long and fruitful life because I killed it.
I’m basing my understanding of which animals are and are not extinct on my own witness testimony, and I appreciate that since I’m only one person this is a less-than-comprehensive survey. But unlike most of the unlikely creatures on this island and elsewhere in the world, dragons don’t have the presence of mind to keep their existence hidden. Their intelligence is about on level with a wolf or a parrot, and since modern people know about wolves and parrots I would think they would also know about the non-mythological iteration of dragons, if dragons were still around.
A fully mature dragon is typically between a hippo and an elephant in size, has an incredibly thick, scaly hide, can run on all fours at the same speed as a horse and can engage a man in combat as a biped, on hind legs and swinging powerful forearms. Its paws come with long claws, its head—oblong and lizard-like in shape—has a set of very sharp teeth, and it has a tail that can be swung like a weapon. Also, thanks to what I imagine are some serious dietary problem, dragons tend to smell like sulfur. I suspect this is where the fire-breathing aspect of their legend came from.
If encountering a dragon, it’s always a good idea to have a vampire, a mercenary demon, or a very fast horse on your side. If you don’t have any of those things, but you do have a decent broadsword and some skill with it, there’s a puncher’s chance at survival because dragons have a soft spot in their scaly armor just below the neck, but that’s about all.
I had none of those things, and if the dragon wanted to eat me he could do it well before I made it up the nearest tree. And as I said, even if I did make it, for all I knew he could climb trees too.
“Hi, buddy,” I said, as nicely as I could. I was adopting a defensive posture that would do me exactly no good if he pounced. “You wouldn’t want to… go extinct for me now, would you?”
The dragon stood where he was: on all fours and facing me. While the light wasn’t great, it didn’t look as if he was treating me like a threat. There was a distinctive whoosh-whoosh sound, and he was swaying.
He was wagging his tail, and sniffing at the air. Then, in what I thought at first was a charge, he lumbered past me and to the spot I’d been sitting not so long ago.
He was rooting around in the leaves.
It was Bruno’s sulfur. Sulfur attracted dragons. This was news to me.
This would have been a super time to climb a tree and escape, but I had gone past being afraid and had settled on curious. Something around his neck was glowing gently. Not like a throbbing neon sort of glow, more like the defensive action of a jellyfish. It was weird, because dragons aren’t battery-powered and don’t glow.
I took a few cautious steps forward. The dragon noticed, and fell back until we were face-to-face again. He stood his ground, but not in a way I’d call threatening. He looked anticipatory, mostly. Like he was at least self-aware enough to recognize he was the most terrifying thing in the jungle—aside from whatever it was he’d scared off—and knew the best way to keep people at ease was to avoid any sudden motion.
I stepped closer, my hand out in front and at the same level as his head. A few more steps, and I was close enough to pet him.
Which I did. He tilted his head toward the hand like a dog, and as jarring as the entire concept was, I realized that was essentially what I had in front of me: a gigantic lizard-dog.
He licked the side of my arm and I tried not to panic.
On closer inspection, the glowing thing around his neck turned out to be a collar. It was about three inches wide and made of some kind of plastic with a built-in fluorescence. It gave off a gentle yellow-green light, which made the writing on it easy enough to read:
HELLO MY NAME IS BUSTER. I AM FRIENDLY.
“Oh,” I said. “Hello, Buster.”
I nearly lost my arm then, because Buster got very excited when he heard his name, and my hand was still holding onto the collar at the time. He jumped up and down and ran in a small circle, and then he growled something that sounded an awful lot like his name.
The parrot analogy wasn’t entirely without merit. I did hear a dragon speak once before, but it was mostly an act of mimicry, not with any real sense of understanding language on a level we might expect from a fully cognizant being.
“Okay, Buster, okay. Calm down.”
Buster was kind of adorable. Terrifying dragon, sure, but adorable terrifying dragon. He was easily the friendliest pet monster I’d come across in centuries and his enthusiasm over having met me appeared to be something he couldn’t fully contain. This put the entire landscape at risk, but so far he hadn’t accidentally damaged me.
“Um, sit,” I said. “Sit down.”
Buster sat. Someone trained him well.
“Stay,” I said.
I took a few steps around the tree and the land Buster had just been rooting around in. I found the tin of sulfur first, then Bruno.
The incubus was dead. My guess was he had been for a little while, likely passing while I was asleep and holding onto his sticky hand.
He seemed to be dissolving at an accelerated rate. I won’t bother to describe what that looked like, but suffice to say the sleeping bag was no longer something anyone else would be able to use.
I decided to leave him where he was. Gordana was supposed to return in the morning; she could figure out whether or bury him or what. Whether I was there with him wh
en she got back was an open question. I had a new mystery to solve, and waiting around until sunrise wasn’t going to solve it.
I pocketed the tin and returned to Buster, who stayed put like a good boy. I figured there was more information on that collar, something that would tell me who tamed him and where he lived. An “if found, please return to…” statement of some kind.
There wasn’t any such thing on the collar though, which I guess made a little sense since nobody on the island had a real mailing address anyway. There was only one other word on the collar at all, and to get to it I had to rotate it 180 degrees.
The word was PULL. It sat above a tiny tab.
I pulled, several layers of the glowing collar unspooled, and soon I had a fifteen-foot leash in my hands.
Buster’s tail wagged again, and nearly took out my legs. He looked up expectantly.
“Home, Buster,” I said. “Take me home.”
And then we were off.
* * *
It almost goes without saying that following the meander of someone’s pet dragon through a jungle just contributed to the challenge of figuring out precisely where I was.
I knew only a couple of the estates near the top of the island on sight, and then only from certain angles. Two or three times, I caught a glimpse of the lit side of a building, and one or two of those times I thought maybe I recognized the building, but I considered that insufficient to start knocking on doors. Too many people around this part of the island reacted negatively to strangers, and after the tsunami I had plenty of reason to think a negative reaction would only be more strident.
Plus, I thought Buster was going to lead me to his home, which I expected to be in a house. I also expected him to get me past any gates.
I began to question this assumption around the time the angle of our ascent reached a degree of steepness that made it seem a lot more like rock-climbing than hiking.
Soon, it became impossible to pace Buster in any meaningful way, because he was a better climber and appeared to be traveling a well-known route. It was still dark out, though, and I’m not the kind of person to free-climb an unfamiliar cliff face in the dark when I have a choice. Sure, if I’m fleeing someone or something, I’ll scale whatever you’ve got, but otherwise, I’d rather go around or wait for someone with ropes to come along.
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 19
