The Return of the Dragon

by Rebecca Rupp

  “I think he’s going below,” Zachary said. “There — he’s walking across the deck — he’s gone.”

  “Let’s go see Fafnyr,” Hannah said. And then, as Zachary frowned and opened his mouth: “I know, Zachary, but all this F stuff is getting silly. We’ll ask him if he knows anything about the boat. And the camp.”

  Zachary dropped the binoculars back in his pack and pulled out his flashlight.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll lead the way.”

  One by one, the three children ducked into the cave. As they entered, they smelled the special scent remembered from last summer — a spicy mix of wood smoke, incense, and cinnamon. The cave was much larger than it looked from the outside. Zachary’s flashlight threw eerie shadows on the stone walls. As they edged farther into the cave, the sounds of the outside world were suddenly silenced. The whistle of the wind and the rhythmic crash of the waves ceased abruptly. All was utterly quiet. The cave led farther and farther downward, deep into the center of the hill.

  “The cave seems bigger than it used to,” Sarah Emily said. Her voice quavered a little. Sarah Emily was afraid of the dark.

  “It’s all right,” Zachary said reassuringly in front of her. “We’re almost there.”

  Just as he finished speaking, there was a brilliant glitter in the darkness as the flashlight beam reflected off a broad expanse of shining golden scales.

  Sarah Emily caught her breath.

  It was a dragon.

  The dragon’s name, the children knew, was Fafnyr Goldenwings. Fafnyr was a tridrake — a three-headed dragon — who had been alive for thousands of years. The cave was a Resting Place, a safe haven for dragons, given to Fafnyr long ago by Aunt Mehitabel when she was a little girl. Aunt Mehitabel, who was in her eighties, seldom visited the island now. She lived in an apartment in Philadelphia. Just last summer, she had given the children clues that helped them discover the dragon. “The time has come,” Aunt Mehitabel had written them in a letter, “for me to pass on the trust. I am not getting any younger and Fafnyr needs friends and protectors.” The children had promised to keep Fafnyr and his Resting Place secret and safe. In return, they had all become Dragon Friends, marked by the dragon’s claw in the center of their palms with a spark of shining gold.

  There was the sound of a heavy body shifting on the cave floor. Then there came a soft hiss in the darkness as the dragon, awakened, softly flamed. The cave blossomed into light. A pair of neon-green eyes opened, at first narrowed into gleaming slits, then growing wider.

  “Fafnyr,” breathed Zachary.

  The dragon made a rumbling sound deep in its chest and brushed a golden claw across its eyes. It arched its neck, unfolded its smooth golden wings, and stretched them out one at a time, first to the right and then to the left.

  “Dear me. I must have dozed off,” it said in a scratchy voice. It cleared its throat.

  “How nice to see you all again,” it said. It nodded majestically to each child. “Hannah. Zachary. Sarah Emily. Delightful.”

  “It’s wonderful to see you, Fafnyr,” Hannah said. “We’ve missed you terribly. It has been months and months since we’ve been here.”

  The dragon gave a jaw-cracking yawn.

  “I have missed you too, my dears,” it said. It cleared its throat again in an embarrassed manner. “Or,” it added, “I would have, if I had been awake. I do need my rest, you understand.”

  The dragon yawned enormously for a second time.

  “Months, you say,” it said. “How time flies. And what have you been doing since we saw you last?”

  “Oh, we’ve been at school,” said Hannah. “We haven’t been doing anything important. I’m taking art classes. And I’m on the field hockey team.”

  “And you, dear boy?” The golden head turned toward Zachary.

  “I’ve been building model rockets,” Zachary said. “I named the best one after you, Fafnyr. I painted it a sort of gold color, so I named it Goldenwings. You should see it fly.”

  “Is it the kind that explodes?” the dragon asked in a delighted voice. “I always liked the ones that explode. A bang, and then all those glittery bits.”

  “Those are fireworks,” said Zachary. “These are different. They have engines. You launch them and then they come back down on parachutes.”

  “Ah,” the dragon said. It rolled its eyes briefly upward in the direction of the cave ceiling, as if looking for a descending parachute.

  Then it turned toward Sarah Emily. “And you, my dear?” it asked. “How have you been?”

  “I’ve been fine,” said Sarah Emily. “I’m taking piano lessons.” She wrinkled her nose. “But I’m not very good yet. I’m only up to a thing called ‘The Happy Froggie.’”

  “Practice makes perfect,” the dragon said. “I have no doubt that you will shortly triumph over this . . . cheerful amphibian.” It hummed a few bars of something unrecognizable. “I myself have musical ambitions,” it confided. “We must collaborate sometime. Perhaps a duet.”

  “Fafnyr,” Zachary cut in worriedly, “did you know there are strangers on the island? They’re camping on the beach, right near the bottom of the hill. And there’s a big boat anchored offshore — with a man on it who’s watching your cave. Have you seen him? Do you know what he’s doing here?”

  “He could be dangerous,” Sarah Emily said.

  “He could be a spy,” Zachary said.

  Hannah sighed.

  “We don’t know that he’s watching the cave,” she said fairly. “We couldn’t tell what he was looking at. Lots of people have binoculars. He could be a bird watcher.”

  The dragon thought for a moment.

  “Has this . . . boat person . . . done anything frightening?” it asked finally. “Threatened you?”

  “Well, no,” said Zachary. “We just saw him looking at the hill through binoculars.”

  “So he could, in fact, be bird watching,” the dragon said. “Or perhaps he’s a student of rock formations. Or a landscape painter.”

  “Well,” Zachary said doubtfully, “I guess he could be. We didn’t really see him do anything wrong.”

  “I don’t think Aunt Mehitabel would like trespassers,” Sarah Emily said stubbornly. “Besides, he scared me.”

  The dragon slowly shook its head and made a tutting sound.

  “It seems to me,” it said judiciously, “that this person — these persons — are nothing to worry about. We should give them the benefit of the doubt. Innocent until proven guilty, you know. Doubtless they will shortly realize that this is a private island and will then depart. The situation will resolve itself.”

  “But what if they don’t?” Sarah Emily asked. “Depart, I mean.”

  “Humans,” the dragon said loftily, “waste inordinate amounts of time worrying about things that never happen and dangers that aren’t really there.”

  “But the man is there,” Sarah Emily protested. “And all those tents and things —”

  Hannah put a restraining hand on her arm. “I don’t think that’s what Fafnyr means,” she said. “He means you’re imagining that the man on the boat is dangerous when he might not be at all. It’s a little like Mrs. Bernini, remember?”

  “Mrs. Bernini?” the dragon repeated.

  Sarah Emily nodded. “She lives in a funny little house at the end of our street back home,” she told the dragon. “I used to be really scared of her. She always wore black dresses and her yard was all tangly and full of weeds. I thought she was a witch. But she wasn’t at all. Once we got to know her, she was really nice.”

  “She makes peanut brittle,” Zachary said.

  “Precisely,” said the dragon. “Precisely, my dear. You worried foolishly about something that was never there. And what was there?”

  It waved a triumphant claw.

  “Peanut brittle,” it said.

  Zachary shuffled his feet restlessly. “But it never hurts to be careful,” he said. “We promised Aunt Mehitabel to keep the Resting Plac
e secret and safe.”

  The dragon gave a little sigh. “This all reminds me . . .” it said. It wriggled its wings and settled itself more comfortably on the cave floor.

  “Perhaps,” it said diffidently, “you would like to hear a story? It may help put your fears at rest.”

  “We’d love to,” said Hannah.

  “We’ve missed your stories,” said Sarah Emily.

  The children sat down on the cave’s stone floor, snugly warmed by the dragon’s inner fire, and leaned back against Fafnyr’s golden tail. As the dragon began to speak, the cave walls seemed to shimmer and fade. There was a scent of dust and sun-warmed leaves — a foreign smell with a tang of licorice and lemon — and the twittering sounds of bird song and the baa-ing of sheep. The children, transported by the dragon’s voice, found themselves swept into another place and time, seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.

  “Niko,” the dragon began, “was a shepherd boy. He lived long ago in the rocky hills of Greece, in the days when poets sang songs about gods and wars, and the great city of Athens, with its marble temples and crowded marketplace, seemed to be the very center of the world. Niko did not live in the city, though. He lived in a cottage in a little village, with his mother and father and his younger sister, Daphne. Around their cottage grew olive and lemon trees. Niko’s father fished in the sea and brought home a good catch every night, while Niko tended the family’s little flock of sheep, which wandered every day on the mountainside. But then one day trouble came to the village. . . .”

  Niko, perched on a rock overlooking his flock of nine sheep and four new lambs, was worried. It was a beautiful day, warm and lazy, the sort of day that Niko usually liked to spend napping in the sun or sitting in the shade of the trees, daydreaming of all the things he’d like to do or be. Perhaps someday he would be the captain of a swift red-sailed ship, traveling to strange and distant lands and coming home laden with gold and silver and jewels. Or a great warrior in a glittering helmet topped with dyed horsetails, setting off to battle the Persians. Or best of all, a brilliant philosopher in a long white robe, discovering the answers to all his many questions: What are the stars made of? What causes rainbows? Why does the moon change shape? And—if a boy built himself a huge pair of feathered wings—would he be able to fly?

  Today, however, all the questions seemed to have flown out of his mind. He was wide awake and alert, his eyes fearfully scanning every rock and tree, the fingers of his right hand pleating and re-pleating the hem of his short tunic. A monster was loose on the mountain.

  First, sheep had begun to disappear. Two had vanished from the flock of Niko’s friend Stephanos— simply gone without a trace. Soon more sheep were spirited away—one here, two there—almost, the shepherds claimed, between one blink of an eye and the next. Clumps of bloody wool were found caught in the bushes, and there were strange plots of crushed plants and broken branches — marks where something heavy had crouched, waiting for a chance to kill.

  Then one of the villagers, a man named Jason, actually saw the monster. The creature was like no animal ever seen on earth, Jason said, gesturing wildly with his hands. It was a supernatural being with the body of a serpent, the wings of an eagle, and the head of a lion, yellow-fanged, with flaming red eyes. When Jason bravely approached it, dagger drawn, ready to do battle, the creature magically disappeared. He had found its enormous tracks in the soft ground, he told his awed listeners, but the tracks simply ceased at the point where the monster had vanished. Unfortunately a heavy rain in the night washed away the telltale traces. When he led the villagers to the very spot on the following day, there was nothing to be seen.

  Now Niko, his heart pounding at the stir of every leaf and every rustle in the bushes, was afraid. He felt cold, even in the hot sun. He longed to take his flock and go home — but “Sheep have to eat,” his father said. So here he was, waiting on the mountainside, with a scary prickly feeling between his shoulder blades.

  Slowly the sun topped the sky and began its long journey downward toward the horizon. Usually as he followed the sun’s path across the sky, Niko thought about the sun god, Helios, driving his fiery chariot toward his shining palace in the west. But today he just waited impatiently for the day to be over and the sun to be gone. As the sun sank lower and lower, he gave a sigh of relief. Nothing had happened. The monster had not appeared. It was time to call his flock and go home.

  He hurried across the field, gathering the sheep together for the trip down the mountain, to the safe pen behind the little house. He counted the sheep as he urged them along toward home. One, two, three, four, five — that was Daphne’s favorite, a fat ewe with a comical black splotch over her nose — six, seven, eight, and nine. All were there. And then the four lambs, frisking about at their mothers’ heels. Niko had named each one. There was plump little Penelope; Dido, who had a crumpled ear; Ajax, who was always causing trouble; and his own special lamb, Panno, who had soft brown wool, just the color of fresh-baked bread. One, two, three . . . Niko paused, frowning, and counted again. Three. Just three. His heart gave a thump of alarm. Panno was missing.

  He rapidly circled the grazing field, peering under bushes and behind rocks, and calling. Behind him, one sheep began to bleat, and then another. Still no lamb.

  The monster could strike between one blink of an eye and the next, Niko remembered, with an awful sinking feeling in his stomach. Had it been here, after all? Had it somehow crept to the edge of the field and lain there, watching him through the thicket with its flame-pointed red eyes? Niko shivered. But he had to try to find Panno. Quickly he collected his flock and drove them down the hill, through the little village street, and into the family sheep pen. He made sure their water trough was filled, then fastened the gate behind him and ran to poke his head in the cottage door. He explained the dreadful news to his mother.

  “Wait for your father,” his mother protested, but Niko shook his head.

  “Maybe he hasn’t gone far,” he said. “I’ll go look again. It won’t be dark for a while yet.”

  He ran back down the village street and up the winding track toward the mountain. Once again he circled the field where his sheep had been grazing. Nothing there. He climbed higher, poking his head into every little thicket, checking behind every rock and tree. Then, caught and tangled in a thorny branch, he found a tiny tuft of soft brown wool. Panno must have wandered this way, Niko thought. Lost and confused. He called, but there was no answering baa. He climbed higher and higher, searching as he climbed. He had never explored this part of the mountain before. The shepherds stayed lower down, closer to the village, where the grass was greener and richer.

  Suddenly he heard a shifting in the bushes in front of him, a scrabble on the rocks. Little hooves on stone? “Panno?” he called softly. He pushed the branches aside and felt his heart leap in terror in his chest. He was face-to-face with the monster.

  It was the most enormous creature Niko had ever seen — bigger and more terrible than he had imagined. It was covered with gleaming golden scales. It had polished golden claws, a long arrow-pointed tail, wings neatly folded across its glittering back, and — Niko gasped — three heads on long serpent-like necks. One head, its eyes a piercing green, was looking directly at Niko. The other two heads, eyes closed, were curled low on the creature’s shoulders, seemingly fast asleep. Niko’s knees gave way beneath him. He sank to the ground and buried his face in his hands. He was almost too terrified to breathe.

  Then the monster spoke.

  “My dear boy,” it said. It sounded concerned and upset. “Please don’t be frightened.” It nervously twitched its golden tail. “Despite my impressive and powerful appearance,” the monster said — it turned pinkish and looked modestly down at its claws —“I am quite peaceful. Pacific in nature. At heart, my dear boy, I assure you, I am gentle as a lamb.”

  Niko tried to ask a question. At first, no sound came out.

  Then he said, in a high, strained voice, “But aren’t you .
. . a monster?”

  “The designation,” the creature said in an offended tone, “is highly rude.”

  Look what you’ve done, one part of Niko’s mind shouted at him. First you stumble into the monster. Then you have to insult it and make it angry.

  “Highly rude,” the creature repeated huffily. “The proper, or common, name, as one might call it, is drake or dragon. We are, to be precise, a tridrake. A three-headed dragon. Tri, as in trident, triangle, and tripod.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Niko faintly. He gulped nervously. “But was it you that? . . . Have you ever? . . . Do you . . . eat sheep?”

  “Eat sheep?” the dragon repeated. It shuffled its claws uncomfortably. “Well, I cannot deny, dear boy, that in the distant past I have—occasionally . . .” Its voice trailed off. “But not in recent centuries,” it said firmly. “Dragons, by and large, are vegetarian. Besides”—it made a face—“sheep are so woolly. And they bleat.”

  “Vege . . . ?” Niko began uncertainly.

  “We eat vegetables,” the dragon said. “And cereal grains and fruits.” It eyed Niko severely. “Clearly, education is not what it used to be.”

  A breath of wind rustled the bushes, causing Niko to jump and look hastily over his shoulder.

  The dragon looked with him.

  “You seem on edge, dear boy,” the dragon said. “A not uncommon state, I find, for humans. Perhaps a soothing soup . . .”

  “There’s a monster on the mountain,” Niko said. His words tumbled over each other in his hurry to explain. “Everybody’s frightened. Sheep have been disappearing for weeks — dragged off and killed. Just today, one of our lambs disappeared. And Jason — he lives in our village — saw the monster. He even saw its footprints. The monster ran along the ground and then the footprints just stopped. It vanished into thin air.”

  The dragon nodded.

  “How big were these footprints?” it asked.

  Niko shook his head. “Nobody saw them but Jason. It rained in the night and washed everything away. But he said they were huge. And he could see”—his eyes flickered uneasily toward the dragon’s immense golden feet—“the marks where its claws dug into the ground.”