by Tom Holt
‘This,’ said Prodsnap at last, ‘isn’t getting us anywhere, is it?’
Snorkfrod glowered at him, but Chardonay nodded meekly. ‘It was only an idea,’ he said. ‘Looks like we’re going to have to walk after all.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Prodsnap replied. ‘Got an idea.’
‘Right,’ said the dragon, and turned to the barman. ‘That’s a bottle of calvados for me and a Perrier for the lady. She’s paying,’ he added. ‘I haven’t got any money.’
They sat at a table in a quiet corner, the opposite end of the bar from the pool table. ‘Is that a game?’ the dragon asked.
Bianca nodded. ‘Pool,’ she said. ‘Don’t change the sub—’
‘Prodding things with a long thin stick,’ the dragon observed, finishing the bottle and wiping his lips. ‘Had something similar in my day, only the sticks were longer and the players were on horseback. And it wasn’t little coloured balls they poked at, either.’
‘No?’
The dragon shook his head. ‘After they ran out of dragons,’ he said, ‘they took to prodding each other, would you believe. To see who could fall off his horse the quickest. I think you’re probably descended from them, so you can wipe that superior grin off your face.’
Bianca frowned. ‘Whatever my ancestors may have done,’ she said, ‘I’m not responsible. That’s a good rule you’d do well to remember.’
The dragon shrugged. ‘Who gives a toss who’s responsible?’ he replied. ‘I prefer being irresponsible. Especially now you’ve made me such a nice cozzy to be irresponsible in.’ He swilled the bottle round, by way of a hint. ‘I haven’t been in your century long, but I think I like it. It’s so...’
‘Advanced? Civilised?’
‘Combustible,’ the dragon replied. ‘Not to mention fragile.’
Bianca shook her head. ‘Don’t even think about it,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t last five minutes. And if you get shot down in flames, my masterpiece goes with you. Any cannon-shell holes in my beautiful statue, I’ll have your lungs for dustbin liners.’
The dragon smiled. ‘Your technology is crap,’ he said, slowly and with evident pleasure. ‘Too slow. Too cocksure of itself. There’s only one half-decent combat aircraft in the whole damn century, and you made it for me. Thanks,’ he added. ‘And yes, I don’t mind if I do. Same again, please.’
When Bianca returned with another bottle, the dragon leaned forward, elbows on the table, and blew smoke-rings through his nose. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I’d better explain. I owe you that, I suppose, in return for the masonry work.’
The last surviving dragon peered down from the cave in which he had taken refuge, and watched the stevedores loading the carcasses of his race onto the big, twelve-wheel wagons. Strangely enough, he wasn’t angry. He didn’t seem to feel anything very much, except for a strange sensation of being at the beginning rather than the end.
Later, when the last wagon had creaked away down the main cart-road to Caerleon, he fluttered down to the riverbank and scratched about. In a small gully he found a pile of empty cans. They smelt awful and each had written on the side:WORMEX™
Kills All Known Feral Dragons - Dead!
Warning: harmful if swallowed.
Right, he muttered to himself, don’t drink the water. Clever little buggers, the white men. Superior intelligence, probably. The dragon could remember when they were nothing but a bunch of red-arsed monkeys skittering around in trees. Strewth, he said to himself, if those original monkeys were around now to see how far their great-grandchildren had come, wouldn’t they be proud? No, replied the dragon’s common sense. They’d be (first) shit scared and (second) turned into boot-linings.
But the wee bastards had done him one favour; they’d taught him right from wrong. As far as he could make out, because of something called Symbolism, dragons stood for
Evil and humans stood for Good. Therefore, what humans did was Good and what dragons did was Bad. Hence, the emergence of Mankind as Top Species, presumably.
What dragons did was mess around feeding and minding their own business. This was Bad.
What humans did was eradicate whole species whose existence was inconvenient to them. This was Good.
Right, said the dragon to himself. Let nobody say I’m a slow learner.
After burning the city of Caerleon to the ground and incinerating its defenders, the dragon was pleased to discover that doing good can be fun. Virtue, he’d heard humans say, is its own reward. Yes. He could relate to that. And there were an awful lot of cities left; so much thatch, so little time. By the time he’d torched Caerleil, Caermerdin, Caerusc and Carbolic, he reckoned he’d probably earned a medal, maybe a bishopric - not that he knew exactly what a bishopric was. If asked to venture a guess, based on recent experience, he’d have said it was probably like a hayrick but easier to ignite.
Imagine his distress, therefore, when he learned, during the final carbonisation of the beautiful Midland city of Rhydychen, that he wasn’t doing good at all, but rather the opposite. At Rhydychen, they sent out the archbishop and an even score of priests in purple dressing gowns, all of whom tried to dispose of him by swearing a lot and ringing little bells. In the few seconds before they faded away and were replaced by a residue of light grey ash, he distinctly heard them refer to him as the Evil One, the Spawn of Satan and all sorts of other unsavoury names. It almost (but not quite) took his breath away.
The dragon paused. He was aware that Bianca was staring at him, her mouth open.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘am I going a bit fast for you? Stop me if I am.’
‘All those ... people,’ Bianca said quietly. ‘You killedthem.’
‘To a certain extent, yes. If only someone had had the common sense to explain the rules to me earlier, none of that would have happened. I must say, for a dominant species your lot can be thick as bricks sometimes.’
Bianca shook her head as if trying to wake up. ‘Hundreds of thousands of human beings,’ she said. ‘And you—’
‘Ants.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’ve seen you do it,’ the dragon replied. ‘Not you personally, of course, but humans in general. What you do is, you boil a kettle, you stand over the nest the ants have thoughtlessly built under your kitchen floor, and you—’
‘That‘s-’
The dragon nodded. ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘You forget, I’m from a different species. And I didn’t make the rules. More to the point, I didn’t even know what the rules were until I found out, quite by chance. And once I’d found out, of course, I stopped.’
‘You did?’
‘Well, of course. Back then, you see, all I ever wanted to do was the right thing.’
In response to his polite request for a copy of the rule book, the dragon got three cartsful of angry letters from the Pope (which he dismissed as a load of bulls) and a challenge to single combat. Good versus Evil. The big event.
The dragon thought about it and then scorched his reply in fifteen-foot letters on Salisbury Plain: It’s a deal.
Humanity nominated its champion: Dragon George Cody, Albion’s premier pest control operative, recently dubbed Saint by His Holiness in Rome. Naturally, the dragon knew Cody. In fact, it was Cody’s absence from Caerleon, Caerusc, Tintagel and Caerdol that had spoiled four otherwise perfect barbecues.
During the week between the issue of the challenge and the date fixed for the fight, the dragon camped out in a pleasant little valley in the Brecon Beacons. There was a nice roomy cave, a cool, fresh brook and a little grove of trees to lie up in during the warm afternoons. George, no doubt, was frantically training somewhere, but the dragon couldn’t be bothered with all that stuff. After all, this was the showdown between the two diametrically opposing principles of the Universe. Doing anything to influence the outcome struck the dragon as faintly blasphemous.
Two days before the fight, the dragon left the shade of the trees and waddled down to the brook for a drink. Just as he was ab
out to take a long, cool suck, he noticed a funny, familiar smell. He hesitated. He looked about.
The surface of the brook, he noticed, was covered in dead fish.
Half an hour of nosing about revealed a pile of empty Wormex™ cans, concealed under a thick mass of brambles half a mile downstream. For a long time the dragon lay beside the water, his brows furrowed in perplexed thought. Surely not, he kept saying to himself. Impossible. Out of the question. Absolutely no way. For pity’s sake, what was the point of arranging a contest between Good and Evil and then trying to cheat?
Twenty-one empty cans and a streamful of dead trout.
The dragon had stopped speaking and was looking at her, one eyebrow raised. Bianca shook her head again.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘But the survival of the human race was at stake. You said yourself—’
‘No.’ The dragon’s voice was soft and reasonable, with just a dash of perplexity. ‘No, it wasn’t, that’s the whole point. What was at stake - as set out in black and white in the super limited edition official pre-fight souvenir brochure - was the contrasting merits of Good and Evil. And that’s what I simply couldn’t get my head around, try as I might. Of course,’ he went on, waving to the barman for another bottle, ‘if I’d been a cynic I’d have had no trouble explaining it away. You see, as a battle between species, survival of the fittest and all, it was a foregone conclusion. In the red corner, a huge, fire-breathing, flying, invulnerable dragon. In the blue corner, lots of little squishy things who fry if you sneeze on them and starve if you burn their crops. But as a contest between moral forces, it’d be a foregone conclusion the other way. Particularly if the bad guy forfeited the match by not showing up, on account of being home dead with severe gastritis. But that wasn’t the way I saw it.’
‘No?’
The dragon shook his head. ‘Still wouldn’t have made any sense,’ he said. ‘Think about it. Your entire species is wiped out, except for you. There’s got to be a reason, surely. If there wasn’t a reason, you’d go stark staring mad just thinking about it.’
Bianca intercepted the fresh bottle and took a long, serious pull at it. ‘All right,’ she said, wiping off the neck and passing it over. ‘So then what happened?’
Well (said the dragon), I found another stream that didn’t smell of roast almonds, had a good long slurp and went to sleep.
When I woke up, there were five humans standing over me. I took a deep breath, but they waved a bit of white rag on a stick at me. I believe that’s supposed to make you fireproof.
They explained that they represented a syndicate of humans who earned their living by making bets on things - horse-races, chess matches, witch duckings and, apparently, confrontations between Good and Evil. They had a proposition to put to me, they said. Something, they said, to our mutual advantage.
It was just as well they said the last bit, because if they hadn’t they’d have found themselves floating on the breeze like wee grey snowflakes two seconds later. As it was, for a moment I reckoned that at last the humans had finally got their act together and worked out some way dragons and people could share the same ball of wet rock without having to snuff each other out. Actually, I was wrong. But the proposition was interesting.
They told me that the big fight had attracted a lot of interest in gambling circles. The trouble was, once the news broke that I hadn’t drunk the Wormex™ cocktail and was accordingly still somewhat alive, the odds had been redrawn on the basis that Saint George was going to be fondued and I would inevitably win. You could get two thousand to one on Cody, no trouble at all, but if you wanted to bet on me nobody was prepared to take your money. This, the betting men said, struck them as a wonderful opportunity cunningly disguised as a fuck-up.
Explain, I said.
They explained. If they put their shirts on George to win and then I lost the fight ...
Come, come, I said. All false modesty aside, do you really think there’s a lawyer’s chance in Heaven of that happening ?
They shuffled their feet. They cleared their throats. They fiddled with their hats. Was I familiar, they asked, with the concept of taking a dive?
George, they went on, was already in on the deal and would do his bit to the letter. All I had to do was wait until he tried to prod me with his lance - he’d miss, naturally - and then roll over on the ground, make funny noises and pretend to die. Once everybody had gone home, I’d make myself scarce and never come back. They’d just acquired some vacant real estate, they said, a big island called Antarctica, completely empty, not a human being anywhere. I was welcome to it. Chance to make a fresh start, live my life without any further aggravation from homo sapiens. Plus, they added, once again saving themselves in the very nick of time from being oxidised, it was the only possible way to resolve the Good-versus-Evil showdown with the one result that actually made any sense, which was, of course, a draw.
Bianca realised that she’d lost all feeling in her hands. She looked down and saw that her hands were clamped solid on the arms of her chair.
‘And?’ she demanded.
The next bit (continued the dragon) makes me feel a bit upset when I think about it. As a rule I’m not one to carry a grudge, but I reckon it was a pretty poor show.
I did my bit. George didn’t do his. Maybe, just conceivably, there was some sort of communications breakdown, I don’t know. Perhaps the gamblers were lying when they said George had agreed to co-operate. Somehow, though, I doubt it. Like I said, I’d known Cody a fair while, and not only would he sell his own grandmother, he’d throw in forged Green Shield stamps.
So there I was, or rather wasn’t. A right idiot I felt, with my body stuck with George’s lance like an enormous green cocktail sausage, and my head on a pole being pelted with distinctly second-hand groceries. By that point, however, there wasn’t a lot I could do about it.
Maybe it served me right; after all, I’d agreed to cheat too, and Cheating is Wrong. And you could say George didn’t cheat, because his job in the grand scheme of things was to kill the evil dragon, and that’s precisely what he did do. I really don’t know, and what’s more I don’t really care any more. I’ve had enough of Good and Evil to last me, and as far as I’m concerned it sucks.
Any old how. There’s me, dead. Which is presumably where the story’s meant to have ended.
Only it didn’t.
‘You’ve gone ever such a funny colour,’ said the dragon. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t have drunk all that apple juice.’
‘Calvados. And no, I don’t think it’s that.’ Bianca swallowed a couple of times, as if she’d got the Arc de Triomphe stuck in her throat. ‘Excuse me asking this, but are you dead?’
‘I was,’ replied the dragon, scratching his ear. ‘Very much so. If there was an award for Stiffo of the Millenium, I’d have been a contender, no question about that, right up until a few weeks ago. Round about the time you started—’
‘Don’t.’ Bianca swallowed again. ‘Would you excuse me?’ she said. ‘I feel a bit unwell.’
‘Over there by the fruit machine and turn right,’ said the dragon. ‘That’s assuming I’ve interpreted the little drawings on the doors correctly.’
‘Thank you.’
While Bianca was in the ladies’, the dragon passed the time by drinking off another three bottles of calvados and, having exhausted the wine bar’s supply, a bottle and a half of Bacardi. Not a patch on Diesel, but in time you could probably acquire the taste.
‘As I was saying,’ he went on, ‘it was your statue that did it. Why, I have no idea. You got any theories?’
Bianca shook her head. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘And anyway, I’ve clearly gone barking mad, so anything I say isn’t likely to be much help to anybody.’
The dragon frowned a little, pulled open a packet of peanuts and offered her a handful, which she hastily refused. ‘My theory - and it’s just that, a theory - is that somehow, somewhere along the line, something has cocked up quite spectacularly. The whole Good-an
d-Evil business is up the pictures and it needs setting right. And,’ he went on, more to himself than to Bianca, who in any event was staring at the toes of her shoes and making puppy-dog noises, ‘for some reason that beats me completely, it needs setting right now.’ He sat very still for maybe nine or ten seconds; then he finished off the last of the rum, slapped his knees jovially and stood up. ‘Ready?’ he demanded.
‘Woof,’ Bianca replied.
‘I think I’ve decided what I’m going to do next.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yes.’ The dragon looked out through the window, smiled a little and ate the last peanut. ‘I think I’d like to find George,’ he said.
CHAPTER SIX
Prodsnap’s idea was very simple. All they had to do was find a phone box and call a cab.
Eventually they found a phone box ...
(‘But don’t we have to put money in it?’
‘Or a phonecard.’
‘You’ve got a phonecard?’
‘Got one? Man, I invented them.’)
... and eventually the taxi came. Moving with extreme speed, Prodsnap was able to get his claws round the passenger door handle before the driver was able to throw the car into reverse and get away.
‘Hi,’ he said brightly. ‘Birmingham, please.’
The cab driver’s eyes were as round as soup-plates, and he made a sort of snurgling noise. Prodsnap occupied the front seat, beckoned towards the bushes and grinned.
‘On our way to a fancy dress party and the blasted car died on us,’ he said. ‘Don’t you just hate it when that happens?’
The driver’s eyes were riveted to the six-fingered, claw-fringed talon resting lightly on his dashboard. ‘Fancy dress?’ he guttered.
