Paint Your Dragon Tom Holt

by Paint Your Dragon (lit)

  The dragon had clambered right up onto his own head. It was a long way to the ground from there, as the crow flies. Not so far as the human falls, but landing safely is more problematic that way.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Bianca demanded.

  ‘I’m standing on my head. What does it look like I’m doing?’

  ‘Come down,’ Bianca shouted. ‘It isn’t safe!’

  The dragon stood, motionless, gazing. He could see a long way from there; almost as far as he’d been, and almost as far as he had to go. At first Bianca, and then Bianca and a lot of professional people with loudhailers and certificates to prove they were experts at getting people down from high places, tried to persuade him to come down. He didn’t seem to hear them. He was miles away.

  In the middle of all this excitement, a jeep rolled up and parked on the edge of the crowd, behind the TV van. They listened to the reporter jabbering happily into his micro­phone.

  ‘He’s got it all wrong, of course,’ Mike said.

  ‘Only to be expected,’ Kurt replied. ‘Just as well, prob­ably. If they knew exactly who he was they’d be shooting at him.’

  On the back seat of the jeep, Father Kelly knelt, head bowed, palms together. Kurt rather wished he wouldn’t; it had been ever so slightly flattering at first, when this priest came running over pointing to something Kurt couldn’t see, three inches or so over the top of his head, and gibbering about haloes and saints. That had been two hours ago and he hadn’t let up one bit in all that time. Fur­thermore, he kept asking Kurt to do things he couldn’t do, and wouldn’t even if he could; in particular, the requests concerning disarmament and world peace would put Kurt personally out of a job. Kurt had tried asking him nicely to stop, shouting and even hitting him with the tyre iron; the clown didn’t seem to notice. Finally he’d decided to try ignoring him till he went away. There was a chance it might work in maybe forty years or so.

  ‘Ah shucks,’ Kurt sighed. ‘Guess I’d better deal with this. I think it’s the last of the loose ends.’ He climbed out of the jeep, shoved something down inside his jacket, glanced in the wing-mirror and smoothed his hair. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I get to thinking, maybe it’d be nice if some other guy sorted out the loose ends, just once. In my dreams, huh?’

  ‘In my dreams,’ Mike replied, ‘I get chased down winding corridors by a seven-foot-tall saxophone. Count yourself lucky.’

  Kurt nudged and shoved his way to the front of the crowd and waved. The dragon saw him and waved back.

  ‘Yo, Fred,’ Kurt shouted. ‘What are you doing up there, for Chrissakes?’

  ‘Using my head,’ the dragon replied. ‘Following my nose. That sort of thing.’

  Kurt shrugged. ‘Up to you, man,’ he said. ‘If you come down, you can have maybe fifty years of quiet, mundane existence; a splash of fun here and there, from time to time a kick in the nuts from God, and eventually a one-way ride on the celestial meathook.’

  ‘Kurt,’ the dragon replied, ‘you missed your calling. You should have been in advertising.’ He grinned and stood on one leg while he scratched an itchy ankle. ‘I think it was Confucius or one of that lot who said it’s not necessarily better to eat shit than go hungry.’

  ‘Depends,’ Kurt replied, taking a bar of chocolate from the top pocket of his jacket and breaking off a chunk. ‘Raw, yes, agreed. What confuses the issue is books like Shit Cookery Oriental Style and 1001 Feasts Of Faeces. Boy, you don’t know what anything’s like until you’ve tried it.’

  ‘Bless you,’ the dragon replied. ‘You’d be good at this sort of thing if only your heart was in it. But I’ve seen more sincerity on a game show.’

  Kurt shrugged. ‘Catch,’ he said. He pulled something out from under his jacket and tossed it to the dragon, who caught it one-handed.

  ‘What’s this?’ the dragon asked.

  ‘Ah,’ Kurt replied, and walked away. For the record, on the third day he ascended bodily into Heaven, where they gave him a job searching new arrivals in case they’d tried to take it with them. He was very good at it and bored stiff. Eventually he broke into the reincarnation laboratories, then ran away and joined a flea circus.

  The dragon opened the package Kurt had thrown him. He studied it for a while, puzzled; then, just as the TV cameras managed to zoom in and focus on it, he threw it into the air. Then he followed it.

  Bianca, among others, screamed and looked away as he hit the ground. When she looked up again, she saw that her statue of Saint George was back in position, horse rearing, shield held forwards, sword raised. It was stunningly beautiful, and all wrong. Even before the crowd had dispersed, she knew what she had to do.

  Three months later, the vice chairman of Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits (UK) formally declared the revamped Victoria Square open. It was raining; flinging it down with the special reserve stock extra wet rain with added real water that you only get in Birmingham. As an extra precaution, some men from the Council had attached inch-thick steel hawsers to the legs of the statues, but they needn’t have bothered. The new George and Dragon group wasn’t going anywhere, or at least not for some time.

  Critical opinion was divided, as always, ranging from ‘strikingly innovative and original’ to ‘gratuitously per­verse’. The latter school did wonders for the statue’s popularity, as hundreds of people who thought they knew what ‘perverse’ meant turned out to have a gawp. What they actually saw was a tiny dragon backing away from a huge, towering George, advancing on his minuscule oppo­nent with his sword raised above his head.

  Later critics recognised the piece’s true merits; and now it’s in all the books and you can buy little plastic Saint Dragon and the George key-rings in the library gift shop in

  nearby Chamberlain Square. In any event, it was Bianca’s last sculpture; she retired, hung up her chisel and went into partnership with Mike, running the biggest chipping and gravel merchants’ firm in the West Midlands. Ex-friends still ask pointedly why someone who devoted so much of her life to making statues should now devote an equal amount of energy to buying them up in bulk and turning them into limestone fertiliser. When asked, Bianca will generally smile and make some oblique remark about slum clearance and doing her bit to put the finality back into Death, until Mike interrupts her and explains that actually, there’s more money in it. Which, incidentally, is perfectly true.

  The dragon rose.

  This high above the clouds, with no ground visible and nothing else to be seen in any direction except straggling white fluff, perspective goes by the board. What looks like a small dragon up close could be a large dragon far away, or vice versa. Not, of course, that it actually matters.

  True, Kurt’s gift-wrapped parcel had turned out to contain a six-inch-long plastic toy dragon, bought from the Early Learning Centre in the Palisades, off New Street. But, as Kurt himself deposed in evidence in front of the Celestial Board of Enquiry, it stood to reason that if it was in a kids’ shop, it was probably a kid toy dragon, and maybe it just grew up.

  Or maybe it didn’t want to grow up. Maybe it just thought a happy thought and flew the hell out.

  There’s an urban folk-myth that says that every time a child says he doesn’t believe in dragons, somewhere a dragon dies. This is unlikely, because if it was true, we’d spend half our lives shovelling thirty-foot corpses out of the highways with dumper trucks and the smell would be intolerable. Slightly more credible is the quaint folk-theorem that says that the higher up and away you go, the less rigid and hidebound the rules become; it’s something to do with relativity, and it limps by for the simple reason that it’s far more trouble than it’s worth to disprove it.

  In any event, the dragon rose. With nobody to see and nobody to care, it was as big as it wanted to be. It was huge.

  This high up, small is large and large is small, fair is foul and foul is fair; and this is fine, because problems only arise when people on the ground point and say, ‘This is small; this is big; this is good; this is b
ad.’ Which points out the moral of the story: stay high, stay aloof and there’ll be nobody to fuck you around. It works flawlessly if you’re a dragon, which very few of us are. Unfortunately, there’s no equivalent pearl of wisdom for human beings, who there­fore have to make out the best they can.

  The boy who stuck feathers to his arms with wax and learned to fly eventually went so high that the sun melted the wax, and he fell. But that was all right, too, because it served as an awful warning, and besides, he was heavily insured.

  In any event, the dragon rose. The dangerous heat of the sun warmed his plastic wings but didn’t melt them. An airliner, carrying the Kawaguchiya Integrated Circuits team back to Tokyo, flew past directly below, looking as small as a child’s toy in comparison. A little higher up, a commu­nications satellite bounded back the amazing news that earlier that day, in Mongolia, the mythical Saint George had killed what could only be described as a dragon, along with fifty thousand innocent bystanders, who on further enquiry turned out not to have existed, and so that was all right. The item was sandwiched between the latest in the Southenders­-Star-In-Love-Romp-With-Plumber story and an entirely inaccurate weather forecast; what the guys in the trade call Context.

  There’s an old saying among dragons that every time a human says he doesn’t believe in dragons, a human dies, and serve the cheeky bugger right. However, since there is now only one dragon, who firmly refuses to believe in the existence of human beings, there is no immediate cause for alarm.

  The dragon spread his wings, turned into the wind and hovered, motionless as any statue.