Shaughnessy jerked away, saying “What?” in a sleepy voice.
“George! Ariel! Get up, goddamn, get up!”
George jumped up quickly as another tongue of flame jetted into the sky. Ariel bolted up also. “Oh, shit,” she breathed. George made inarticulate sounds and seemed to be trying very hard to swallow. Shaughnessy had popped up after Ariel and George. She asked me what the hell was going on. In answer I pointed behind her and up. She turned around and said, “Oh, my goodness.”
It floated above us, flapping its wings lazily. Occasionally it buoyed on the wind; I saw what Ariel had meant about the gasbag. It vaguely resembled a leather Zeppelin being fucked by a sea serpent, but this is in no way intended to make the thing sound comical. Quite the contrary, it looked as if it could easily eat all of us in two, maybe three swallows. As we watched, the dragon rolled its huge head in a lazy circle on its long neck, opened its mouth, and belched out a healthy flame-thrower’s dose. It was too high for the flame to reach us, but I felt the heat. Its breath stank like the afterburn from a bad Mexican dinner.
I forgot Ariel’s admonition to George and looked into its eyes … .
There was an animated Disney film, The Jungle Book, based on the Kipling story. It had a python with a funny name, though I can’t remember what it was. It had those eyes … . You looked into them and the pupils dilated into multicolored bands. The dragon’s eyes caught the firelight, drank it up until it spread into a pale yellow glow. The pupils were twin motes punched into the centers of the eyes. Ariel’s voice came from a long way off. “It’s the fire. I should have known.”
“Known what?” Shaughnessy sounded as if she were underwater.
“The campfire. Dragons use their fire-breathing as a mating call.” She paused. “The ground all around here—this is a mating ground.”
My head turned to follow the dragon’s every motion, eyes glued to its own strange and fascinating eyes. Toward the bottom of my peripheral vision I saw the tail curl, roll, and straighten like a deadly banner, scaled, ridged, arrowhead-tipped. I didn’t move my eyes to look; I couldn’t. Those beautiful and frightening eyes … .
“It thinks the campfire is another dragon,” Ariel continued, “and it’s come to mate. They can’t mate in the air; they have to land and—Pete!” Her sharp voice jerked my head toward her automatically, breaking the spell. “Don’t look into its eyes!”
George carefully averted his gaze from the huge beast and bent down to his sleeping bag. He picked up his broadsword and drew the blade.
Sixty feet above our heads the dragon had begun to circle. The breeze from its wings ruffled Ariel’s mane. It rumbled as its bulk glided over us.
“Maybe we should put out the fire,” Shaughnessy suggested.
“Good idea,” said Ariel.
Having no water to quench the campfire, I grabbed a burned-out log and pressed it over sections of the campfire until the twigs, wood chips, and logs were only smoking. Dying embers glowed dull orange.
I grabbed the crossbow from Ariel’s pack. “Just in case, I said.
“You’ll probably just make it mad,” she said.
The dragon sent out another jet of flame, then another, this one smaller, tentative. Ariel watched it; the eyes didn’t seem to bother her. “It can’t keep that up and stay in the air,” she said. “It’s using up hydrogen like crazy. I think it’s wondering what happened to the dragon it thought was here. With any luck it’ll forget about it and go away.”
“If it came here to get laid,” said Shaughnessy, “it won’t forget about it that easily.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Shaughnessy gave her a sidelong look, one eyebrow raised. “How do unicorns mate, I wonder?”
Ariel looked away from the circling dragon. “None of your goddamned business.”
“I think it’s leaving,” I said. Ariel and Shaughnessy were glaring at each other.
The dragon stopped flapping in a circle and angled itself upward. With slow wingbeats it pulled itself skyward. By the time I looked away it was a dark blotch against the night sky. “Well,” I said, “so much for dragon-slaying adventures. How disappointing.” I lowered the crossbow.
George sheathed his sword. “I’m never gonna be able to go back home.”
Shaughnessy looked at him in amusement, looked to the blue-black sky where the dragon had vanished, then back to George. “Sorry you’re let down, George, but personally I’m sorta pleased with the outcome, you know?”
Whatever reply he would have made was drowned out by a roar I felt in my bones. A new star blazed in the sky, falling to earth like a fastball pitched by Zeus. The ground lit up in Halloween colors. I snapped the crossbow up, finger fumbling for the trigger. I had little time and I needed to put a bolt straight down its throat and hope it didn’t burn to ash before it got there. If I missed, it meant a certain groundfight, because the thing wouldn’t have enough gas left to get aloft. And I didn’t want to have to battle those claws—each one was as long as I am tall. I squinted up at the orange light. The heat on my face increased. Aim toward the center of the flame. Squeeze … . The bolt flew, its hiss fading into the dragon’s roar. The earthquake bellow ceased, and so did the stream of flame. The dragon kept coming. We all ran in four different directions. It landed atop the smoldering remains of the campfire with a whump that jarred my teeth. My knees buckled and I tripped.
Its head reared stupidly and it tried to raise itself. Not ten feet in front of the automobile-sized mouth was George, sword in hand. He stepped forward, then stopped cold. His swordpoint lowered slowly. He was looking into the dragon’s eyes.
It tried to burn him. The head reared back on the serpentine neck, struck forward, and hissed. All that came out was the weak sound of escaping hydrogen. Embedded just in front of the tree-trunk-sized right foreleg was the rear half of the crossbow bolt. The beast brought the leg back to try to raise itself and the bolt snapped off. Smoke rose from the embers of the campfire beneath the furious thing.
My eyes widened. “George!” I screamed. “George, run, get out of there!”
He looked my way. My shout must have given him back his bearings: he looked back to the dragon’s neck, avoiding the eyes, and brought the sword up in a two-handed grip. He stepped forward.
“No, no, George! Don’t—”
It went off like a reptilian Hindenberg. I saw the light of the explosion and managed to twist my head away just as the blast picked me up gently and slammed me down ten feet away. Pieces of dragon went in all directions, slamming into burned trees, plopping onto the grass, pattering the charred ground after being hurled skyward. My right shoulder burned as I picked myself up. I ignored it. A searing on the lower right of my stomach made me look down. the I’M WITH STUPID shirt was eaten half away. I removed it hastily and rubbed off hydrochloric acid—dragon blood—with the back of the shirt. Fortunately only enough had splattered me to turn my skin pink and itchy. I got up in time to see the remains of the fireball as it burned itself out. A thick, slaughterhouse smell hung in the air.
Ariel and Shaughnessy emerged from behind a knot of burned trees. They were arguing and didn’t notice me.
“Don’t you ever try to touch me again—do you understand me?”
“I’m trying to tell you,” replied Shaughnessy defensively, “I didn’t mean to. I saw the explosion and grabbed you. It was a reflex.”
“You don’t know what it feels like.”
“I can guess. It hurt me, too.”
“Poor baby. Let me tell you something, child.” Her eyes were haughty. “You don’t deserve to touch me.”
Shaughnessy planted her feet and raised her voice half an octave. “You know, ever since I joined you, you’ve acted like I wasn’t worthy of your presence because you’re pure as angel’s piss—”
“Nobody asked you to come along. You invited yourself.”
“Okay, fine. But in the midst of elevating yourself to such pure and lofty heights, you’ve proven to me you
’re just as human and fallible as the rest of us, because I think you’re jealous.”
“What could I possibly be—”
“Where’s George?” I interrupted.
They turned to face me. “I … don’t know,” said Shaughnessy.
“Yes, I can see you’re both busy with more important things, right? He could be hurt.”
“I’ll go look for him.” Other than a small patch on the right side of her head where she’d been burned, she seemed all right. She turned and stepped over two pounds of cooked dragon meat.
I looked at Ariel with raised eyebrows. “Well?”
“You think she’s right.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if she’s right. But since she joined us you have been acting different.”
“Different how? Jealous?”
“No. More like … threatened. I think you’re still preoccupied with your avenues of possibility. It’s not like you to stand there arguing with someone while somebody else might need help.”
“Mmm.” She looked thoughtful, as if she had an opinion of her own she was weighing against mine. “So why are we standing here?”
We looked for George. Scarcely a minute had gone by when Shaughnessy called out. She’d found him behind a boulder, thrown thirty feet from where he’d been in front of the dragon. His right wrist was sprained and he had a broken middle finger on the same hand, cuts, bruises, and a few burns where blood had spattered him. I dug out the first-aid kit and splinted his finger and swabbed his wounds.
“How about you?” I asked Shaughnessy when I finished with George.
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Uh-huh.” I made her bend her head forward while I swabbed her scalp. “It’ll grow back,” I told her, and returned the medkit to the pack. “How about you?” I asked Ariel.
“What are you going to do, give me a Band-Aid?” She laughed. “I don’t have a scratch.”
“Figures. So what do we do now?”
She tossed her horn. “I guess we make camp again. I doubt we’ll have any more—” A jet of flame overhead.
“The explosion,” said Shaughnessy. “It’ll probably attract them from miles around.”
“Lovely,” I said. “Fucking lovely.”
“I don’t think they’ll bother us if we don’t light another fire,” said Ariel.
“I can’t tell you how happy that makes me.”
“At least George got his dragon.” She walked over to where George sat with his back against a rock and nudged him with a hoof. “Right, George?”
“I didn’t have anything to do with it.” He looked morose.
I re-tied the pack and examined the sleeping bag. A choice cut of dragon flambé had plopped onto one corner and the blood had eaten away most of the material beneath. I picked up the sleeping bag by the other end and pulled. The meat rolled off, feathers dropped out from the hole, and ashes and burned wood chips flaked from the bottom of the bag. I put it over one shoulder, pulled the roll of duct tape from a backpack pocket, and sat beside George. I started patching the eaten-away section.
George stared glumly at his sword. An orange tongue of flame licked the sky and danced in reflection along the blade. I looked up, frowning. “What’s the matter?” I asked, looking back to George. “Mad because you didn’t get to play hero?”
“Well … . I was supposed to kill a dragon and I didn’t have anything to do with it. It just blew up all by itself.”
I didn’t tell him that it had blown up because I’d shot it in the gasbag and the leaking hydrogen had ignited on the remains of the campfire. It would have made him feel worse.
“Your father doesn’t have to know that,” I said, knowing as the words left my mouth that it was the wrong thing to tell him. He made no reply.
I tried again. “Look, nobody becomes a hero by setting out to do it. Circumstances make heroes. Some people just end up in the right place at the right time and they do something they think is perfectly natural for them to do, and suddenly they’re heroes.”
“I could have killed it,” he said.
I nodded. “That’s what counts, George. You did all you could do—I saw you in front of that thing with your sword out. Heroism isn’t necessarily doing something. Sometimes it’s the willingness to do it, when the occasion is right.” Which, I added to myself, isn’t often, thank God.
“Isn’t it good to be a hero?”
“It’s not good to go out of your way to be. It can get you killed—you came pretty close tonight, you know. Look, you’ve been paying attention to the Don Quixote, haven’t you?” He nodded. “That’s what usually ends up happening when you set out to be heroic—you get dumped on your ass. I’ve met people who’ve done heroic things—but never a real, live honest-to-goodness hero. Those only exist in comic books and hungry imaginations.” I looked at the patch job on the sleeping bag. It would hold, at least until I could find another one.
I patted George on the shoulder and told him not to worry and to get some sleep, then I stood up. Before I turned away he said, “Pete?”
“Uh.”
“Um, I was supposed to come back with—I mean, my dad told me to bring back a piece of the dragon I killed, to prove I done it.”
I nodded and yawned. It stretched my voice out. “We’ll look for a piece of tail for you tomorrow, when it’s light.” I smiled at my own joke, but he didn’t get it. He thanked me soberly and said good night.
I walked to the other side of the boulder, looking for a meatless piece of ground big enough for my sleeping bag. Ariel stood before me, tail swishing. “You certainly get preachy when you get half a chance,” she said.
I unfurled the bag. “What do you want I should do? He was feeling pretty bad, so I gave him a pep talk.” I smoothed out the sleeping bag.
She nodded. “I feel sorry for him. He tries so hard.”
“He’ll be okay.” I drew Fred to check for damage, but there was none, thank goodness.
“I know.” She looked at me a long moment. “Sleep well.” There was a sarcastic note in her voice. She glanced at Shaughnessy, who was thirty feet away, looking up at the shapes of dragons in the air, their bodies like distant ships seen from below the water.
Ariel walked a short distance away and lay down with her back to me. I looked at the sleeping bag at my feet and looked back to Shaughnessy. I walked past Ariel to her. “We’d better get some sleep,” I said.
My voice startled her and she spun, gasping. She put a hand lightly on my arm, placed the other against her chest, fingers spread. “I’m sorry. You scared me.”
I glanced at her hand on my right biceps and leaned away just enough for her to lower it. “Sorry,” I muttered. “Come on. We’ve got a lot of walking to do tomorrow.”
“I don’t know if my feet’ll stand up to it.” She smiled at the joke. I didn’t smile back. We walked to the sleeping bag and she lay down on her side.
“Good night,” I said.
She looked surprised. “Good night, Pete.”
I went to Ariel and kicked a fist-sized piece of dragon out of the way. She raised her head to look over her back when I knelt beside her. I touched her neck lightly. “Lay back down. I need a pillow.”
She lowered her head back to the ground silently and I lay my head on top of her neck. I lay on my back, staring at the starry sky. In some places the stars were blotted out: dragons. I turned onto my side because they made me uncomfortable.
I was exhausted. My sleep was dreamless, I think because of Ariel.
*
I shook George awake.
“Huh? What’s going on?” He looked around wildly. “Another dragon?” He reached for his sword.
“Nope. Wake-up time.”
He stood and, forgetting his broken finger, tried to crack his knuckles as he yawned and stretched. “Shit.” His accent stretched it into two syllables. “‘Scuse me,” he said to Shaughnessy’s amused face.
By daylight the ground was an awful mess. Pieces of dragon
meat and internal organs were strewn haphazardly over an area the size of a football field. The stench of ruined meat mingled with the smell of burned wood, producing an odor I could do without smelling again. All of us—except Ariel, of course—were filthy, ragged, and stinking like a slaughterhouse.
“What time is it?” I asked. “Looks like the sun’s been up awhile.”
George looked at his wrist. “I forgot to wind my watch.”
“Five till ten,” said Ariel. “I decided we needed the extra sleep.”
I nodded. Desperate as I was to catch up to Malachi, we’d have been dragging by midday if we’d got up at sunrise. “All right. We’d better get packed and get a move on.”
“I can’t come with you,” announced George.
We looked at him. He fidgeted. “I mean, I’ve got to get back home. They’re expecting me back, and I’ve gotta let my dad know about … this.” He waved his broken-fingered hand at the mess.
I nodded. “We’ll help you look for a piece to take back with you, George.”
“I ain’t sure there’s enough left to take back. I mean, most of it just looks like steak.”
“We’ll find something,” promised Ariel.
The four of us searched in separate directions, scouring the blackened ground for something worth taking back, something George could show his father to prove he’d slain a dragon. A bone, a claw … . No, too big. A scale from the tail, maybe, or the arrowhead tip. A section of leathery wing.
Ariel Page 17
