A Dragon and Her Girl

by Max Florschutz

  In the cantilevered bone over my eyes, the pits that read the magnetic currents of the world swirled with nausea, telling me that, wherever I was, it was untold leagues away from my northern forests, a long way south and farther west than any seafarer had dared venture. In fact, if the men of my time who considered themselves learned were right, I should have been either in the middle of Oceanus Incognita or off the edge of the earth. Well, all Draconi know that the earth is not flat, but as round as a Saxon’s skull, and I wasn’t swimming. So much for learned men. The one thing I was sure of was that I had better come to like this place because it was going to be my new home.

  After flying for most of the day, I was certain it was a home I would not have chosen. Too empty. Several times I saw flying things, never close enough to challenge, nor even to be sure that they were Draconi, especially since they flew with no beat of wing, incredibly fast and unbelievably high.

  The ground below me was streaked here and there with straight paths of smooth gray stone. Along the lines moved what looked to be scarabs or possibly pill bugs, large beetles of ugly, flat colors. Bugs are not fit prey for an adult of my Line, but these were very large beetles. I cirdled down to have a closer look. Two of them stopped beneath me. One was a bilious brown and the other solid white with blue and red fires flashing on its back. They reeked of burning lamp oil, forge-hot metal, and some acrid effluvia that stung my nostrils. A man got out of the white one.

  I went into a stall, forgetting to flap, in my amazement. What kind of world is this where men encase insects in armor and ride inside them?

  The man walked up beside the brown beetle. I heard two loud pops and he sprawled on the ground. The brown beetle roared and ran away.

  It’s hard to resist running prey. I chased off after the beetle, overflying it, then flaring down in front of it. It shrieked and stopped. Two men leaped out, shouting in a tongue I had never heard but, with the inborn knowledge of all Draconi, could understand. They weren’t being complimentary about my ancestry, nor were they offering me a proper challenge. In truth, they were downright insulting. They pointed their hands at me. I heard more popping sounds and something stung my breastbone.

  Well, if they had no honor, I had no obligation. I charred them with one blast, setting the beetle aflame as well. As I reached to skewer dinner, the damned bug exploded! It blasted me muzzle over mead kettle, rolling me like a puffball along the ground. A piece of its armor whacked me between my horns and knocked me cross-eyed. It also burned my dinner to two lumps of cinder.

  I settled for beef again that evening. Obviously I was going to have to learn more about this place before I could safely hunt humans here.

  It took several days to find a cave. My new lair wasn’t much of a cave, only a deep hollow in dirty gray sandstone rather than an arching granite cavern, mined smooth by dwarfs. Unwelcoming, too, with no seeping water for a bathing pool, and no heaps of shining gold to cozy it up a bit.

  In truth, I was beginning to suspect that gold might be hard to come by in this country. There was no smell of it on the two men I hadn’t eaten, and no lovely aroma in the air of new-mined gold freshly brought to light.

  I had to keep reminding myself that I was fortunate to be alive. Despair became a new taste on my tongue. No honorable prey proclaiming challenge, no gold to be found. And in this world, I found I did not rule the skies.

  One darkmoon night, I was frolicking in the air, playing with the winds rather than having a care for my safety.

  The creature was on me before I was even aware of it. It came at me with a banshee shriek, riding the rumble of Ragnarok thunder, spewing a tail of fire, tossing me like a mayfly in its turbulent wake. It left behind a reek of oil and metal that told me it was akin to the ground beetles.

  I lost a lot of sky before I got lift under my wings again. That may be what saved me. It had circled around at me, fire sparking from its rigid, back-swept wings. Something ripped through my right wing, shredding one membrane panel, flipping me over on my back. It was lunging down on me. Flailing at the air, all control gone, I was helpless. We were less than sixty rods above the broken ground, and I was looking Death in her cold eye, when it suddenly pulled up, screaming high into wider air.

  I flared into a stall, and twitched down into a good-sized gully in the desert floor, making the best speed my wounded wing would allow. I could hear it above me, searching, but fearing to fly too low. When it was gone, I ascended and limped back to my lair.

  My pride was badly dented that night. In the long hours before dawn, I wrestled with the demon of realization that I was no longer the most powerful being in the air. No griffin, no winged Sphinx, no Valkyrie of my time could have withstood me—any more than I could stand up to the unholy amalgam that had attacked me.

  When it was coming straight for me, I had seen that men rode inside the armored flying insect. Could it be that in this place men had handfasted with the enemies of mammals and warm-blooded reptiles alike, and used them for steeds? What price had they paid, I wondered, for that evil alliance?

  That was when I knew despair.

  I took cattle for my hunger and stayed on the ground after dark, wrapped in self-pity, angry anew at my fate. Restless, wanting the world that was gone, trying to make sense of this new world.

  I was lonely. No trembling wizards braving my hunger, outstretched hands offering jewels from Far Aegyptus in return for the knowledge they asked of me. No dwarfs bringing rough-hewn gold in worshipful tribute. No fields of harvesters to swoop down on just for the fun of watching them scatter. No long evenings of philosophical dispute with learned witches clothed in bone amulets and rivers of dark hair. No ritual challenge and combat.

  No mate.

  The hot nights stirred my blood. For the first time I understood the rampages of my southern kin among the men of the desert who wore curved swords and braided their beards for Allah. We Draconi of the northern mists and chilling rains are slower in our passions, but they are deep, deep as the black waters of the Ice Sea. Once aroused, we do not waver.

  I kept a tight hold on my yearnings. Going berserker in my injured condition would be dog-stupid. But there is no challenge in preying on cattle, skinny deer, and the odd razorback or rabbit. Men are really the only fit prey, and I wasn’t having much success hunting men. The rules had changed, and I didn’t know the new ones.

  One morning I woke to a low rumble and the insect reek. My first instinct was to burst from my cave, belching flame and ready to attack the creature that dared invade my domain. My recent experiences, however, counseled caution. I crept from the shadows into the lemon-yellow light of dawn. The rocky ground before my lair sloped down some way then leveled out into a smooth sand floor. Sitting on the sand, surrounded by its own stench, emanating waves of heat, was a bulky, blue-carapaced snout beetle almost as large as I am. Beside it, leaning on its long nose, stood a man.

  Both my hearts hammered in my breast. He smelled of gold.

  I couldn’t take him while he was protected by the insect. With gold at stake, I didn’t want the cursed thing exploding and destroying the beginnings of my hoard.

  To lure him away, I stretched my jaws, tightened my throat, and began to sing. It was a song I had learned from the Rhine Loreleis, a wordless flow of music in a minor key, complete with two dark-hued harmonies that hinted of sensual twinings in the night, of love and lust and unearthly delight. The Loreleis always could weave a good tune.

  It caught him. He turned his head, listening, not yet understanding. He drank from a glass bottle and I smelled the sharp bite of brandywine. One hand went to his mouth, a spark glowed, and smoke drifted from his nostrils.

  Smoke? From a human?

  He looked wholly human, and if he was a mage, he didn’t dress the part. His trews were close-fitting dark-blue cloth, and his tunic was black leather, pigskin by its smell, open down the front. Under it he wore something white that came up close around his neck, but no sign of a weapon, not even a bodkin. I drew i
n a suppressed breath: gold glinted from his throat and one wrist. Saliva dripped from my tonguetips and I almost lost the thread of my song.

  His boots scraped on the rock. When I saw the crown of his head, I reared up to my full height and fixed him with one baleful golden eye.

  He stumbled to a stop, dropping the bottle, his mouth sagging agape, his limbs suddenly frozen. The insect didn’t explode, no curses magical enveloped me. Finally something was going properly in this strange world.

  I called him to me. He came, moving in the stiff-jointed way of the entranced. I studied him carefully while I held him in thrall—I’d had enough surprises. He seemed as human as men of my time. He wore his hair longer than the short helmet-cut of a cataphract, his jaw was beardless, and his eyes were covered by two round black pieces of glass. I was familiar with glass of magical properties, but this glass, whatever its purpose, gave off no arcane aroma. I touched him with the tips of my tongue, and he shuddered in a most human fashion.

  I backed him against a slab of rock and curved both wings to fence him round before I released him from my stare.

  For a really satisfactory tormenting, it’s wise to wait them out in silence, let them speak first. Often those first words reveal their deepest fears, giving you a direction for the torment.

  He was quiet for a goodly time, weaving a bit as if he were having trouble with his balance. He reached up and removed the glass things from his face, then ran a hand down his chin. His eyes, dark, bagged, and red-rimmed, touched me, slid away, then crept back. His voice was broken into bits like gravel in a streambed, hissing and rattling. “Oh man, I have got to lay off the booze, I’m losing it.” He scuffed his hands at me. “Well, you just piss off. I don’t need very large, lovely green dragons on top of everything else.”

  Obviously this man wasn’t understanding his situation.

  He put one hand against the rock to steady himself. “Go on, beat it. The rest of my life may be going down the toilet, but I refuse to have DTs, too. There are no dragons. I’m asleep. I’m dreaming you.”

  I chuckled and he cringed away from the sooty heat. I stretched out one foreclaw and delicately nicked the back of his hand. I licked a scarlet drop from the point of my claw. “Dreaming, are you?”

  “Shit,” he said.

  He put the glasses back on his face. “All right, if you’re going to kill me, do it. Get it over with.”

  He wasn’t cooperating. Yes, he was scared, but by now he should have been down on his knees, babbling to various divine beings to intercede and save his paltry little life, which, in my experience, they never do. Circling deep in the currents under his surface fear was an urge to die almost draconian in its bleak intensity. A human with a Death wish? I’d thought that reserved for higher forms of life. This man piqued my interest. “Are you so eager to die?” I inquired.

  His mouth twisted into a sour line. “That was my intent, yes. Why else come to the Mojave-godforsaken-Desert?”

  “Why?”

  “You tell me. The production company folded, I can’t pay my bills, the producer’s assistants’ assistants won’t return my phone calls, and my last decent client just went over to William Morris. Next thing you know, headwaiters won’t seat me during rush hour. I’m not waiting around for the luncheon postmortems on poor old Terry Pierce’s career, nice guy, just couldn’t cut it, heard he slunk back into the Great Flyover somewhere, all that bullshit. A bottle of Halcyon, a quart of Stoli, and the whole problem fades away.” He creaked out a laugh. “I sure as hell didn’t expect to end up fried by a dragon, a mythical beast that doesn’t even exist, which must mean that I’m crazy, too.”

  Although that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, I was a little irked that he still didn’t believe in me. “I am not mythical,” I said. “I am an adult female Draconis of the Verdigris Line. I was thrown into your world by the magic of a second-rate wizard who got lucky.”

  “Magic? Not even a hack scriptwriter would believe that one. The only magic these days is in the movies.” He went still, as if every muscle in his body were suddenly frozen. “Movies. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, if you are real—“ He pulled off his glasses and took a step toward me.

  I hissed and backed up. “You will find that I am very real. Pray to whatever gods you revere, man. I will give you that time.”

  He raised his hands. “Wait a minute. Stop. Can’t we cut a deal here?”

  Bargaining is an honorable reaction to tormenting. I raised my head and vented a little flame into the cool morning air. “What did you have in mind?”

  Fire always shakes them. He managed to keep most of the fear out of his voice. “You don’t kill me, and I make us both so filthy rich we’ll puke.”

  Not exactly a revolutionary bargaining point, and rather indelicately stated, but he was trying. “You promise gold?”

  “Gold? If that’s how you want it, sure. Here,” he tore the gold from his neck and wrist, “you want gold, take these. The Rolex alone is worth six thousand. Consider it a down payment.”

  I could feel a new wish for life born in him. That’s what tormenting is all about, the rising and dashing of hope. The pleasure flowed through my body like sex or flight. “How will you get this gold you offer?”

  “Just by signing papers, babe. You let me represent you, do an exclusive contract with me, and I’ll have every major studio begging to use you. Shit, Spielberg and Lucas will go fucking nuts! You’ll be the biggest thing to hit the movies since Godzilla!”

  He continued in a language just as arcane as any first-water mage. His words didn’t matter. I felt his excitement, the hot rush of his human desires, the need in his blood not only to live, but to succeed at this plan he was concocting. Humans are most interesting when they are fired with that singular drive to create. His life force burned more brightly the longer he talked.

  “So,” he finished, “have we got a deal?” He rubbed his palms together. His aura was vivid with life.

  I looked down at him, holding my silence until both color and hope faded from his face. His shoulders sagged. “I think not,” I said.

  His eyes flinched but he stood his ground. “Nothing I can say will change your mind?”

  I turned my head to fix him with the balefire of one hungry eye. In the act of inhaling a fire-breath, I hesitated. He was really quite brave, facing me with no weapons, almost as cast adrift from his referents as I had been in the void, yet controlling his fear. He had the desperate courage of a dragonet facing a phalanx of lancers. His visage was even faintly draconic, long and thin, bone-edged along its planes and hollows. His eyes and hair were black and shining like the scales of Draconis enbonii, the Line of my first chosen egg-mate.

  And in truth, I was very lonely. My Line is more solitary than most, but here in this place of so many unknowns, I needed a touchstone to link me to sanity, even if it was only the limited conversation of a human. I had the suspicion I wasn’t going to find another of my own kind.

  I hadn’t answered his question. When I released him from the entrancement of my gaze, he slumped against the rock at his back. “Okay,” he rasped, “I get it.” He dragged one hand over his face. “Can I smoke first?”

  So I hadn’t imagined it. It was against all reason, but I knew I had seen it. In the strange ages of change I’d missed, could humans and Draconi somehow have become kin? “Please do,” I said.

  He reached into his clothes and brought out a thin white stick. He put it between his lips, holding his other hand to its tip. I heard a small snick. And suddenly his fingers were aflame. It startled me, raising a wild hope, until I saw that he held in his palm a small metal device that actually produced the fire. He inhaled deeply, then let tendrils of blue smoke drift out of his nostrils.

  Disappointment was as deep as the hope that had been vaulting. Not kin, then, not real fire. Still, it was something to note that down the ages, humans had retained enough memory of us to preserve our ways. To show that I accepted his reverence, I politely breathed some
of my own smoke to join his.

  He coughed. He looked up at me, a slash of smile pulling his mouth askew. “Go for it, babe. At least ‘Death by Dragon’ makes a better headline than ‘Small-time Agent OD’s.’ Too bad no one will ever read it.”

  I sucked in a great draft of air, arching my neck, raising the points of my wings. White-hot the flame roared, incandescent heat, hissing and crackling, searing up my throat, out between my long jaws, to splash harmlessly over rock and sand, because at the last instant, I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to kill him. I’d found food to sustain my body, uninteresting food, true, but enough to keep me alive. Now I needed sustenance for my mind. This man had the courage to pretend to laugh at Death. How could I kill a being capable of that?

  “How much gold?” I said.

  He opened his eyes. Dark hair stuck sweat-slicked to his cheeks. His voice was a whisper. “To tell the truth, I don’t think I could figure your take of a ten-million-dollar contract and three percent of the gross, after my commission of course, right at this particular moment.”

  What amount of gold is honorable in this age? I suppose, like any other age, as much as you can get. In some ways, the world does not change. His two pieces of gold lay before me, throwing back the light with a soft gleam. Centuries of tradition named him prey, life to be tormented and taken. But the mind must rule the blood. I did not want to kill him. In this new world I could make my own rules.

  I settled back on my haunches, tucking in my wings. As the sun rose to bake us in a welcome heat, between us we reasoned a bargain that would allow me to let him live. Against all sensible argument, I put my trust in him, agreeing to his plans, even telling him my True Name to seal the bargain, although he said we’d have to change it because Sigrigrantharisis was too long for something called billboards. There was much I did not fully understand in his words, but I could feel his eager interest in me.

  By the time we parted, I was hungry enough that I had to stop looking at him. To hold me over until I could find acceptable prey, I asked for the insect.