The Dragon Book (24 page)

A policeman is sworn to protect and serve. But that “protect” part can get a little complicated when mythological creatures are involved …

Peter S. Beagle was born in New York City in 1939. Although not prolific by genre standards, he has published a number of well-received fantasy novels, at least two of which,
A Fine and Private Place
and
The Last Unicorn,
are now considered to be classics of the genre. In fact, Beagle may be the most successful writer of lyrical and evocative modern fantasy since Bradbury. He has won the Locus Award and two Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards, as well as having often been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. Beagle’s other books include the novels
The Folk of the Air; The Innkeeper’s Song; Tamsin;
and a popular autobiographical travel book,
I See by My Outfit.
His short fiction has appeared in places as varied as the
Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
the
Atlantic Monthly,
and
Seventeen,
and has been collected in
Giant Bones, The Rhinoceros Who Quoted Nietzsche and Other Odd Acquaintances, The Line Between, Strange Roads, We Never Talk About My Brother,
and
Mirror Kingdoms.
He won the Hugo Award in 2006 and the Nebula Award in 2007 for his story “Two Hearts.” His produced screenplays include the animated versions of
The Lord of the Rings
and
The Last Unicorn,
and he has two new novels
—Summerlong
and
I’m Afraid You’ve Got Dragons—
plus several new story collections and nonfiction books scheduled for release in 2009 and 2010.

“I am happy to report,” Officer Levinsky said to Officer Guerra, pointing to the dragon sprawled across the Telegraph and 51st Street intersection, “that this one is all yours. I’ve been off shift for exactly seven minutes, waiting for your ass to get here. Have a nice day.”

Guerra stared, paling visibly under his brown skin. Traffic was backed up in all four directions: horns were honking as madly as car alarms, drivers were screaming hysterically—though none, he noticed, were getting out of their cars—and a five-man road crew, their drills, hoses, sawhorses and warning signs scattered by a single swing of the dragon’s tail, were adding their bellows to the din. The dragon paid no attention to any of it, but regarded the two policemen out of half-closed eyes, resting its head on its long-clawed front feet, and every now and then burping feeble, dingy flames. It didn’t look well.

“How long’s it been here?” Guerra asked weakly.

Levinsky consulted his watch again. “Thirty-one minutes. Just plopped out of the sky—damn miracle it didn’t crush somebody’s car, flatten a pedestrian. Been lying there ever since, just like that.”

“Well, you called it in, right?” Guerra wondered what the police code for a dragon in the intersection would be.

Levinsky looked at him as though he had suggested a fast game of one-on-one with an open manhole. “You
are
out of your mind—I always thought so. No, I didn’t call it in, and if you have the sense of a chinch bug, you won’t either. Just get rid of it, I’m out of here. Enjoy, Guerra.”

Levinsky’s patrol car was parked on the far side of the intersection. He skirted the dragon’s tail cautiously, got in the car, slapped on his siren—for pure emotional relief, Guerra thought—and was gone, leaving Guerra scratching his buzz-cut head, facing both a growing traffic jam and a creature out of fairy tales, whose red eyes, streaked with pale yellow, like the eyes of very old men, were watching him almost sleepily, totally uninterested in whatever he chose to do. But watching, all the same.

The furious chaos of the horns being harder on Guerra’s normally placid nerves than the existence of dragons, he walked over to the beast, and said, from a respectful distance, “Sir, you’re blocking traffic, and I’m going to have to ask you to move along. Otherwise you’re looking at a major citation here.”

When the dragon did not respond, he said it again in Spanish; then drew a deep breath and started over in Russian, having taken a course that winter in order to cope with a new influx of immigrants. The dragon interrupted him with a brief hiccup of oily, sulphurous flame halfway through. In a rusty, raspy voice with a faint accent that was none of the ones Guerra knew, it said, “Don’t start.”

Guerra rested his hand lightly on the butt of the pistol that he was immensely proud of never having fired during his eight years on the Oakland police force, except for his regular practice sessions and annual recertifications at the Davis Street Range. He said, “Sir, I am not trying to start anything with you—I’m having enough trouble just believing in you. But I’ve got to get you out of this intersection before somebody gets hurt. I mean, look at all those people, listen to those damn
horns
.” The racket was already giving him a headache behind his eyes. “You think you could maybe step over here to the curb, we’ll talk about it? That’d work out much better for both of us, don’t you think?”

The dragon raised its head and favored him with a long, considering stare. “I don’t know. I like this place about as well as I like anyplace in this world, which is not at all. Why should I make things easier for you? Nobody ever cares about making anything easier for
me
, let me tell you.”

Guerra’s greatest ambition in law enforcement was to become a hostage negotiator. He had been studying the technique on and off for most of his tenure on the force, both on-site and through attending lectures and reading everything he could find on the subject. The lecturers and the books had a good deal to say concerning hostage-takers’ tendency to self-pity. He said patiently to the dragon, “Well, I’m really trying to do exactly that. Let’s get acquainted, huh? I’m Officer Guerra—Michael Guerra, but people mostly call me Mike-O, I don’t know why. What’s your name?”
Always get on a first-name basis, as early as possible. It makes you two human beings together—you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes.
Now if only one of those books had ever covered the fine points of negotiating with a burping mythological predator.

“You couldn’t pronounce it,” the dragon replied. “And if you tried, you’d hurt yourself.” But it rose to its feet with what seemed to Guerra an intense and even painful effort, and with some trepidation he led it away from the intersection to the side street where he had parked his blue-and-white patrol car. The traffic started up again before they were all the way across, and if people went on honking and cursing, still there were many who leaned out of their windows to applaud him. One driver shouted jovially, “Put the cuffs on him!” while another yelled, “Illegal parking—get the boot!” The dragon half lumbered, half slithered beside Guerra as sedately as though it were on a leash; but every so often it cocked a red eye sideways at him, like a wicked bird, and Guerra shivered with what felt like ancestral memory.
These guys used to hunt us like rabbits. I know they did.

The phone at his waist made an irritable sound and rattled against his belt buckle. He nodded to the dragon, grunted “My boss, I better take this,” and heard Lieutenant Kunkel’s nasal drone demanding, “Guerra, you there? Guerra, what the hell is going on up in Little Ethiopia?” Lieutenant Kunkel fully expected Eritrean rebels to stage shoot-outs in Oakland sometime within the week.

“Big, nasty traffic jam, Lieutenant,” Guerra answered, consciously keeping his voice light and level, even with a dragon sniffing disdainfully at his patrol car. “All under control now, no problem.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve been getting a bunch of calls about I don’t know what, some sort of crazy dragon, UFO, whatever. You know anything about this shit?”

“Uh,” Guerra said. “Uh, no, Lieutenant, it’s just the time of day, you know? Rush hour, traffic gets tied up, people get a little crazy, they start seeing stuff. Mass hysteria, shared hallucinations, it’s real common. They got books about it.”

Lieutenant Kunkel’s reaction to the concept of shared hallucinations was not at first audible. Then it became audible, but not comprehensible. Finally coherent, he drew on a vocabulary that impressed Guerra so powerfully for its range and expressiveness that at a certain point, phone gripped between his ear and his shoulder, he dug out his notebook and started writing down the choicest words and phrases he caught. If anything, Guerra was a great believer in self-improvement.

The lieutenant finally hung up, and Guerra put the book back in his pocket and said to the dragon, “Okay. He’s cool. You just go on away now, go on home, back wherever you … well, wherever, and we’ll say no more about it. And you have an extra-nice day, hear?”

The dragon did not answer, but leaned against his car, considering him out of its strange red-and-yellow eyes. Huge as the creature was—Guerra had nothing but military vehicles for comparison—he thought it must be a very old dragon, for the scales on its body were a dull greenish black, and its front claws were worn and blunt, no sharper than a turtle’s. The long low purple crest running along its back from ears to tail tip was torn in several places, and lay limp and prideless. The spikes at the end of its tail were all broken off short; and in spite of the occasional wheeze of fire, there was a rattle in the dragon’s breath, as though it were rusty inside. He supposed the great purple wings worked: it was hard to see them clearly, folded back along the body as they were, but they too looked …
ratty
, for lack of a better word. Spontaneously, he blurted out, “You’ve had kind of a rough time, huh? I get that.”

“Do you?” The dragon’s black lips twitched, and for a moment Guerra thought absurdly that it was going to cry. “Do you indeed, Mike-O? Do you
get
that my back’s killing me—that it aches all the time, right there, behind the hump, because of the beating it takes walking the black iron roads of this world? Do you
get
that the smell of your streets—even your streams, your rivers, your bay—is more than I can bear? That your people taste like clocks and coal oil, and your children are bitter as silver? The children used to be the best eating of all, better than antelope, better than wild geese, but now I just can’t bring myself to touch another one of them. Oh, it’s been dogs and cats and mangy little squirrels for months,
years—
and when you think how I used to dine off steamed knight, knight on the half shell, broiled in his own armor with all the natural juices, oh … excuse me, excuse me, I’m sorry …”

And, rather to Guerra’s horror, the dragon
did
begin to cry. He wept very softly, with his eyes closed and his head lowered, his emerald-green tears smelling faintly like gunpowder. Guerra said, “Hey. Hey, listen, don’t do that. Please. Don’t cry, okay?”

The dragon sniffled, but it lifted its head again to regard him in some wonder. Surprisingly severe, it said, “You are a witness to the rarest sight in the world—a dragon in tears—and all you can say is
don’t do that
? I don’t
get
you people at all.” But it did stop crying; it even made a sound like rustling ashes, which Guerra thought might be a chuckle. It said, “Or did I embarrass you, Mike-O?”

“Listen,” Guerra said again. “Listen, you’ve got to get out of here. There’s going to be rumors for days, but I’ll cover with the lieutenant, whoever, whatever I have to say. Just
go
, okay?” He hesitated for a moment, and then added, “Please?”

The dragon licked forlornly at its own tears with its broad forked tongue. “I’m tired, Mike-O. You have no idea how tired I am. I have one task to complete in this desolate world of yours, and then I’m done with it forever. And since I’ll never, never find my way back to my own world again, what difference does anything make? Afterward …
afterward
, you and your boss can shoot me, take me to prison, put me in a zoo … what wretched difference? I just don’t care anymore.”

“No,” Guerra said. “Look, I’ll tell you the truth, I do not want to be the guy who brings you in. For starters, it’ll mean more reports, more damn
bookkeeping
than I’ve ever seen in my life. I
hate
writing reports. And besides that … yeah, I guess I’d be famous for a while—fifteen minutes, like they say. The cop who caught the dragon … newspapers, big TV shows, fine and dandy, maybe I’d even meet some girls that way. But once it all died down, that’s all I’d ever be, the guy who had the thing on the street with the dragon. You think that’s a résumé for somebody wants to be a hostage negotiator? I don’t think so.”

The dragon was listening to him attentively, though with a slightly puzzled air. Guerra said, “Anyway, what’s this about finding your way back to your own world? How’d you get here in the first place?”