The Dragon Book (3 page)

AFTER that, the dragon let her roam as she pleased around the lagoon, as long as she told him stories whenever he asked. She made up stories about dragons, about princesses, about evil Kings, good and handsome Princes, about the brothers of Princesses, crisscrossing them, sometimes using the same people in one story after another. She tried to make every one different, but to her they seemed to all be the same, about wanting to go home, to be with whom she loved, and where she belonged.

She was sitting in the sun one afternoon, longing for home, and tears began to roll down her cheeks. The dragon said, “What’s the matter?”

“You ate my brother,” she said bitterly. “You ate all my people. I hate you.”

He gave one of his throaty chuckles, unperturbed. “You eat the fish. You don’t care about
their
brothers.”

She cast off the thought of fish, which she had always eaten. “Do you have no family? No tribe? Where did you come from?”

He looked surprised. His huge eyes blazed red as the heart of a fire. “I was always here.” But his stare shifted, and as much of a look of perplexity as she had ever seen came over his long, snakelike face. “There were more of us, once. But not many more.” He turned, and flopped away into the lagoon and disappeared.

During the day, he often slept in the sun, or went down into the lagoon and was gone for a long while. She guessed that he went out the tunnel to the open sea. She wandered the beach, drinking from the waterfall that tumbled down from the top of the cliff and spread its shining skirts across the sand, eating berries growing down the stone wall, and seaweed, crabs, and clams, or anything else she could find. She worked out stories as she walked, saving bits and pieces when she could not make them whole, and remembering it all in a big overstory she would never tell him, about a girl taken captive by a dragon, who was rescued in the end by a Prince.

When he came back, he always had a fish for her and cooked it with the fire of his breath; no matter what the fish, bass, bonito, or shark, the meat always had a faintly sharp, spicy taste. If he had fed well, he burped up lots of stones, some as big as her fist, most toe-sized, clear lumps of colored crystal, red and blue and green. If he had eaten nothing or little, he complained and glowered at her and licked his lips at her, and talked of eating her instead, his red eyes wicked and his tongue flickering.

“I don’t have to listen to you,” she said, holding herself very straight. She turned back to the crevice, where she could get away from him.

Behind her, the deep rumbling voice said, “If you try to escape, I will definitely eat you.”

She spun toward him. “But I want to go home. You should let me go home.”

At that, he gave off a burst of furious heat and exhaled a stream of green fire. She dodged him and ran toward the crevice.

One huge forepaw came down directly in front of her. When she wheeled, his other paw came down, fencing her in.

“You can’t leave!”

She put her hands over her ears, the roar shaking her whole body. The ground trembled under her. He was lying down, curled around her. She lowered her hands. He was calm again, but his great scaled bulk surrounded her. Only a few feet away, the enormous eye shut and opened again. “Tell me a story.”

So she had to escape. During the day, she followed the seams and gullies worn into the cliff, hoping to find another way out, but they all pinched out or ended in falls of broken rock. Once, in the shadows at the back of a defile, she found a skeleton, still wearing tattered clothes—a cloak with fur trim, and pretty, rotten shoes, even rings on the fingerbones.

The bones were undisturbed. Whoever this was, however he had gotten here, he had never even left the cave.

She had left the cave. She found herself a little proud of that.

One evening, after she told him a story about some adventures of the Prince as dragon, she turned to go back into the crevice, where she usually slept. Before she could reach the cliff, he caught her lightly with his forepaw—the long curved claws like tusks inches from her face—and tossed her backward. She stumbled off across the beach, wondering what she had done wrong. The other paw met her and sent her reeling back. She whirled, frightened, her hands out, and he batted her around again. His head suspended over her watched her with a cold amusement. He was
playing
, she realized, in a haze of terror, not really hurting her. She caught hold of his scaly paw and held tight, and he stopped.

But he did not let her go. He reached down and took her between his long jaws, gently as a mother with an egg. She lay, rigid, her breath stopped, between two sets of gigantic teeth, the long tongue curled around her. He lay down, stretched out, and carefully set her on the sand between his forepaws. He put his head down on his paws, so that she lay in the hollow under his throat, and went to sleep.

She lay stiff as a sword under him. Something new had happened, and she had no notion what he might mean by this. What he might do next. Yet the cavern under his throat was warm, and she fell asleep after a while.

The next day, he dove into the lagoon and was gone, and she began to search from one end of the cliff to the other for a way out. She went back through every crevice, tried to chimney up the sides, and crawled along the top of huge mounds of rubble. Always, the space came to an end, the cliff pressed down on her, dark and cold.

She crept back out to the sunlit lagoon again. The beauty of it struck her, as it always did, the water clear and blue and dark at the center, and paler in toward the shore, the tiny ripples of the waves, the cream-colored sand. The sky was cloudless. The cliff vaulted up hundreds of feet high, sheer as glass.

As she stood there, wondering what to do, the blue water began to whirl, eddying around, and the dragon’s great head thrust up through the center of it, a white fish between his long jaws.

He saw her, and came to her, cast down the fish, and breathed on it with the harsh fire of his breath, and then, as usual, stood there watching her eat it. She was hungry and ate all the pale, flaky meat. Being close to him made her edgy. She had thought of a good story to tell him, with a long chase through a forest, and the dragon’s escape at the end. She could not look at him, afraid of what she might see brimming in the great red eyes.

He sat quietly throughout the story, as he always did. She had learned to feel the quality of his attention, and she knew he was deep into this story. She brought it to an end and stood.

His head moved, fast as a serpent, and he caught her between his jaws. He laid her down on her back between his forepaws. She lay so stiff her fists were clenched, looking up at the wedge-shaped head above her, and then he began to lick her all over.

His tongue was long and supple, silky smooth, longer than she was tall, so that sometimes he was licking her whole body all at once. She was afraid to move. He licked at her dress until it was bunched up under her armpits. His touch was soft, gentle, even tender; stroking over her breasts, he paused an instant, his warm tongue over her, and against her will, she gasped.

He said, in his deep, harsh voice, “It’s only me, the Prince,” and chuckled. He slid his tongue down her side and curled it over her legs.

She clutched her thighs together, but the tip of his tongue flicked between them, into the cleft of her body. She shut her eyes. She held her whole body tight, as if she could make an armor of her skin. Her strength was useless against him.

But nothing more happened. He slept, eventually, his head over her. She dozed fitfully, starting up from nightmares.

In the morning, he went off as usual, and she searched desperately along the cliff face. At the waterfall, she stood in the tumbling water, thinking of his tongue on her, wondering what else he would do.

Behind the streaming water, she noticed a narrow crevice.

She stepped into it, behind the water, and saw that the slit in the rock angled back into the dark. She pressed herself into it. Water ran three inches deep along the bottom of the crevice. As she worked her way back, and the dark shut down around her, her hands along the walls on either side passed through sheets of water coming down.

She came to a place where the gorge divided in two, one side running to her left, one to her right. It was totally dark. She stood still a while, her mind blocked with fear, and then she realized that there was water trickling over the toes of her right foot, and the other was dry. She followed the water.

The crevice walls came so close together that her nose scraped in front and the back of her head scraped behind her. The tunnel twisted, turned. In the dark, she fumbled along, her heart thundering. She should have brought water. Food. She should have planned this. Thought ahead. Was it night, now, was it dark out, as it was so dark in here? Blindly, she crept forward through the crevice in the rock. She could not go back now. He was back there by now; he knew that she was gone.

The tunnel narrowed and kinked. In the kink, for an instant, she could not move, buried there in the belly of the cliff, caught in the wedge of the stone, and she almost screamed. Instead, she made herself relax. There was water running over her ankles. She had only to follow the water. She pushed slowly, gently forward, most of her body stuck fast; but her foot moving, then her thigh, her hip, until she worked her way around the bump in the rock.

The tunnel widened. It began to climb upward, twisting and turning, but always up in the dark, until she was helping herself along with her outstretched hands. Then the climb came to an end in a blank rock wall, with water spilling down its surface.

She felt her way along the rock wall, found a place where she could climb, and went up. Her hands groped ahead of her for holds, and her feet pressed against the rock. If she fell from here, she might die. Break her leg. Die slowly. Then, reaching up, she realized that she could see her hand.

She followed that grip into brighter light. She could see where to put her hands now, and the stone was warm. Above, beyond the edge of rock, was pink sky: the sun just going down. She pulled herself the last few feet up to the grass beside the pool of water, and lay down, exhausted, and closed her eyes, and slept.

SHE had nothing to eat, but the spring had come; the meadow was full of mushrooms, and the trees of birds’ nests and eggs. She walked a whole day and much of the night, through a brilliant full moon, before she came at last to the high road where it came down from the mountain passes and veered toward the sea. It was deserted. Even from its crests, she could not see the coast. Off toward the ocean, a plume of thick black smoke clotted the air; she wondered if the farmers were burning off their fields for the spring planting.

She walked on, eating whatever she could find—roots, nuts, even flowers and grubs. On the third day, she came on some travelers, who gave her some bread.

They were surprised to find her walking alone; they said, “Be careful, there are robbers on the highway. The Duke has gone south to a war, and there is no law.”

“And raiders on the sea,” said another. “Be careful.”

So she watched out for strangers, walking along, but she thought that she was near her own village and looked for the path down to it. She wondered what she would find there—if anything were left there. She wept once, thinking of Marco. But she was still walking along the high road, her feet sore, and every muscle aching, when someone shouted, and a skinny boy bounded down out of the rocks toward her.

“Perla! Perla!”

It was Grep, who had rowed third oar on Marco’s boat at Dragon’s Deep. She laughed, astonished, her hopes surging.

Grep bounded around her, laughing. “You’re alive! You’re alive! Come, hurry—Marco will—”

“Marco,” she cried, running down the steep path beside him. “Marco is alive?”

“Marco, Ercule, Juneo, me,” he said. They slowed to a crawl under a fallen tree. “Everybody else went down in the storm.”

“The storm,” she said, startled.

He put his finger to her lips. “But you’re alive!” He laughed again, joyous, as if nothing else mattered. “Come on—” He ran out ahead up a short, steep slope and onto the flat top of the sea cliff, shouting.

“Look here, everybody! Look here!”

She stood there, looking around her. She knew this cliff, which had stood behind her village. Now on its narrow height stood a cluster of huts inside a ditch—half as many huts as the old village, and now from each one, faces peered out.

And she laughed, delighted, and stretched out her arms, and they were running toward her, her sister, all tears, and her friends.

“Perla! Perla! You came back!” She flung herself into their arms, and for a while nothing mattered.

“Where are the men?” she asked, in her sister’s hut. Her sister set a piece of fish before her, a slab of bread, and she reached greedily as a child for them.

“They’re out,” her sister said vaguely. She said, “The few there are. Marco has been the saving of us.”

Perla looked around the hut, smaller than before, stoutly made with stone footings, a withy wall domed overhead, and covered with straw. There was only one bed, and that small. Her eyes went to the doorway, where half a dozen children hung in the opening, watching her wide-eyed.