"Apprentices wanted
Cheffing
Waiting
Ingredients
Apply: The Dragon's Restaurant, Little Ravine"
When the dragon starts advertising for staff no-one is sure what to do. I mean what does happen when a forty-foot long talking dragon wants to set up a high-class restaurant on the edge of town? Your town? It's a nightmare, isn't it? We're not just talking about families of immigrants who might slip an unfamiliar vegetable or two into the soup, we're talking about a kitchen the size of an aircraft hangar and a lot of asbestos.
"Would you like that flambéd at your table, sir?"
You nod. A jet of flame from the kitchen brulées your pudding to exactly the correct, tasty state.
The health and safety implications are horrendous. The council will never be able to cope. Half the staff are still on stress leave after that business with the Beanstalk a few years ago that no-one wants to talk about. Children have been running away from home to try their hands at being giant-killers. Now they all want to be sous-chefs.
And there's the business about dragons eating people. People like us. People who have conversations, live in the next street or suburb and avoid eating each other wherever possible. The dragon has spent years winnowing the local population and suddenly she wants to be a citizen; she has even applied to join the Chamber of Commerce. Burghers nod sagely and talk about the civilising effects of trade and community engagement.
What could possibly go wrong?
Parents are tempted – of course they are. Who wants little Billy to be a cobbler all his life when you have six generations of experience of all the things that can go wrong in the cobbling world? Things go right, too, of course: life is generally long, not too complicated and uninterrupted by horrific injury but we tend to forget those things when we seek advantage for our children. And so we send them off to be interviewed for a very different career.
"So, small scented delicacy, are you more interested in cooking or in serving at tables?"
"Errm..." the potential apprentice has just met his potential employer and is most interested in fleeing as fast and hard as he can all the way down The Little Ravine and across the plain to the safety of Gowe and a life spent in the contemplation of feet and soles.
"What's this other one? Ingredients?" Perhaps he will be sent out into the countryside to dig up roots or collect herbs? Then he can run away. All the way down the Little Ravine and across the plains to –
"Oh, that's where you and I make something tasty together."
There is a long pause while the interviewee works out all the possible implications of that statement.
"Errm, cooking. I like cooking."
"Of course you do."
None of the fourteen potential apprentices return home from the interviews. Fond parents imagine this is because their children are busily learning the Arts of Cookery and Restaurant Management at what will surely become a Taran icon. The truth only begins to emerge when construction starts.
#
Every day it takes Bob and his team of builders two hours to travel home from the building site in the Little Ravine. They don't begrudge the time and they don't stop looking over their shoulders until they reach the safety of the little river-side town below the walls of Tara. Tara the white, Tara the brave, Tara the glittering palace overlooking the river crossing, the little town of Gowe, the marshes and the rolling plains all around, Tara where the Royal Guard are based. Usually, the builders would camp on-site and have fine cheerful evenings around their campfire cooking stew, singing songs and occasionally playing host to some village girls. Not on this job. Night is when she inspects their work and leaves scrawled instructions pinned to the signboard below the advert that says,
"Coming Soon
The Dragon's Restaurant
Families Welcome"
The roost is insufficient – reduce to thicken
Even with the short days the work is going well. The instructions are couched as recipes which Bob sometimes asks the pale kitchen staff to translate.
"She w...w...wants more r...r......reinforcement up there see?" Explains one of the apprentices. There are thirteen of them.
“Is it worth it, then, being an apprentice here?”
"Oh, yes! Only nine more years and I'll be qualified to work as a kitchenhand anywhere."
Bob looks at the thin, trembling boy in front of him and then over at Luke his own apprentice, just starting to build his adult muscles and growing tanned and fit on the huge meals Bob's wife feeds him.
"Do you want to escape?" whispers Bob. "We could help you."
"Oh...well...it would be nice to see mum again. But we're doing Cassoulet this week. I don't want to miss that."
"Right. What's your name?"
"At the moment I'm Vegetables. Next week, if I do all my chopping right, I'll be Side Salads."
Bob doesn't ask again.
Recipe – Upper Roost
Ingredients
Roosting bar
Supports
Ramp to floor
Method
Supports and Roosting Bar – reduce to thicken
Ramp – grate finely
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Time
Finish by Friday and I'll pay you double.
The builders know there is a pile of treasure somewhere in the caverns. They talk about it sometimes when the dragon pays them in gold coins from long ago or once with a heartbreakingly beautiful mermaid carved in sapphire. Mostly she pays them in silver pieces. There is no agreed price for the work. Bob received a contract that promised: "Build what I ask and you will live a long and prosperous life." Bob is growing wealthy on the dragon's erratic payments and plump on the gourmet picnics the apprentices serve up at lunchtime. On the other hand he is grey at the temples now. They have all seen the stinking pile of bones and body parts piled far back in the cave. They shovelled dirt onto it when they first arrived and agreed not to talk about it. They don't except of course for telling wives, girlfriends, best friends and everyone in the Golden Dragon one night after more than a few beers. Occasionally new bones appear and they add more dirt. Potion Tom is about halfway down the pile now next to his sticky copy of Don Quixote.
#
Today Bob is pushing his team to apply the final coat of varnish to beams and doors and sweep up any mess so they can finish the job by lunchtime.
"Last day, lads. No slacking. Let's get it done."
They load the bigger tools onto the pack ponies, throw scrap wood into the trees and stand back, hands on hips, to admire their work. They have built a wall three stories high out of red-clay bricks. At ground level there is a row of diamond-latticed windows either side of a varnished oak double door. Up on the top levels where the cliff curves out to meet the wall there is a huge open arch complete with roosting bar, inside there is another open arch overlooking the restaurant and a ramp down into the kitchen. Bob and his team are satisfied. This is a job well done.
"All done, lads, let's get going."
"Purrfect," says a voice above them. Luke farts and soils his trousers. They all look up. She has arrived silently and molded herself against the hill. She is green on green and hard to see among the trees. Bob estimates she is seven pack ponies long and three high. Her huge eyes glow amber in the afternoon sun. She runs a dark tongue around green lips and leaves her mouth open so they can see her teeth.
"Beautiful work, little Builder-Bites," she flexes her claws and croons, "Ooooh look, Mummy, a restaurant! Just in time because I am soooo hungry." She starts to move down the hill towards them. Implacable. Inevitable. An avalanche of scales and teeth and impossibility. Bob, however, has not spent a lifetime dealing with building supply merchants for nothing.
"O'course, there's still the path to finish." He isn't particularly brave but he is desperate and a master of the delaying tactic. "See, you'll need a nice firm surface, all raised up out of the wet. We'll start here an' it'll curve away through the trees there to the carriage park. Crazy paving, you know, just like the rose garden at Tara. Very swish it'll be."
Somewhere behind the dragon just over the ridge, trees bend and snap. Bob imagines the great tail thrashing with annoyance.
"Crazy paving?"
"Yeah, you know, all those different shaped pieces of stone fitted together in a, like, pattern. If you don't do anything, this'll all be mud come the winter and you'll be putting down boards and your floor'll be filthy and-"
"Yes, yes. Very well. When will you be finished?"
Bob sucks at his teeth.
"Mebbe Thursday? If we can get the stone, o' course. It'll look lovely. Lefty and Luke – you take the ponies, go fetch a load o' them flat rocks from that landslip in the Ravine. Just leave us Dobbin. The rest o' you, come on, we'll start from the door."
Dobbin is the oldest of the pack ponies and has plenty of meat on him. In a race for their lives the men will run faster than Dobbin. All afternoon as they tap and shape and level the stones, Bob is calculating how big the dragon's stomach is and how many Dobbins would fill it up. The crazy-paving path curves from the entrance, across the clearing and into the trees. They are using any old stones they can find. Lefty and Luke haven't come back.
"Right," says Bob loudly, "Let's go down and help them bring up that stone." He gestures hoping the dragon can't see him and they all pick up what tools they can carry. Dobbin is hobbled in the clearing grazing and doesn't raise his head to watch them go. Bob is glad about that.
Arialda snoozes in the sun. As darkness falls and her builders still haven't returned she slides silently down into the clearing until she can reach out and plunge one talon into Dobbin's head straight through the eye socket and into the brain. The startled horse doesn't even have time to neigh. Arialda chews and chomps and looks at the building. She is pleased. Thwarted but pleased. And they did have the decency to leave her a snack. She spits out the harness, clambers up to the roof of her new restaurant and roars out her triumph. She will chase them all down, she will burn their homes, she will gut their families while they watch, she will...below her light spills out of the windows, making diamond patterns on the crazy paving and the grass. The apprentices are laying tables and lighting lamps. Arialda creeps back down to the clearing.
"Ohhh! Beautiful!"
She's right - it is. The windows glow, the doors are open, the fire crackles. She sniffs. "Mmmm!" Coffee and garlic and bacon. "I am a genius!" She spends the night in contemplation of her restaurant and her own brilliance.
Down in Gowe the relieved builders call Luke "Shit-knickers" and pat Bob on the back.
"Crazy paving!"
"Mate!"
Behind them at the foot of the Little Ravine an Apprentice tacks up a carefully-lettered blackboard:
"Opening Night
At
The Dragon's Restaurant
This Saturday – Seafood Special"
#
There are many types of magic. Arialda and her apprentices will tell you that their magic comes from hard work, good ingredients and experimentation.
"It's not right!" the apprentice holding the spoon is in tears. "It tastes...dead or something." The other apprentices cluster round, dipping their own spoons and licking and nodding.
"Cardboard."
"Flat."
"Dull."
They all look up at Arialda. She lowers her head, extends her tongue and Dipping Sauces places a careful spoonful right on the very tip.
"Mmm. Hmm. Ech! You're right, small annoying voices. What have we not done? What is missing?"
They are in the kitchen that Bob built, making a new dipping sauce. Something a little Eastern and spicy to drizzle over pan-fried prawns.
"Garlic. Lemon. Chilli. It's all there! It must be in the proportions. Mix it again. Measure well, Mr Dipping Sauces and keep a record."
They end up working on it all night. At 2am they add coriander. It helps.
"Not perfect, though."
"Peanuts?"
"Soy?"
"Rice wine?"
They look up. Arialda opens one sleepy eye.
"Try them all."
By lunchtime they have fourteen candidates. Along the great marble-topped chopping counter they lay out bowls of dipping sauce big enough for everyone to have a taste, big glasses of water and a spittoon. It takes a full hour before they have tasted and argued it down to the three best versions.
"Now, Mr Dipping Sauces, make them all over again. This one needs to be spicier. This one is too peanutty. And this one is, bleh! It's just lemon – add something."
The apprentices, blinking and swaying from lack of sleep, summon up enthusiasm from somewhere and work to create a masterpiece. Arialda snoozes. The kitchen is big enough for her to turn around in; the apprentices work at stoves and benchtops along the edges of the cave. There is some natural light from holes in the walls and from the great fire that has two whole hogs roasting on spits. The youngest apprentice, Spit, is turning them slowly. Arialda likes having apprentices. She likes their little hands and their dexterity; for all her insistence on proper methods of chopping and mixing, these aren't skills that she has mastered. Her talons can achieve delicate movements but she finds it hard to hold a knife or to chop something as small as a garlic bulb. For the apprentices, it is a match made in heaven. They are all obsessive-compulsive workaholics determined to make the best of everything: the best chopped vegetables in the Three Kingdoms; the best gravy anyone has ever tasted anywhere ever; and now, the best possible dipping sauce for prawns.
By the middle of the next night they are all clustered excitedly around a single bowl, clamouring for Arialda to taste it.
"We used fresh chili."
"And those big fat sweet lemons, not the small sharp ones."
"And ground the peanuts really fine with a little pepper and salt and some coriander seeds. That was a stroke of genius, Side Salads!"
"And we still added fresh coriander."
"And-"
They stop babbling. The tongue is there. Dipping Sauces places a teaspoon of reddish liquid on the tip of the tongue and stands back. They all take a breath and hold it.
"Mmm. Oh. Mmm." She swills the flavour along each of the taste areas on her tongue and then around her mouth. "Something sweet. Something sour. Something a little, mmm, nutty with an edge." She inhales and chews. "Garlic. Lemon. This is superb." The apprentices cheer and clap, cry and hug each other. "Make prawns, Hot Entrees and we shall test it one more time."
Hot Entrees serves up butter-fried honey prawns for an early breakfast. They dip and exclaim and laugh. It is a celebratory meal. Arialda purrs with satisfaction.