It's a sunny afternoon in May at about that time when sensible peasants are finishing up the cider and lying down in the shade for a nap. We are floating in a perfect blue sky, like the one Veronese painted for his Wedding at Cana. The sun is warm on our backs, the wind is soft like gauze and below us a bird swoops after insects. The peasants give the rough clay of their cider jars one last pat, grass and leaves crunch pleasantly under their heads, they slide their hats over their eyes and breathe in salty sweat. They sleep, we drift, the bird swoops.
"Snack!" Murmurs a voice very close to the ear. We are buffeted by the tail wind of something very big passing much too close. Correcting out of our involuntary spin we watch a green dragon spit fire at the bird and snap up its crispy carcase.
And then we know where we are.
We are above the Little Ravine. It's a narrow, damp little pass leading up from the Plains of Tara into the forested mountains. The pass is called The Little Ravine because there is a much bigger one to the north. The North Pass is wide and well-travelled and notorious for its slow traffic, congestion and annoying customs inspections. Merchants lead their trains of pack-ponies slowly over the mountains waving travel passes that start off crackly-new and end up grubby and cloth-soft. Bribes chink from hand to hand. It's slow, expensive and safe. The Little Ravine, on the other hand, is notorious for dragons. Well, a dragon. She lives at the top of the winding, rocky chasm and preys on passing travellers. Incautious merchants, mostly, who dreamed of a fast route from Tara to the markets of Horst.
In the taverns of Gowe the merchants' families bewail their losses and the young men tell stories about the immense pile of gold and jewels that the dragon must sleep on.
"And bones," interject their girlfriends. "Lots of bones." And the girlfriends are, of course, right. None of the bold young men who set out to steal the dragon's hoard ever return.
#
Coming up out of her dive, the dragon notices a lone traveller in the ravine. "Dinner!" she hisses and flies down to lie in wait in the shadowy entrance to her cave.
The path up the Little Ravine is wide enough for a laden pack pony but it is gravel and shale and slippery underfoot which makes it hard to run away. Trees line the path and vines hang from the cliffs overhead. The air is cool and moist. Water trickles constantly. What with the shadows and the moving vines and the water noise and the slipping of feet and hooves on the loose rock it's hard to spot the line where mossy rock becomes scaly skin. It's only when an eye opens as big as your head that you realise the warnings were true. And then of course the gravel and the shale make it hard to run.
Only the foolhardy or the desperate would take this path.
Soon enough the man comes trudging up the path and stops on the level area outside the cave to take a swig from his waterskin. His name is Tom and he's a herbalist. Everyone calls him Potion Tom. They called after him when he set out this morning:
"Potion Tom, don't take the short-cut!" But he did. He stands still now and pulls a scarf out of his back pocket to mop his brow.
The scarf is thin from constant use. It was red once and someone has lovingly darned its rips and holes with soft, rust-coloured wool. He looks around. Nothing but rocks, the smooth dark type with sharp edges under the moss.
"Hello traveller." The man jumps and spits water.
"H-hello?"
"You look hot," says the voice. "Why don't you come inside and rest in the shade?"
Potion Tom squints into the shadows. Grass grows here, and trees. He can see the dark shadow of what might be a cave. Sweat runs into his eyes.
"You're nowhere near the top," purrs the voice. "And it's getting dark."
He spots it, this time. A crack in the canyon wall. The entrance to a cave. The voice coming from inside the cave is like nothing he has ever heard before. Gentle and seductive. He doesn't think about dragons because none of the stories the young men tell mention talking dragons. Just the scrape and slide of gold under its monstrous claws.
"I- "
"You left it a bit late to start out, didn't you?" She – he's sure it's a woman - sighs. He's starting to imagine some languid cave-dwelling hermit. His face brightens, she might know about special herbs that grow on mountains. He's sure the top of the ravine is just around the next bend. He'd like to keep walking but when he imagines taking another step and then another he can feel the strength leaving his legs. Yes, he left it a bit late. Yes, he was in the tavern last night, drinking too much beer and worrying. Reading and re-reading the letter from his daughter.
"Where are you off to?" says the voice. It's a beautiful voice: female, husky, a little musical. Potion Tom takes another swig of water and wonders if she's pretty.
"Laprenda. I'm on my way to see my youngest daughter. She's sick on her childbed and like to die."
"Isn't her mother with her?"
"Well no," says Tom apologetically, "She died and then I moved to Gowe last year. Better prospects."
"She's alone then? Like an orphan?"
Tom ducks his head. He's had that thought himself in the dark hours when dawn is a long way away and he can raise spectres in his head of his daughter alone and...
"She's married," he says defensively, "but he's not...you know." He shuffles his feet miserably. Pebbles clatter.
"You poor thing." She says, "You must be so worried. So anxious to get there." Tom blinks away a tear. "You should rest a while. Then you'll be able to walk faster when the moon rises."
Tom shuffles his feet again.
"I don't want to delay." He says. There's a lump of self-pity in his throat and a crawling self-doubt in his belly.
"Silly man. When did her message reach you? Yesterday?" Tom nods. "Well then, it will have taken most of the week to reach you. It's extremely unlikely she's survived. You'll get there just in time to sit with the dead."
"No I-" but the will to move has left him. She's right. Lena is white and cold. Her baby by her side. Both of them still, the colour fading from their skin. The room full of the scent of myrrh with an undertone of decay. He should have stayed in Laprenda. Should have been there. Should have...
Something rustles in the undergrowth to one side of the clearing. Something huge.
"Oh no!" says the voice. "It's the dragon! Come inside where it's safe!" Potion Tom looks up the ravine, surely that was the top. More movement in the bushes. It could be a lion. Facing that way Tom backs across the clearing into the shadowy cave. In front of him a green scaly tail slides out of the bushes to curl around and cut off his escape. He wets himself.
"Welcome," says the voice in his ear. "You're just in time for dinner."
#
"I don't suppose..." The cave is huge and deep. The sandy floor slopes up to the rear wall where Potion Tom sits on a damp rock a long way from the dappled moonlight at the entrance. He is feeling a long way from everything - from the light at the cave-mouth, from his daughter who he will never see again and from his life as an apothecary in his thatched cottage just outside Gowe. When he wakes at dawn and stands in his doorway to scratch and spit and wonder what the day will bring, he can see past the other cottages to the River Pye below him with its single-masted fishing boats and long horse-drawn canal barges. Across the river the town of Gowe - all dark bricks and woodsmoke - is just waking up. All of its streets lead from the river up a gentle slope to the green plain. To the west the plain lies flat all the way to the sea. To the east are the forested mountains, full of trouble, where he is now. Directly in front of him, rising out of the green and looming over it all, is the Palace of Tara.
We are right at the beginning of our story so the Palace of Tara is a single, blocky building - just a square, 3-storey keep with four round towers with conical blue-tiled rooves, one at each corner. There are overhanging battlements that run along the top of the keep and around each tower. The walls are faced with white quartz so that the palace sparkles in the sun. Every morning our apothecary friend (don't get too attached, lives here are short on the whole and his situation is tenuous to say the least) can see the bronze glint of spears and helmets up on the battlements. Tara has a formidable force of Royal Guards. He wishes they were here with him now.
The town is kept at a proper distance from the palace by a wide ring of marshes that stink all summer and freeze all winter. The road to the keep lies along a raised causeway across the boggy land to an archway with a portcullis made of cast bronze. Only the aristocracy, their soldiers and their servants are invited in so Potion Tom doesn't know that through the archway is a cobbled yard with stables, armoury and smithy on three sides with the palace, home to the King and Queen, up a flight of stone steps directly opposite the archway. The walls of the keep are thick: three horses nose to tail can be in the archway at the same time. Right now our friend would like to be there. Anywhere that's not here. He gazes longingly at the cave entrance. The dragon snorts and hooks one claw through his trouser leg to pull him closer. Closer to her teeth. Her long, sharp, gleaming teeth. In the mouth that stinks of sulphur and sewers.
"Wait!" gasps Potion Tom, coughing in the sulphurous breath. "I could read you a story."
The dragon grunts. She isn't much in the mood for stories. Older dragons are always making her fly over this landscape or that and read the story inherent in the slope of mountains and curve of streams. On the other hand she isn't particularly hungry and the morsel isn't going anywhere. She unhooks her claw from his trouser leg and rests her snout on her forepaws.
"Try me," she purrs.
The strange little man feels about in his pockets and produces a leather-bound object. The dragon watches closely. She has never seen one before. She whuffs and sniffs. It smells like old trees.
"What's that?"
"It's a book."
The dragon watches the apothecary unfold it like skin off a rabbit and stare at it as he begins to tell his tale.
"At a certain village in La Mancha, which I shall not name, there lived not long ago one of those old-fashioned gentlemen who are never without a lance upon a rack, an old target, a lean horse and a greyhound."
The dragon listens entranced. How delightful that dinner should prove so entertaining!
The hours pass and the voice grows cracked and less pleasant to listen to. The dragon decides to eat him.
"But wait!" Potion Tom holds out the book. "We're only halfway through. If you eat me now, you'll never know how it ends."
"Ends? How can a story have an end?"
How could it? Wind carves the mountains, rivers run, trees shed seeds, fruits and leaves and then pass on but the story remains. Even deserts tell a story in the shifting of their sands. How could a story possibly end?
"Well, I'll read it all and you'll see. Is there any water? My throat is a little dry."
"Are you hungry too, my dinner?" Murmurs the dragon.
"Er..." says Potion Tom, who hadn't wanted to mention eating. The dragon shows him the spring at the rear of the cave and disappears briefly, returning with a fresh-killed sheep.
"Could I light a fire, d'you think? I like my sheep cooked."
A gout of flame engulfs the corpse and singes off the man's eyebrows.
"Thank you." Fortified with spring water and flash-roasted mutton, he continues the tale.
You must not think, Dear Reader, that Stockholm Syndrome kicks in at this point. It may be easy enough to delude yourself with fantasies of friendship and survival when your captors are of the same species as you and can after all only do to you the things encompassed by human imagination. This captive however is sitting on a rock in a dim cavern surrounded by the remains of countless previous dinners. The evidence strongly suggests that some of them dragged themselves half-eaten into dark shadows to die. He reads on. He even, O unfortunate man, teases out the story with digressions, interspersing extra little moments. The Author would have been horrified. Tampering with another's Art! Really, he deserves his fate.
Finally, Potion Tom has to admit to himself that dragons do not sleep, he has run out of ideas for digressions and the concept that a story should have a beginning, a middle and an end is all wrong. Especially the end. Stories should go on forever.
"They are already going down and I do not doubt but they will drop and fall all together in good earnest, never to rise again. Adieu." He closes the book with trembling hands. A tear dribbles slowly from one eye. He wonders if the tear will have time to travel as far as his jaw or even drip onto his hands before-
"And that's the end, is it?"
"Yes." The tear traces the curve of his cheek. He thinks he would have liked to say goodnight to his daughter, one last time.
"What you're saying is: that's it, no more, he dies and everything stops?"
"Yes." The tear drips onto his hands.
"That's completely ridiculous!"
The dragon eats him in three bites starting at his feet. And, yes, Dear Reader, I'm afraid she does take the time to chew each bite properly before she swallows. She rolls his flesh around in her mouth and tells the dying man,
"You taste of...herbs and bad jokes. Humans are such a thrill to eat."
Then she takes the strange thing called "book" to one of the older dragons and tries to explain the phenomenon she has just experienced. After a frustrating afternoon which ends in violence she takes it back to her cave and throws it into the shadows.
This is not an anonymous death. Everyone knows about Tom's daughter and what he intended. His careful calculations. He was in the pub talking to peasants who know all about hunger. He was gambling on the dragon being full. They made peasant calculations - extrapolations from cattle and dogs. Their small lives haven't encompassed bodies ripped apart and flung across dark caverns just for the joy of it.
"Go the long way around," said Maisy the bargirl but they all knew that was because she hoped a laughing-eyed merchant from Bannesk had done just that and would be back in the Summer.
The Dragon spends the evening licking Potion Tom's skull clean and glaring at the book. Lambs taste helpless and birds taste surprised. Merchants taste of guile and money, peasants taste scared and humble but this, this flavour is different. Can a story make someone taste better? She sucks at one of his leg bones. The marrow is rich and nutty. She can taste the old knight and his horse and the windmills and...she drifts into dizzy sleep. She dreams she swoops and dives through clouds of flavour. Up through a soft wool of curiosity, around and around a white pillar of humour, diving down in the wet grey of fading ambition. In her dream she howls for lost hope. She jerks awake. The howl is still echoing off the walls of the cave. She picks up the book and takes it to her treasure chamber, a smaller cave hidden away down a tunnel. She glares at the book, willing it to speak.
In the dark night she goes hunting.
"Er. Tell you a story. Yerss. I've gorra cheese puff if you'd like that. No?" The peasant holds the strange cube in his great loose fingers and doesn't look at it once. "Once upon a time there wuz three liddle pigs-"
"No! That's not right! Use the...thing!"
"I can't read."
"You can't what?"
"Thass a book, that is. There's a lot of 'em about. At least three that I know of. An' I can't read it."
She pulps him against the wall of the cave and licks his flesh off his bones in long vengeful stripes. He isn't carrying a book but down at the bottom of his bag he has something wrapped in cloth. It tastes of...
"...herbs and something rancid and yet..." In the dragon's mouth it is a dot. The size of a lemon drop. She sucks and licks and crushes it against the roof of her mouth. It smears its way down her throat. "So, this is a cheese puff!" She rolls on her treasure and dreams rich tapestries of coarse laughter, unending toil and the joy of strong muscles pressing a plough into the earth and one body into another. She slides langorously into wakefulness. It is morning and she goes hunting again.
"Can you read, small meal?"
It is unsurprising yet gratifying to those of us of an autocratic temperament how quickly the threat of being eaten will drive even the dullest peasant into a classroom. Within a few short weeks of the dragon's encounter with the apothecary all through the mountain ranges above Tara, down into the foothills, all among the villages of forest and plain, dirt-blackened thumbs scrabble at delicate pages. Brains accustomed to nothing more onerous than watching the passing of yet another agricultural cycle suddenly struggle with the concept of an unreliable narrator and the value of iambic pentameter:
If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
When,
You really want to get your point across
Use iambs in their fives to lay it out
The meaning really sticks inside their brains
And best of all you never have to shout
Children heading out into the forest to take Granny a basket of food now carry, besides the long knife for dealing with wolves, a storybook. Eventually, of course, our story should end with a group of heroic young men marching up The Little Ravine to the dragon's lair bearing blazing torches, pitchforks and all the usual paraphernalia of The Mob. Most of them would not survive and nor would the dragon. But this is the Kingdom of Tara. King Philip and Queen Beatrix are all-powerful. Their word is law. Knights, hunting dogs and servants all leap to obey. There are no unions here and no cats in this world, nothing to teach Tarans humility, nothing to temper the belief that The Beast can be controlled. Nothing unusual there: Starling thought she could manage Lecter; Delilah believed she had Sampson well in hand; every God-Emperor there ever was, has believed in the loyalty of those close to them right up until the first blade goes in. Et tu Brute? But Taran policy has always been to appease the powerful and then co-opt them. King Philip waves a hand. Courtiers nod sagely. Advisors peer over their spectacles and predict success. Wild success. A greater success than their Majesties have ever seen before. The greatest success yet. No-one consults the merchants or (are you insane?) the peasants who frequent the forest.
"Teach the dem dreggin to read, idiot knave! Pesky dreggins eatin' Our peasants ain't any way to rule a Kingdom. You! See to it!" Without anyone apparently moving an empty circle opens around the courtier Dusadis who swallows and bows low. Extremely low. The Court moves on to discuss the up-coming May Day pageant. Dusadis is sent the very next day into the mountains with a full suit of extra-strength bronze-plated armour and the Taran Syndicated Literacy Program, Grades 1-7.
"A is for Armoured, Armaments, Alive," he begins.
"B is for Breakfast, Brunch and Biting," retorts the Dragon and eats his horse.
They practice writing in the soft dirt of the cave floor. The sand in his armour joints squeals and grates. The dragon's eyes are tiny lamps at night watching him. Dusadis curls up in his armour and his cloak as far from the rotting bones at the back of the cave as he can and tries not to think about the future.
#
He learns the dragon has a name.
"Arialda, dear heart. After Harewald. My first kill. First one with a name anyway."
After a few meals of blackened mutton Dusadis sends for a field stove and supplies. Along with basic literature the Dragon ingests short-crust pastry and listens to Dusadis' nightly fairy tale.
"Once upon a time there were three little pigs."
"Yum!"
"They set out into the world to seek their fortunes. They reached a field and the first little pig built a house out of straw. He built it very quickly and then went to play in the mud. The second little pig walked on and found a clearing in the forest where he built his house out of twigs and wood. Such a hammering and nailing! But he, too, was finished in a day and went to play in the mud with his brother.
"The third little pig built a brick house. Stone by stone. And had no time to play with his brothers. Then came the winter and the hungry wolf-"
"Aah!"
"The wolf slunk up to the house of the first little pig and heard his teeth chattering with fear behind his straw walls. 'Little pig, little pig let me come in!' ''N-not by the hairs on my chinny-chin-chin!' 'Then I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in!' he cried. And he did."
"Wait! Wolf, you said? Big sharp teeth and claws? He blows the house down?"
"It's a story. It's not necessarily true. The first little pig ran away and the wolf chased him to the house of the second little pig. He could smell them inside ''Little pigs, little pigs let me come in!' 'Not by the hairs on our chinny-chin-chin!' ''Then I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in!' he cried. And he did. The little pigs fled to the house of the third little pig and locked themselves inside."
"This is stupid. Pigs aren't fast. The wolf could catch them easily."
"He's an old wolf. With a limp."
"You do the terrified prey voices very well." Dusadis watches the long tongue licking around her jaw.
"Er. Anyway. When the wolf reached the brick house he cried 'Little pigs, little pigs let me come in!' 'Not by the hairs on our chinny-chin-chin!' 'Then I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house in!' but it wouldn't blow down. The wolf huffed and puffed and puffed and huffed until he saw stars, but the house wouldn't blow down. He was a sly old wolf, though, so he climbed up onto the roof to see if he could get in that way. The third little pig heard him and lit a great big fire and put a cauldron full of water onto it to boil. The wolf jumped down the chimney into the cauldron and died and they ate him for supper."
"They ate him? I'm not sure I like that ending, Mr Storyman."
Dusadis serves up chicken pie. "I know another story about a wolf who eats people."
The dragon snorts,
"Does it actually eat people or does it just have to breathe on buildings until they boil him in a pot."
"Well, listen and you'll find out. And like I said, stories aren't necessarily true."
"Not necessarily true..." She bites into the pie he has baked. "What's this?"
"Chicken."
"Where's the feathers?"
"I took them off before I cooked it."
"Cooked...that's what you do to make chicken taste like this, is it?"
"Yes."
"You humans cook everything don't you?"
"Most things." Dusadis admits carefully, he isn't sure where the conversation is heading.
"You don't have feathers, do you? Could I make you taste like this, d'you think?"
Dusadis swallows his own mouthful of chicken pie and says,
"There are lots of ways of making things taste different. There are things a bit like stories called recipes."
"Tell me the recipe about the wolf who eats people. Make sure he cooks them so they taste like this."
"Er. OK. Once upon a time there was a baker's daughter. Her mother made her a red cloak with a hood and sent her into the forest to visit her grandmother..."
#
The snarled demands from the undergrowth for stories cease.
"Jolly good show! Our peasants may now desist from this practice of literacy."
The paintings of the time, however, show plough-boys and goat-herds with their noses buried in books. Also, the Taran Lending Library in the marketplace in Gowe with its Borrowing Windows shiny with use.
Most Tarans felt the same way about the dragon as you would having a best-selling author living in your street: so proud to have one, so thrilled by the danger and romance until, of course, any particular Taran came face to face with the actual monster.
"Can you cook, little snack?"
Peasants try to tell her stories and are briefly relieved when she demands their favourite recipes instead.
"Well, my old gran used to make a good boiled head."
"Excellent! Let's try that." After the decapitation, Arialda reads from her notes. "Let me see...Boiled head...soak in boiling water by the fire then, using the back of a knife, scrape off the hair."
Trying not to throw up Dusadis fishes one of the heads out of the hot water. The man was called Colin and had calmly given Dusadis a letter for his family and then turned to face his death. Reduced inside his armour to a scarecrow Dusadis has thrown the letter into the stove. It isn't important. Nothing is important. He is alive. He carefully scrapes away Colin's beard and hair, then waggles the bald head at the dragon.
"And the rest."
Dusadis scrapes clean four more heads: a cow, a sheep, a wolf and a horse.
"Good. Boil them. And we'll need some parsley – a quarter-bushel should do it."
The heads will be simmering each in its own stewpot on the big cooking fire for two to three hours so we have time for a quick tour around the kingdoms:
Approaching the coast from the west the land is a riot of colour. From Frentrund in the North where warm swamp rivers seep into a tropical estuary that blooms, blossoms, chirrups and squeaks with fruit and flower, iridescent bird and playful bat all the way South to freezing Bann-Esk where the inhabitants weave bright jumpers to make patterns against the snow and cold rock; for all that distance the coast is a riot of jungle colours. Halfway down where the River Pye wriggles its way out of the last cow pasture to reach stone houses and the harbour there is the land of Tara. It is sweet Tara, sweet temperate green Tara, that we swoop down to watch. Here sit the old men with their fishing nets and their stories. A fish flickers in the river. Maybe a salmon or...no, another sleek brown trout. We follow it upstream. Past farms and orchards; villages and stacked hay. Above a wide shallow weir we reach a great plain. Oak trees, short grass and great herds of deer greet us. Even from the air the plain seems endless. But right in the centre next to the riverside town of Gowe is a brighter green ring around a white dot. The white dot is Tara itself, palatial home to the benevolent rulers of the plain and the wide green ring is the stinking marsh that is home to mosquitos, crayfish and cholera. Everyone agrees something should be done about the marsh. No-one can agree on what because everyone is too busy reading. If Dusadis ever returns to the Taran Court he is going to discover that because of him the populace has forgotten about dragons, kings, everything in fact, lost as it is in a literature-fuelled debate about fantasy versus reality.
"Imagination – Ruining our Children!"
"True Story revealed as Lies!"
"Howl! Can the Big, Bad Wolf ever be understood?"
The fervour of the debate is what happens when people need something to be passionate about. It is what all that structure of chivalry and honour is for – knights questing about the countryside ready to die for a lady's glove. Everyone's a critic now and the Innkeepers' Guild has banned discussion of punctuation in pubs. The Italics Society meets in secret in an upstairs room at The Golden Dragon in Gowe but membership is dropping since the Brotherhood of the Subordinate Clause turned violent.
The dragon doesn't care. She has no idea what she has started. Right now she wants someone to fetch a quarter-bushel of parsley. We'll go. You can be a Dragon's Apprentice for a few minutes.
Searching for parsley in the sprawling kitchen garden you pull back a trailing stem of borage and find a tiny nursery. Nutshells packed with dandelion fluff are cradles for miniscule babies all wrapped in cobwebs. They must be faery children. You wonder if you should take the fragile little things home with you for safety. Then a heavily reinforced bootcap whacks into your shin and down at knee-level a sweet piping voice abuses you. Your ears are so horrified they shut down so you miss half of it.
"...dung-swilling, yellow-gizzarded, fart-faced babysniffer."
"I'm not-"
"Wotcher doin' then?" Down at knee level a sweet-faced girl dressed in cobwebs and petals and butterfly wings is glaring up at you. She is extraordinarily beautiful so that you can only stare at her face and her lissome curves and...
"Ow!" you cry out and clutch at your shin. The pretty little thing is wearing boots and carrying a short sword. Your shin is bleeding and the swearing hasn't stopped. One of the babies wakes up with a feeble cry. "An' you can shurrup an' all." Yells the faery. Being slapped in the face with a wet leaf would make most babies scream even louder. This one falls silent. A survivor. It lies in its swaddling glaring at the older faery. You can only apologise and hobble away. You are not sure if the world has gone quiet or your ears have fainted.
Back at the kitchen door you realise that the small handful of blood-dampened parsley you have gathered is not a "quarter-bushel" and the tyrant in the kitchen may not be happy. Still, what's the worst she can do? You approach the cave, holding out the few sprigs of parsley and they burn to a crisp, collapsing to ash by your feet. You are probably quite badly injured and it is going to hurt in a minute. Next time you really would be better off concentrating on the job and not wandering about satisfying your idle curiosity.
"Babysniffer," growls the chef. "Where's my parsley?"
By the cooking stove, Dusadis removes the heads from their pots and slices off the tops of the skulls. He removes the brains whole, keeping each head and brain on its own chopping board – it won't do to mix them up. You return with, finally, a sufficient quantity of parsley and he thanks you and sends you off to have your burns seen to.
Dusadis carefully skins and chops each par-boiled brain adding minced parsley and stirring the mixture into some melted butter with a little lemon juice and cayenne pepper. The meal is presented: Each of the heads on a separate platter with its tongue (skinned) beside it garnished with the brain and some parsley butter. Thin and weak as he is Dusadis will not eat any of this. He only eats wild roots and grasses now.
The Dragon tastes each of the meals slowly savouring a tiny mouthful. The wolf head is quickly rejected,
"Too gamey."
Dusadis takes obedient notes: The Dragon is compiling a book of her favourite recipes. Cow, sheep and horse all meet with her favour, but human...will she or won't she prefer human flesh? If Dusadis had any nerves left he'd be shaking in his hardened leather boots. The armour is no real protection – if she really wanted to she could winkle him out of there in minutes. Seconds. The dragon wrinkles her long snout. Scratches thoughtfully under a scale. Has a second lick.
"Hnh. Pleasant enough, but...insipid. Something is missing, metal morsel, what is it?"
Dusadis shrugs hopelessly,
"I don't know. I'm not really...I mean you need a proper chef."
Hot breath engulfs him. He closes his eyes. The teeth are so close. So close.
"And where will I find one of those?"
"In...um...in a restaurant?"
"And what is that?"
"Um..." Dusadis has attended Court Banquets, the annual Reeve's Feast, picnics both rustic and aristocratic and he has eaten in inns and on campaign. He has only once been to a restaurant with some of his fellow young knights out looking for food, love and trouble. "...um, people go there and they pay money and the chef cooks and the waiters serve you food."
"They pay money?" says Arialda from the shadows.
"Yes, the very good ones have lots of people going there and the food is very expensive." Says Dusadis.
"What food?"
"Whatever they've got."
"You mean, people go there expecting to be fed and they just eat what they're given?" Arialda says suspiciously.
"Yes. There's a sort of list to choose from." Dusadis makes menu shapes in the air with his hands.
"Why do they go?"
"The expensive ones are very fashionable. People go there to, y'know, see and be seen."
"Eat and be eaten," murmurs the dragon. "Where are these things?"
"Er...in cities. Bannesk has one." Says Dusadis. That's the only one he has been to.
He breathes fresh air again. Hears her slither away. With a careful sigh Dusadis crawls away to bed. He sleeps under a rocky shelf. He thinks she can't reach him there. As the sun comes up, a talon hooks into his armour and drags him out. Dusadis snaps awake with hot dragon-breath flooding his helmet.
"Come out little winkle," says Arialda. "Restaurant. Tell me again."
"Erm..." The dragon has obviously been awake all night worrying at this. Fretting at it like a dog with a favourite old bone that really has no meat on it but can't be left alone. Dusadis coughs and gathers his thoughts. "You go in and a...someone called waiter--"
"Why?" snaps the dragon.
"What?"
"Why is it called waiter?"
"Umm...because he's waiting for you when you get there...um?" Dusadis is guessing. The dragon snorts and nudges him to carry on.
"And the waiter takes your cloak--" says Dusadis.
"Why? What does he do with it?" says Arialda, bewildered.
"Dunno. But I got it back at the end."
"Was it cleaned or anything?"
"No." Says Dusadis.
The dragon huffs. "That makes no sense. Carry on."
"So...the waiter takes you to a table and helps you sit down and gives you a mennoo."
"A what?" says the dragon.
"It's the list of all the food they have. And you pick what you want to eat."
"Wait. All the tables are right there, can't you just pick the one you want."
"Oh no! It's very strict. You make a booking--"
"Book-ing" says the dragon. Dusadis hears a scritch-scratch noise and risks turning his head. She is taking notes. "Go on." A quill pen. His quill pen, tiny in that immense claw, and a stack of flat parchment sheets.
"Well, then you sit and another waiter--"
"There's more than one?"
"Yes. They bring you bread and water and nibbly things like nuts or olives or...oh and you get a list of wines too."
The pen scratches.
"So the food is already made?" says the dragon.
"I don't know. I remember there was a pig on a spit and they'd cut pieces off if you ordered that."
"Or-der," says the dragon, writing.
"And on the mennoo you can pick, you know, say chicken and then whether you want hot veggies or spices or gravy or mash or or anything."
Scratch scratch scratch.
"Then you eat some bread and drink some wine and they bring you starters. You choose them too." Says Dusadis brightly.
"Starters?"
"Little, itty bitty snacks – we had prawns on sticks, a cheese puff each and four dumplings."
Scritch scritch scritch.
"And then the main course with all the side bits."
"Side bits?" asks the dragon.
"I had salad in a little bowl and sauces and gravy in a pouring jug and then a big plate with chicken and balls of fried rice and cheese."
Scratch scratch scratch.
"Um..." Dusadis scrabbles through his memory. "Then there's different wine. And cheese on a plank. Then more different wine. Then sweet puddings."
"All this is one meal?" says Arialda.
"Yes! It costs an arm and a leg as well," says Dusadis before he can stop himself. There is a short silence.
"How much?" the dragon's voice is silky-smooth. Dusadis quails inside his armour.
"A s-silver coin. Then the chef came out with his apprentices, the people he's teaching to cook and we all clapped."
"App-rentice," says the dragon slowly, writing it down. "Well, well. You must make me some of these things. A cheese puff for instance. And...am I your apprentice do you think?"
"Um..." Dusadis isn't sure what the safest answer is. "Maybe. A bit."
"I want to be chef." Says the dragon.
"Righto." Says Dusadis. "Better get on to making cheese puffs then."
That was how the dragon was stolen. That was how they stole her mind, her heart, her understanding of herself and everything it meant to be a dragon. Some piffling, inconsequential humans fell into her claws and she was tempted by a storybook and a cheese puff. One of those little pastry pockets full of cheese and herbs. Cheese. Vegetarian for flame's sake! Nevertheless, she ate it and there was no talking to her after that.
Arialda says that's a lie. But when the apprentices tell the story late at night it always ends like this:
One bite and she said to Dusadis, "I could kill for this, you know." He was a very good teacher. Not a quiver in his voice when he said, "Then I'll just have to show you how to make it for yourself."
#
The dragon is coming to love the crafting of food and Dusadis is starting to respect her passion for that crafting. The next day he helps her make a sign pointing up the ravine. It says "Food". Their first customer arrives at the cave within hours.
"Is it like a restaurant? Only I doesn't has any money."
"Don't worry, soft entrée, you will be contributing in other ways." The dragon is hidden away in the dark, only her voice seducing him in.
"Righto."
"This way, please." Dusadis, wearing a hand-sewn apron over his armour, conducts the traveller to a pair of rocks. One for sitting and one as a table. "Here you are. Careful, the bowl's hot." The traveller has a spoon in his pocket and tucks in. When he pushes the bowl away with a happy sigh, the voice from the dark says,
"Chicken cacciatore – what do you think?"
"Really good. Not as good as my mum used to make, mind."
"What?"
Dusadis drops the empty bowl and it smashes.
"Yeah, my mum used to put something in that--"
When I say the dragon is coming to love the crafting of food, I don't mean to imply that she is anything but an autocrat. She is not in love with the debate about flavour or the sharing of knowledge. She is in love with the exact production of particular flavours to a specific recipe. Dusadis looks down at the shattered corpse and wonders what it was his mum used to add.
"Maybe it was lemon...maybe that would bring out the flavour a bit more?"
#
Dusadis is awoken in the night by hot rank breath flooding his helmet.
"Mr Head Waiter, we need to know more. Here." A soft chink by his head. "Tomorrow you are to go out into the world and go to restaurants. Many restaurants."
Dusadis runs as soon as the sun is up. Of course he does. He is starved and wretched from his months in the cave but he doesn't dare take off his armour. In the face of extraordinary dangers like that posed by a dragon, we sometimes forget that normal life with its bears and wolves and bandits continues unchecked. Not Dusadis! He is determined not to survive all those months with a dragon only to fall prey to some lower-level predator. In the mid-morning sun Dusadis staggers out of the forest sword in hand, longing for his comfy bed in his courtier's attic. Tottering along the road he falls in with a pleasant young man from the Brotherhood of the Subordinate Clause. They argue about semi-colons until Dusadis is pushed into the River Pye.
Splash! Ah literacy! If the dragon only knew. Her demand for stories has caused an explosion of literacy across the region and the River Pye is now home to no less than four Floating Libraries. But for literacy, that sad splash would be the last we would see of Dusadis but out of the darkening evening comes Lucinda's Library, specialising in Murder, Suspense and Home Economics. Lucinda herself fishes Dusadis out with the heavy book winch bolted to the prow of the barge.
"Oh!"
"Oh my!" and they're in love. Just like that.
The next day the bubble doesn't burst but it definitely sags. They both looked better by candlelight and Dusadis's expression has settled back into terror. "Restaurants," he says to her after breakfast. "I need to know about them." And he reads. Every so often he goes out on deck to scan the sky. Without his armour (tarnishing quietly in the wheel house) he feels like a peeled grape. We should perhaps discuss Taran technology. This time in Tara's history is what you would call The Bronze Age. You would expect smiths and alchemists and miners to eventually collaborate and devise the hotter furnaces Tarans would need for iron and then steel. But you would be reckoning without Avalon. We lost the human world to iron. It's a horror of a place now, all hard edges, bright lights and poisons. An alchemist's wet dream with furnaces as hot as suns. The Lady in Avalon will not permit iron in Tara or anywhere else in this world. Dusadis has armour that is wicker-work for lightness, fastened with oiled leather straps and plated with bronze in all the important places. Dressed for battle, he looks like a mediaeval samurai, only shinier. And thinner.
Bent over a table, feeling raw and frightened, Dusadis reads about tableware and napkins and conviviality. About tapas and smorgasbord and cocktail nibbles. About hors d'oeuvres and entrees and canapes. And coffee. He reads so fast his head spins. He makes lunch and stares mournfully into Lucinda's wide grey eyes. After lunch he reads some more. In the evening they take their books out on deck. After a while Lucinda tells him about a restaurant she went to once in the harbour town at the mouth of the Pye. Dusadis is entranced. The lamplight is casting a romantic glow. Their hands touch. Their eyes meet. They lean forward nose to nose and... "There's my Head Waiter!" booms a voice out of the sky. Dusadis wets himself. A taloned claw snatches him up. Lucinda is left far below, screaming. In her other claw Arialda has a fishing net full of tables and chairs. "Put me down!" yells Dusadis. "I'm researching!"