The Book of Dragons (15 page)

By twos and by threes, by tens and by twenties, the children vanished into the wood, till the mantle of the field was left plain green once more.

“All the embroidery is unpicked,” said the Princess, sighing.

The sun shone, and the sky was blue, and the fields were quite green, and all the flowers were very bright indeed, because it was May Day.

Then quite suddenly a cloud passed over the sun, and the silence was broken by shrieks from afar off; and, like a many-colored torrent, all the children burst from the wood, and rushed, a red and blue and yellow and white wave, across the
field, screaming as they ran. Their voices came up to the Princess on her tower, and she heard the words threaded on their screams, like beads on sharp needles:

“The dragon, the dragon, the dragon! Open the gates! The dragon is coming! The fiery dragon!”

And they swept across the field and into the gate of the town, and the Princess heard the gate bang, and the children were out of sight—but on the other side of the field the rose-thorns crackled and smashed in the hedge, and something very large and glaring and horrible trampled the ferns in the ditch for one moment before it hid itself again in the covert of the wood.

The Princess went down and told her nurse, and the nurse at once locked the great door of the tower and put the key in her pocket.

“Let them take care of themselves,” she said, when the Princess begged to be allowed to go out and help to take care of the children. “My business is to take care of you, my precious, and I’m going to do it. Old as I am, I can turn a key still.”

So Sabrinetta went up again to the top of her tower, and cried whenever she thought of the children and the fiery dragon. For she knew, of course, that the gates of the town were not dragon-proof, and that the dragon could just walk in whenever he liked.

The children ran straight to the palace, where the Prince was cracking his hunting-whip down at the kennels, and told him what had happened.

“Good sport,” said the Prince, and he ordered out his pack of hippopotamuses at once. It was his custom to hunt big game with hippopotamuses, and people would not have minded that so much—but he would swagger about in the streets of the town with his pack yelping and gamboling at his heels, and, when he did that, the greengrocer, who had his stall in the marketplace, always regretted it; and the crockery merchant, who spread his wares on the pavement, was ruined for life every time the prince chose to show off his pack.

The Prince rode out of the town with his hippopotamuses trotting and frisking behind him, and people got inside their houses as quickly as they could when they heard the voices of his pack and the blowing of his horn. The pack squeezed through the town gates and off across country to hunt the dragon. Few of you who have not seen a pack of hippopotamuses in full cry will be able to imagine at all what the hunt was like. To begin with, hippopotamuses do not bay like hounds: they grunt like pigs, and their grunt is very big and fierce. Then, of course, no one expects hippopotamuses to jump. They just crash through the hedges and lumber through the standing corn, doing serious injury to the crops,
and annoying the farmers very much. All the hippopotamuses had collars with their name and address on, but when the farmers called at the palace to complain of the injury to their standing crops, the Prince always said it served them right for leaving their crops standing about in people’s way, and he never paid anything at all.

So now, when he and his pack went out, several people in the town whispered, “I wish the dragon would eat
him”
—which was very wrong of them, no doubt, but then he was such a very nasty Prince.

They hunted by field, and they hunted by wood; they drew the woods blank, and the scent didn’t lie on the downs at all. The dragon was shy, and would not show himself.

But just as the Prince was beginning to think there was no dragon at all, but only a cock and bull, his favorite old hippopotamus gave tongue. The Prince blew his horn and shouted:

“Tally ho! Hark forward! Tantivy!” and the whole pack charged down-hill towards the hollow by the wood. For there, plain to be seen, was the dragon, as big as a barge, glowing like a furnace, and spitting fire and showing his shining teeth.

“The hunt is up!” cried the Prince. And, indeed, it was. For the dragon—instead of behaving as a quarry should, and running away—ran straight at the pack, and the Prince on his elephant had the mortification of seeing his prize pack
swallowed up one by one in the twinkling of an eye, by the dragon they had come out to hunt. The dragon swallowed all the hippopotamuses just as a dog swallows bits of meat. It was a shocking sight. Of the whole of the pack that had come out sporting so merrily to the music of the horn, now not even a puppy-hippopotamus was left, and the dragon was looking anxiously round to see if he had forgotten anything. The Prince slipped off his elephant on the other side, and ran into the thickest part of the wood. He hoped the dragon could not break through the bushes there, since they were very strong and close. He went crawling on hands and knees in a most un-Prince-like way, and at last, finding a hollow tree, he crept into it. The wood was very still—no crashing of branches and no smell of burning came to alarm the Prince. He drained the silver hunting-bottle slung from his shoulder, and stretched his legs in the hollow tree. He never shed a single tear for his poor tame hippopotamuses who had eaten from his hand, and followed him faithfully in all the pleasures of the chase for so many years. For he was a false Prince, with a skin like leather and hair like hearth-brushes, and a heart like a stone. He never shed a tear, but he just went to sleep. When he awoke it was dark. He crept out of the tree and rubbed his eyes. The wood was black about him, but there was a red glow in a dell close by, and it was a fire of sticks, and
beside it sat a ragged youth with long, yellow hair; all round lay sleeping forms which breathed heavily.

“Who are you?” said the Prince.

“I’m Elfinn, the pig-keeper,” said the ragged youth. “And who are you?”

“I’m Tiresome, the Prince,” said the other.

“And what are you doing out of your palace at this time of night?” asked the pig-keeper, severely.

“I’ve been hunting,” said the Prince.

The pig-keeper laughed. “Oh, it was you I saw, then? A good hunt, wasn’t it? My pigs and I were looking on.”

All the sleeping forms grunted and snored, and the Prince saw that they were pigs: he knew it by their manners.

“If you had known as much as I do,” Elfinn went on, “you might have saved your pack.”

“What do you mean?” said Tiresome.

“Why, the dragon,” said Elfinn. “You went out at the wrong time of day. The dragon should be hunted at
night.”

“No, thank you,” said the Prince, with a shudder. “A daylight hunt is quite good enough for me, you silly pig-keeper.”

“Oh, well,” said Elfinn, “do as you like about it—the dragon will come and hunt
you
tomorrow, as likely as not. I don’t care if he does, you silly Prince.”

“You’re very rude,” said Tiresome.

“Oh, no, only truthful,” said Elfinn.

“Well, tell me the truth, then. What is it that if I had known as much as you do about I shouldn’t have lost my hippopotamuses?”

“You don’t speak very good English,” said Elfinn; “but, come, what will you give me if I tell you?”

“If you tell me what?” said the tiresome Prince.

“What you want to know.”

“I don’t want to know anything,” said Prince Tiresome.

“Then you’re more of a silly even than I thought,” said Elfinn. “Don’t you want to know how to settle the dragon before he settles you?”

“It might be as well,” the Prince admitted.

“Well, I haven’t much patience at any time,” said Elfinn, “and now I can assure you that there’s very little left. What will you give me if I tell you?”

“Half my kingdom,” said the Prince, “and my cousin’s hand in marriage.”

“Done,” said the pig-keeper; “here goes!
The dragon grows small at night!
He sleeps under the root of this tree. I use him to light my fire with.”

And, sure enough, there under the tree was the dragon on a nest of scorched moss, and he was about as long as your finger.

“How can I kill him?” asked the Prince.

“I don’t know that you
can
kill him,” said Elfinn; “but you can take him away if you’ve brought anything to put him in. That bottle of yours would do.”

So between them they managed, with bits of stick and by singeing their fingers a little, to poke and shove the dragon till they made it creep into the silver hunting-bottle, and then the Prince screwed on the top tight.

“Now we’ve got him,” said Elfinn, “let’s take him home and put Solomon’s seal on the mouth of the bottle, and then he’ll be safe enough. Come along—we’ll divide up the kingdom to-morrow, and then I shall have some money to buy fine clothes to go courting in.”

But when the wicked Prince made promises he did not make them to keep.

“Go on with you! What do you mean?” he said. “
I
found the dragon and I’ve imprisoned him. I never said a word about courtings or kingdoms. If you say I did, I shall cut your head off at once.” And he drew his sword.

“All right,” said Elfinn, shrugging his shoulders. “I’m better off than you are, anyhow.”

“What do you mean?” spluttered the Prince.

“Why, you’ve only got a kingdom (and a dragon), but I’ve got clean hands (and five-and-seventy fine black pigs).”

So Elfinn sat down again by his fire, and the Prince went home and told his Parliament how clever and brave he had been, and though he woke them up on purpose to tell them, they were not angry, but said:

“You are indeed brave and clever.” For they knew what happened to people with whom the Prince was not pleased.

Then the Prime Minister solemnly put Solomon’s seal on the mouth of the bottle, and the bottle was put in the treasury, which was the strongest building in the town, and was made of solid copper, with walls as thick as Waterloo Bridge.

The bottle was set down among the sacks of gold, and the junior secretary to the junior clerk of the last Lord of the Treasury was appointed to sit up all night with it, and see if anything happened. The junior secretary had never seen a dragon, and, what was more, he did not believe the Prince had ever seen a dragon either. The Prince had never been a really truthful boy, and it would have been just like him to bring home a bottle with nothing in it, and then to pretend that there was a dragon inside. So the junior secretary did not at all mind being left. They gave him the key, and when everyone in the town had gone back to bed he let in some of the junior secretaries from other Government departments, and they had a jolly game of hide-and-seek among the sacks of
gold, and played marbles with the diamonds and rubies and pearls in the big ivory chests.

They enjoyed themselves very much, but by-and-by the copper treasury began to get warmer and warmer, and suddenly the junior secretary cried out, “Look at the bottle!”

The bottle sealed with Solomon’s seal had swollen to three times its proper size, and seemed to be nearly red hot, and the air got warmer and warmer and the bottle bigger and bigger, till all the junior secretaries agreed that the place was too hot to hold them, and out they went, tumbling over each other in their haste, and just as the last got out and locked the door the bottle burst, and out came the dragon, very fiery, and swelling more and more every minute, and he began to eat the sacks of gold, and crunch up the pearls and diamonds and rubies, as you do “hundreds and thousands.”

By breakfast-time he had devoured the whole of the Prince’s treasures, and when the Prince came along the street at about eleven, he met the dragon coming out of the broken door of the treasury, with molten gold still dripping from his jaws. Then the Prince turned and ran for his life, and as he ran towards the dragon-proof tower the little white Princess saw him coming, and she ran down and unlocked the door and let him in, and slammed the dragon-proof door in the fiery face of the dragon, who sat down and whined outside, because he wanted the Prince very much indeed.

The junior secretary cried out, “Look at the bottle!”

The Princess took Prince Tiresome into the best room, and laid the cloth, and gave him cream and eggs and white grapes and honey and bread, with many other things, yellow and white and good to eat, and she served him just as kindly as she would have done if he had been anyone else instead of the bad Prince who had taken away her kingdom and kept it for himself—because she was a true Princess and had a heart of gold.

When he had eaten and drunk he begged the Princess to show him how to lock and unlock the door, and the nurse was asleep, so there was no one to tell the Princess not to, and she did.

“You turn the key like this,” she said, “and the door keeps shut. But turn it nine times round the wrong way, and the door flies open.”

And so it did. And the moment it opened the Prince pushed the white Princess out of her tower, just as he had pushed her out of her kingdom, and shut the door. For he wanted to have the tower all for himself. And there she was in the street, and on the other side of the way the dragon was sitting whining, but he did not try to eat her, because—though the old nurse did not know it—dragons cannot eat white Princesses with hearts of gold.