The Dragon Book (41 page)

That both dismayed and encouraged him. He was aware now that the emotional pitfalls he had been skirting during his quest arose from feelings of love after all, not the absence of it. He had refused to reveal his desire to Zilant because he was afraid of what it meant. Fear, reluctance, uncertainty, dread—they were all part of the experience, along with joy, wonder, surprise, and delight. He would need to get used to all of them now he was free to pursue an uncertain conclusion.

Pukje was indeed a dangerous dragon, but he knew better than Ros did who his master was, ultimately. There was no use railing against the people he had chosen to play important roles in his life, not when he himself had invited them in. It did them a disservice to imagine lies and treachery at every turn, just because he nursed doubts he barely acknowledged to himself.

Ros looked up at the crabblers.
You cannot turn back now,
he had heard the monstrous denizens of the Divide telling him yesterday.
Take it how you will.
He had done exactly that, and very nearly tangled himself in a net from which he couldn’t escape—because it wasn’t
escape
he wanted at all, in the end.

We are closer than ever,
Adi had said in her letter.

The mouth parts of one of the crabblers clattered the same brief message as before.

“We know you, Roslin of Geheb.”

“Better than I do myself, it seems,” he clacked back.

“All right, now, go,” Pukje told him in an irritated voice. “Live. Be wise. Stay out of trouble.”

“I will,” Ros said. “If you’re sure?”

“I am. You know your road now.”

Pukje’s eyes closed, and he returned to looking more like a stone than any living thing.

Ros removed the pendant from around his neck. Placing it on the sand next to the wounded dragon’s beak, he said, “Thank you, master. I believe I do.”

Stooping to pick up his pack from the wreckage of the strand beast, Ros walked to the base of the cliff and began the long climb northward.

Here’s a sly and playful take on what history might look like if it wasn’t written by the
winners …

Tad Williams became an international bestselling author with his very first novel,
Tailchaser’s Song,
and the high quality of his output and the devotion of his readers have kept him on the top of the charts ever since as a
New York Times
and
London Sunday Times
bestseller. His other novels include
The Dragonbone Chair, Stone of Farewell, To Green Angel Tower,
the Otherland books
—City of Golden Shadow, River of Blue Fire, Mountain of Black Glass, Sea of Silver Light—
as well as
The War of the Flowers
and
Shadowmarch.
His most recent books are a collection,
Rite: Short Work,
and a novel,
Shadowplay,
the second in the Shadowmarch series. He lives with his family in the San Francisco area.

“AM! Mam!” squeed Alexandrax from the damps of his straw-stooned nesty. “Us can’t sleep! Tail us a tell of Ye Elder Days!”

“Child, stop that howlering or you’ll be the deaf of me,” scowled his scaly forebearer. “Count sheeps and go to sleep!”

“Been counting shepherds instead, have us,” her eggling rejoined. “But too too toothsome they each look. Us are hungry, Mam.”

“Hungry? Told you not to swallow that farm tot so swift. A soiled and feisity little thing it was, but would you stop to chew carefulish? Oh, no, no. You’re not hungry, child, you’ve simpledy gobbled too fast and dazzled your eatpipes. Be grateful that you’ve only got one head to sleepify, unbelike some of your knobful ancestors, and go back and shove yourself snorewise.”

“But us
can’t
sleep, Mam. Us feels all grizzled in the gut and wiggly in the wings. Preach us some storying, pleases—something sightful but sleepable. Back from the days when there were long, dark knights!”

“Knights, knights—you’ll scare yourself sleepless with such! No knights there are anymore—just wicked little winglings who will not wooze when they should.”

“Just one short storying, Mam! Tale us somewhat of Great-Grandpap, the one that were named Alexandrax, just like us! He were alive in the bad old days of bad old knights.”

“Yes, that he was, but far too sensible and caveproud to go truckling with such clanking mostrositors—although, hist, my dragonlet, my eggling, it’s true there
was
one time …”

“Tell! Tell!”

His mam sighed a sparking sigh. “Right, then, but curl yourself tight and orouborate that tale, my lad—that’ll keep you quelled and quiet whilst I storify.

“Well, as often I’ve told with pride, your great-grandpap were known far-flown and wide-spanned for his good sense. Not for him the errors of others, especkledy not the promiscuous plucking of princesses, since your great-grandy reckoned full well how likely that was to draw some clumbering, lanking knight in a shiny suit with a fist filled of sharp steel wormsbane.

“Oh, those were frightsome days, with knights lurking beneath every scone and round every bent, ready to spring out and spear some mother’s son for scarce no cause at all! So did your wisdominical great-grandpap confine himself to plowhards and peasant girls and the plumpcasional parish priest tumbled down drunk in the churchyard of a Sunday evening, shagged out from ’cessive sermonizing. Princesses and such got noticed, do you see, but the primate proletariat were held cheap in those days—a dozen or so could be harvested in one area before a dragon had to wing on to pastors new. And your great-grandpap, he knew that. Made no mistakes, did he—could tell an overdressed merchant missus from a true damager duchess even by the shallowest starlight, plucked the former but shunned the latter every time. Still, like all of us he wondered what it was that made a human princess so very tasty and ’tractive. Why did they need to be so punishingly, paladinishly protected? Was it the creaminess of their savor or the crispiness of their crunch? Perhaps they bore the ‘bookwet,’ as those fancy French wyverns has it, of flowery flavors to which no peat-smoked peasant could ever respire? Or were it something entire different, he pondered, inexplicable except by the truthiest dint of personal mastication?

“Still, even in these moments of weakness your grandpap’s pap knew that he were happily protected from his own greeding nature by the scarcity of princessly portions, owing to their all being firmly pantried in castles and other stony such. He was free to specklate, because foolish, droolish chance would never come to a cautious fellow like him.

“Ah, but he should have quashed all that quandering, my little lizarding, ’stead of letting it simmer in his brain-boiler, because there came a day when Luck and Lust met and bred and brooded a litter named Lamentable.

“That is to say, your pap’s grandpap stumbled on an unsupervised princess.

“This royal hairless was a bony and brainless thing, it goes without saying, and overfond of her clear complexion, which was her downfalling (although the actual was more of an uplifting, as you’ll see). It was her witless wont at night to sneak out of her bed betimes and wiggle her skinny shanks out the window, then ascend to the roof of the castle to moonbathe, which this princess was convinced was the secret of smoothering skin. (Which it may well have been, but who in the name of Clawed Almighty wants smoothered skin? No wonder that humans have grown so scarce these days—they wanted wit.)

“In any case, on this particularly odd even she had just stretched herself out there in her nightgown to indulge this lunar tic when your great-grandpap happened to flap by overhead, on his way back from a failed attempt at tavernkeeper tartare in a nearby town. He took one look at this princess stretched out like the toothsomest treat on a butcher’s table and his better sense deskirted him. He swooped scoopishly down and snatched her up, then wung his way back toward his cavern home, already menurizing a stuffing of baker’s crumbs and coddle of toddler as side dish when the princess suddenfully managed to get a leg free and, in the midst of her struggling and unladylike cursing, kicked your great-grandpap directedly in the vent as hard as she could, causing him unhappiness (and almost unhemipenes). Yes, dragons had such things even way back then, foolish fledgling. No, your great-grandpap’s wasn’t pranged for permanent—where do you think your grandpap came from?

“In any case, so shocked and hemipained was he by this attack on his ventral sanctity that he dropped the foolish princess most sudden and vertical—one hundred sky-fathoms or more, into a grove of pine trees, which left her rather careworn. Also fairly conclusively dead.

“Still, even cold princess seemed toothsome to your great-grandpap, though, so he gathered her up and went on home to his cavern. He was lone and batchelorn in those days—your great-grandmammy still in his distinct future—so there was none to greet him there and none to share with, which was how he liked it, selfish old mizard that he was even in those dewy-clawed days. He had just settled in, ’ceedingly slobberful at the teeth and tongue and about to have his first princesstual bite ever, when your grandpap’s pap heard a most fearsomeful clatternacious clanking and baying outside his door. Then someone called the following in a rumbling voice that made your g-g’s already bruised ventrality try to shrink up further into his interior.

“‘Ho, vile beast! Stealer of maiden princesses, despoiler of virgins, curse of the kingdom—come ye out! Come ye out and face Sir Libogran the Undeflectable!’

“It were a knight. It were a big one.

“Well, when he heard this hewing cry, your great-grandpap flished cold as a snowdrake’s bottom all over. See, even your cautious great-grandy had heard tell of this Libogran, a terrible, stark, and wormy knight—perhaps the greatest dragonsbane of his age and a dreadsome bore on top of it.

“‘Yes, it is I, Libogran,’ the knight bellows on while your g’s g got more and more trembful, ‘slayer of Alasalax the Iron-Scaled and bat-winged Beerbung, destroyer of the infamous Black Worm of Flimpsey Meadow, and scuttler of all the noisome plans of Fubarg the Flameful … ’

“On and on he went, declaiming such a drawed-out dracologue of death that your great-grandpap was pulled almost equal by impatience as terror. But what could he do to make it stop? A sudden idea crept upon him then, catching him quite by surprise. (He was a young dragon, after all, and unused to thinking, which in those days were held dangerous for the inexperienced.) He snicked quietly into the back of his cave and fetched the princess, who was a bit worse for wear but still respectable enough for a dead human, and took her to the front of the cavern, himself hidebound in shadows as he held her out in the light and dangled her puppetwise where the knight could see.

“‘Princess!’ cried Libogran. ‘Your father has sent me to save you from this irksome worm! Has he harmed you?’

“‘Oh, no!’ shrilled your great-grandpap in his most high-pitchful, princessly voice. ‘Not at all! This noble dragon has been naught but gentle-manifold, and I am come of my own freed will. I live here now, do you see? So you may go home without killing anything and tell my papa that I am as happy as a well-burrowed scale mite.’

“The knight, who had a face as broad and untroubled by subtle as a porky haunch, stared at her. ‘Are you truly certain you are well, Princess?’ quoth he. ‘Because you look a bit battered and dirtsome, as if you had perhaps fallen through several branches of several pine trees.’

“‘How nosy and nonsensical you are, Sir Silly Knight!’ piped your great-grandpap a bit nervous-like. ‘I was climbing in the tops of a few trees, yes, as I love to do. That is how I met my friend this courtinuous dragon—we were both birdnesting in the same tree, la and ha ha! And then he kindly unvited me to his home toward whence I incompulsedly came, and where I am so happily visiting …!’

“Things went on in this conversational vain for some little time as your great-grandpap labored to satisfy the questioning of the dreaded dragon-slayer. He might even have eventually empacted that bold knight’s withdrawal, except that in a moment of particularly violent puppeteering, your great-grandsire, having let invention get the best of him while describing the joyful plans of the putative princess, managed to dislodge her head.

“She had not been the most manageable marionette to begin with, and now your great-grandpap was particular difficulted trying to get her to pick up and reneck her lost knob with her own hands while still disguising his clawed handiwork at the back, controlling the action.

“‘Oops and girlish giggle!’ he cried in his best mock-princessable tones, scrabbling panicked after her rolling tiara-stand. ‘Silly me, I always said it would fall off if it weren’t attached to me, and now look at this, hopped right off its stem! Oh, la, I suppose I should be a bit more rigormortous about my grooming and attaching.’

“Sir Libogran the Undeflectable stared at what must clearful have been a somewhat extraordinate sight. ‘Highness,’ quoth he, ‘I cannot help feeling that someone here is not being entirely honest with me.’

“‘What?’ lied your great-grandpap most quickly and dragonfully. ‘Can a princess not lose her head in a minor way occasional without being held up left and right to odiumfoundment and remonstrance?’

“‘This, I see now,’ rumbled Sir Libogran in the tone of one who has been cut to his quink, ‘is not the living article I came to deliver at all, but rather an ex-princess in expressly poor condition. I shall enter immediately, exterminate the responsible worm, and remove the carcasework for respectful burial.’

“Your great-grandpap, realizing that this particular deceptivation had run its curse, dropped the bony remnants on the stony stoop and raised his voice in high-pitched and apparently remorsive and ruthful squizzling: ‘Oh, good sir knight, don’t harm us! It’s true, your princess is a wee bit dead, but through no fault of us! It was a terrible diseasement that termilated her, of which dragon caves are highlishly prone. She caught the sickness and was rendered lifeless and near decapitate by it within tragical moments. I attempted to convenience you otherwise only to prevent a fine felon like you from suckling at the same deadly treat.’

“After the knight had puddled out your grandsire’s sire’s words with his poor primate thinker, he said, ‘I do not believe there are diseases which render a princess headless and also cover her with sap and pine needles. It is my countersuggestion, dragon, that you thrashed her to death with an evergreen of some sort and now seek to confuse me with fear for my own person. But your downfall, dragon, is that even ’twere so, I cannot do less than march into the mouth of death to honor my quest and the memory of this poor pine-battered morsel. So, regardless of personal danger, I come forthwith to execute you, scaly sirrah. Prepare yourself to meet my blameless blade …’ And sewed on.

“
Clawed the Flyest,
thought your great-grandpap,
but he is deedly a noisome bore for true.
Still, he dubited not that Sir Libogran, for all his slathering self-regard, would quickly carry through on his executive intent. Thus, to protect his own beloved and familiar hide for a few moments langorous, your pap’s pap’s pap proceeded to confect another tongue-forker on the spot.