The Dragon Book (42 page)

“‘All right, thou hast me dart to tripes,’ he told the knight. ‘The realio trulio reason I cannot permit you into my cavernous cavern is that so caught, I must perforcemeat give up to you three wishes of immense valuable. For I am that rare and amnesial creature, a Magical Wishing Dragon. Indeed, it was in attempting to claw her way toward my presence and demand wishes from me that your princess gained the preponderosa of these pine-burns, for it was with such-like furniture of evergreenwood that I attempted pitifullaciously to block my door, and through which she cranched an smushed her way with fearsome strength. Her head was damaged when, after I told her I was fluttered out after long flight and too weary for wish-wafting, she yanked off her crown and tried to beat me indispensable with it. She was a pittance too rough, though—a girl whose strength belied her scrawnymous looks—and detached her headbone from its neckly couchment in the crown-detaching process, leading to this lamentable lifelessness.

“‘However,’ went on your great-grandpap, warming now to his self-sufficed subject, ‘although I resisted the wish-besieging princess for the honor of all my wormishly magical brethren, since you have caught me fairy and scary, Sir Libogran, larded me in my barren, as it were, I will grant the foremansioned troika of wishes to
you
. But the magic necessitudes that after you tell them unto my ear you must go quickly askance as far as possible—another country would be idealistic—and trouble me no more so that I can perforce the slow magics of their granting (which sometimes takes years betwixt wishing and true-coming).’

“Libogran stood a long time, thinking uffishly, then lastly said, ‘Let me make sure I have apprehended you carefully, worm. You state that you are a Magic Wishing Dragon, that it was her greed for this quality of yours which cost the unfortunate princess her life, and that I should tell you my three wishes and then leave, preferably to a distant land, so that you may grant them to me in the most efficacious manner.’

“‘Your astutity is matched only by the stately turn of your greave and the general handfulness of your fizzick, good sir knight,’ your great-grandpap eagerly responsed, seeing that perhaps he might escape puncturing at the hands of this remorseless rider after all. ‘Just bename those wishes, and I will make them factive, both pre-and posthaste.’

“Sir Libogran slowly shook his massive and broadly head. ‘Do you take me for a fool, creature?’

“‘Not a fool creature as sort,’ replinked your grandpap’s daddy, trying to maintain a chirrupful tone. ‘After all, you and your elk might be a lesser species than us
Draco Pulcher
, but still, as I would be the first to argue, a vally-hooed part of Clawed the Flyest’s great creation … ’

“‘Come here, dragon, and let me show you my wish.’

“Your great-grandpap hesitated. ‘Come there?’ he asked. ‘Whyso?’

“‘Because I cannot explain as well as I can demonstrate, sirrah,’ quoth the bulky and clanksome human.

“So your forebeast slithered out from the cavernous depths, anxious to end his night out by sending this knight out. He was also hoping that, though disappointed of his foreplanned feast, he might at least locate some princessly bits fallen off in the cave, which could be served chippingly on toast. But momentarily after your great-grandpap emerged into the light-some day, the cruel Sir Libogran snatched your ancestor’s throat in a gauntleted ham and cut off that poor, innosensitive dragon’s head with his vicious blade.

“Snick! No snack.

“This treacherness done, the knight gathered up the princess’s tree-tattered torso and emancive pate, then went galumphing back toward the castle of her mourning, soon-to-mourn-more Mammy and Daddums.”

“BUT how can that be, Mam?” shrimped wee Alexandrax. “He killed Great-Grandpap? Then how did Grandpap, Pap, and Yours Contumely come to be?”

“Fie, fie, shut that o-shaped fishmouth, my breamish boy. Did I say aught about killing? He did not kill your great-grandpap, he cut off his head. Do you not dismember that your great-grandcestor was dragon of the two-headed vermiety?

“As it happened, one of his heads had been feeling poorly, and he had kept it tucked severely under one wing all that day and aftermoon so it could recupertate. Thus, Libogran the Undeflectable was not aware of the existence of this auxiliary knob, which he would doubtless of otherwise liberated from its neckbones along with the other. As it was, the sickened head soon recovered and was good as new. (With time the severed one also grew back, although it was ever after small and prone to foolish smiles and the uttering of platitudinous speech—phrases like, ‘I’m sure everything will work off in the end’ and ‘It is honorous just to be nominated,’ and such-like.)

“In times ahead—a phrase which was sorely painful to your great-great-pap during his invalidated reknobbing—your g-g would go back to his old, happy ways, horrorizing harrowers and slurping shepherds but never again letting himself even veer toward rooftopping virgins or in fact anything that bore the remotest rumor of the poisonous perfume of princessity. He became a pillar of his community, married your great-grandmammy in a famously fabulous ceremony—just catering the event purged three surrounding counties of their peasantly population—and lived a long and harpy life.”

“But Mam, Mam, what about that stark and wormy Sir Libogran, that … dragocidal maniac? Did he really live hoppishly ever after as well, unhaunted by his bloodful crime?”

“In those days, there was no justice for our kind except what we made ourselves, my serpentine son. No court or king would ever have victed him.”

“So he died unpunwiched?”

“Not exactly. One day your great-grandpap was on his way back from courting your grandest-greatmam-to-be, and happened to realize by the banners on its battlements that he was passing over Libogran’s castle, so he stooped to the rooftop and squatted on the chimbley pot, warming his hindermost for a moment (a fire was burning in the hearth down below and it was most pleasantly blazeful) before voiding himself down the chimbley hole into the great fireplace.”

“He couped the flue!”

“He did, my boy, he did. The whole of Libogran’s household came staggering out into the cold night waving and weeping and coughing out the stinking smoke as your grand’s grandpap flew chortling away into the night, unseen. Libogran’s castle had to be emptied and aired for weeks during the most freezingly worstful weather of the year, and on this account the knight spent the rest of his life at war with the castle pigeons, on whom he blamed your great-grandpap’s secret chimbley-discharge—he thought the birds had united for a concerted, guanotated attempt on his life. Thus, stalking a dove across the roof with his bird-net and boarspear a few years later, Sir Libogran slipped and fell to his death in the castle garden, spiking himself on his own great sticker and dangling thereby for several days, mistaked by his kin and servants as a new scarecrow.”

“Halloo and hooray, Mam! Was he the last of the dragon-hunters, then? Was him skewerting on his own sharpitude the reason we no longer fear them?”

“No, dearest honey-sonny, we no longer fear them because
they
no longer see
us.
During the hunders of yearses since your greatest-grandpap’s day, a plague called Civilization came over them, a diseaseful misery that blinded them to half the creatures of the world and dumbfounded their memories of much that is true and ancient. Let me tell you a dreadsome secret.” She leaned close to whisper in his tender earhole. “Even when we snatch a plump merchant or a lean yet flavorful spinster from their midst these days, the humans never know that one of us dragons has doomfully done for the disappeared. They blame it instead on a monster they fear even more.”

“What is that, Mam?” Alexandrax whimpspered. “It fears me to hear, but I want to know. What do they think slaughters them? An odious ogre? A man-munching manticore?”

“Some even more frightfulling creature. No dragon has ever seen it, but they call it … Statistics.”

“Clawed Hitself save us from such a horridly horror!” squeeped the small one in fright.

“It is only a man-fancy, like all the rest of their nonned sense,” murmed his mam. “Empty as the armor of a cracked and slurped knight—so fear it not. Now, my tale is coiled, so sleepish for you, my tender-winged bundle.”

“I will,” he said, curling up like a sleepy hoop, most yawnful. “I s’pose no knights is good nights, huh, Mam?”

“Examply, my brooded boy. Fear not clanking men nor else. Sleep. All is safe, and I am watching all over you.”

And indeed, as she gazed yellow-eyed and loving on her eggling, the cave soon grew fulfilled with the thumberous rundle of wormsnore.

Although he writes other kinds of science fiction as well, and even the occasional fantasy, Harry Turtledove has become one of the most prominent writers of alternate history stories in the business today, and is probably the most popular and influential writer to work that territory since L. Sprague de Camp; in fact, most of the current popularity of that particular subgenre can be attributed to Turtledove’s own hot-ticket bestseller status.

Turtledove has published alternate history novels such as
The Guns of the South,
dealing with a time line in which the American Civil War turns out
very
differently, thanks to time-traveling gunrunners; the bestselling Worldwar series, in which the course of World War II is altered by attacking aliens; the Basil Argyros series, detailing the adventures of a “magistrianoi” in an alternate Byzantine Empire (collected in the book
Agent of Byzantium);
the Sim series, which takes place in an alternate world in which European explorers find North America inhabited by hominids instead of Indians (collected in the book
A Different Flesh);
a look at a world where the Revolutionary War
didn’t
happen, written with actor Richard Dreyfuss,
The Two Georges;
and many other intriguing alternate history scenarios. Turtledove is also the author of two multivolume alternate history
fantasy
series, the multivolume Videssos cycle and the Krispos sequence. His other books include the novels
Wereblood, Werenight, Earthgrip, Noninterference, A World of Difference, Gunpowder Empire, American Empire: The Victorious Opposition, Jaws of Darkness,
and
Ruled Britannia;
the collections
Kaleidoscope
and
Down in the Bottomlands (and Other Places);
and, as editor,
The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century, The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century,
and, with Martin H. Greenberg, the Alternate Generals books—plus
many
others. His most recent books include the novels
The Man with the Iron Heart, After the Downfall, Give Me Back My Legions!,
and
Hitler’s War,
and the anthologies
The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century, Alternate Generals III,
and
The Enchanter Completed.
Coming up is
Liberating Atlantis.
He won a Hugo Award in 1994 for his story “Down in the Bottomlands.” A native Californian, Turtledove has a PhD in Byzantine history from UCLA and has published a scholarly translation of a ninth-century Byzantine chronicle. He lives in Canoga Park, California, with his wife and family.

Here he shows us that it’s possible to miss what’s right under your nose—worse, refuse even to
look …

Along with the rest of the wizards and the savants—and the guardsmen—from the Empire of Mussalmi, Kyosti stared south through a gap in the trees toward the mountains that marked the tropical continent’s backbone. Even down here, even in the lowlands’ sweaty summers, snow clung to the highest of those peaks. Steam—or was it smoke?—rose from the white-clad tops of a couple of crests not too far from each other. Kyosti shook his head. Those crests might not look too far apart from here, but many miles would separate them from each other.

In the old days, Mussalmian maps of those mountains had borne a warning inscription: HERE BE DRAGONS. Kyosti, something of a student of those days, had seen many such maps, some in the original, more reproduced by the law of similarity so the wider scholarly community could have access to them. The inscription never varied; that subjunctive never turned into an indicative.

But this was a new age. If there were dragons in these tropic mountains, Mussalmi wanted to know about it. And if there were none, the Empire wanted to know that, too. Even if this expedition found none, even if it showed there had never been any, bards would doubtless go on spinning tales about them. That was all right with Kyosti. Bards and tales of ancient days were one thing. The worries of marshals and statesmen were something else again.

Kyosti didn’t believe the explorers would find any dragons. He thought dragons were a figment of the bardic imagination—and of the imaginations of the tropical continent’s small, pale, skinny natives. Still, he recognized that he might be wrong. And even if he wasn’t, who could say what the expedition
would
discover, despite discovering no great fire-breathing worms?

One of the native guides pointed toward the distant mountains. “You for dragons looking there?” he asked, scratching under his loincloth. It was all he wore. Along with the strangely accented, ungrammatical Mussalmian he spoke, that made Kyosti figure that he was none too bright.

“Yes, we will look for dragons there, Sztojay,” the wizard answered. He might have been talking to an idiot child.

Sztojay didn’t get offended—or didn’t act offended, anyhow. The natives had learned that bad things happened to them if the imperials realized they were angry. The little man just said, “You to mountains going, you dragon there finding.”

“We’ll see,” Kyosti said indulgently. What did, what could, a jungle native know about the mountains?

Sztojay said something else. Kyosti didn’t really hear what it was. A native girl—woman—ambled by, bare breasts jiggling. The women here wore no more than their menfolk. With their atrocious climate, that made sense in a way. Still, Kyosti wasn’t the only Mussalmian whose eyes kept bugging out of his head. Far from it.

By imperial standards, the native women were easy lays. Someone had told Kyosti as much before he sailed south. Whoever it was—the wizard couldn’t remember now—he’d known what he was talking about. Kyosti smiled, remembering.

“Come on! Are we ready?” That was Baron Toivo, who was in charge of the expedition. He had a place at the Imperial Academy in Tampere, not far from the capital, and was connected to the Emperor’s family. Even without all that, he would have been a bad man to cross, as he was large and strong and short-tempered. Kyosti wasn’t astonished, then, when no one told him no. Toivo took off his broad-brimmed straw hat and waved it over his head. “Well, let’s go!” Ready or not, they went.

MUSSALMI ruled all the way down to the foothills of the mountains. That didn’t mean that imperials were seen in the jungle very often. Most of the Mussalmians who did go there had either started with nothing and were hoping to come home with something or had made a hash of something and effectively become nothing themselves.

Bearers from one tribe or clan or petty chiefdom handed the expedition and its chattels on to the next one farther south. A few coppers, some glass beads, a petty spell or two: such things sufficed as payment. Sufficed? Here on the tropical continent, they might as well have been riches. The natives thought they were.

Kyosti needed a spell from the healer, to cure a painful and embarrassing malady he’d come down with a few days after sleeping with one of those scantily clad native women. Not all southern diseases yielded to charms the imperials had developed, but this one did. He breathed a sigh of relief.

The farther south the explorers went, the fewer the natives who spoke or understood Mussalmian. Another wizard, a cunning linguist called Sunila, devised a translation cantrip that worked … after a fashion. It worked better than pointing and gesturing, anyhow. Baron Toivo swore because it wasn’t perfect, but only halfheartedly, so he couldn’t have been too unhappy.

“You need to watch out for the
tsaldaris
tonight,” one of this latest group of natives said. The cantrip didn’t translate the word the Mussalmians really needed.

Patiently, Kyosti said, “Tell me what the, uh,
tsaldaris
”—he knew he made a hash of the foreign word—“is like. Tell me what it does.”

The native was only too happy to oblige. He went into gory detail, in fact. Before long, Kyosti got the idea: the
tsaldaris
was some kind of vampire. That led to a good deal of talk among the Mussalmians, talk for which they didn’t use Sunila’s translating cantrip. At least half of them thought that the little blond man in the loincloth was either trying to scare them away, or, at best, passing on his own superstitions. Up in the Empire, vampires were as legendary—skeptics would have said, as mythical—as dragons.

Those with a taste for arcane lore dredged from their memories things that might stop a vampire: roses, garlic, sunlight. The native who’d warned them agreed about the last one. Of roses he knew nothing. The tropical continent had flowers that blazed in every color of the rainbow, but none so ordinary as roses. He didn’t know about garlic, either. His folks had other spices. One of the cooks let him smell some. By the horrible face he made, he preferred vampires.

But the Mussalmians didn’t. Several of them rubbed themselves with powdered garlic before getting into their bedrolls and under their mosquito nets. Kyosti was one of those who abstained. He wasn’t sure there were such things as vampires. Even if there were, he doubted whether a northern spice would deter a tropical bloodsucker that had never been exposed to it.

Sunrise pried his eyes open the next morning. He’d come through unscathed. So had the native bearers. So had his countrymen who’d used the powdered garlic. So had his countrymen who hadn’t—except for a map-maker named Relander, who had two punctures on his throat and a look of eerily calm satisfaction on his face. He was the most contented-looking corpse Kyosti had ever seen.

Maybe that was because he still lay in shadow. When the sun finally struck him, his features screwed up and his skin started to shrivel. That should have been impossible. Watching it happen, fighting not to retch, Kyosti saw for himself that it wasn’t. Relander might be a corpse, but he wasn’t quite dead.

To make sure he got that way and stayed that way, the Mussalmians pounded a stake through his heart. The cook put a garlic clove under his tongue. They left him out in the fierce southern sun. His body mortified with unnatural—supernatural?—speed. “Gods grant him peace,” Baron Toivo said.

“So may it be,” the other Mussalmians chorused.

The natives watched what they did with the luckless Relander and what happened to his mortal remains. Kyosti couldn’t read the blonds’ expressions. The man who’d warned the explorers about the
tsaldaris
said something to his friend in his own language. Sunila’s cantrip wasn’t working, but Kyosti didn’t think he needed it to understand what the scrawny little fellow was saying. If it wasn’t
I told them so
, the Mussalmian wizard would have been astonished.

Everyone, natives and explorers from the north alike, seemed delighted to leave the campground where Relander had found his end. “It could be that the vampire will not pursue us, and that we will meet no more of the foul creatures,” Baron Toivo said hopefully.

Hope was one thing. Informed hope was something else again—something better, as far as Kyosti was concerned. With Sunila’s help, he translated the baron’s comment for one of the bearers.

“It could be, yes,” the man replied, his voice grave. “But the
tsaldaris
will have seen that you strangers make easy prey. Why would it
not
come after you to feed again, eh?”

Mussalmians commonly reckoned the natives of the tropical continent flighty and foolish. As far as Kyosti could see, though, this nearly naked bearer reasoned like a schoolmaster. The fellow might work for coppers and trinkets, but he was nobody’s fool.

Tramping south toward the mountains that might or might not harbor dragons, Kyosti kept looking back over his shoulder. The vampire wouldn’t, couldn’t, travel by daylight, but even so … He felt better after they forded a stream. Running water was also supposed to balk such creatures, wasn’t it?