Dragon Rider (38 page)

DRAGON TALES

 

The word dragon comes from the Greek word
drakon,
meaning “enormous serpent.” Dragons have featured in stories around the world for about 7,000 years.

 

In Western cultures, dragons are nearly always seen as bad,
and the stories are of the heroes who destroy them:

 

♦ In an ancient Roman story, the sun god Apollo killed a dragon with just a bow and arrow.

♦ A hero called Beowulf killed a dangerous dragon, but then died himself from its poisonous breath.

♦ St. George battled with a dragon to rescue a young lady—and in doing so became the patron saint of England (even though he was originally a Roman soldier).

♦ The Sraheens Lough Monster is a legendary Irish dragon. It is described as “a little dinosaur with a swan neck that steals sheep and moves like a kangaroo.”

♦ In Scotland, many believe there are dragonlike creatures such as the Loch Ness monster.

♦ In Wales, the Red Dragon
(Y Ddraig Coch)
is the national emblem.

 

In Eastern cultures, the dragon is a symbol
of good luck and loved by all:

 

♦ Chinese dragons include the horned dragon, the winged dragon, the celestial dragon (which supports and protects the mansions of the gods), the spiritual dragon (which generates wind and rain for the benefit of humans), the dragon of hidden treasures (which guards hidden wealth), the coiling dragon (which lives in water), and the yellow dragon (which once emerged from water and presented the legendary Emperor Fu Shi with the elements of writing).

♦ In Japanese mythology there are nine dragons. The fire dragon is the most popular in stories, even though he’s a dragon with a very short temper. (Wonder if
he
would get along with Sorrel!)

♦ After his travels, Firedrake certainly knows which part of the world is best for him.

“I admit, I prefer Asian dragons, as they are forces of nature and not, like in Western myth, incarnations of evil. It sometimes seems to me that in our dragon stories we show how we look upon nature: as something to love and respect, or as something we want to rule over and destroy.” –
Cornelia Funke

 

Sorrel’s Story

 

S
orrel wasn’t born in the valley of the dragons. When she first set foot there she was already more than twenty-three winters old (which is the same as eight in human years). She and her five brothers and sisters were born in a cave with a view of the mountains. The valley lay beyond them, and sometimes, on starlit nights, Sorrel and the other little brownies sat in the cave waiting for one of the dragons to appear in the sky, expecting to see the jagged outline of a back suddenly covering the moon, or a crested tail sweeping across the stars.

Her mother often told her and her brothers and sisters about the dragons, for her grandmother had sung for a dragon all her brownie life, until her voice was too hoarse to sing anymore and it was time for her to curl up under one of the rain-soaked bushes that grew on the mountain slopes around the valley and sing a song to Death.

“Then the dragon wept for her,” Sorrel’s mother used to tell her when she was little. “He wept for two weeks, hot dragon tears, and you can still see the burning trails they left in the valley. Believe me, your grandmother always said, ‘There’s nothing more wonderful in the world than to be a dragon’s companion.’ But they don’t accept every brownie. They send most of them away again, because they want you to sing the unhappiness out of their hearts, and that’s no small task! You have to know how the rain sings, your song must be like the song of the wind, you must sing like the night and the stars. That’s what they want to hear. Dragons get sad terribly quickly. The world so soon casts shadows on their great hearts, and no one but us can drive those shadows away. Only us brownies.”

 

Sorrel’s brothers and sisters listened to their mother, wide-eyed. They all wanted to sing for the dragons when they grew up. Sorrel was the only one who wasn’t so sure.

After all, everyone said that dragons were gigantic—and like all large animals they were sure to be proud of it, quite apart from the fact that they could unintentionally squash or flatten something as small as a brownie at anytime, or perhaps spike you on those spines they had all over them. They even had horns, terrifyingly long horns. Not to mention all the teeth in their mighty mouths—even if her mother said that all they ate with them was moonlight. But who’d believe that?

And then there was their never-ending sadness—even the rain made them feel sad, and it rained often in the valley of the dragons. No, why waste her precious, enjoyable brownie life on a gigantic creature with a spiny crest instead of just having a good time, teasing a few fairies, chasing a couple of elves, and looking for tasty mushrooms?

 

Sorrel’s father felt just the same. He was not a dragon-singer, he preferred to go looking for mushrooms or stealing hens’ eggs from poultry yards, and sometimes he took Sorrel with him because she was the eldest. How she loved prowling ‘round in the moonlight outside a house where humans lived, tricking their dogs and stealing eggs from under their chickens’ feathery behinds! She was soon so good at it that she would slip away even without her father and go where smoke climbed to the dark sky from the chimneys of a human house.

Humans eat the most peculiar things. Brownies think most of them are totally inedible. But there was one farm, not far from the valley of the dragons, that was said to give off the smell of mushrooms for miles around, because the farmer’s wife there knew how to find and dry the most delicious varieties. “Forget it,” Sorrel’s father told her when she’d asked about that farm. “They have a dog there, a big black dog.” But one night, when Sorrel was itching all over under her fur because her brothers had pushed her into the stinging nettles and she badly needed a few mushrooms to comfort her—for if it is true that only a brownie’s song can drive away the sadness of dragons, it’s just as true that only a tasty mushroom will make a sad brownie feel better—well, that night Sorrel prowled around the mushroom-scented farm on quiet brownie feet, with her skin itching. “So what if there’s a dog?” she whispered to herself as she crawled under the fence. “Dogs are stupid, dead stupid, even more stupid than squirrels, and that’s saying something.”

 

Well, perhaps the big black dog who guarded the farmyard really was stupid, perhaps it was even more stupid than a squirrel (which really would be rather stupid), but it had a very, very good nose. And it wasn’t chained up. Oh no.

Sorrel hadn’t gone far when the huge black shadow emerged from the night. She’d never known that dogs could be so big. This wasn’t a dog, it was a calf! And how horrible its hot breath smelled!

The dog chased her—chased her through the night, chased her relentlessly through thorns and thistles, uphill and downhill. Sorrel swerved sideways, she sobbed as she ran, she cursed herself for her recklessness—and she heard the huge black dog panting and gasping behind her. “I’m sure it’s never tasted a nice juicy brownie before,” she told herself despairingly. “I’m sure such a delicious smell has never risen to its big black nose! It’s going to eat me, skin and bones and all, that’s what it’s going to do, and no one will ever know I ended up inside its stomach! What a dreadful fate! When I’m only just twenty-three winters old—and is that any age for a brownie? No! No, it’s no age at all!”

She sobbed and stammered like this as her stumbling feet ran on, and then …

Then, all of a sudden, there was the dragon.

 

The jagged crest on his back covered the moon, and his scales shone like silver in the moonlight. And he was big, oh goodness, he was enormous! He lowered his head with its terrifying horns and examined Sorrel as if he had never in his life seen a brownie girl before, then he raised it again and looked at the dog as it came bounding through the undergrowth, panting. The snarl that emerged from the dragon’s chest was not very loud, but it sounded extremely menacing, and the dog put its tail between its legs—uttered a howl, and didn’t even glance at Sorrel before racing away just as fast as it had been running after her.

 

As for the dragon, he looked at Sorrel again. Sorrel stood with her knees trembling, not sure whether to run away like the dog or simply die of fright on the spot. But when she looked into those golden dragon eyes— “There’s no finer sight!” Wasn’t that what her mother always said? “No finer sight!”— when Sorrel looked into those eyes she suddenly wanted nothing in the world more than to drive away the sadness she saw there.

“What’s your name?” asked the dragon, and she could hear from his voice that he was still young.

“Sorrel,” she said softly, so softly that the dragon lowered his head again to hear her better. “What’s yours?”

“Firedrake,” replied the dragon.

So that was how the two of them met: Sorrel and Firedrake. Sorrel rode into the valley of the dragons on Firedrake’s back, and from then on she sang him to sleep on many wet and rainy nights—and she discovered that what her mother had told her was true: There’s nothing more wonderful in the world for a brownie than to be a dragon’s companion.