The Dragon Book (46 page)

“The
pranys
stirs again,” Galvanauskas murmured after quiet returned. “One day, sure as sure, it will wake.”

If anything could have restored Kyosti’s courage, the native’s words were the tonic he needed. “That has to do with what I want to show you,” the Mussalmian said. “Come on.”

Galvanauskas let out another sigh. If this one wasn’t martyred, Kyosti had never heard one that was. “I have gone this far,” the native said, as if reminding himself. “I can go a little farther.”

“Oh, good,” Kyosti said. His sarcasm rolled off Galvanauskas like water off the oily feathers of a goose.

Kyosti stopped in front of the dragon. Though the creature wasn’t going anywhere, the net still wrapped it. None of the Mussalmians had shown the slightest interest in taking off the mesh. Kyosti’s preservation spell did almost too perfect a job. Hatred and ferocity still seemed to glitter in those golden eyes.

Pointing to the beast, Kyosti said, “
There
is a
pranys
.” To Sunila, he added, “Make sure your cantrip translates that most exactly.”

“The cantrip does … what it does,” Sunila said. Despite his improvements, he’d never been fully satisfied with it. Kyosti understood why not, too. But the other wizard went on, “Since you used the natives’ word for the thing, your meaning ought to come through.”

Galvanauskas looked at the dragon. At last, he seemed to realize that Kyosti was waiting for some kind of response. He came out with, “So you say,” which might have meant anything—or nothing.

“There is a
pranys
,” Kyosti repeated, louder this time. If you were going to get anything across to the tropical savages, you had to say it over and over, and shout yourself hoarse, too. “It is an animal. It is
only
an animal. Now it is a
dead
animal—well, an animal spelled into lifelessness. It is bigger and heavier than I am, but not much. You and your men have been carrying it—you know that. There are many more like it up there higher in the mountains. Even if they all thrashed in their sleep at once, they couldn’t make an earthquake. You know that, too.”

Galvanauskas looked at the dragon again. Then he looked at Kyosti. “So you say,” he said once more, and walked off without a backwards glance.

“Why, you—!” Kyosti started to storm after him.

Sunila set a restraining hand on the preservationist’s arm. “What’s the use?” he said. “You tried—and look what you got. There’s none so blind as the man who refuses to see.”

“Mrmm.” It was a rumble of discontent—of rage, really—down deep in Kyosti’s chest. But then he, too, sighed. “Well, when you’re right, you’re right. I just get so sick of the way savages stick to their savagery and superstition even when you’ve got the proof that it’s nonsense right in front of their ugly faces!”

“That’s what makes them savages,” Sunila said reasonably.

“I know. I know. When we get down onto the flatlands, we’ll trade them in for another bunch, and then for another and another one yet while we go back through the jungle,” Kyosti said.

“Vampires,” Sunila remarked.

“We’ll be ready for them this time around,” Kyosti said. “And then …” He stared north like a lover looking longingly toward his distant beloved. “And then …” The words were so wonderful, he said them again. “A ship will be waiting in the harbor. We’ll climb aboard. We’ll load our specimens into the hold. And we’ll sail back to civilization!”

“Civilization!” Sunila echoed. “I can hardly wait. A chance to write up what I’ve learned. A chance to publish. A chance to be a bit famous, if only for a little while. I wouldn’t mind that.”

“Neither would I. And I wouldn’t mind a hot bath and smooth spirits and aged cheese and soft sheets and a softer mattress. And I sure as demons wouldn’t mind seeing a woman who speaks my language!” Kyosti said.

Sunila nodded eagerly. “That all sounds bloody good!”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Kyosti agreed.

The ground shuddered under their feet once more. Kyosti tensed, but it was only an aftershock from the previous quake, over almost as soon as it began. Just for a moment, he looked back at the smoking mountain that now lay behind the explorers. The plume rising from it seemed a trifle thicker than it had before, but that was probably his own fancy.

He snorted. Galvanauskas and the other natives from his tribe were the ones who let their fancies run wild.
He
was a sensible, rational Mussalmian—and cursed glad of it, too. Better yet, he
was
on his way home. As soon as he’d got clear of it, that mountain could go ahead and blow its top. It would be the dragons’ worry, and the unicorns’, and the natives’, but none of his.
On my way home!
What a marvelous phrase that was!

EVER so slightly, the dragon stirred in its sleep. Ever so slightly, it snorted. It had been sleeping, sprawled out across the middle of the tropical continent and under the warm, comfortable sun, for an age and an age and an age. The last time it woke to breathe fire here and there and everywhere, great scaly beasts on two legs and four ruled the world (or thought they did, or would have thought they did had they thought at all). The shrew-like, mouselike longfathers of the creatures that would eventually style themselves Mussalmians and their close relatives, natives and savages, skulked in the scaly beasts’ enormous shadows. But when resistless fire smote the great scaly beasts, the smaller ones no longer had anything to stop them from growing greater themselves …

One day soon, the dragon would wake again. It could feel that, even in its dreams. And when it did … Oh, when it
did
…!

A dragon’s
soon
is not the same as a man’s. It might come in twenty thousand years, or even ten thousand. It might be twenty years, or even ten. But it might come the year after next, or even next year. It might be tomorrow. It might even be … tonight.

Adolescence is a time when we look within ourselves, trying to discover who we really are. Sometimes, though, it may be better not to know …

Raised in the village of Thaxted, in Essex, England, Diana Wynne Jones has been a compulsive storyteller for as long as she can remember, a habit that has made her the author of more than forty books and won her the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award given by the World Fantasy Convention. She’s perhaps best known for her Howl’s Castle series, consisting of
Howl’s Moving Castle
(recently made into an animated film by Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki),
Castle in the Air,
and her most recent book,
House of Many Ways.
She’s also well-known for the six-volume Chrestomanci series, which includes
Charmed Life, The Magicians of Caprona, Witch Week, The Lives of Christopher Chant, Conrad’s Fate,
and
The Pinhoe Egg
; the two-volume Magids series; the two-volume Derkholm series; and twenty-two stand-alone novels, including
Archer’s Goon, The Ogre Downstairs, Power of Three,
and
A Sudden Wild Magic
. Her many short stories have been collected in
Warlock at the Wheel and Other Stories, Stopping for a Spell, Minor Arcana, Believing Is Seeing: Seven Stories,
and
Unexpected Magic: Collected Stories.
Almost as well-known as her fiction is her hugely entertaining
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: The Essential Guide to Fantasy Travel,
and she has also written the nonfiction book
The Skiver’s Guide.
She now lives in Bristol, England, with her husband, a professor of English at Bristol University.

THIS is the story behind the recent swathe of destruction just south of London.

HIS name was Jonathan Patek, but his father, Paul, always called him JoBoy. Lydia, his mother, never called him that until his father was dead. Paul Patek, the offspring of an Englishwoman and an Asian father, was a tall, bulky, jovial man with a passion for cooking and eating curry, very much adhered to his Asian side, while working as a GP from his very English house in Surrey. Lydia, who worked as receptionist for Paul, preferred to be English. She picked at the curries, made a roast every Sunday, and ensured that JoBoy had the most English education possible.

When JoBoy thought of his father, he always thought also of the lovely, hot, throaty feel of swallowing a good curry.

Paul’s death was a mystery. He set off one afternoon to visit a bedridden patient. ‘And I told him.’ Lydia said, ‘that doctors don’t do home visits these days. It’s a waste of their valuable time. And he simply laughed.’

Two days later, Paul’s body was discovered at the bottom of a nearby quarry. His car had been driven into gorse bushes at the top of the quarry and half overturned. It seemed to be suicide. Except, why was Paul’s body as dry and emaciated as if he had starved to death? Nobody ever answered the question.

This reduction of his father to skin and bone troubled JoBoy horribly. He always thought of Paul as ‘full of juice,’ as he put it to himself. He could not understand it. There had not been time for Paul to starve.

Lydia made the best of things by selling the large house to a partnership of doctors, where she continued to work as receptionist, and moving into a smaller house nearby. JoBoy, while he finished his education, had to make do with a small glum room at the top of the new house, from which he could see one frail, dusty tree and a patch of sky interrupted by television aerials. He was not happy, but this did not stop him growing taller and wider than his father before he had finished school.

‘You’ll follow in your father’s footsteps, of course,’ Lydia said, and made arrangements. Consequently, JoBoy found himself a student doctor in the same teaching hospital as his father, complete with white coat and stethoscope, following a consultant round the wards. He accepted this. He thought that perhaps, in time, he might discover the reason for Paul’s sudden emaciation.

He had completed nearly a year of his training when he collapsed. It was a disease as mysterious as Paul’s death. They thought it was a variant of glandular fever. At all events, JoBoy was now a patient where he had been a student, and others studied him. He was there for six months, during which time he became weak as a kitten and nearly as emaciated as his father’s corpse.

‘I wish they’d let you come home!’ Lydia said whenever she visited him.

In the spring, they did let JoBoy go home, out of pure bafflement. Lydia had to help him climb the stairs to his room and help him down again in the mornings. JoBoy’s limbs creaked as he moved, and his muscles felt to him like slabs of jelly. Worst, to his mind, was the way his brain had become an inert, shallow thing, incapable of any kind of speculation. I must work on my brain, he thought helplessly.

Lydia never let JoBoy be alone for long. She came home at midday and made him curry for lunch every day. Since she had never attended to the way Paul made curry, hers was a weak yellow stuff, full of large squashy raisins. JoBoy ate it listlessly for a week or so. Then he rebelled.

‘I’ll get my own lunch,’ he said. ‘I prefer bread and cheese anyway.’

LYDIA was possibly relieved. ‘If you’re quite sure,’ she said. ‘I can go shopping again in the lunch hour then.’ She left the ingredients for curry carefully laid out on the kitchen table. JoBoy ignored them. He spent the days reading his father’s medical books, trying to revive his brain, and obediently ate the curry when Lydia cooked it in the evenings. He several times tried to ask his mother medical questions while she supported his staggering person upstairs at night, but she always said, ‘You can’t expect me to know anything about that, dear.’

JoBoy concluded that he would have to cure himself.

He lay on the sofa downstairs and wondered how this was done. The disease seemed to have permeated every cell of his body, and, as it made him so weak and tired, it followed that he first needed some way of injecting energy into his body. He looked weakly around for some high-octane source. The fireplace was empty, and he had no strength to light a fire. But he felt that fire was what he needed. Water too, he thought. Something elemental. But he had no strength. After a while, he tottered over to the patch of sun from the big window and lay down in it.

It worked. Sunlight did seem to infuse him in some way. After three days of lying in the sun, he had sufficient energy to remember that, among the schoolboy possessions randomly stashed in his bedroom, there was an old Bunsen burner. He staggered up there and searched. The burner turned up in a black plastic sack rammed into the wash-basin he never used. JoBoy looked from it to the taps. ‘Water,’ he said. ‘I have fire and water.’

He tottered back downstairs and attached the Bunsen burner to the unused inlet beside the fire. He lit it. Then he tottered to the kitchen and turned the cold tap on full. Then he collapsed on the sofa and tried to reconstruct himself.

It went slowly, so slowly that JoBoy sometimes despaired and used his precious energy in bursts of useless rage. And he had at all times not to become so immersed in his own cellular structure that Lydia would come home and find him with these energy sources burning and gushing. It would alarm her. She would think he was mad. She would worry about the gas bill and wasting water. So he set his alarm clock for the time of her return and hurried to turn off the tap and the burner before he heard her key in the door.

Slowly, oh slowly, for the rest of that year, he visualised each part of himself in turn and laboriously rebuilt it. At first, he had to do it cell by cell, and it all seemed endless. But by Christmas, he found that he could reconstruct larger parts of himself in one go. He redid his liver, which made him feel much better. But there were strange side effects. The main one was that he kept feeling as if the body he was reconstructing was separate, outside him somewhere. He imagined it as lying beside him in the air next to his sofa. The other side effect was stranger. He found that he could turn off the Bunsen burner and the kitchen tap without having to actually go and do it. Odd as this was, it saved JoBoy from having to get up before Lydia came home.

By this time, Lydia was saying, ‘You do seem better, but you’re still so pale. Why don’t you go out and get some fresh air?’

JoBoy groaned at first. But eventually, he redid his wobbly legs, wrapped himself in a coat, and crept down to the wood at the end of the road. There it smelt sharply of winter. The bare trees patterned the sky like the branching veins in his new-made eyeballs. He looked up and breathed deeply, sending clouds of breath into the branches. And the wood breathed back. JoBoy thought, This is an even better energy source than fire and water! He turned and crept home, almost invigorated. His legs—indeed, every bone in his body—were creaking in a strange new way. It felt as if they were lighter and more supple than before.

‘Must have gone to feed the new body,’ he murmured as he plodded up his mother’s front path. There was a strange feeling to his shoulder-blades, like cobwebs growing there. He went to the wood every day after that. It seemed to enlarge his sense of smell. He smelt keenly the softness of rain and even more keenly the sting of frost. When the first intense yellow celandines appeared at the roots of trees, he smelt those too. He was not aware that they
had
a smell before that.

By this time, the way to the wood was less of a journey and more like a stroll. And with every journey, the cobwebby feel at his shoulders grew stronger. One day, as he stood staring at a bush of catkins, dangling yellow-green and reminding him of a Chinese painting, he realised that his shoulders rattled. They felt constricted. Uncomfortable, he spread the wings out. They were big and webby and weak as yet, but he could no longer deceive himself. He was becoming something else.

‘I’d better redo my brain at once,’ he muttered as he walked home. ‘I need to make sense of this.’

He remade his brain the next day. Not that it helped. A confusion of notions and images thundered into his head and left him so entirely bewildered that he found he was rolling about on the floor.

Eventually, he managed to stand up and make his way to the bathroom, where he stripped all his clothes off and studied himself in the mirror. He saw a thin, spindly human body. Definitely human. And so thin that it reminded him forcibly of his father’s corpse. As he turned to pick up his clothes, he saw, sideways in the mirror, the large sketchy outline, dense and dark grey, of the thing that he was becoming. It had wings and a long, spiked face. It went on four legs. The spines of its head continued in a line down to the tip of its arrow-headed tail. Its eyes blazed at him, through and somehow beyond his human eyes.

JoBoy turned his great spiked head and breathed gently from his huge, fanged mouth on to the mirror. Steam—or was that smoke?—gushed out and made a rosy cloud on the glass. There was no question what he was.