The Story of Owen (7 page)

“What happened?” I asked, because I could remember the Prime Minister saying pretty much the same thing during the last election, promising that dragon slayers would be more available to small towns. It had been enough to get him elected with a majority government to back him, despite his complete failure to carry through on any of his other campaign promises so far. Trondheim had simply gotten lucky, and we knew it. But the way Lottie spoke suggested that she could see an easy solution to the problem, albeit one that the government wasn't going to like.

“Factories happened,” Hannah said. “Cities became the centers of more than population. Carbon smoke started belching into the skies over Europe and Asia, and Africa and North America took to mining and drilling with a new intensity to support the demand.”

“And then the wars,” I said.

“And then the wars,” Lottie confirmed. “And between the wars, the rise of Fordism, which, in addition to ensuring that nearly everyone in North America could afford a car, set in motion a higher state of industrialization that promoted even more carbon emissions.”

“I'm not sure what that has to do with dragon slaying,” I said. “Well, aside from the fact that there are more dragons now than before the wars, and more cars.”

“But not more dragon slayers,” Hannah pointed out. “It's still a family business. No one ever becomes a dragon slayer without being born to it, even though the days of not being able to afford a sword and shield are mostly over.”

“And with men like Ford offering dragon slayers money, lots of money, to come and work specifically for them,” Lottie added, “small towns, and even some small cities that didn't have any wealthy industries, lost their dragon slayers. Governments responded quickly, for the most part, implementing mandatory military service for all dragon slayers. That's how we got through World War II. No one wanted to go into the field having lost their dragon slayers to corporations.”

“So the army had dragon slayers and the corporations had dragon slayers, but no one else did?” I said.

“Particularly after the Oil Watch Articles codified everything, putting the protection of world oil reserves at the forefront of dragon slaying.” Hannah said. “A dragon slayer went straight from school to the Oil Watch, took a tour abroad or served in Alberta, and then came home to a contract somewhere, or ended up in the Royal Canadian Mounted Dragon Slayers.”

“Which is what you did,” I said to Lottie. She nodded, and something occurred to me. “Are we paying you?” I asked. “Are we paying Aodhan, I mean?”

“No,” Lottie said. “You're not.”

I looked at Owen, and suddenly I was in the middle of an unfamiliar symphony.

“You want to encourage dragon slayers to come back to small towns and stay there,” I said, finally getting some sense of where the conversation was heading, even though I didn't understand my own part in it yet, like everyone else had been practicing for weeks, and I was sight-reading the sheet music. “Without a contract or being in the RCMD.”

“See, I told you,” Owen said, in the same tone he'd used when he pointed out that I had thought of Pearson.

“You did,” said Lottie, and I knew that she understood his doubts and fears, even if they hadn't talked about them yet. “And yes, that's what I would like to see happen. The cities can take care of themselves, but there has been a steady increase in rural dragon attacks, and concentrating dragon slayers in the cities, the way we have been, will only lead to disaster.”

I thought about the school board office, how it been under attack so often lately. I thought about Saltrock in general, and how much it needed the salt mines and the grain elevators. Our local economy depended on the oil-burning heavy tankers that came in and out of the harbor every day, belching carbon into the air. I had never given consideration to the politics of dragon slaying before. I felt like I'd suddenly discovered more pieces to a puzzle I had thought complete, and I wasn't sure what to do with them. What Lottie was talking about was huge, the biggest thing that had happened in dragon slaying since the Pearson Oil Watch was founded. And for some reason she needed me to make it work.

“So you're setting a precedent,” I said slowly. “And you're going to use Owen to set it too. But why do you need me?”

“Well, to begin with, Owen can't fail algebra,” Hannah said lightly. “That would set a dreadful example.”

“You want me to tutor him?” I asked.

“Yes,” Owen said. “I do. But it's more than that.”

“Just tell me,” I said, setting my cutlery down on my plate. It was time to catch up with the rest of the orchestra. I had never liked the feeling of being half a measure behind.

“Every dragon slayer used to have a bard,” Lottie said. “Someone who records the dragon slayer's actions. They did it two ways, actually, first to present the slayings to the public, but also in a more prosaic way, so that the dragon slayer could learn from his or her mistakes. But now it's all covered on the news or TSN like a sport. There's no soul, no personal attachment between dragon slayer and bard.”

“You want me to be Owen's,” I said.

“Times have changed,” Hannah said. “But we need more than press releases and idiots with smartphones who don't know when it's time to run away.”

“And you can write music,” Lottie said. “Like the old bards did, back before everyone could read. Dragon slayers don't have an oral history any more, just a million hits on Google. If you could make Owen popular in music, it would catch people's attention.”

“You've never even heard my music,” I said. “And I've never written music with lyrics.”

“Owen says you're good,” Lottie said. “That's enough for me.”

“Owen's never heard my music,” I pointed out. “He's just heard me play.”

“You don't have to decide now,” Hannah said. “Just think about it.”

I looked down at my plate, at the burnt crust of my garlic
bread. I thought about Aodhan, out driving around on his own in the middle of nowhere because his sister had a crazy idea. I thought of Owen, who seemed quite willing to toe the family line, rounding out the orchestra of Lottie's vision. I thought of Trondheim, and the rest of the county, which had only lost a dozen buildings and four people to dragon fire since the Thorskards had arrived in town.

“No,” I said. “No, I think I'll do it. I mean, I'll do it.”

I looked at Lottie when I said it, but I could see Owen sit up straighter out of the corner of my eye. Lottie smiled, and when I glanced at Hannah, I saw that she was smiling too. I wondered briefly if I should maybe have asked my parents before agreeing to become an accessory to dragon slaying, but then I decided that at least this might provide something interesting to discuss when the inevitable “What do you mean you're not sure about university?” talks began again.

“Great!” said Owen. “Of course, this means that now we have a pretty big problem to overcome.”

“What exactly?” I asked, trying to remember if there was some sort of government policy I should have taken into account before signing up to do this.

“I'm really bad at math,” he said, and started clearing the table.

Most postmodernists blame the decline of the draconobardic tradition on the sudden and soaring popularity of the Beatles. The Lads from Liverpool were exactly that: four guys with accents who sang about love and truth, and never once mentioned a dragon slayer. The world split around them. There were many who loved the simplicity of the music, the harmonies and the earnest quality of the lyrics. And there were many who were afraid of the example they were setting.

For the first time since Shakespeare, who had also ignored dragons for the most part and set his plays in bizarre alternate universes where dragons were imaginary creatures of significant rarity, the English-speaking world was confronted by a cultural phenomenon that was insanely popular and entirely bereft of danger. An entire generation of young people (my parents included, though both will deny it unless under threat or blackmail), threw themselves at the Beatles, much to the concern of their elders, who worried about the effect listening to the Beatles' music might incur.

And that was before you got to their hair.

The end result was, of course, the British Invasion, which saw other bands with varying musical styles become popular in North America, drowning out the screams of the traditionalists, who insisted that too much music and not enough dragon slaying could only result in long-term damage to social order. If only, was the common lament, Buddy Holly's airplane had not been beset by dragons while he and a few other bards and their dragon slayers were flying over Iowa. Then, just maybe, the American music scene would have been strong enough to stall the Brits.

As is often the case, the postmodernists were almost entirely incorrect.

The true decline of dracono-bardism was not the result of the Beatles or the Stones or the fact that Buddy Holly died a few years before anyone in North America heard of John Lennon. It was the not the fault of any one thing, though history is a sensational medium that tends to latch onto one idea and pretend it is responsible for everything. By the time the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964, the traditional relationship between a dragon slayer and his or her bard was already under significant strain.

“And if anyone ever argues that point with you,” Lottie said, “Ask them the name of Buddy Holly's dragon slayer.”

It took me more than fifteen minutes to find it on the Internet, and even then, no one seemed to be in agreement over how the dragon slayer's name was spelled.

Anyway, what really happened was that in 1897, Irish author Bram Stoker published a story that almost everyone knew but few people had ever actually read.
Dracula
and the various
sparkling and over-romanticized versions of it that followed, was written in the style of a bard even though Stoker himself had no connections to the dragon slaying world. The popularity of the book, coupled with the already infamous story of Vlad the Impaler, served to foment distrust between dragons slayers and the general public—and also resentment, as, for the first time, the bards started to operate separately from their subjects. The end result was an entirely new canon of dragon slayer stories where, instead of being the hero or heroine, the dragon slayer was relegated to being at best a creepy stalker, if not the outright villain.

There were a few exceptions. Canada managed to retain a portion of its traditional music, largely thanks to a statute that mandated 40 percent of everything on the radio had to be written by a Canadian or feature a dragon slayer. This allowed for the success of songs like “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which told the story of the attempted rescue-by-dragon-slayer of a tanker's crew after they were attacked in the middle of Lake Superior. Even though the tragedy resulted in the death of everyone involved, and Gordon Lightfoot, the composer of the song, was no more a bard than Stoker was, it still clung to the old heroic style.

The other exception was, of course, Lottie Thorskard. She had been the first dragon slayer in more than half a century to actively play up her ancestry (Norwegian) instead of focusing on the country of her birth. Her critics said that this could only damage the reputations of Canadian dragon slayers, but the effect was that, thanks her enormous success and fame, stories and songs based on Beowulf and his ilk grew popular again, though never quite eclipsing the popularity
of the Stoker knockoffs, largely because Americans had more buying power.

This was the landscape as I entered it: unbalanced and fraught with the potential to blow up in everyone's faces. There had already been some casualties. In 2003, the Dixie Chicks had been eviscerated for their stand against American dragon slaying policy, though they, like Lightfoot, were not actual bards. A few years later, Lady Gaga, also not a bard, had taken to the stage with elaborate shows and over-the-top music videos that incurred the wrath of pretty much everyone over the age of forty, until halfway through her second album when the subversively brilliant, pro-dragon slayer nature of her music became apparent. Still, I didn't exactly want to follow her model either. For starters, I can't walk in regular platform shoes, and Lady Gaga's shoes are typically closer to architectural features than they are to footwear.

The more I thought about it—and I thought about it rather a lot after I kind of impulsively accepted Lottie's offer—the more I realized that for more than a century, and probably longer, dragon slayers and bards hadn't been working together, and that was the problem. I still didn't know exactly how I could help Owen, or if I could write songs with lyrics, but I was starting to understand that
the idea
of teamwork was more important than anything I might write about us. It was the image of it, dragon slayer and bard, that we were going to restore. Sure, it would help if the actual content was good, but the fact that the songwriting was secondary went a long way toward bolstering my confidence.

Almost none of that helped me explain it to my parents.

Dinner at Owen's became a weekly event. Well, eventually. The next Thursday night, when I told them I was going out again on Friday, I was surprised when Mum put on her most serious “we need to talk about your prognosis” face.

“Siobhan,” she said. “Your father and I have talked, and we're not entirely comfortable with this decision.”

“To go to a friend's house for dinner?” I said. “You've been shoehorning me out of the house for years.”

“We meant to a dragon slayer's house for dinner,” Dad said.

I looked at him with confusion. “I'm pretty sure I'm not on the menu, dad.”

“Maybe not
their
menu,” Mum said. “But you've only been there once and you already volunteered to fight dragons with them. I just think we should talk about that.”