Awaria or The Dragon's Daughter

Awaria or The Dragon’s Granddaughter

by I. Sarno

There are monsters in the Slavic woods…and they are not the dragons.

The sky was disturbed. It began as a red coal glowing faintly, far off. Awaria and her son had been crouched on the rock shelf at the entrance to her cave, high above the blue of Morskie Oko. Despite their keenness, their raptor eyes could not identify the threat yet. Awaria’s mirrored scales reflected the moon in its orbit while her son’s own coal black coloring drank in the darkness of the night. The hesitant red glare in the sky was not the quick, pale white streak of shooting stars. The air between dragons and invader grew tense as the fiery glow brought an accompaniment of sounds. The metallic hum and of an engine, growing steadily until the airplane dwarfed the forest, filling the empty air above them. Young smoke tendrilled from Węgiel’s nostrils, and he took to the sky to meet the threat before his mother could snap, “No!”

He sailed towards the nose of the trespasser, his mother’s jaws had caught empty air. An instant later, Awaria desperately launched herself from the mountainside, but that instant stretched into a lifetime. Węgiel beat his black wings steadily, the ropey pectorals of his scaled chest easily raising him through the darkness. His mother bellowed a roar below him, quickly closing the distance between them. His lips curled back as the glow of fire crawled up his throat, exploding across the cockpit, the pressure smashing the glass inward, moving through the fuselage, igniting its payload, and collapsing the craft outward. All the same, the young dragon’s pupils dilated with the most splendid sight as the metal skin of the vessel sloughed off. In that blazing instant, both dragons had been blown away by the spectacle.

The villagers of a younger time had named the green dragon Awaria, for the chaos and malfunction she brought to their fledging settlements, and long before the men in black coats slaughtered their decedents. Awaria already had a name, given to her by her own mother but no human tongue that Awaria knew could approach a proper pronunciation. Awaria was charmed by the moniker anyway. She was with those memories when days later, she awoke submerged across a stream. Her head lay in a heap of rocks, nostrils barely above the waterline. Her horns and spikes were cracked where they had not been shorn away entirely by the blast, and their roots deep within her bones ached. She tried to stand, freeing the dammed waters that her broken body had caused. She floundered when her front legs could not bear her weight and smashed back into the stream, instinctively flapping her wings to right herself, but the membranes had been nearly vaporized. She failed again, smashing back down into the waters, stirring up silt and disparaging fishes that had only just now been freed when her bulk had moved. Awaria sank her back legs into the stone and muck of the river, kicking her dead weight up the opposite bank. The effort revealed more of her sooty scales, blackened by the explosion.

Dragons were notoriously fireproof, although enough concussive force was still deadly. An oily smell bloomed in her nostrils. Lifting her left arm to her face, she tested it by opening and closing the talons. They responded to her on a delay, but obeyed, unlike her savaged arm on which she lay. More kicks from her sturdy haunches sent her onto the embankment. Ordinarily, her mirrored scales reflected the greens, the russet, and the liminal white of the surrounding woods depending on the season. Now they were blackened with soot, cracked and bleeding in other spots. She knew that her chest plates would not heal symmetrically but would likely match the angle of her jaw as it drooped now to one side.

Węgiel was gone. The bits of black leathery membrane, charred bone, and bomber wreckage in the streambed was testament of his absence. Her beloved hatchling had always ranged further than she would have liked, and now he was flying where even she could not go. She had whelped countless hatchlings safely in the caves high above Morskie Oko. “My boy.” she whimpered finally, breathing a waterlogged sort of grief, and let sleep consume her.

---

Stark hunger awakened her again in her streambed. Awaria pushed herself up the hillside with her haunches, through the blasted trees and fallen trunks, pulling herself along with the claws of her good arm. The forest had a perpetual gray tone, a mix of munition exhaust and worse things the humans threw up into the atmosphere. The forest had been nearly green with the rare gold burst of larch. Her right arm would not bear weight at the shoulder, and she limped on without it. Though she could grasp with the false hands of her wings, the green membranes that allowed her flight would take long to heal. Awaria was grounded. She could not chase down a rabbit, let alone a red deer, so she lay in ambush, drifting off to sleep and occasionally waking to a brave deer or two that had come grazing too close. She snapped her jaws or spit fire at them, but she had not compensated for the new angle of her broken jaw, sending her precious flame off kilter. In her rage, she thrust herself after a doe, which easily skipped away. Panting and raking at the forest floor with her back legs, she detected a putrid smell on the air. Although preferring to hunt fresh meat, dragons were not above scavenging.

Limping with her shredded wings clamped close to her sides as though she were a lame destrier, she came to an artificial flatness. A huge pit had been dug into the brow of the hill and hastily filled in. With a strength she had not managed, she leapt onto the pit and sunk her back legs into the newly piled gravel. Using the giant muscles atop her thighs, she kicked back like a great scaled donkey falling into the ground. Her good arm brought up layers of corpses, each thinner than the last. An acrid smell rolled off of them. They were covered in white powder, caked with the moisture of their mass grave. Her stomach churned a warning. Poison.

Most of the bodies were naked, with snatches of clothing clinging to others. Lime had already eaten through the tender flesh of their cheeks and tips of noses. Hollow eyes and faces looked up at her, some indicating they contained other poisons with their grey or yellow skin, others with obvious bullet holes. Awaria craned her neck under the weight her hunger, looking from face to face, then silently moved away.

A soft mewling sound stopped her. It was barely audible, even to the broadest of her senses. Chancing the woodpile of corpses again, she tentatively drew her weakened talon over the ground, pulling away limbs. The mewling grew although still faint and wretched. Awaria pulled back a talonful of corpses. Sheltered by a tent of her own mother’s arms was a smaller corpse with the same greyish skin. The lime had eaten away the toddler’s nose and cheeks but she had escaped the crush of bodies. Although featherweight now, the child was too thin and would have been hot to the touch. Dragons did not register heat as a sign of a fever. The child was too fragile to eat, reeking of poison, and too small to make a difference even if Awaria ate her. She did not cry as a healthy child should, even when exposed to the oxygen for which she was starved. The baby barely moved but her subdued sounds reminded Awaria of her own hatchlings while they still turned in their eggs. This child was not intended to live, thought Awaria, but my child was not intended to die. Before she had fully formed a course of action, she was gingerly coursing about the child with her massive jaws, gentle enough to pick up an eggshell. She retracted her tongue so she would not taste the lime the baby was powdered with. The baby lacked energy to squirm and hung limply between the dragon’s lips, from the very same mouth that had once savaged hands wielding scimitars.

Moving uneasily, Awaria rotated her neck as far as her anatomy would allow and deposited the baby between the pronounced scapulars of her back. The baby lolled like a doll against the spikes that ran down the dragon’s back. Everything about me now is asymmetrical, why not weight distribution? Awaria thought to herself. Although the child had been burning to the touch, she was freezing within. The dragon’s own natural heat seemed to reach her and the mewls grew fewer, which worried the dragon. Awaria moved off towards the river again where she dunked the baby, washing the lime and grave smell from her. The baby howled like a newborn then and the dragon considered it a good omen.

---

“I need a goat.” Awaria repeated to the stag she had cornered in the muck of the stream. His eyes rolled white as he wheeled about and face his pursuer, his velveteen rack in full bloom. “A goat?” She felt his confusion, “Not for me. Not to eat. I found a baby and it needs milk.” She clarified.

“A kid?” he tried to reason, “Why do you not just let nurse it yourself, Pani Smok?” he wheezed the high pitch trill which constituted deer laughter.

“No, a human baby. Their young.” She explained slowly, cognizant of how ludicrous it all was.

“Kurwa.” He whistled, at no one in particular, “Human? Why not return it to its people?”

“I do not know its people. Humans put it in the ground, along with its family, I suspect.”

“Mmmm,” ruminated the stag, “Humans have a tendency of doing that, more so as of late.” He plucked up a blade of bison grass from the embankment with his lips and considered, “It will die soon if it does not have milk, if it feeds even half as often as our own children.”

“Hence my dire need of a goat. For a wet nurse.”

“The only goats, I suspect, based on your appetite, would be out of reach. You are in rough shape. It would take us time to get up to the peaks and we are not as sure footed as they are. We could send a bird but that also takes time.” The Stag paused for a moment, “Human children grow up to be hunters and dragon slayers, you know.” he peppered into the conversation.

“Maybe, maybe not. This is no Saint George.” Awaria said flatly.

“What do you propose then? It will have to eat something.”

Avaria considered her newfound conspirator before responding, “I swear not to harm you, your wives, and young. Your lineage shall be safe from me, and this tiny hunter, always, if it even makes it that far. It could be dead in the hollow of the tree where I left it, even now.”

“A bulky thing, having to detail your lineage to a hungry dragon every time it falls upon you.” Mused the stag, “But beneficial. Rivals are always cropping up, or were. You could smell my blood a mile away as it is. I’m sure you could distinguish a drop of it if need be.”

“It smells of the acorns you ate today, the cherries of last summer spidering through your fat, and the field you were sired in.” she described blackly, hunger returning to her most vividly.

“A deal then.” The stag struck his hoof into the mud, tossing his head back, “I shall fetch my wives.”

----

The baby did not want to latch at first. She eventually grew accustomed to the deer-wives and the dewy caresses of their wet noses, warm red fur, and glittering pits of dark eyes. In comparison, a dragon’s heat was the angular heat of an insulated furnace. But although she sucked greedily, she did not gain weight, totter, or try to imitate sounds. She was alive but not thriving.

One night, Awaria eyed her across the small fire she had built for her unexpected ward. They both lay on the moss-covered forest floor. The baby stared at the fire with jaundiced eyes. Awaria could not fly so her cave was out of reach for the nonce, she had found herself as a deer-herd. The deer-wives had laid down like fuzzy buns in concentric circles in the nearby grasses. The Stag and his herd kept close to Awaria nowadays. The child curled up with their own spotted young at times, but clambered onto Awaria whenever she was near. Her humor is off, Awaria reflected. The dragon considered the deer curiously, then raked her good talon against the wrist of her weaker arm. Blood oozed through the scales and she reached it out to the baby. The child surveyed it seriously, then tried a tentative lick. Awaria laughed to herself, making a hoarse exhale, If you survive this, Awaria said quietly, leaning her great golden eye down to the toddler, I will name you Jadwiga. A warrior’s name. In times of savage winters, the great Northeastern boar-mothers would eat their own young. Dragon mothers were not as melodramatic, Awaria had decided. Instead, dragons would allow their young to feed from their own blood. Female dragons were much larger than their same-aged male counterparts for the protection of the young. Awaria reasoned she had enough blood to contribute.

----

With her meals of deer milk augmented with Awaria’s own blood, whatever illness had followed baby Jadwiga from her grave had been burned away. She had finally gained weight and the scars on her face and extremities healed. Soon she was tottering and chasing after her deer-brothers. All traces of jaundice had left her and a healthy glow settled on her skin. She could already speak the language of deer and dragons. Jadwiga rode on Awaria’s broken horn like a monkey. The girl’s antics reminded Awaria of her own Węgiel. In an instant, the toddler chasing leaves was gone and the young black hatchling, big as a red deer, jumping up to snap at low hanging branches over a logging road was in her place.

Thin new white membranes had grown into Awaria’s wings. It would still take time for them to harden and color. Stag’s herd had spotted men in green coats, “They may be her people.” he said seriously, “I did not expect to see men here so soon.”

“We would not even know her people if we tried. Still, we should try.” Awaria reflected.

On a Spring day, Awaria stood shoulder to near-shoulder with Stag as they turned out Jadwiga to a small group of men in green coats and they melted further into the forest. Jadwiga trusted the dragon and deer with the implicit trust of the young, not remembering her own pain in the grave. As the naked little girl ran up to them with flowers, the men looked concerned. They leaned their long guns across their knees as they crouched down to talk to the girl. “I do not like this.” said Stag. “You do not like anything.” Awaria said simply, although her eyes remained glued to her ward. “What if we taught her the wrong language?” he added. “She’s a child. Why should that matter?” Stag grunted in the brush, “Man is wolf to man.” He said. In the distance the men rose up and were laughing, one began to pull his shotgun from his arm and backed away from the girl. His friends or brothers moved off with him. Jadwiga looked behind her at the tree line, the sudden look of a child lost at the market. One of the men began to point his gun at her feet. Before the sound of Stag’s alarmed grunt reached her ears, Awaria was up in the air again, crashing between the men and the girl. Shots were fired up haphazardly and over her armored shoulders, pinging off her scales. A breath of fire rolled across the men and the field was gone.

Epilogue:

Years pass, as they must. Sunflowers grow in the forest field where the fire blossomed. On a clear fall day, a young girl with perfectly plaited twin braids appeared at the front door of the village schoolhouse and asks to be enrolled. She is tall, bright, and cheerful. Her name is Jadwiga and she lives with her mother, uncle, and his wives up on the mountain. The teacher pauses for a moment, “Wives?” Jadwiga apologized and corrects herself to say, “wife. Singular. I have many cousins and half-siblings too. They are always coming and going though, to visit.” The teacher smiles and says she understands. Many men died in the war and scattered families, but families have always found a way to stick together. When asked her last name, Jadwiga considered for a moment and responded, Smokowska. Although she lived the furthest from the schoolhouse, she is always early to school and did her sums perfectly. The boys made eyes at her but she did not notice. One day, Stasek tried to follow her home to snoop. He wanted to see what her sisters looked like but lost her in a stand of larch sheltered on one side by a towering cliff.