Hagop the Gem Smuggler

Hagop the Gem Smuggler

There weren’t always dragons in the valley. But when the Turks ravaged the villages, expanding their reach into Armenia proper, the reptilian monsters followed. Opium was in demand again, and the Empire had big plans for poppy fields. But the irresistible draw, for reptile and hominid alike, was the garnet-like gem found in the hidden caves of the Caucasus mountains. Here, myriads of Rozilian mines had recently been unearthed. The swirl of light and dark red shades visible in each stone was hypnotizing. The gem’s beauty piqued the interest of the bored and drowsy sultanas, and its rarity captured the greedy heart of the smuggler. But for dragons, it was the smell: musky, sharp, rotting. The same stench that had kept the mines covered for centuries. But now the odor was released, and drew the creatures down from the north.

Hagop der Petrossian had royal blood. Not anything traceable, but it was there, in the “der” of his surname. He knew it and his family knew it. Not to mention his neighbors, jealous on every side. He was eighteen, and had avoided the last two tribal wars due a shortened left leg caused by polio of the bones as a child. No one thought he would make it, but a healer had treated him and predicted he would survive. Through some last-ditch efforts consisting of herbs and secret traditional remedies, his leg was saved, but the growth was stunted, and he had to wear a lift in his boot to minimize his limp. School had not been in session for a year and a half. The war had been hard, and the dragons’ return had not been anticipated. Many people had fled to nearby villages, away from the stench of the caverns and the creatures that frequented them. But Hagop’s family had stayed. One would think Hagop’s illness would decrease the envy of the neighbors, but not so. His blue-blood lineage, along with the simple fact of his existence in the face of so many Turkish raids, prompted many to sneer and taunt. “Hagop the Impaired”, they called him. But Hagop was not bothered by them. He knew what suffering was. Years on a sick-bed had hardened him to things that would hurt most people, and softened him to the suffering of others. There were many people who were sick in his village, and his family had money to help. They could buy medicine. But the most powerful medicine was something very expensive and rare, even for a der Petrossian.

Hagop had a secret about his leg-- he had been healed by Rozilian. It had antibiotic and immunity-boosting functions that worked more quickly than any medicinal plant known to the most accomplished healers. At high temperatures, the gemstone’s heart became viscous, sticky, and theoretically releasable. But no human tool could accomplish this. No knife or sword, no hammer or axe. Only the pierce of a dragon’s tooth, in the heat of a dragon’s flaming breath.

The healer had told him. Few had ever seen it done before. It was the stuff of myths. Rozilian was astronomically expensive. Hence the rampant smuggling. The healer had gotten hers from a sultana two years ago. She in turn had gotten it from an elderly courtesan, who’d obtained it from a gem smuggler through employment of dubitable womanly charms. If he had been in his right mind, he would never have let go his treasure for a fleeting dalliance with a faded beauty. But the underground market was flooded with these half-deranged, violent men.

The dragons stayed in the caves of the Caucasus range, for a twenty-mile span, leaving their dark holes only in search of water during the hot summers, when even the mountain springs were reduced to a trickle. The latest group of Turks had long since disappeared, their initial mining efforts thwarted by the arrival of the thunder of wild dragons. The only proof of the Ottoman presence was the missing sons and fathers who had died defending their villages from the swift invasion. And perhaps some scattered areas of poppies that sprouted up from abandoned bags of seed, silent witnesses to a plan gone awry. Some men had succumbed to death through direct battle with the great creatures, but most had died in tunnel collapses as the dragons forged their way through the rock to reach the deeper and larger gem reservoirs.

Since then, it was only the determined insanity of the smugglers that allowed any rozilion to find its way outside the dark recesses of those hills. And this was how the stories of the gem piercings became reborn in the village fire-talks. The successful smugglers, the lucky ones, lived to tell of how the dragons got drunk off the scent of the gem centers; how they lifted the gems delicately in their long, scaled muzzles, and raised their heads toward the black ceiling above them while inhaling deeply to prepare for the blast. And then, in a maneuver that was breathtaking for the smuggler to behold, the dragon tossed the gem straight up and simultaneously expelled a blue-hot laser beam of light from the tip of its tongue, enough to target the gemstone and suspend it in midair for several seconds. As the dragon reached the end of its fire-burst, the blue line disappeared and the gem dropped, right into the waiting jaws of the great beast, whose razor-sharp front left incisor pierced the hard outer shell of the gem, loosening its lifeblood onto the lips and carapace of the deadly monster, and filling it with heady delight.

It was at this point that the smuggler would run out with his large shallow metal bowl and hold it up under the dragon’s raised neck, hoping to catch a drop or two of the sludge as it dripped out of the mouth of the beast. It was a deadly game. How long to stay before the drugged dragon noticed the human and roused itself to make a move? The most any smuggler got was five, maybe six drops before the creature tried to alter the position of the stone and extract the last dregs. At this point, its eye would catch any nearby movement, because both the ecstasy and the languor caused by the ingestion of the gem heart were extremely short-lived.

It was this story that planted a seed in the recesses of Hagop’s mind. Limping Hagop, non-fighting Hagop, suffering Hagop, determined Hagop, impervious to the taunts of others, was growing a poppy field of hopes and dreams about the promises of a gemstone, in pursuit of which many lost their lives. It was the the third retelling of this story at the fire-talks which prompted Hagop der Petrossian, “Hagop the Impaired”, to dedicate his life to becoming “Hagop the Gem Smuggler”.