The Smallest Dragon

There weren't always dragons in the Valley.

Old Yarl said they came in the last years of the Goblin Wars. And since he was just about the only person left living that had survived the Goblin Wars, it was likely to be bordering on the truth. Or at least as closely approaching the borders of the truth as Old Yarl ever did. Old Yarl was more of a map maker than an actual explorer, not just of the truth but of everything else as well. As far as I knew, he had never left the valley and was not well positioned to know the intricacies of how and when the dragons had arrived. But he was the only one left who would talk about it, so he got to write his own version of history. There were other survivors. But they had a bleak, harrowed look and they couldn’t be drawn out about it; the dragons’ arrival or the brutal conditions that had precipitated it. The others didn’t live in the village. Nance lived in the hills a few miles out of town and there were rumours of a ranger still living further out. I remember seeing him when I was younger riding into town with a herd of cattle and a brace of deer. That was five years ago though, and for all we saw of him now, Old Nathan could be a ghost. He wasn’t young then and old people die. Everyone dies.

My father died in that war. Most of the adults of fighting age in the town perished, if not in the initial skirmishes, then from the ensuing famine and disease that became rife in the community after the goblins poisoned the waterways and killed the crops. Then the King’s Men came and the goblins retreated for a time. The remaining elderly townspeople built walls, dug wells, and under the direction of the King’s Engineers, significantly upgraded the defensive capabilities of the settlement. It was largely safe now if you didn’t go outside the walls at night and you didn’t venture too far from the town.

I think I was ten when I first saw a dragon in full flight. I was struck then, I am still struck by the magnificence of the experience. It was sunrise. I was carrying water from the well, looking over at the edge of the mountain when I caught a flash on the horizon. A shimmering, roiling, red and gold ribbon of glorious colour, reeling and undulating across the sky almost too fast for the eye to track. The orange rising sun rippling off her majestic scales like they were transparent fluid. And then the male, blue and silver, much larger, in pursuit of his quarry. A mating dance. It was so incongruent: they were so vivid against the florid orange sunrise, the one moment of true beauty in an otherwise bleak winter’s day, that I felt truly humbled and small. I still feel hot tears well up as I think of it. It was brand new to me then, and it was as though somehow I’d seen behind reality, that I had been blessed to catch a glimpse of the inner workings of a world that was so much grander than I was. I will remember that moment until the day I die.

“You great oaf!” barked Yarl from the cairn where he was perched enjoying a pipe filled with a pungent blend of imported tobacco. “Those rocks aren’t going to lift themselves! Get your head out of your ass and get to work!”

I sighed, picking up another huge rock, rolling it up on my knees and getting my chest under it so I could carry it to the wagon at the edge of the field. One of the downsides to having grown up in a rural valley where the adult population had been decimated by a goblin epidemic was that as soon as you physically could work, you were put to task doing back-breaking physical labour. I had been clearing rocks out of this particular field for the last week. I’d been clearing all the rocks out of all the fields for the last five years. There were plenty more to go. At sixteen, I was bigger than the other kids, broader and taller. You might think that would be an asset. But being big meant I was always picked for grunt work and food was still scarce. At mealtimes everybody was always not so subtly commenting on how much it took to feed me. I would much rather have been working with the King’s Engineers, working on the waterways like Althus. But these were the rocks that would ultimately pave the aqueduct, and Althus couldn’t lift them. Also, Althus was quick and charming. Good with people. Knew the right things to say to the King’s Men. I tended to get lost in my own thoughts a fair bit and when I did try to talk, it would come out wrong. I think people thought I was stupid. I know Yarl did because he would frequently ask me if I was stupid. When I didn’t immediately reply, he’d take it as a self-evident truth and seemingly congratulate himself on it. In any case, I was judged better at lifting things, fixing wagons and banging out nails for the village smith than put to work on any task that required brains or finesse.

“Couple more and we’re good to go, Yarl. Wagon’s nearly full. Where are the horses?”

Yarl grumbled. “King’s Men have the horses. You’ll have to pull it.”

I looked at him with eyes like pebbles.

“I can’t pull that to town, Yarl. If you’d let me know an hour ago when it was half full, there might have been a chance.”

Yarl looked irritated. He took a draw on his pipe and let out a loud, two-toned fart.

“If you want to eat tonight, you’ll pull the wagon into town. And you’ll keep your dern mouth shut.”

What Yarl did not seem to realise is that it was going to be physically impossible for me to overcome the inertia of the rock laden wagon. It was ridiculous to even try. But he’d cut off meals for less. Maybe he did know it wouldn’t work, and it amused him to see me fail.

Sighing, I tied a rope around my shoulders in a makeshift harness. Then I tied another rope around a big old sycamore tree. Yarl was too consumed in his pipe to realise my strategy: after tying myself to the wagon, I was going to try to pull on the rope attached to the tree to get the wagon to move.

It didn’t work exactly as I had anticipated. By which I mean the wagon didn’t move. It felt like it might move though, so I kept struggling, pulling hand over hand on the rope until I could feel the strain in every corded knot of muscle in my body. I thought I was going to be ripped apart. But I kept grasping the rope, relentlessly pulling. Then something surprising happened. I felt a little give, and then the teensiest bit of shock as the tree snapped in half and I was flung back against the wagon, which caused it to finally move somewhat, albeit in the totally wrong direction.

Holy shit. I knew I was strong. But I didn’t know I was that strong. This wasn’t a sapling. The tree was over a hundred years old. My parents had met underneath it and now I had ripped it in half. It was about five feet in diameter and about fifty feet high. Actually it was probably more like sixty feet high because the rope was only fifty feet long and now the tree was falling on me.