The Third Valley

“There weren’t always dragons in the Valley.”

“T’weren't always a valley,” Gerald replied. He smirked, looking to Langdon lying prone in the grass at his side for validation. Langdon’s grey eyes continued to survey the flat land below. He was in no mood to get philosophical. He raised an eyebrow and dipped his eyelids. Gerald accepted it as a concession. It was about as much of one as he could expect from Langdon.

A flake of the black hunting-party paint around Langdon's eyes fell away and flittered into the coarse hair of his beard. The paint had dried and cracked in the heat of several days, but it mostly held fast. It had only fallen from the wrinkles at the corner of his eyes, leaving them looking like crooked stalks of wheat before harvest against a night sky.

Eighteen days they had been trudging through the hills and valleys to arrive at a destination where it would’ve taken the crow less than half a day. The behemoth contraption they were burdened with slowed their progress to barely a crawl. They were down to seeds and berries. Enough to get them home after their job was done.

The flake of paint in Langdon’s beard dislodged and danced away in the wind as he worked his jaw. He cracked between his teeth the shell of one of the seeds they had gathered from the flowers that grew by the creek bed along the way. He spat the shell into the grass and chewed on the kernel that had developed inside.

“You sure this is the one?” Langdon asked, knowing damn well this was the one.

“Aye,” Gerald replied. He low-crawled a few inches forward for a better view. “There’s a coupla big openings. One there. One there.” Gerald pointed to the far southwest corner, then to the north wall, closer to their position. Two gaping black holes like the mines in which Langdon’s great-grandfather had worked and died yawned at them, deepening and darkening in the fading light. “Ration of whiskey says she comes out the far southwest.”

“I’ve got no ration.”

“Oh,” Gerald replied, knowing damn well Langdon had no ration. “That’s right. It was me lunch, whunnit?” His chuckle was full of gravel and phlegm, and it drove him into a fit of coughing.

“That thing ready?” Langdon asked before popping another seed into his mouth. His eyes remained fixed, his head nodded in the direction of his right shoulder. Gerald groaned as he shifted his considerable weight. He let out a sigh once he’d settled on his side, leaning on his elbow in the grass. Langdon turned his head just enough to cast a critical sideways look toward a winded Gerald.

Gerald scoffed. “It’s the skins!” He lifted one of the furs that he wore to shield himself against the cold. “Damned things be heavier than the animal we strip ‘em from. Warm though, ain’t they?”

Langdon spat out the shell and it flittered away in the wind.

Gerald looked at the machine standing behind them. It had taken a dozen horses to pull the monstrous thing across the hills. It took logs the size of Gerald—without the skins on—chopped down to wedges to chalk the wooden wheels. It stood as high as the trees and wide as some of the smaller rivers. Could have been higher, but Langdon had demanded the old man who engineered it keep it at a height that wouldn’t stand out among the tree line. The old man had told him they’d sacrifice some distance.

Then we’ll get closer, Langdon had told him as if the solution were an obvious one.

Gerald had been involved in every step of the manufacture. He knew the design and operation better than the features on his children’s faces. He could barely calculate the cost of a dozen and three-quarters bushels of grain, but he understood the mathematics of targeting as if it were second nature. He had spent months learning how to aim and fire it, adjusting for height and tension, distance and wind. Could put a spear within a barrel’s width of a slow-moving chicken at fifty meters, he liked to brag after a few drinks. No one knew better how to make it do what it was made to do.

It was made to protect his family. Langdon's family. Every family in the tribe.

It was made to kill dragons.

“Oh, she’s ready, alright,” Gerald said, nodding. He glanced out over the ridge. The sun had disappeared over the mountains to the west. A heaviness settled on his chest. The weight of what the night would bring.

Gerald wondered if Langdon felt it too.

“We’ll get ‘er, Lang.”

The dusk had grown heavy enough that stars were beginning to show. A few of the younger horses were growing restless, blowing and stomping. Langdon kept his eyes on the yawning of the cave in the southwest corner. Gerald could see him rubbing the leaves in which they lay between his fingers. He took a handful of the leaves near him and pulled them from the ground. He placed his fist against his nose and drew deeply. Lavender.

He closed his eyes and the heaviness melted away at the thought of Agatha. She always smelled of lavender. He imagined the sun reflecting off her golden hair, long and flowing in the wind.

A different weight set in.

He tossed the leaves to the ground and blew heavier than any of the horses had. He chided himself for allowing such thoughts to intrude.

He opened his mouth to speak but was cut off by the squeal of a mare. Gerald and Langdon turned in unison to look. Several horses were beginning to stutter back and forth, jangling the buckles on the leather straps that had lashed them to the slingshot and now anchored them to the trees.

The men met each other’s gaze.

Langdon said, “We need to--”

Both men ducked flat against the ground as a scream echoed across the valley, shriller and more splintering than any horse could make. Night had snuck over them. Each of them would have sworn the beast was hovering just overhead. Gerald winced. The horses grew frantic. The scream came again, piercing their ears. The horses roared in response, a terrifying sound in its own right. They began to kick and gnash at each other and pull against the lashes that held them. The mare that Gerald had ridden in on let out a deafening trumpet as she reared high on her hind legs, snapping the leather rains that were loosely looped around one of the slingshot’s beams. She pounded away like thunder, and the night was torn apart again by that ear-splitting shriek from below.

“Where is she?” Langdon demanded.

“Hard to tell," Gerald answered, crawling up next to him. “I’ve got the southwest corner dialed in. I’d bet every whiskey ration I got that that’s where she’ll be.”

“Mount up.”

The weight of the skins was no longer a problem as Gerald sprang to his feet and sprinted to the side of the ‘shot. Langdon reached the crank on the other side of the rig, the one he would use to turn it seven degrees to the left if she exited the mouth on the north wall. He’d have less than a second to turn thirty times to get the slingshot into position before she took flight. They’d discussed aiming toward the middle, hedging their bets. Gerald was certain she would come from the southwest, and Langdon trusted him with his life.

More importantly, he trusted Gerald with the life of his family.

The cry grew deeper now. Heavier. She had shaken off the haziness of sleep and her wits were about her. Her call now resembled the rumble that was the last sound children had heard before they were snatched away in the thing’s massive talons. The last sound so many had heard before the flames washed over them, leaving a trail of ash and charred dirt.

Doubt crept in, as it tends to do. What if he was wrong? Gerald was suddenly wishing they’d hedged. He couldn’t tell which hole the sounds were coming from. They echoed chaotically between the hills and mountains surrounding the valley. Dear God, what if there was a third entrance they hadn’t--

Gerald’s breath stuttered to a halt. They could hear the scraping of scales against the rock edges of the cave’s maw like a sword being dragged across a shield as she entered the valley floor. She looked as if she were wrapped in a cast-iron shell until she emerged completely. She stretched her legs, growing almost twice as high as the mouth of the cave. The cast-iron shell split down the middle, and wings greater than any flagship's main sail extended to twice the length of her body.

There she stood. They had found her. There in the southwest corner of the third valley.

Gerald slammed the lever forward and the rig rocked backward, bouncing off the chocks. There was a thick slicing sound, and the spear was loose. And then all was quiet. The horses were far gone by now, having snapped the lashes and stampeded into the tree line. Both men held their breath. Only the rustle of leaves and grass in the cool breeze remained.

The spear seemed to hang in the night sky. The only sign that it was even moving was how small it seemed to become as it grew farther and farther away. Moonlight glinted off the tempered steel as it began its descent. The dragon flapped her wings once, a lazy warm-up swing, seemingly still unaware that anything was amiss. She shook her massive head and blew hard through her nostrils. A tendril of smoke snaked out the left side of her nose. Another flap of the wings, this one stronger. One more, and as she raised them a fourth time, she bent her knees.

She was going to take flight.

The spear landed in her neck in front of her right shoulder, just as she’d extended her legs and swept downward with her powerful wings, forcing rocks and dust into the cave behind her. The spear’s momentum knocked her sideways. She rolled and clawed at her neck, but she couldn’t reach. Even if she could, the spear had gone straight through. She wouldn’t be able to remove the barbed head. She only succeeded in dragging her razor-sharp claws across her scaled cheek.

Her screams filled the night. She rolled onto her back, wings lashing out, claws digging. She tried to leap into the air and take flight. She came crashing down and the ground trembled enough that Langdon had to take hold of the crank to steady himself. Her hind feet kicked at the destroyed ground as she lay on

her side. She was making small sounds now. Whimpers. She suddenly seemed small from so far away in such a helpless position.

Then everything went still.

The wind died down. The leaves and grass settled. Neither man breathed.

It worked.

Gerald looked at Langdon. Langdon looked at him. Their breaths came in short, shallow bursts. A smile began to grow across Gerald’s face. Langdon began to laugh. Gerald too. Gerald stumbled off the rig, almost tumbling to the ground on shaky legs. Langdon stomped around the frame and the men met in front of the rig in an embrace.

Gerald whooped.

They backed away and grasped each other’s forearms in a salute to their success. They stepped to the crest of the hill. Standing tall. Surveying their victory. Imagining the elation that would meet them when they returned home and shared the news.

“I’ll be damned,” Gerald whispered. He nodded toward the southeast corner of the valley. His mare galloped out away from them into the open valley and slowed to a trot. She pawed at the ground and began to graze.

Gerald laughed from his belly.

Langdon tightened his grip on Gerald’s forearm. “You do be damned if you think I’m going to walk alongside your fat ass atop that mare.”

“Well, then,” Gerald said, taking a step back and feigning offense. “...shoot ya for it?”

The men grinned under their grisly beards and extended their arms, hands balled into fists.

“Ready?” Gerald asked.

Langdon’s nod was cut short by the roar from the mare. They turned to see her on her hind legs, trumpeting an alarm.

It was drowned out by a hellish squall.

Gerald winced and shielded his ears. Langdon’s arms hung heavy at his sides. His footsteps sank deeper into the dirt under this new weight as he approached the ridge. The mare was kicking up clods of dirt and dust in its retreat back the way it had come. Langdon could see that the poor girl wouldn’t make it.

Maybe none of them would make it.

He fell to his knees and watched as the second dragon postured for flight from the mouth of the northern wall.