There Weren't Always Dragons In The Valley

“There weren’t always Dragons in the valley,” my Grandfather said, but they had been there for all of my life and for all of my father’s life. No matter how much I might have wanted to believe him, I always reminded myself that on any given day, he couldn’t recall after he’d eaten his breakfast of corn mush if he had been corn mush, or split pea porridge, or a slice of bread so I paid him little mind. I only knew only that watching the sky for the Dragons had always been a part of my life.

Sometimes Grandfather’s thoughts could be as clear as water just pulled from the well. He could tell you about some moment in his life with so much detail you would find yourself wishing the goat shed would catch fire just so you could get away from him. Then there were other days when his thoughts were no more clear than the water in an ox wallow, and in the last year there seemed to be many, many more of those days. On those days, he would look about the room, examining the faces of his family and wonder why he had been abandoned in a room full of strangers who seemed to know him.

In the time before the Dragon found him on the road to town, our father had often told us that we should listen to Grandfather’s stories. He said that his father once had a memory like none other. “Listen for the gold,” Father would say; he could tell you how much old man Groont had paid for the silver and black horse on the third day of Lenk seventy-five years ago. He could recall that three silver crowns, two bronze bots, and four copper litts had changed hands to seal the deal. To be fair, on the days when Grandfather could remember the past, he could recount every word of the negotiation between Groont and the miller who finally agreed to the price, but only if the miller could still use the horse to haul grain over to Glossen one day per month. If the miller needed the horse more than that, he would have to pay two coppers for each day he needed the animal. It turned out to be a poor deal for the miller, who ended up needing the horse far more often than he’d expected and, in time, found that he had paid old Groont several times more to rent the horse than he had received in payment for it. That was Groont, and Grandfather would chuckle. No matter the deal, no matter how poorly he seemed to make out in the agreement, Groont always came out on top. Sadly both the horse and the miller were eaten by the Dragons on one of the trips to Glossen. Old Groont and his two boys crept out in the dead of night to retrieve the grain and made several trips into Glossen with the bags of grain on their backs. They sold it dearly, for as they told the good people of Glossen, there were Dragons about, and no one could be sure when there would be more grain available. Despite a sore back and an ankle he’d twisted in a rut on that road in the dark of night, Groont had made out well, very well. Just as he always did.

Grandfather remembered all of that, and I cannot tell you how many times he snared me with that story after I had brought him his evening tea. Sometimes I would try to get him to tell me how the Dragons came to live in the valley, but he would look at me as if I had grown two heads. He had no idea what I was talking about. He would say he knew nothing about any Dragons, but there was this about Grandfather; when he was telling stories, he could natter on for as long as it would have taken a dozen candles to burn down to pools of cold wax and remember every detail of a given course of stories that were like stones along the path he was traveling but have no idea of the stones on a path he had followed the day before or might follow a few days hence. Given a little patience, though, he would eventually come around to the story path that held the stone with the answer you were looking for. All that was needed was to wait for him to get to that particular story and then listen. My father had been right, there was gold to be found; if you were patient enough.

On an evening when I brought him his tea late, he grumbled about how he’d been waiting for me and wondered if he had become so unimportant in the family that he might never see another cup of tea. Then he looked up, then looked closer at my face.

“Girl,” he said, “You’re crying. What has happened?”

Grandfather never noticed any of us. As far as I knew, we were all just so many posts to him. Posts with ears to listen to his stories. We brought him his porridge and his dinner and his tea. We helped him out to the back house, we helped him to bed, and we helped him to rise and dress, and we listened to his stories until we could find an excuse to leave, but he never noticed us. Any of us. We thought maybe he might notice that his son, my father, had suddenly disappeared down a Dragon’s throat, but he never said a word, though he did mutter about the lessening of food at the evening meal.

It was all I could do not to drop the clay cup of tea before I handed it to him and sank to my knees beside his chair and put my head on his thigh, and began to cry. I had not cried for my father. Not that way, and nor where anyone could see me. Instead of crying, I went to the woods with the axe and cut wood and raged. I swore that one day I would kill the Dragon. I cursed and screamed where none but the trees could hear, and I vowed I would hack off the head of the Dragon like I struck off the limbs of the hackberry tree. I had not, though. Not that day nor in the next year or the year after. The fury that I had felt became a cold, hard stone that took the place of my heart. I felt nothing. I cut wood, I gathered berries and mushrooms, I helped my mother make dinner, I helped my brothers with their chores, and I took food and tea to Grandfather. I felt neither sadness nor joy. I did as I was asked, and I did as I was expected, and I moved about with the never-ending weight of the stone that had come to live within my chest.

Grandfather’s trembling hand found its way to rest on my head as I cried. I do not think that he had ever touched me before, not in kindness nor in anger. I had never thought that he regarded me any more than he would have regarded a chair or a broom or the clay cup that held his tea. I never felt that I was more than a thing in his life. It was true that he would draw me into his endless well of stories. Often the same stories over and over. Snaring me with a never-ending rope of words. It had nothing to do with my being special to him. He would entrap my brothers or our mother or even a stramger who had come to the door to ask for directions. He had no regard for what we might be doing or might need to get done before the day was out. He talked of other days, other times, of things that made no difference to our lives or our needs, but on this night when I felt that I had been torn apart, he noticed my tears and then, as I wept with my face against his boney thigh, he put his palsied hand upon my head and left it there, slowly opening and closing his fingers in a clumsy caress.

When the tears seemed to stop, and I pulled up the hem of my apron to wipe my face, he quietly asked again, “What has happened, Genie?”

I do not think he had ever used my name. For him, I was always “girl,” just as both my brothers were “boy” and my mother was “woman.” I had never once heard him call my father by name either, just “boy.”

None of us ever thought this was strange. This was just Grandfather’s way, and in truth, it seemed to be the way of all of the men and women of our village. It was the way of my father and my mother. They had given us names but never used them. If both of my brothers were in the yard and one of them was needed, then the one that was needed might be called by his name. More often than not, they would go to the door, shout “Boy,” and point to the one they wanted. There were no other girls, so I was called “girl” when I was needed. Maybe it had been different before the Dragons. I had heard some of the elders talking about how that had once been so, but now it was just the way of things.

I had been named for Grandfather’s long-dead wife, a woman I had never met, and there was a softness and such longing in his voice as he said my name; it was enough to start my tears flowing, though I did not give voice to them.

“Genie,” he quietly said again, “tell me what has happened.”

I found words. I pushed them past the burning of my throat and out of my mouth.

“It is my cousin, Eben, and his sister Theana, and Mother’s sister, Belen. They were picking berries down where the two rivers meet. A Dragon took them.”

I would have told him of Belen’s weeks old baby and how it had been found wrapped in a blanket under the berry bushes, still alive, but no one knew for how long because there were no nursing mothers in the village, and the Dragons had long since taken the cows and goats, but then the well of tears came tumbling out of my mouth and I began crying with the force of the river where it falls into the great canyon, and like the river, my grief poured out as if there were no end.

Grandfather’s hand continued to gently stroke my head. his feeble hand trembled, but still it was comforting, and slowly my crying stopped. For a time, there was nothing but his slowly moving fingers on my head and the warmth of his thigh beneath my cheek. When, at last, I began to realize that his lap blanket was wet through with my tears, I lifted my head to apologize and offered to get him another from the box at the foot of his bed.

“No, Genie,” he said, “the blanket is fine, but my tea is cold. Could you fetch me another? There is something I would like to tell you. Only Groont and I know about the night the Dragons came, and neither of us has ever told another living soul what we saw that night, but I would like to tell you. That is if you can bear to listen to more of my maundering.”

I rose to fetch him the tea. On another night, I might have resented having to be trapped by another of his stories, but on this night, I welcomed anything that would take my mind and heart from Eben’s death. Poor, beautiful Eben. It hardly seemed a week since we had shared a furtive kiss in a dark corner of the meeting house. A week when the stone in my heart finally melted, and I could think of nothing else but his lips on mine. A week when I had cut two fingers with a kitchen knife and nearly cut my foot off with the axe because I was thinking of the next kiss. Now it was a kiss that would never happen.

Grandfather was slowly rocking in his chair, his old eyes unseeing as I pressed the cup into his hands. He hardly seemed aware of it as he shakily lifted it to his lips before lowering it to his lap, where he cradled the warmth of it to his belly.

“When I was a boy,” he began, “there were no Dragons in the valley. No Dragons anywhere. Not in stories. Not in legends or even in the mouths of mothers trying to frighten their children into behaving. No Dragons anywhere at all, but when the first one came, I was there to see it. I saw it come out of the cave at the end of the valley,

“You have never seen the cave; no one who was not alive before that Dragon came has ever been down to that end of the valley. Old Groont was there that day, but he was just a boy then. You most likely can’t imagine Old Groont as a boy any more than you can imagine me as a young rascal who got up to any mischief that would plague his parents. Groont was a few years older than me and the boys I ran with. What a lad he was too. A real hellion of a pup. He was called, Jaben back then and was always in and out of one scrape after another. If there was a thing to be done that he was told not to do, he would be at it before sunup the next day and be dragging himself home after dark to lick his wounds, or count his winnings.

“Jaben was that rare sort who was always the lord of all he surveyed. There was not one of us boys who would not have traded our eyes and fingers to be like him. We followed him like puppies, and if he noticed one of us over the others, we lorded it about as if he had tapped us on the shoulder with a golden sword. Time and time again, the elders warned us about him and then beat us when we ignored them and followed him into whatever trouble he churned up.

“It was about then that we began to hear stories of an old man who had come to the valley and was living in the cave. We all knew of the cave. It was a fine place. Ten men standing side by side could have just touched the walls, and four men, each standing on the shoulders of the one below, like the traveling tumblers at the spring festival, could have just touched the roof. It was just that high from front to back. There was also a little side cave in the back, just big enough for a cot and a chair.

“We were amazed to hear about someone living in the cave. It was a fine place to pen animals to keep them safe from the wolves at night. Fine for a heard of goats or maybe a dozen oxen, but a man living in a cave? Ha! Jaben began jesting about the kind of man who would live in a cave and suggested that we should go see if he had horns like a goat or a tail like an ox, or maybe he was more of a giant rabbit in need of a big hole. Of course, the elders got wind of Jaben’s talk and warned all of us to stay away from that old man. In fact, they said, if we knew what was good for us, we would not even go near the mouth of that valley. There were strange tales about that old man. He was dangerous. He was up to dark doings. It was said that he had been driven out of a far land because of something he’d done, and some said that there might even be a price being offered for his head.

“Well, I can tell you, they could not have been more certain that Jaben would have to see for himself than if they had lit a fire under him. Sure enough, quicker than a sly wink, Jaben was off to the valley. Jaben began to go there every chance he got. None of us dared to go with him. We listened to the elders, and they had us in night sweats with the fear of what might befall us if we went into that valley, either at their hands or those of the strange old man. But Jaben was like a dog after a blue thorn pig, and he went again and again. He always came back without so much as a scratch, but he did come back with stories.

“One time, he told us how he was slipping from tree to tree and was about halfway up the valley, just to where he could see the mouth of the cave, when there was a huge noise, like the biggest clap of thunder you had ever heard. Like ten claps of the loudest thunder you have ever heard all at the same time. The trees shook with it, and the ground under his feet danced, and Jeben said that he fell to the ground and clung to the very grass itself to keep from falling into the sky. Out of the mouth of the cave came a ball of lightning that bounced from wall to wall all the way down the valley, all the while screaming like the village idiot the time he set himself on fire at the blacksmith’s forge.

“Another time, he went into the valley at night and saw the old man dancing on the big flat rock at the mouth of the cave. He was as naked as the day he was born, but all about him was something that looked like white fire. Dancing on that rock with him were wraiths also made of white fire. He had a tall walking stick and seemed to play the wraiths like puppets on strings. First one, then another. Then with a flash, they were all gone, and the old man picked his robes from the ground and put them on, kicked some dirt on the little fire at the mouth of the cave, and went inside.

“Every time we saw Jaben, he had another story. The old man did this. The old man did that. There were strange noises. There were strange lights. There were things that he didn’t even have the words to tell us about. Sometimes he was wide-eyed with amazement at what he had seen. Other times he was so scared he was almost white with fear and would not say a word, but he always went back again. The more he told us, the more we wanted to follow him the next time he went. One night we did. Not all of us, just me and or two others. One was Keev, he was my age, and there was another boy, blessings on him, but I cannot remember his name. I do remember he had always been a good boy. Never once did a bad thing to worry his parents. Not until that night.

“Jaben had been telling us that he was sure something was about to happen. The old man had been very busy in his cave, and just a few nights before, Jaben had dared to creep right up to where he could look into the cave. He wasn’t worried about being seen because the old man had filled the cave with dozens of torches. Light came out of it like the light of a bonfire that steals away your ability to see beyond it. The old man, he said, had been clambering around on platforms he’d made from saplings lashed together. He seemed to be making a kind of gate out of lengths of rope. The way Jaben told it, the gate looked like the opening in the middle of an orb spider’s web. The web was made from rope, but it glittered and gave off colors and strange smoke whenever the old man called out odd-sounding words and waved his stick around. Sometimes the hole at the center of the web would cloud over, and then a great puff of stinking yellow smoke would billow out. Sometimes the center would shimmer like the surface of a pond and then make a little ‘pop’ sound, and the pond would vanish. When that happened, the old man would curse and throw down his stick and storm out to the mouth of the cave. Some nights he would stand there for a long time before giving up for the night and putting out the torches. Other times he would stand there for a long while just looking up at the stars before going back in and making some small change to the ropes that made up the web.

“Jaben seemed sure that on the night he talked us into following him into the valley, something important was going to happen. Every time he had been back, the web was more complicated. It was now more like a great funnel that led all the way to the back of the cave. There was a blue fire that danced over the strands of glittering rope and it never went out. It was making a sound too. A sound like bees trapped in a hive. It was a sound that you felt more than you heard. Jaben said that if you put your hand on the big flat rock at the mouth of the cave, you could feel the sound and that it felt like the bites of a whole nest of red and black stick ants. The old man was always naked while he worked on the web. Sometimes the wraiths would be with him, and he would send them to this or that place on the web until they popped with the sound of a hailstone hitting a leaf and vanish. Jaben said that the old man was more excited every time he saw him, and he thought this would be the night. He was right, and the four of us were there watching from the trees when the Dragon came.

“There was a place where there had been a rock slide so long ago that great trees had grown up on it. We crept along the ridge of the slide until we could just see into the mouth of the cave. We couldn’t see all the way into the cave, just some of the far wall. I think we were all surprised to find that Jaben had been telling the truth about the cave. It was lit like a bonfire. Even the far hill was lit so that you could see the trees almost as clear as if they were in the light of the day. He’d told the truth about the sound too. It came out of the ground and through our feet. It came from the trees around us, and it was in the air. I think that if Jaben had not been there and as solidly rooted as a tree, we would have run away. Keev was at my side, he was my closest friend, and I heard him whispering that we should go, the elders were right, and we shouldn’t be there. That other boy, the one whose name I’ve lost, was saying the same. They sounded as if they were ready to wet themselves like frightened puppies, but I grabbed Keev’s arm, as much to chase away my own fear as to keep him with me. There has not been a day since that I don’t find my thoughts straying to the wish that I had listened to him and that other boy. If I had, then we would have been halfway home and not standing out on that spit of land when the Dragon came out of the mouth of the cave. It is a thing I can still see when I close my eyes. It finds me in my dreams more nights than not and I fear that when I die, that night will be the memory I take to the life beyond. If there is one, I tell you true, Genie, I would be glad to find there is no life beyond this one just to be rid of that night.”

Grandfather fell silent. My tears and the ache in my heart had been forgotten as I listened, but on his leathery cheeks I saw the tracks of his tears. I had not heard it in his voice, but even so, there was a trail of wet that rolled down from each eye, traveled the creases around his mouth, and then fell from his chin. His tea had been forgotten and was now cold again.

“Can I get you another tea?” I asked. It was not the question I most wanted to ask. I wanted to know what had happened next. But those tears were like a door barred and pinned that kept me from asking.

“Ah, yes. Tea would be good. Hot tea. Yes, that would be nice.” He said the words as if in a dream. As if he were in a place on the other side of the world. I took the cup from his fingers that still curled about it, and he seemed to not even know that I was doing so. Just as I had taken the cold and forgotten cup from his fingers, I put the fresh cup of hot tea in them. He raised the cup to his lips, sipped from it, and once again cradled it to his belly. It was as if he wrapped his entire being about it as if it were the only thing at his core that might still hold him together. I had once seen a mother in the village holding her just drowned child like that. No tears, no wailing, just holding and holding and holding.

I said nothing, I simply sat in the darkening room, waiting for him to speak again. My brothers and mother had gone to be with what was left of Eben’s family to do what could be done, though I wondered what , if anything, could be done after the Dragon had once again come to take away the world. I had been left with Grandfather because Mother had seen I was useless with my own tears and would be little help if it was needed. Take care of the old man as best you can. Listen to his stories, give him his supper and his tea. That was what I could do, mother had said.

“The Dragon came out of the cave as fast as a snake on a bird, and the bird was that naked old man with his stick. He waved it around his head like he might make the Dragon dance the way he did with the wraiths, but the Dragon was no wraith. Its head darted all about, its mouth snapping at the old man as he jumped and danced just out of reach of those snapping jaws. The Dragon seemed to be held by a tether that it strained against and once the old man realized he was out of the Dragon’s reach, he quit backing up. He stood his ground, spread his feet wide, raised his stick, and sang out some words in another language. The wraiths popped into existence all around him and mimicked his every move. The Dragon roared at them. The trees shook with that roar. Even the ground shook with it. The Dragon lunged again. The old man shouted his words and waved his stick, and then with a sound like the sky ripping apart, the Dragon was suddenly free, and the old man and all the wraiths vanished down its throat.

“Beside me, Keeve screamed; maybe I did too. Instantly, the Dragon’s huge head snapped around to face us, and it spread its wings. ‘This way, Jaben shouted, and without looking to see if we followed, he ran down a path he knew. I was at his heels before I even knew I was running. We ran and slipped and fell and then ran again for what seemed like the whole of the rest of that night. We ran until Jaben pushed his way under a rock that jutted out of the hill and pushed through a stand of thorn bushes that hemmed in the space under the rock. ‘We’ll be safe here,’ he said. It was then that we both realized that Keev and that other boy were not with us. We never saw them again.”

With that, Grandfather drank down his cooling tea in a single, great swallow and then quietly asked if I would bring him a cup of the brandy my mother kept for making spice cookies for the end of winter celebration.

Grandfather held the cup of brandy for a very long time before he took a sip. Then, in his feathery old voice, he quietly said, “There were not always Dragons in the valley, but since they came, they have taken so much from us, too much. Mayhaps you and I will see a day when they are no longer in the valley. I would like to see that day before my eyes close for the last time. I would like that very much.”