These Weights We Carry

The cry was an unsettling thing. So much humanness in that sound, singing from pink, purse-sized lungs; warm air expelled through blunted teeth. He did not investigate. Wet soil lay soft beneath him while glassy water stroked his chin. The sun crouched limp and low behind sagging clouds and he could feel no urge – from the tip of his snout to the flick of his tail – to shift an inch for the quavering noise crossing the lake towards him.

Time passed and some kind of movement creeped across his awareness. Shingle scattered in the wake of feet a few yards away. The dragon tried to study the uneven nothingness on the inside of his eyelids, telling himself they were too heavy lift. The footsteps closed in nonetheless. By now the crying had dropped down to a wavering note that drifted in and out, as if its owner were tuning a well-used instrument.

Then a sniff and intake of breath wisped past his ear. Something deep within him stirred, and he opened his eyes.

A carriage lay upon the opposite shore, its shattered carpentry jutting towards the sky like the ribs of a washed-up carcass. The shadow of the cliff from which it had fallen caressed its splintered spokes. He didn’t need to get closer to know there were no survivors.

Except for the child now sat beside him.

Somehow, it hadn’t met the same fate as its travelling companions. It’s…family, he assumed. He excavated the word, dusty and disused, from the back of his mind. Dragons didn’t hold onto to words like these – complicated, ill-defined terms – but he’d heard it somewhere.

He swung his long, aquiline face towards the plump human. Its eyes were blue. Much bluer than the sky at that precise moment. An echo of the kind of clear day and soaring flight that spread the world before him like a personal treasure – a hoard of landscape and life gathered just for him.

The eyes told him that the child was old enough to understand some things. The wrongness of its situation, for one. It was starkly alone, in a way that most younglings never would be. This was the opposite of all its experiences up to that point, shaped by a nearness to warm bodies and other beating hearts.

He could tell by the way it was watching him that it also understood ideas like size and strength. At some point humans go through a stage of forgetting their vulnerability – they become big in their own minds: conquering, indestructible. The child had not yet latched on to these delusions. The dragon instead saw comparison in those eyes – calculating how the largeness of the creature before it could exist beside its own, diminutive body.

They watched each other until long-lost synapses started to fire in the dragon’s mind. Thoughts – beyond the vague, primordial instincts of eating, sleeping, moving – formed with a speed he didn’t like. The child’s survival had not been an accident. Now, with his mind clearer than it had been for decades, the dragon saw the consequences of this truth: The child’s existence was a fact he would not change, and if something was out of place, it must be returned.

At that moment there came the scraping sound of steel sliding against steel, then a dull, heavy thud. The dragon looked down and saw a single disc of bronze lying in the mud. The scale had slipped from his side and fallen to the ground, its sheen nestled amid the earth like a beetle shell or mushroom cap.

The dragon’s memories stirred, shadowy and somniferous, but he refused to heed them. He turned his eyes away from the scale and the patch of skin where it had once been, and opened his jaws. The child shuffled back, but he snagged his teeth upon its cloth wrappings and tugged it up. It dangled for a moment and the disturbing cry threatened to return, a wail vibrating in its throat, then the dragon twisted his neck over his shoulder and perched the child on the ridges of his spine.

It was nice to see some instinct in the youngling, as its hand came out to find purchase, reaching round the curve of his neck. He gave a shiver to awaken his immobile muscles and to test whether the child would fall. It stayed in place, silent but aware, he thought, feeling its blue eyes on the base of his skull. His cargo made flight unnavigable, but he briefly spread his wings all the same, the membrane straining against joints and bone, trying to catch a breeze. He tucked them in again and stepped away from the lake, towards the forest where a bank would sharply climb to a road of men.

He ignored the sound of the second thud, didn’t glance back at the freshly shed scale. Instead, he fixed his focus on the looming branches and carried the child into the arching boughs of the woods.

*

They saw no one for the first few days but fleet-footed rabbits and rust-furred deer. For this time, the dragon thought, the child was smartly passive – undemanding. It accepted its role as goods to be delivered; in its youthful wisdom it understood that almost everything it encountered was driven by a force much stronger than itself. Some creatures could reshape their worlds, but the child could only move as greater beings would have it move, and continue to draw hopeful, defiant breaths. Perhaps this is what had saved it.

He fed it fruit and mountain water and the child slept. A lot. The jealous dragon would trudge on, leaving plates of bronze in his wake, denying the unmaking that was happening within him, the tiredness returning to his soul.

It was as they approached the first town that the child changed. It seemed to remember its humanness. It tried to chase a line of ants away from where the dragon rested, forcing him to retrieve it by the hem of its garments. Later it counted the spines on his back with a pointed finger and accompanying mumbles. It started to talk in its sleep. All this was… He searched for the phrase and found the strange word waiting for him: Curiosity. That was it. A desire to know the way of things beyond yourself. It struck him as unhealthy.

At the town, he roamed the streets without question or concern. The humans got out of his way and among the empty avenues he found more suitable food for the child. Meat that had been smoked or cooked, as well as those convoluted concoctions of milk and wheat that they liked to ferment and bake. While the child ate, sat at the base of a stone well, he broke the surface of the water and drank deep before he could glimpse how much of him was now missing his shimmering coat. Despite his efforts, he still saw in the reflection a bloodshot eye looking back at him, its golden sheen fading more each day.

He turned away from it, only to meet a woman edging across the square towards them, her own eyes on the child. He roared. It was a noise which could reset the rhythm of others’ hearts, a sound he had seen batter trees to the ground. It didn’t quite level the houses here, but it did as he intended. The woman left them alone, joining her neighbours cowering in their dwellings.

He shook his head. An emotion in an unfamiliar shape was knotting in his stomach. There was another scrape and clunk as a scale slipped from his neck.

This was the weakness of human nature – the thing no dragon need dwell on – a blood-deep urge to claim each other. Dragons could flatten and burn and raze, but this was wilful destruction of another kind. It was too easy to pull the thread that would unravel everything, if everything was connected. If one human was responsible for another, to each other, and so on, where did it end? They fell like dominoes doomed to all tumble if pushed, though he couldn’t recall how he knew that game.

They moved on. The child became heavier on his back; his feet grew sore. A chill whipped at his exposed flesh as his armour peeled away, piece by piece.

At the next town the reception was quite different. There was still fear in the humans’ eyes, but pity too. This made him want to roar again, but he found his thunderous bellow had dwindled to a croak. The child shocked him by laughing at the sound. It wasn’t the audacity of its amusement – the croak was ridiculous even to him – but the act itself. Another quirk of its species, mirth, crawling back into place. The child might be whole before the journey was through, the dragon thought.

The humans of that town did not run from him, and the dragon left the place with a cloak draped over his shoulders, gifted by a stupid, brave girl. He walked through the night. His wings dragged upon the ground, a leathery train he no longer had the strength to lift. Meanwhile the child slept, except for a moment, when the moon was at its highest, when it woke to lay a hand on the dragon’s soft, naked cheek and bunch a tighter fist around the coarse fabric of the cloak.

*

When they reached the city, he was so diminished no one noticed him arrive. It was as if he’d faded away and become more real all at once. Human gazes glanced off him, never holding in place, forgotten as soon as they looked away. And yet, as he slipped among the steepled buildings, their copper-green roofs grasping for the sky, a life that wasn’t his was waking within him. He found he somehow knew more than he thought he ever could. The taste of plum pudding. The name of a poet. The reason why steam escapes a boiling pot.

With all this came more; dark doorways unlocking with the clunk of falling scales: The weight of a sword at your side. The crack of bones under your boot. The way to the palace in this city.

The child’s hand was still there at his shoulder. He concentrated on it as they approached the largest building to be found in that mass of human construction. It sat on a hill, looking over all the others like an eagle at roost, wings spread, talons dug deep. The carved stone of the façade poured down from the hillside into a hundred perfect, wide steps. They welcomed and cautioned all at once – access was granted, but not without giving something for it.

He climbed steep path, and passed by the ranks of flags standing like sentries. They fluttered crimson one way, purple the other, with a crest of a rearing white horse bending and snapping in the wind. He knew that the horse was meant to tell enemies of the speed and honour of its bearers when riding into battle. He remembered how he’d hated the sight of it, and soaked its pale flank with blood.

At the threshold the child’s face was enough to gain an audience. He eased the youngling to the floor. It took his hand and seemed to know the way. It led him down gilded corridors that craftsmen had toiled their whole lives to create, and vaulted halls so grand one wondered if the entirety of history was contrived just to make them possible. It was all familiar. He had walked these rooms and he had coveted them.

The King awaited them in the throne room. He looked much older than when he’d last seen him. Gravity had kneaded at his skin, bordering his once strong jawline with jowls. The cold, grey stare was the same, however, the one that had watched, helplessly, as he’d cut down the King’s friends and family for a title and the seat in that room. There was an emptiness to those eyes now, a resignation to suffering. He wondered if he’d put it there.

The King reached a hand out to his grandchild and it – she – the little girl he’d carried from the lake to the palace, let go of the dragon’s fingers and took hold of her grandfather’s.

And he knew that dragons didn’t have fingers, and yet he held his suddenly empty hand out before him. What had been the last cool, stiff spot on his back felt oddly loose and he twisted to reach it. The final scale slid from his body, hitting the marble floor, ringing out in a clear, devastating note that seemed to reverberate across the nation.

In the mirrors of the throne room he saw the man he had been before this kingdom had cursed him for his crimes. But he was missing much from those days now. He had no hunger. The hole that had burned bright in the centre of him was gone, the hollowness that drove him to take and kill.

It was being the dragon which had fixed him. The witch’s magic was meant to be a trap, an endless, meaningless existence. Instead, it had sent his soul home.

As a beast he didn’t regret. He didn’t grieve. He was free of all he’d ever felt or thought or done. It was giving over to a world where survival was the only end, where you hunted when you were hungry, and slept when you were tired, and flew when you wanted to feel the warmth of the sun on your back. There was no room for anything else and it wasn’t punishment, it was utter liberty.

Now the curse was broken and this – this human heart and mortal brain – was what robbed him of all his peace. There was no simplicity here, nothing truly untouched by human flaws. Only the filthy shade of his conscience. The vast shipwreck of his ambitions.

This was the weight too much to bear.

He bent and picked up the scale. It was heavy as a lump of iron, the sheen of it still glimmering in the torchlight. It was beautiful. He had been beautiful. Pure and boundless.

The child had already been led away and, to his surprise, he was permitted to go. Justice, as far as the King was concerned, had been done. It was a funny notion.

He descended the steps outside the palace, sure where he was going but not how to get there. The smooth, leaden disc was still tight in his hand when his foot connected with another. It skittered a few feet across the ground, then stilled, inviting his attention. He retrieved it and dropped the scales into the cloak’s deep pockets, one on each side. The mass of them rested knowingly at his hip, expectant.

He retraced his steps through the city and found another bronze plate kicked beneath a beer cart. He collected it, and it joined its fellows. He left the city, down the same country roads he had been days before, eyes alert and ready for a flash of metallic shine. He collected his scales from the towns he had been to, begging them from confused locals, and from the riverbeds of the places they’d stopped to drink.

The cloak strained against the burden and the seams bulged to the point of tearing, so in the next village he acquired a pack and once more began to pile them together. They clinked against each other as he walked, like coins waiting to be spent.

The lake was changed in the sneaky way seasons rearrange things when you aren’t looking. The wildflowers had sprung up, chaotic and joyful, and the water danced in a soft summer wind.

The shattered carriage was mostly rotted away now, an abject shell. He approached it and saw what was always there, but which he’d refused to understand: The crest of the white horse, clearly emblazoned on the side of the wood even after the weather’s attempt to strip it.

Had he seen it that night as it trundled along the ridge? Had he been flying overhead, believing himself free, and recognised it?

He did not remember. Could not. A cerebral haze reinforced the divide between dragon and man. Their minds were not one and the same, but uneasy companions, rushing to and from each other, playing tag in the dark. There was always a possibility that the sight of the crest had resurrected the rage of a past life in his impulsive animal spirit. He would’ve torn at it with tooth and claw, striking against it with the beat of his huge, gusting wings, until the carriage tipped and fell. It would’ve been natural, instinct more than revenge. A red rag to a bull.

The child’s survival had been miraculous. Or maybe she’d just had the good fortune catch him on a full and satiated day. Perhaps the great force she’d defied was him. Perhaps he’d been tired and indifferent.

But as a dragon, it would never have been a choice. An action taken or not, each route identical in his bestial brain. Choice required all those things he hadn’t missed about humanity. The messy, difficult things. That was the trade. The double-edged sword of existence. The only way out was to fall on it.

His pockets dragging nearly down to his ankles, the relics of his beasthood on his back, he began to wade into the lake. It was cold despite the heat of the day, a shock of icy lightning striking at his senses. The scales committed, making their way for the depths, and without thinking he pushed his chin upwards, which tilted his eyes to the sky. He knew he was in that moment where his next breath was a decision to be made, where his mind would overpower his body, until they both lost the fight. There was a flock of cirrus clouds curling across the open expanse, which was blue. About as blue, and no more, than the child’s watchful gaze.

The man tugged at the tie of his cloak and searched for the nearest shore.