Of Course I Struggle

Of course I struggle. The ropes aren’t that tight, and these girls aren’t used to tying knots. But there are so many belts around me that undoing two or three doesn’t do much good. The most I can manage is to wriggle, wormlike, and try to get away from the ruins of Sister Tiberia’s cell. I scrape myself raw, but I don’t like lying over a hollow, burned space in the earth.

I don’t really expect that they’ll just leave me here to be roasted and eaten.

But that seems to be what they’re doing. They invoked the Grand’Gul and now I suppose he’s on his way—the dragon that lives beneath Holy Cross Abbey and torments the nuns.

Even if he doesn’t catch me, I’m doomed. The nuns will find me and then expel me from Holy Cross. With my book—I’ll insist on bringing the book, since it opens for me and nobody else. It is more mine than any nun’s, even though I can’t read, and I can protect it better than they can. If I can make my way back home to Lors, I’ll consider myself lucky.

First I have to escape the bonds tied by that pack of novices. My bones are screaming in pain.

With no stars or moon by which to measure the night’s passing, I don’t know how long I’ve been waiting before I see the sky move. Darkness shifts against darkness, and a restless wind reaches down. My ears ring, deafened.

When the wind stops, I know. The Grand’Gul has come.

What will I feel first? The tickle and scratch of a claw, the hot slice of teeth? Or the blanketing heat of dragonfire?

I should have done so many things differently. I wish I’d told my friend Remy when I left the village—where I was going, how to find me again—rather than leaving with hardly a thought. I believed I was acting like a hero, saving the book and sparing the village. Really I was just an arse. And now I’ll be punished.

Overhead, a bright spot sails through the stars, followed by darkness.

When the darkness descends, it’s as if I’ve never felt fear before. Everything stops; there is nothing but this. The Gul’s landing is soft. Or it would be soft, if he weren’t so heavy. The ground quivers and I can’t bear to look—but I do look, I make myself look.

The night is dark, and the dragon is dark, but it glistens. I catch quick gleams of lavender, rose, green, gold along scales. A faint glow from two nostrils, threads of hot saliva sizzling to the ground. I know where its tail is because something thumps and knocks a rock loose. Finally, ragged wings lift—with a terrible stench—and cup my body.

All of this would have a kind of beauty if there weren’t such a terrible scent of char and rot, coming perhaps from the flesh caught in its teeth, or the flesh curled under its claws, or—it doesn’t really matter, because soon I will be dead and what remains of me will be rotting in the Great Maw as well.

My mouth is still full of rope, but I hear myself begging the Gul not to eat me.

“I’d be scarcely a mouthful anyway. And nothing b-but gristle.”

I don’t know if the Gul understands human speech, even in the best of circumstances. But my voice makes it pause. I feel a shift in the air, and a thrum as the wings tighten and something massive reaches toward me—its head, that must be its head—and I realize that the vibrations I feel are its heart beating.

In my last moments, I think how sad Remy will be, knowing how my story started (Someone leaves home) but not how it ends, or why I treated him the way I did. My poor brothers and sisters, never to be cured now …

Somewhere in that tangle of thought, I stop being afraid. Or I’m not only afraid, because not fearing a dragon would be the height of stupidity, even at the end.

My senses are overwhelmed. For a moment, all I know is the nearness of a dark orb—to call it an eye would be to underestimate it—peering up close at me. I am lost in a vast blackness as it stares at me and I stare at … whatever is behind and inside that eye.

It’s as close as I’ve ever come to the gods.

I feel it draw a deep breath, and the tent of its wings sucks inward upon me. I wait for the exhale that will end everything.

Instead, something sharp—a claw—slides along my flesh and under the ropes. It curls me neatly up in its talons and then, with a great ripple of strength, pushes off the ground and into the sky.

… … …

If you have never soared miles above creation in the claws of a dragon, nothing I can set down here will begin to explain what it’s like. But since I assume you have not done this, I will do my best to capture it, and you will take me at my word.

Terrifying. Marvelous. Miraculous. Painful but gorgeous. It is one of those things (events, experiences, things) that sometimes make me sob with longing for more life than I can ever possibly live, because there is so much of the world, and no matter how long I am in it, I will see only the smallest part. Even as I fly with the Gul, I am weeping for all the times I will not fly.

We circumnavigate a teardrop of flickering lights that is Poictiers, fires banked for the night. I see the wet gleam of the Clain River and the faintest reflections of night sky on roof after roof after roof. No, not night sky—the Gul. The glow of it filters down through the drizzle and is reflected in anything wet.

A long, unbroken stretch of dark roof is the cathedral. Between that and the river sits the abbey of Holy Cross, quiet now, at least until dawn prayers. I search for the girls who trussed me up and invited the Gul to come get me, but they must be inside. I see towers of buildings not visited, a small river on the far side, the whorl of the ruined Roman amphitheater.

Then comes a warm, pungent blast. The Gul has exhaled, away from me. He flaps his wings, and we climb higher, toward the clouds. The rope knot is jolted out of my mouth, and I cry out in fear and pain. My flesh is about to burst through the bonds. I can’t be sure that they’re tight enough to hold me, even long enough to die in the jowls of the Grand’Gul. There’s no telling when the knots will slip loose and I’ll fall to my death, or the Gul will lift one hand (Foot? Talon?) and tuck me casually into its maw, or any one of a thousand other horrors that I haven’t thought of yet will come to pass in fact.

I have to look up. I can’t not-look. I twist to see big, smelly claws and big, hot scales that are smooth in the middles and sharp on the edges and even more dreadful than claws and teeth—because every animal has those, but only this one is armored in scales the size of my hands.

And once again horrible things bring beauty and sadness, because they remind me that everything is about to end—the flight and my life—and much sooner than I’d expected when I first climbed over the wall into Holy Cross.

We turn and fly around the city again. I think the Gul must be playing with me. He’s amusing himself like a cat with a mouse.

“Trying to scare my heart into stopping?” I shout into the hot-and-cold wind. “Think I’ll taste better that way?”

It’s almost as if he understands me. He folds up his wings, and we plunge toward a dark patch of earth.