A Book Dragon
Donn Kushner
Copyright 1987 by Donn Kushner

CHAPTER I

DRAGON AND HIS
GRANDMOTHER

WE SELDOM HEAR OF DRAGONS NOWADAYS. IT IS EASY
to believe that they never existed at all. But many
years ago people knew that there were dragons,
just as they knew there were angels and devils,
witches and gnomes, and, on occasion, banshees
and leprechauns. Even if they saw no dragons in
their own neighborhoods, they were sure that some
could be found in far, unknown, fearful places. So
that, in old maps of unexplored lands we can still
see blank areas with the warning words, "Here
there bee dragons."

The maps are all filled in now; the empty spaces
bear names like Caracas, and Vladivostok, and
Chicago. Dragons aren't mentioned at all. But there
are dragons alive today, at least one of them. This
is his story.

NONESUCH WAS - AND STILL IS. FOR THAT MATTER-THE
last of a family of dragons that lived over
five hundred years ago in a limestone hill,
honeycombed with caverns, above the vil-
lage of Serpent Grimsby near the south coast
of England. The dark mouth of the family's
cavern opened towards an ugly tangled
scrub forest that ended, at the lap of the
hill, in an evil bog: land which few men
entered by choice and still fewer left. From
the cavern, the dragons could see the tip of
the village church spire over the crest of the
next hill and, past this, the square towers
and crenellated walls of the Earl's castle.

The castle had been built in the time of
Nonesuch's great-grandfather. While lurking
in the forest above the building site, he had
become so interested in watching the walls
of the donjon rise that when he came down
for a snack of fat cattle, he found the circle
almost completed. The drovers were able to
herd the cattle inside and drop a crude gate,
strong enough to keep out the dragon, who
was of a peaceable disposition and too lazy
to break it down. Later, he could only sniff
sadly at the roasting meat as the guards
and the workmen feasted on three of the
cows. They had a fine time, with their ale

barrels, and the smoke rising in the clear air, and their songs
rising too, in praise of their own cleverness. When they were
full, at the bidding of good Father John, the Earl's chaplain,
they all knelt to thank the Lord for saving their animals from
the evil dragon, whom they took to be the Devil himself.

Such setbacks often seemed to happen nowadays, None-
such's grandmother told him. In the past, dragons, especially
those of her own family, had been quicker, fiercer, subtler,
more wily than they were now. The young dragon — he was
not quite fifty years old at this time, of a clear luminous green,
and his scales moved over each other with scarcely a squeak-
listened to his grandmother with rapt attention, gazing at her
with eager yellow eyes.

Nonesuch had never known his mother. Shortly after his
birth, she was seized with a great longing for solitude and
dryness and flew south, to brood over the sands of the Sahara
Desert. Sometimes her vast form could be seen by the fearful
Egyptians, sprawled atop the Pyramid of Cheops. She crouched
before the Sphinx, both motionless for days, until the stone
monster's patience had, at last, won. Then Nonesuch's mother
had flown off towards the sources of the Nile. Who knew
where she was now?

Whatever she herself had done in the past, the grandmother
now stayed indoors. Nonesuch never tired of hearing her recount
his family's history. He would sprawl on the flat floor of the
cavern, by the entrance, sometimes raising a wing to keep the
least ray of sunlight from his grandmother's eyes, while she
lay as far from daylight as possible, by her pile of treasure.

His grandmother told Nonesuch of the legendary founder
of their race, the great Gorm, who, it was said, lumbered up

from the black swamps when men still lived in caves. Gorm
used to lie down among these cave-dwellers and let them
pound him with clubs and try their flinty spears on his tough
hide, much as a dog enjoys his master's scratches. Then,
when they were worn out with their useless efforts, Gorm
would lazily select a few of his attackers for lunch.

She told of cunning Hraftiagel, who would crouch in the
brown grass of Salisbury Plain within sight of the pillars of
Stonehenge on summer evenings, picking off the blue-painted
Druids as they whirled in ecstasy among the shadows.

Her memory ranged then to the Continental branch of the
family: to the mighty Feuerschlange, who ruled in the dark
forests of northern Germany. With his tail alone, this fearsome
beast once swept a whole phalanx of steel-clad soldiers into a
small lake. Then he set the lake boiling with his fiery breath
and ate his dinner cooked, picking each soldier out of his steel
shell. Nonesuch's father had seen people do much the same
thing with snails, the grandmother added for the sake of
information, though she disapproved of her son's interest in
human eating habits. (' 'What good can come of it?'' she would
remark.)

And then her mind, which sometimes could not remember
events of the same day, took a great leap backwards. In the
beginning, his grandmother told Nonesuch, dragons had chosen
to separate themselves from the dinosaurs, to whom they
were distantly related, except for being so much more intelligent.

She described that terrible time, millions and millions of
years ago, when a huge stone from the sky struck the earth
and filled the heavens with dust, so that the vegetation which
fed dinosaurs and their prey died, and in time the immense
beasts died too. She told, almost as if she were seeing it now,
how the ancestors of the dragons flew high above the dust

clouds, resting only on the mountain tops, feeding on the
ancestors of sure-footed mountain goats and other such frugal,
hardy creatures. Below them, in the thick murk, the dragons
could hear the plaintive groans of dinosaurs, who seemed
more ready to die than to admit how their world had changed
and seek new food in new places. Occasionally a pterodactyl,
a great winged reptile, would swoop up into the sunlight,
then, confused by so much clarity, descend again into the
dying forests.' "They were so stupid,'' the grandmother said,
wagging her head with a sour, disapproving tone, as if she
were speaking of creatures alive now, not those dead for mil-
lions of years.' 'No true dragon could ever tolerate stupidity.''

"But Grandmother," Nonesuch said respectfully, for he
knew she didn't like to be contradicted, "some of our ances-
tors have done foolish things. You've said so yourself." He
remembered her past stories. "Most of the time," he added.

His grandmother reared back her head and almost rose up
on her legs; her dim eyes glowed fiercely. "Foolish? Yes!
Improvident? More often than not! Never counting the cost! At
times, frankly, insane! But not stupid! Any true dragon could
always tally up the costs of its actions, could always foretell
that it was heading for disaster, if it chose. But there are more
important choices!''

Then, her eyes sending out pulses of dull light, as pride
and sorrow swelled within her, his grandmother told of the
valiant, unfortunate Schatzwache, who, from high above the
Caucasus mountains, spotted a vein of pure gold exposed by a
sudden geological fault. Obedient to the great law of all dragons,
"Guard your treasure," Schatzwache settled down on the
shining surface, covering it with his wide wings and long tail,
hardly leaving it even to search for food. Finally, when he was
so weak that he could no longer fly, he was set upon by scores

of knights with two-handed swords and hundreds of bushy-
bearded peasants with long axes. He gave a good account of
himself before his enemies hacked him to pieces, and his green
blood mingled with theirs. But the dragon's blood burned
down into the gold itself, giving it a magnificent blue-green
sheen: the "dragon-gold" from which the crowns of all the
Czars of Russia were fashioned.

"Yes, guard your treasure," the grandmother repeated.
"A dragon without a treasure is nothing but an ugly flying
reptile, with even less dignity than a salamander!" Then, her
nostrils pinched together, she added, "With less dignity than
a turtle, and with no more than a toad.''

Nonesuch's grandmother had many sayings like this, which
she brought out at more or less appropriate times.' 'Never kiB
anything you won't eat," she would say, adding in a milder
tone, "Why waste the energy?" Or, "Be dauntless, valiant,
tragic, whatever you like; but don't be stupid." Or, "If you
must fight, find a worthy foe.'' (Often adding with a shake of
her head, "If you're lucky enough to come across one these
days.'') But usually, even if she had said it before, she would
end her list of precepts with:' 'Always guard your treasure!''

So, dreaming, remembering her family's past glory, her
cracked, scaly head nodding, her great eyes closing and
winking, the grandmother drooled and mumbled over her own
pile of treasure: over the gilded sword hilts, the blackened
silver arm rings with crudely cut sapphires, the gold coins in
rotten wooden chests, the skulls and neck-bones
encircled with diadems and jewelled chains.




At the very back of the heap, against the ca-
vern wall, were layers of stacked shields, elbow-
deep in tarnished silver coins, all resting on a massive carved
door that seemed to have been torn by its hinges from some

castle hall. Sometimes she dragged herself up on the pile of
treasure and thrust the door aside with her claws. Behind it
was a narrow tunnel that slanted steeply downwards. The
grandmother would stick her head into the tunnel and withdraw
it again. Rarely she entered as far as her shoulders; only once
with all her body but the tip of her tail. She let no one else
enter.

When she had looked long enough down the tunnel, she
withdrew her head, moodily thrust the door back in place,
weighed it down with the shields and coins, and spread herself
out so that a claw and a wing, at least, covered part of the pile
of treasure; then she would resume her thoughts, and her
slumbers, and her tales of the old days.

Almost always, when she had given her account of her
family's history and a catalogue of the rules by which they
lived, the grandmother would heave a sigh that made the
cavern's walls shudder, and remark that their race had declined.




For several generations now, they had lost the ability to
breathe fire. The only traces that remained of this once mighty
power were the internal fires that caused their eyes to glow
and to give forth enough light for the dragons to find their way
in pitch darkness. And, she added, that Kept their blood warm,
so that they were active in all weathers, not sluggish in fall
and sleeping in winter like the lowly reptiles that sometimes
dared to claim kinship with them.

More important, dragons seemed to have missed their
path in dealing with humans. The grandmother's words were
saddest when she spoke of these creatures. She had watched
them closely and felt that no good could come of them. They
were small, soft, fearful, but resourceful: capable of infinite
guile. Sometimes, she suspected, they regarded dragons only
as problems, not as catastrophes. She confessed to a terrible
foreboding that human cunning would finally triumph over the
dragons' strength and sinewy grace, over their fierce courage
and joy of combat.

And after a silence that might last half an hour, the
grandmother would declare that it was not through fear that
most dragons now refrained from eating human flesh, but
through suspicion. When they spoke of their reluctance to eat
people, dragons usually mentioned how difficult it was to
separate them from their clothes: the thick leather jerkins; the
layer upon layer of petticoats that bunched up so in your
stomach; then, the armor, the shin-guards, the chain mail,
and all the rest!

But these weren't the real reasons, the grandmother said,
winking wisely. She had finally decided that dragons did not
eat human flesh because they mistrusted it.

They were wise to do so. She herself had flown over
battlefields and seen thousands of human bodies, drying in the

wind, infecting all the air with their stench. Despite this, she
had hovered over the field for hours to watch and learn.

She had concluded that since humans killed, but did not
eat, each other there must be something terribly wrong with
their flesh. "And your cousin will leam what it is one day,"
she said. "You'll see if he doesn't!"

She was referring to Nonesuch's mean cousin, Cauchemar, a
mud-colored beast who was usually seen out of the comer of
one's eye, slithering away, and who was now the only one of
the family who ate humans.

But even though he was the terror of Serpent Grimsby and
its surroundings, Cauchemar probably did humans more good
than harm. He ate mainly murderers and other violent criminals,
his appetite excited by the scent of evil and terror that rose
from their flesh. After such a meal, Cauchemar would lie for
hours at the mouth of his own cavern with an expression on
his face that showed he had acquired as much knowledge as
nourishment from his victim.

He was also fond of liquor. Sometimes he would eat a.
drunkard who had fallen asleep after going out behind the
village inn to count the stars. But even a very little alcohol
affected Cauchemar powerfully. He would then lie on the ground
for hours, staring up at the stars himself, his great eyes like
moons come down to earth, crooning uncouth songs.

"Watch out for Cauchemar," the grandmother often told
Nonesuch, nodding mysteriously. The remark made no sense
at all. Nonesuch, who had not yet reached his full growth,
measured a good thirty feet from nose to tail, and his wingspan
was still greater. Cauchemar, who was smaller, had stopped
growing ten years ago. Nonesuch ranged high in the air for the
joy of flying; sometimes he would overthrow young pines with
his claws as he passed, just to see them fall. He considered

himself a match for almost anyone, especially his cousin. But
his grandmother continued to warn him, looking at him as if
there were yet more behind her words.

And sometimes her words were more puzzling still. She
would mutter herself to sleep with ' "Turtles and toads; turtles
and toads," in tones of such distaste that it seemed there
could be no forms of life lower than these.

CHAPTER   II

T URTLES, TOADS,
AND BUTTERFLIES

13

NONESUCH ALWAYS BECAME
UNCOMFORTABLE WHEN

his grandmother spoke so slightingly of
turtles and toads, though he certainly did
not contradict her. Her words reminded him
of an unimportant event in his childhood,
one that he had never thought it worth while
to mention to anyone. Whenever he remem-
bered this incident, he told himself that it
was foolish even to think about it, let alone
bring it into his elders' important conver-
sation.

He had just turned ten and was rejoicing
in his ability to fly, to travel great distances,
to look down on all the petty earth-bound
creatures. One day, soaring above a wide
beech forest, he saw a wink of blue far
below. Circling, he realized it was a small,
perfectly round pool shaded among the
smooth boles of the beech trees. Nonesuch
was still childish enough to be curious at a
new, pretty thing, though he was trying to
overcome this. He glided down into the
forest. This took skill as well as courage,
since his wingspan was already greater
than the distance between many of the trees.
He had to twist and bank to avoid the trunks
and slip between the branches. As he de-


scended he thought, with some pride, that all the full-grown
dragons were too large to follow him and, with a feeling he
could not identify, that soon he would also be too large.

Nonesuch landed by the pool's brim. When the surface
became still again after the wind of his flight, he looked over at
his own face, framed in the reflection of beech trunks. His
features were still childlike, without the fierce, proud angles of
a proper adult dragon. The water was smooth, the day hot and
dusty. He thrust his head in, almost up to the eyes. Then he
looked up at the beech trees, down at their crooked reflection
in the rippling water, and let his eyes sweep the surface of the
pond to enjoy the double image of a bright-yellow butterfly
with a blue star on each wing.

"Well," a grumpy voice remarked, "I hope you'll leave
some water for the rest of us!"

Nonesuch opened his eyes wide. Directly before him a
head rose out of the water, a homy, disapproving head on a
long, wrinkled neck that emerged from a hard greenish-orange
shell.

The dragon took his head completely out of the water.
In the wave this created the turtle's head disappeared for a
moment, then poked up again by a lily-pad. To show that he
had not descended to the pool for frivolous reasons. Nonesuch
took a deep drink of water and announced stiffly, "I was
thirsty."

' 'I can well believe it, with all those fires inside you,'' the
turtle replied.' 'We were watching you,'' he added.' 'It's very
rare to see one of your lot so close. Usually you stay above the
tree-tops, which is quite close enough."

14

Nonesuch decided not to take offense at the remarks of
such a lowly creature. "Our wings are too vast and broad;

their sweep is too mighty for the confined air of the forests,''
he replied loftily. This was how they talked back in the cavern.

"Yes," hissed a thin, very high voice, which Nonesuch
still heard - for dragons had sharp ears: they could hear a
sheep bleat or a maiden scream three valleys away. The butterfly
was speaking. Now it continued: "I've seen them bouncing
from the tree trunks like hailstones. They have no control at
all!" Then, as if to show what control was, the butterfly
traced an intricate, beautiful pattern round a spiky hawthorn
bush on the bank of the pool. Had she touched any of the
thorns, it would certainly have torn her frafl wings, but this
only made her fly faster.

High above, the wind stirred the beech leaves. New sun-
beams flashed down; the butterfly seemed to be winding then-
light among the thorns. For a few seconds she hovered, quite
motionless, above the exact center of the pond. Then she
glided down towards a bright stone on the bank; but she saw,
just in time, that a gray-brown, warty toad had placed his feet
on it and was looking heavenwards with a pious, hungry
expression. The butterfly soared upwards immediately and
lighted on the highest thorn. "So that's where you've got to,"
she exclaimed. "You're so ugly, I tend to forget about you."

"That might be a mistake," the toad replied in a mild,
though gravelly, voice. He hoisted himself onto the stone and
sat for a moment, panting. "Though I have to admit," he
added,' 'that you're probably not worth the trouble of catching.
Too much air and motion in you to make a real mouthful."
Without seeming to move his head, the toad darted out his
long tongue and scooped up a fat black water bug from the
pool's surface. "Ugly but substantial," the toad remarked,

15

when he could speak.' 'Just as I am." He burped, and added in
a more kindly tone, "Of course, you (Ally lay eggs. Youimbibe
no more than a drop of nectar; you only live two days. How
could you have any flesh on you?"

These words didn't offend the butterfly. She darted over
the dragon's back, then around his head, so that a head-
shaped line gleamed in reflection on the water.' 'You are large,''
she remarked. "What do you do?"

These words amused Nonesuch, who was still hardly larger
than a human being. "You may think I'm large now," he
replied condescendingly, "but wait till I've reached my full
growth."

He realized immediately that the butterfly couldn't wait; if
this thought occurred to the butterfly, it didn't bother her.
"What will you do tfien?" she asked.

Nonesuch wasn't sure exactly what he would do. He
recalled the most impressive stories he had heard from his
grandmother; and from his uncles too, very restless dragons
who sometimes slept in the family's cavern but were always
eager to be off. His uncles, he recalled, had claimed that by
flying through clouds they could cut them into small pieces.
"We can fly through the cloud-capped mountain peaks," he
said proudly. "Nothing can stand in our way."

The other animals considered his words. "I can fly in the
mist too," the butterfly said,' 'but it makes my wings heavy.''

The turtle, who had been listening with his head sub-
merged to his ears, now lifted it out of water. "I suppose
you're going to tell us you can fly through stone," he said
suspiciously.

"Of course not," Nonesuch replied. "We wouldn't want
to." Though he spoke haughtily, as was always proper for a
dragon, he recalled that his father and his uncles, in the zest

16

and gtory of their flights, had sometimes crashed into moun-
tain peaks; perhaps they had imagined that the rocks would
give way before them, but they never had.

The turtle's reply was even more haughty.' 'I should think
not! All rocks are derived from the shell of the Greatest Turtle
of All. Nothing can be more solid and massive!"

Before the dragon could ask him to explain this statement,
the butterfly piped up again. "We don't strike against rocks,
either, though we may rest on them. But the first butterfly
never rested: she was a beam of light, infinitely swift. At last
she grew weary of glancing off beautiful objects or passing
by them, so she broke up into many butterflies. Like our an-
cestor, we must always keep moving."

"One certainly must avoid striking rocks," the turtle
remarked ponderously.

"But we avoid nothing else!" Nonesuch asserted, not at
all pleased with the way the conversation kept getting away
from him. "My uncle and his cousin, Blackhearth, fought a
mighty battle with the wild, uncouth, fringed dragons from
the Scottish Highlands. The noise of their trumpeting shook the
hills; its echoes rolled so that people couldn't sleep for a month
after the battle itself. When the dragon judges declared our
side the winner, the battleground had been so plowed up that
nothing grew again." His audience looked at him without
speaking.' 'At least, not tffl the next year,'' Nonesuch conceded.

The others were silent at first. Then the toad croaked
approvingly. "There must have been good rain puddles in
the plowed land afterwards: excellent places for breeding fat
grubs."

"Yes!" the butterfly piped up enthusiastically,' 'I've seen
it that way after the wild pigs have been fighting, if it rains the
next day. Then we can watch our own reflections in the water,
so close that they are larger than the clouds themselves."

17

Nonesuch didn't care at all for the comparison with wild
pigs. He also recalled that it had not rained for two weeks.
• 'How do you know about rain puddles?'' he asked peevishly.
"You couldn't have been alive to see it."

The butterfly was not abashed. "I've learned it from the
other butterflies," she replied, as if this should have been
obvious.' 'We tell each other everything that happens. So it's
as if none of us dies at all." She darted over the dragon's back
and added politely, "I'll tell them about you. Years from now
the butterflies will remember that once a small dragon came to
their pool."

• 'Well, I should think so!'' Nonesuch exclaimed.' "They'll
be very impressed that you saw one so close; that you weren't
afraid. Why, when we fly over a city the people scatter in fear.
They run to hide in their churches and ring bells.'' Nonesuch
glanced at the water. "They look no bigger than water bugs
then."

"Oh my!" the butterfly whistled. "I'm afraid I don't see
the point of flying so high. I keep to ground level, and the
children run out to catch me. Some think I'm a sunbeam, as if
the first butterfly of all had returned. I avoid them, unless their
hands seem gentle; then, I might perch on their wrists a
moment."

The toad caught another water bug. Nonesuch said to
him, ' 'I suppose children run out to see you pass too!"

The toad was too busy swallowing to answer right away.
Then he said, very humbly, "Oh no, at best they laugh at me,
which I don't mind. But they can be cruel too. I've seen a
dozen of my brothers dangling by the feet from a twig, jerking
like puppets. It's best to keep completely out of sight, in the
cool grass of the fields."

He sighed. "But even then, there are scythes, and plows,
and plowmen's clogs to grind us into the earth. And besides

these, besides aB the accidental calamities, we make such
excellent food! They all want to eat us," he said, glancing
with mournful pride at his fat thighs. "Snakes, weasels, fish,
everyone. They prefer the frogs, who have smoother skins.
But if they're hungry enough they'll make do even with my
wrinkles and warts."

The toad sighed again and looked at Nonesuch with soul-
ful brown eyes. "But I recall my glorious past. This lets me
forget my troubles and fears, at least for a time."

'' Your glorious past!'' Nonesuch sputtered, then glared at
the toad, unable to speak. Before he found his tongue, the
toad continued. "Of course, I have no such cosmic origins as
my neighbors here. We are entirely creatures of earth. Some
say the first toad arose from a lump of dried mud. What do I
know of such matters? But I do remember my change of form,''
he explained, with simple, deep pride. "Once I was only a
tadpole, no more than a head, a stomach, and a tail. Then
my legs grew out, and my tail fell off when it was no longer
needed-no offense meant," he added hastily as the dragon
swished his own tail in warning. The toad continued: "And
my bone structure changed too, until I was an unmistakable,
complete toad. And I remember it all!

"Now, you will say, 'What of that? He changed from an
insignificant tadpole to a hardly more significant toad.' But
you also changed, when you were in the egg, and you too."
Here the toad nodded at the turtle, and then at the butterfly.
' 'And you, when you were in the pupa, surrounded by a lovely
silk wrapping. You each changed, in your special way. But
none of you can remember it, except in dreams, /can recall all
my changes. Sometimes it seems to me that if 1 tried hard
enough I could even remember what it was like to be an egg.
This is what we toads think about when we watch the moon,

19

which, when it is full, is just the shape of an egg. In the
evenings we sing together, again and again, 'We changed! We
changed! We changed!' "

The turtle and the butterfly listened respectfully to this
ridiculous discourse. Even Nonesuch did not interrupt the small,
ugly creature, but he had especially disliked the reference to
his own life in an egg. This was a subject that dragons never
mentioned: they were ashamed to think that once they had
been so small and weak. He said spitefully to the turtle, "I
suppose you remember all the details of your past life too!"

The turtle swayed his head back and forth at the end of his
long neck. "No," he replied ponderously, ' 'I have long since
accepted that my early life in an egg will remain a mystery to
me. I have, if my humble and bumpy companion here will
pardon me" — he looked courteously at the toad — "a more
important concern: to come to terms with the burden I always
carry, that is, my shell.'' He nodded towards the great orange-
green dome at his back. "I know it protects me from my
enemies; for years, frankly, none has come to this pool who
would even think of attacking me. Perhaps this shell is of no
use to me, here. But, useful or not, we turtles all wear our
shells in honor of the Greatest Turtle of All, of whom you have
surely heard."

He paused weightily. The dragon tried to figure out how
large this Greatest Turtle of All could be. The particular turtle
who was speaking was four times as broad as the lily-pad.
Perhaps a greater one would be half as large as the pool itself.
He could not imagine that so dull a creature could reach a
greater size.

"The Greatest Turtle of All," the turtle continued sol-
emnly, when he judged he had given the dragon enough time
to answer, "contains within her shell our earth, the sun, the

20

moon, and the stars. All order is maintained inside that shell:

light, winds, and seasons. Without the shell, everything would
fly apart. And it must be strong indeed, because this Greatest
Turtle is always under attack by a greater beast - a mad
dragon, in fact, meaning no offense to you ^ who is the deadly
enemy of all order. If he should win, if his teeth should crack
the Greatest Turtle's shell, then all our universe will disappear
and return to the dust from which it arose..

"But we think that, one day, the dragon will grow weary
of the battle. Then his own rage and madness will destroy
him. When that happens, all our own shells will fall away, and
we will dance in the sunlight!''

Nonesuch listened to the turtle's outlandish story with
growing anger. He thought of trying his own teeth out on the
shell of this insolent amphibian, but realized that he could
hardly get his mouth around the turtle's shell. Very well, when
he grew larger he could return to the pool. By that time,
however, his wings would be so wide that he could no longer
fly through the beech forest. Besides, even if he returned on
foot then, the turtle was hardly a worthy foe. At this moment
it was looking at him benevolently, and a little sadly: as if it felt
sony for him. It clearly hadn't realized how deeply it had
insulted him. Nonesuch grew angrier. He considered lashing
all the water out of the pond with his tail and thus destroying
the little world of these lowly creatures who were so small and
weak that they had to make up ridiculous tales to give them-
selves some importance. He reared back, then recalled another
of his grandmother's sayings:' 'Don't become angry over little
things: there are enough big ones." He turned and, in silent
dignity, stalked away.

As he rustled through the forest. Nonesuch slashed down
a hawthorn bush with one sweep of his tail, noting triumphantly

21

that the thorns could not hurt him at all. He destroyed a dried
anthill with one mighty sweep of his paw and was first amused,
then ashamed, to see the tiny ants scurry about. He was
delighted at last to find a worthy and edible foe, a wild boar
fully as large as he. The boar fought well, gashing him twice
with his sharp tusks before it gave up the battle and scurried to
cover in a dense thorn thicket where the dragon could not
follow him.

Their battle had left the ground scarred with many furrows
and holes. Nonesuch swept it all level with his tail, so that no
rain puddles could be formed. Then he found a clearing in the
forest wide enough for him to spread his wings and fly away.
He crossed the forest until he saw the pool again, then flew
higher and higher until it almost vanished. Almost, but not
quite. As long as daylight lasted it was still here, fixed in his
sight, a piercing blue dot. He deliberately kept it in view,
hovering and swooping, until the quiet dusk blotted out all the
forest's details. His grandmother scolded him for returning so
late to the cavern, but he never told her where he had been.

CHAPTER III

AMILY MISFORTUNES

25

AS NONESUCH GREW OLDER. 
,THE CATASTROPHES THAT

stmck his own family stopped him from
thinking of the very trivial events of his
childhood. Troubles arrived at a gallop, and
his grandmother's most gloomy forebodings
came true.

The first to go was his grandfather, a
shambling, good-natured creature known
locally as the Warm of Grimsby Bog. He
had a flexible twenty-foot-long neck, ending
in a great broad head and a gaping mouth
that looked humorous, unless it was coming
right at you. He would eat anything: cattle;

horses, and sometimes, by accident, their
riders as well; droves of swine; flocks of
geese, feathers and all; even wagon-loads
of grain if nothing better offered. Nonesuch
had exchanged few words with his grand-
father, who mainly used the family cavern
for sleeping off his huge meals.

At last, his appetite was his undoing.
The exasperated villagers, tired of seeing
all their goods disappear down that gigantic
maw, decided to cure the dragon's hunger
for good. A great rock in the south meadow
roughly resembled a cow, though twice the
size of any living one. After keeping all
their livestock indoors for a week to starve

the dragon, the villagers painted the rock reddish-brown and
white, tied wooden horns to one end, and slapped on clay here
and there to complete the disguise. When the Worm of Grimsby
Bog arrived, snorting, the real cows scattered, all but one
whose hoof was caught in a mole-tunnel; but she was no more
than an appetizer. Then the Warm, whose hunger, when roused,
was much greater than his prudence or common sense, licked
his lips with a tongue as large as the staysafl of a small coasting
vessel, and swallowed the rock whole.

The unbelieving villagers were too busy watching the
enormous bulge pass down the dragon's throat to notice the
shocked and disgusted expression on his face. When the rock
reached his stomach, the look of horror deepened. With an
indignant squawk, the Warm of Grimsby Bog flapped his mighty
wings and rose in the air, slanting this way and that as the
rock rolled around in his belly. The dragon flew valiantly, some-
times descending to brush the tree-tops, rising again with
incredible force till he looked no larger than a sparrow, then
sinking low as the great rock reasserted itself. He flew over the
village, scraping thatch from the roofs, and past the castle
walls, whose archers were too busy placing bets on the flight's
duration to loose their arrows. He flew past the marsh from
which he took his name and finally, as if drawn by the hungry
waves, out to sea. Humble fishermen watched, gaping like
fish themselves, while the great shape sailed on, now majestic
in the sun, though sagging at the bottom, now clumsily tilting
to one side or the other, until, with a gurgling splash, it plunged
into the sea and rose no more.

For many years after, the waters of that coast were unlucky.
Fish shunned them. Fishermen had to journey far out into the

26

region of fogs and lolling gales for any kind of catch. Mothers
would frighten naughty children with tales of the great dragon
that dwelt beneath the waves, gathering its strength until it
could rise in the air again. Some stories changed the cow-
shaped stone to an anchor to which the beast had been teth-
ered by a brave prince. Such versions gave more dignity to the
dragon than the true story: that he had fallen victim to his own
undiscriminating gluttony.




Nonesuch's father, the son of the Worm ofGrimsby
Bog, perished through his own appetites too, though
more indirectly. He was a medium-sized black dragon
with a high fringe of scales on his head, rather like a
chefs cap. The peasants called him Greedyguts, which was
not quite fair since he was more a gourmet than a glutton.
Somehow, he had become overly fond of human food, the
more ornate and fanciful the better. He would attack wagon-
loads of savory game pies on their way to the castle for the
pre-Lenten feast, and would often turn up his nose afterwards
at the mules. Sometimes he would be seized by a desire for
simpler fare: he would thrust his neck down a merchant's
chimney and pull a sizzling haunch of beef right off the spit, or
suck up whole kettlefuls of succulent soup. On warm, sultry
days, Greedyguts, in search of a lighter repast, would appear
at picnics, his widespread wings hiding the sun like a black
cloud. After the picnickers had fled, aghast, the dragon would
gobble up all the dainties, and sometimes the picnic baskets as
well, but he would always wipe his mouth with the white
ground-cloths before flying away.

He was considered more a nuisance than a disaster, and
people accepted his visits with wry humor. After all, no one

27

wants to turn every merry feast into an armed camp. But the
day came when Greedyguts attacked Lady Ursula's betrothal
feast in the marquee.

Ursula, oldest and only unmarried daughter of the Earl of
Grimsby, was, at twenty-eight, handsome, stem-eyed, and
critical. Her temper and her tongue scared suitors away. At
last her harried father arranged a match with a silent, balding,
widowed knight whose stunted castle in the Welsh mountains
would supply his daughter with a sufficiently distant home of
her own.

The betrothal feast was held on a beautiful June day. The
wedding was to follow in four months, right after the harvest.
On the lawn before the castle a marquee, a great tent, was set
out, bleached linen on a carpet of bluebells and buttercups. It
was open at the ends, and a merry breeze stirred the banners
hanging inside. At one side a small orchestra of sackbuts,
lutes, viols, and trombones played without pause. Facing them
at a long table, the guests laughed and chatted, each talking
more loudly than the others.

Lady Ursula, in a long gown whose color exactly matched
the bluebells, sat at the center of the table. She glanced from
the guests to the musicians, and to her fiance, who sat at her
side, dour but unabashed, his eyes quietly calculating the
value of the silver dishes and flagons.

Lady Ursula made a sign. The orchestra fell silent; most of
the guests, in surprise, did so too. A roll of drums announced
the main course. This was ushered in by the chief chef in his
high white cap, followed by four serving-men in blue and
yellow livery. Each one bore proudly on his head a great silver
platter on which rested a whole roast peacock, stuffed with
larks. The guests sniffed deeply and happily, then gasped with

28

horror. They remained frozen with their mouths open. The
long black neck of a dragon had entered the tent directly
behind the last of the serving-men. Very gently the dragon
lifted the peacock off the plate, with no more sound than the
smacking of his thick lips. The serving-man, feeling his tray
suddenly lighter, turned in surprise, clanging it against a tent-
pole. While this note still sounded, the dragon ate the next
peacock. His great head hung motionless in the marquee while
he swallowed. The guests, still unable to move, dumbly watched
the passage of the peacock down the dragon's throat. He ate
the next one thoughtfully, in two bites.

Then, while all her guests remained frozen. Lady Ursula
rose to her feet. She seized a trombone from one of the cowering
musicians and fearlessly thrust it up the left nostril of the
dragon just as it swallowed the last peacock.

The dragon, whose shoulders and forelegs were now inside
the marquee, reared back with an indignant snort. He lifted
the great tent from its moorings. The stretched linen sides
bowled the musicians into a heap, and many of the guests
with them. Those who could run dashed out the other side,
bearing the table to the ground. Some, in panic, ran the other
way, squeezing past the dragon's sides. Outside, the men-at-
arms, roused at last from the hot afternoon's lethargy, began
to hack at the dragon's tail with broadswords.

And now Greedyguts, as eager as any of the guests to be
gone, tried to withdraw his head; but his scales had become
entangled in the silk banners and his ears were snared by the
horizontal support ropes. With a fierce tug he backed away.
The marquee followed him, leaving Lady Ursula standing by
the wreckage of her betrothal feast. Only when he was within
the shadow of the forest was the dragon able to shake the tent
and its banners from his neck and ears. He looked back at

29

Lady Ursula, and received such a glare of hatred that, burping
apologetically, he slid out of sight among the trees.

Still Lady Ursula stood by her overturned table, ignoring
all efforts to bring her to safety within the castle walls. Her
fiance remained at her side, looking at her with wonder and
doubt. At last, as darkness was falling, Lady Ursula spoke
quietly, but in a voice that precluded any argument. She would
never many him, she said, while that dragon, who had shamed
her festive day, still lived.

The Welsh knight received this announcement silently. He
tugged at his beard as if thinking that, all things considered, it
might be better if the dragon lived a long time. Then he looked
at the silver plates again, still lying on the grass amid bones
and scraps of fruit, and at the rich trappings of the serving-
men, who had started to clear away the debris, cast a quick eye
on the castle's general air of soundness and prosperity, looked
again at Lady Ursula, as if weighing up all the pluses and
minuses, and nodded grimly to his beloved.

The Welsh knight took only time for some essential
preparation before he carried out his promise. One crisp fall
morning, Greedyguts was awakened from a sound sleep, and
dreams of spicy sausages, by an extremely irritating cater-
wauling. He opened his eyes, then closed them again, hoping
the sound would go away. On the contrary, it grew shriller and
more insistent. Greedyguts unwillingly dragged his head to
the mouth of the cavern.

In the valley below stood a bandy-legged peasant squeez-
ing a bagpipe, an instrument that the dragon had never before
heard. Beside the peasant was a small, neat man in black
armor, his helmet under his arm and a businesslike expression
on his face. When Greedyguts's head came in sight the knight
gave a signal and three red-clad musicians raised their long

30

trumpets and blew three unharmonic notes. These sounds,
and the continuing wail of the bagpipe, struck directly on
Greedyguts's nerves.

It was a challenge not to be ignored. Though he was still
groggy from last night's visit to the Lord Mayor's banquet,
and though the cavern opened out into a narrow ravine which
hampered his movements, Greedyguts sallied forth, huffing
and growling as fiercely as was possible for a creature who
mainly wanted to go back to sleep. He began to leap up and
down, to obtain proper clearance for his wings in preparation
for the great sweep downwards towards his puny foes, who
continued making their dreadful noises.

The knight waved his hand again. The bagpipe and trumpets
fell silent. On the hillside, men-at-arms carefully aimed two
catapults and three trebuchets, whose pivoted beams were
loaded with great stones. As the dragon leaped once more into
the air, these stones were released. Two of them struck
Greedyguts, flinging him against the high wall above his
cavern's mouth. While the stones' momentum held him against
the wall, the catapults hurled their man-long arrows, skewer-
ing the dragon like one of the roast oxen of which he had been
so fond.

As the dragon's twisted body slipped down past the mouth
of the cavern, a howl of such sorrow was heard that tears rose
to the hardened soldiers' eyes; they all crossed themselves,
even the Welsh knight. It was the dragon's guilty soul escaping
his evil body, they thought. No one suspected it was the
dragon's mother, wailing her foolish son's fall.

When his father was killed. Nonesuch was away on his
"flyaround." It had long been the custom for young dragons,
on reaching their full growth, to fly around the British Isles.
They had done so before the Normans came, before the Vikings,

31

and the Romans, and the Picts; back to the happy times when
there were no people at all. In those days, his grandmother
told him, the dragons had quite justifiably regarded all the land
as their own. Swarms of them would fly along the coastline,
soaring above the cliffs of Cornwall, skimming the angry waves
of the Irish Sea, circling round each rocky island, seeing few
other signs of life than their own wide wings.

But now, his grandmother said, dragons flew alone and
were rarely out of the sight of man.

So Nonesuch had found it. On rocky mountains and in
dark valleys he always sniffed the smoke of peat fires, sure
signs of human life. When he swooped down to catch a deer,
he realized it was already being pursued by hounds and
horsemen.

He considered flying farther out to sea to seek new lands
until he found one with no trace of humans, but the thought of
his family in the cavern drew him back. On his return, he
learned all the details of his father's death.

"My son was worse than his father!" his grandmother
lamented. "True, everyone has to eat, but to make such a
production of it is worse than foolishness: it borders on
stupidity!"

This was the last complete sentence Nonesuch heard his
grandmother speak. She lapsed into her reveries again. Her
rare words were disjointed. Sometimes "turtles and toads"
again, which caused Nonesuch an unaccountable twinge. Or,
with disgust, "the two-legged ones," by which she meant
humans. Or, with a more comfortable sigh, "the warm, liquid
rock," which at the time made no sense at all.

But for a time, Nonesuch was so immersed in his own
thoughts that he hardly noticed his grandmother's silence. He
was beginning to understand that strength and size, and even

32

skill, were not enough, so long as humans existed in the
world. It was bitter to think this just when he was reaching his
prime; and at first he tried to put the idea away. Sometimes
Nonesuch would zoom around furiously, just over the tops of
trees, breaking their heavy branches with sweeps of his tail.
Or he would carry huge rocks in his claws and drop them on
the stony hillsides, to see them split and prove to himself that
he was still as strong as ever. But he would look down and see,
perhaps, some humble shepherds or plowmen shaking their
heads in disbelief. Then he would fly back to his cavern,
feeling foolish and wasteful.

Often, when he returned, he found that his grandmother
had opened the way to the tunnel behind her pile of treasure.
And then, without knowing exactly when it had started, None-
such noticed that his grandmother was entering the tunnel
completely. At first she disappeared for only a few minutes;

gradually this extended to hours.

With each of her underground visits, Nonesuch's grand-
mother became more and more thoughtful. She would sit at
the mouth of the cavern afterwards, her head hanging six feet
out of its opening, her great dimmed eyes staring out at the
valley and all the signs of busy human life. From time to time
she would heave a thunderous sigh that caused the peasants
to gaze up, surprised, into the clear sky. But she did not speak.

Then, from one of her underground trips, she did not
return at all. Nonesuch waited for her anxiously. He left the
cavern as little as possible, lest she come back in his absence.
When he did leave, he piled brushwood over the tunnel mouth,
to show him if his grandmother had left the hole and entered it
again. He slept across the mouth of the tunnel in case she
decided to come back at night.

33

An in vain. His grandmother was gone. And after a week
of waiting. Nonesuch, who had never stuck so much as his
nose into the tunnel, crawled down it in search of her.

The journey was easy at first. The hole was so wide that
the edges of his folded wings barefy touched the sides. It
continued thus for some time. though Nonesuch soon realized
that his grandmother's greater bulk and wingspan could not
have passed so easily. Here and there he saw her scales dinging
to the tunnel wan. He recalled that she had started to grow
bright new scales since her first trips into the tunnel, which
gave her a speckled appearance. In no time, daylight had
vanished behind Nonesuch, and he continued by the tight of
hisowneyes. The tunnel descended through chalk and limestone
layers, the deposits ofandent seas. Surprised fossils of great
sea monsters gazed out at him from the waDs. Then came
layers of harder rock, shining with flakes of gold and of quartz.
He continued to find his grandmother's scales along the walls.
There was no sign that she had retraced her path. She had
gone on, and he must follow.

Time passed; was it hours or days? He didn't know; he
seemed to have been in the tunnel forever. Nonesuch thought
that the light from his eyes was becoming fainter. Was this
from weariness, making his fires bum less brightly? No, rather
all of the surfaces of the tunnel itself were glowing with heat.
Blasts of hotter air were reaching him from the tunnel's further
depths.

Nonesuch realized then that the tunnel had become a
volcanic vent, leading down to the molten rock in the center of
the earth. Once, very long ago, his grandmother had told him,
all the earth had bubbled like soup in a cauldron. But in time
the surface had cooled and hardened. She had, he recalled,

34

spoken of this with regret. Had she gone in search of "the
warm liquid rocks" at last?

He could see that his grandmother had come this far: her
scales were more abundant on the walls than before, glowing
brighter than the dull rocks. He must follow her still.

But it grew hotter as he descended. Even dragons have
their limits. Nonesuch had long since passed the level of heat
at which a man's hair would have blazed up and his skin
cracked and shrivelled. As he continued down he felt no pain,
but he was invaded by a curious melting sensation, as if his
skin were fusing to his flesh, as if all the cells and tissues of
his body were losing their individual character and becoming
one entity.

A few hours later, when the heat was so great that None-
such's paws began to be deformed by his own weight, he
realized that if he went much farther he would simply melt and
flow into the tunnel's walls. Had this happened to his grand-
mother? Nonesuch could see no trace of her body on the walls;

only scales that continued out of his line of sight, a path he
could no longer follow.

He believed then, and he became more certain afterwards,
that his grandmother had continued her journey to the end,
into the molten lava itself. Perhaps, he thought (though this
was much later), she had travelled to the source of strength of
all dragons. Perhaps she would remain in the molten rock,
growing larger and fiercer, until one day she would break the
rock and earth above her and rise, larger than the British Isles,
and destroy the world.

But, for the present, Nonesuch had to return. The tunnel
was much narrower now than at the entrance. Somehow he
turned around, forcing his head past his tail - a maneuver he
would not have thought possible before - and slowly and
sadly made his way to the surface.

CHAPTER IV

THE END OF THE
GREAT DRAGON




THUS, NONESUCH WAS LEFT
 IN POSSESSK)NOFANEMPTY

cavern and a heap of treasure. He knew -
his grandmother had told him often enough
— that he was supposed to guard this trea-
sure. It had been collected by his ancestors
as far back as anyone could remember,
though he himself had added nothing to it
except a reliquary, a glass-and-gold box
containing the dirty white bone of a saint.
This had been stolen from a church together
with the communion plate, then cast aside
in a forest by the superstitious robbers who
feared it might bring a curse on them. None-
such had found it, sniffed at it, recognized
the gold in it, and carried it back to the
cavern.

His grandmother shook her head.' 'Holy
objects, now!" she had muttered. "Next
we'll be turning this cavern into a shrine!''
But she let the reliquary be added to the
rest of the treasure.

At first Nonesuch did guard the family
treasure. He crouched over it, snarling. Any-
one entering the cavern would have found
a very warm welcome. But no one came. In
the world outside the cavern, they were not
thinking of the dragons' hoard. A time of
troubles had come.

37

Signs of this appeared everywhere. Mounted messengers
hurried along the roads, gazing keenly on either side. Wagons
travelled in groups, guarded by bands of archers. Men-at-
arms skirmished in the forest glades; in open clearings mounted
knights rode at each other with sword and lance. Secret bands
of dark, ragged men attacked any unprotected cottages. Soon
the peasants entered the castle walls, driving their herds before
them. The deer in the forest, anxious and sharp-eared, fled at
the slightest sound. Nonesuch found little to eat in forest or
field, at best a few scrawny, quarrelsome goats, abandoned by
their masters.

The dragon did not know, of course, that the year was
1460 and that these events were minor consequences of a civil
war, the War of the Roses, between the great houses of York
and Lancaster, whose emblems contained white and red roses,
respectively. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to under-
stand a civil war, or any war. As long as anyone could
remember, dragons had settled disputes by formal duels, super-
vised by wise elders. Such contests were bloody but very
seldom fatal—the judges stopped them first, and their verdict
was never challenged. Thus, the thought of killing each other
was almost completely foreign to dragons. (Nonesuch's grand-
mother said, "What with lightning, and rockfalls, and evil
spells, and bad food, and knights who have to prove them-
selves, why should we have to kill dragons too?")

But humans had other practices, as he was now to witness.
The air around the castle walls grew stale with waiting. An
army marched up. A beautiful array of tents appeared, and the
siege began: assaults on the walls with high ladders; rolling
towers full of armed men; attempts to mine beneath the walls

38

themselves. All were driven back. Trebuchets hurled boulders
that bounced off the sturdy walls. Nonesuch dined well on the
invaders' sheep when their keepers became distracted watching
the progress of the siege.

But when the cannon arrived, even Nonesuch forgot the
sheep to watch it. It was as thick through the middle as a tall
oak, all bumpy with castings of gods and dragons and battle
scenes. It lay in a wagon, drawn by six tall, stout horses with
bored, heavy-lidded eyes. The castle's defenders lined the
walls to watch it come and cheered when it paraded past, just
out of arrow range. But they did not cheer long.

The cannon's first shot tore out a wooden bridge that
connected a tower to a wall; the next cracked the tower itself.
A third blew a hole in the thick, iron-bound drawbridge. The
besiegers advanced with scaling-ladders. But as they ap-
proached, the broken drawbridge dropped, still sound enough
for a troop of soldiers to sally forth; obviously, more of them
than the besiegers had expected. A grim battle began outside
the walls, in which the men of the castle seemed well able to
take care of themselves.

After watching these practices of the humans for some
time from within the forest. Nonesuch wandered away, deep
in thought. He had seen the trebuchets, which must have been
like those that had tossed his father around so easily. The new,
noisy weapon was obviously much more powerful still. Now
the cannon fired again. Nonesuch turned back and saw the
ball bounce off the wall and smash into a siege tower, splitting
it and spilling out soldiers like ants from an anthill.

He decided not to watch any more. In a short time the
besiegers and the besieged paused to stare at his wide wings
cleaving the air as the dragon flew away into the cloudy sky.
He stayed aloft all day. till his strength was almost exhausted,

39

looking at the changing cloud shapes below, as if they could
describe how the world had changed.

So Nonesuch did not see what actually happened at the
castle. He did not see the cannon, loaded beyond its capacity
in an attempt to breech the wall, explode and kill the gun crew,
half a dozen knights who had gathered round to watch, and
three of the horses. But even if he had seen this, it would not
have altered the firm judgment he reached during his flight:

that the days of dragons as great, powerful beasts were num-
bered. That, no matter how big and strong a dragon was, the
humans could make something bigger, or at least stronger.

Nonesuch's scales bristled as this came home to him. His
flight was slowed, and he almost flipped over in the air. For
one glorious moment, he thought of facing the cannon below
and dying nobly in combat. Then he remembered the force of
the cannon balls. Humans might cast themselves vainly against
unbeatable odds. This seemed to be their nature, his grand-
mother had said with disgust. But their ways were not his.
Here was a new problem, and there was no one to guide him.
What would he do?

While thinking of this, Nonesuch flew in great sweeps
above the earth. Below, fearful people pointed to heaven and
crossed themselves. They were sure that, in these evil times, a
flying dragon was a portent of yet more evil days to come.

And Nonesuch looked down on the earth too: on the tiny
huts of the peasants; on the castle, which from this height was
no bigger than his toenail; on the besieging troops which
resembled wood lice. He widened the circle of his flight. He
soared westward, over the great beech forest, unchanged since
his childhood. At one instant a round blue pool winked up at
him, but he thought, proudly, that he was far too big and far
too wise to fly down amid the trees. He flew north. The city of

40

Salisbury appeared below; the spire of its cathedral, already
two hundred years old and weathered with time, seemed no
bigger than a scrub pine. As long as he stayed high above the
earth, humans and their works seemed puny enough. But he
could not stay up there forever, looking down on them. He had
to see to his treasure. Thoughtfully, Nonesuch glided back to
his hill and into his cavern.

A glance showed him that the treasure was still undisturbed.
But Nonesuch regarded it with a feeling ofstrangeness. It had
looked familiar and comforting when his grandmother spread
herself over it, so that the pieces of gold made patterns on her
patterned scales. Or when his father or his grandfather had
slept off their feasts in the cavern. They had always seemed
more comfortable if their bellies rested on the treasure heap -
and they scattered the coins about with their sleepy twisting
and writhing so that his grandmother had to sweep them back
with her tail in the morning.

Once, Nonesuch remembered, after she had put the pile
into particularly good order, she told him again, "Always
guard your treasure!" But then, after a time, she had added,
' 'Remember, be as light on your feet as on your wings. A wise
dragon is always poised for departure."

' 'But Grandmother,'' Nonesuch could not help protesting
after he had thought over these words, ' 'how will I guard my
treasure then?"

"That you must decide for yourself," his grandmother
replied haughtily. And then, to preclude any further argu-
ment, "Consistency is a human virtue, of little account to a
dragon."

Nonesuch thought of his grandmother's words. He thought
so long that darkness fell, then another day passed, and
darkness fell again while he crouched motionless. When day
broke again, he rose stiffly and thrust his head into the tunnel,

41

behind the heap of treasure. Then he withdrew his head,
turned to the treasure heap, and filled his mouth with coins.

It was hard work, the hardest he had ever done or heard
of: he carried the treasure down into the tunnel, the coins and
jewels in his mouth, the shields and his one reliquary balanced
on his back, between his wings. He went almost as far as he
had gone before into the tunnel, and it took three trips, or
perhaps four, for at the end he had lost count. He made one
last trip to be sure that no fragments of treasure had been left
along the way to tempt adventurers to go further. Now he was
certain that he had brought the treasure to a part of the tunnel
so hot that no humans could live. Before he returned for the last
time to the world outside, he spoke into the glowing darkness
of the tunnel's depth, "There, Grandmother, I've brought all
the treasure to you. Guard it well.''

He spent another day staring at the mouth of the tunnel.
Then he piled all the loose boulders in the cavern into its
entrance and fetched others from the hillside until the entrance
was sealed off. No human would now suspect that the tunnel
existed. Even though Nonesuch knew that the heat would kill
any men who approached the treasure, he wanted to keep
them as far away as possible.

Now, he thought, he was indeed a dragon without a
treasure. Perhaps he had no more dignity than a turtle or a
toad-or even a butterfly. But, since there were no members
of his family left to mock such simple creatures, he did not
feel inclined to do so either.




In the world outside, the siege of the castle con-
tinued. The defenders valiantly drove the enemy
away again; then they were defeated by treachery
when a disaffected knight let the besiegers in at night
through a secret gate. The castle was taken, and destroyed.

42

All that could be burned was burned, and the walls were
blasted away with gunpowder. Nonesuch watched from greater
and lesser distances, gliding through the maze of caverns in
his hill, Hying out at night - for at this time, he felt it more
seemly not to show himself—to survey the scene at dawn from
a distant vantage point. And now the castle had stopped
smoking; a few scorched and meager peasants were setting up
huts in the shadow of its ruined walls.

During all this time, Nonesuch ate very little. In fact, he
had eaten nothing since removing the treasure; but strangely,
he did not feel hungry. His stomach didn't shrink, as it used to
do when food was scarce. In the past, even if his insides didn't
tell him so, he had always known it was time to eat when,
without craning his neck, he could see his large hind toe with
its gold nail, normally hidden by the swell of his belly. But now
his toe didn't appear at all. He had to crane his head to see it;

and he did this so often his neck became sore.

Nonesuch realized the cause of this curious change when
he stopped to scratch his back against a sharp rock ridge with
a hook-like projection that, in the past, had just fit his shoulder.
Now he felt nothing. He looked back: it seemed that the hook
was a foot higher than it used to be! Not believing his own
eyes, he next compared the size of his foot to that of his
footprint, dried in the mud at the cavern's threshold from a
rainy spell two weeks before. He measured the length of his
tail by dangling it over the ledge before his cavern's mouth.
Before, his tail would reach exactly down to the forest floor;

he knew this from the many times he had hung it over that
ledge to beat out the twigs caught in the scales, for Nonesuch
was a tidy beast. All these measurements confirmed that he
had shrunk proportionately all over.

Nonesuch soon decided that he had changed because he

43

had not been eating. He was able to test this quickly: though
most of the regular flocks had been eaten or driven away, the
wild boars had become bolder and were roaming out of the
forest and invading former pasture-land. Nonesuch had some
good chases and some delicious meals afterwards on the gamy
flesh. His long fast had not weakened him. On the contrary, he
found that he hunted with more vigor, that he was more agile
for being smaller. After he ate, he grew again. And when he
stopped, he shrank. He took his measurements carefully: there
was no possibility of a mistake.

What could have caused this? We will never know for cer-
tain, but in time Nonesuch became convinced that the great
heat to which he had been exposed while following his grand-
mother down the tunnel had worked a change in all his tissues,
so that their overall dimensions altered with his food supply.
As far as we know, he was the only dragon to whom this
happened, for no other dragon went so close to the molten
rock at the core of the earth, and then returned in a fleshy
form.

But Nonesuch found that as he grew smaller, he grew
livelier, more alert. It wasn't only his fighting skill that improved:

the air tasted better, colors looked brighter, he breathed more
quickly and thought more quickly too.

He had already come to the conclusion that there was little
profit in being a very big dragon. Now, he realized, nothing
stopped him from becoming a small one. Perhaps then he
would find the world more to his taste.

Since neither hunger nor weakness troubled him when he
went without food, he decided to forgo eating altogether; just
a quick snack now and then so he wouldn't forget how. Other-
wise, he would continue fasting until he reached a size that
really suited him.

CHAPTER   V

POOL IN THE
FOREST




47

WHAT A STRANGE IDEA, YOU
WILL SAY: WHAT A DIS-

L grace for a dragon to choose to grow smaller!
At first it appeared so to Nonesuch himself.
A short way into his change, he did not
seem to fit into any dignified description at
all. He was just a large dragon, still the
largest creature around, but smaller than
he should be, considering his age. If he had
not been even more obstinate than most
dragons, he would have eaten his nil and
grown again. But, once having started to
grow smaller, he was unwilling to stop until
he saw a clear reason to do so.

When he was only fifteen feet long,
Nonesuch became aware of his first source
of danger. His cousin, Cauchemar, began
eyeing him with unusual interest. Cauche-
mar's eyes shone and his mouth watered
unpleasantly. He had always turned up in
unexpected places before, but now this
seemed to be happening more often. When
Nonesuch was only two-thirds the length
of his cousin, Cauchemar became bolder.
Till now, he had kept strictly to his own
side of the hill and had never entered None-
such's family cavern. He still did not cross
the cavern's threshold, but he waddled or
slithered past it every day, more slyly arro-
gant each time.

Nonesuch began to suspect that his cousin was planning
to add cannibalism — and of a close relative at that! - to
his other crimes. But the violent times prevented this from
happening.

Since the destruction of Grimsby Castle, social order had
almost disappeared from the surrounding world of men. Small
groups of peasants huddled together in clusters of brushwood
huts, guarding themselves and their flocks as best they could
with crude weapons and farm implements. Around them ranged
bands of cruel brigands, some of whom were waiting for the
harvest before they descended on their prey. Sometimes the
peasants would call for help from travelling homeless knights
or men-at-anns. They would exchange food and goods for
protection. But the character of the "protectors" was such
that, as one chronicler of the times wrote,' "The poore sheepe
did not knowe whych was worse, the shepherdes or the
wolves."

In the ruins of the castle itself now lived a robber band
named "The Undergrowthe." Led by the bold, hard-drinking
Black Miles, they specialized in robbing travellers on the way
to the coast from Salisbury. There was good business here,
since at this time many of the more prosperous townspeople
were trying to resettle abroad, or in the Isle of Wight, which
was still relatively peaceful.

The robbers had put together enough stores and weapons
to protect them from any of the human enemies that had
appeared thus far. But in their sorties and forays, they ex-
posed themselves sufficiently to provide many tasty meals for
Cauchemar. Though they tried, in a simple-minded fashion, to
avoid the wfly dragon, their cruel, twisted thoughts and schemes
drew him surely towards them. When they spied the mud-

48

colored dragon lurching away with a look of sly satisfaction on
his face, the men of The Undergrowthe could be sure that their
number had been reduced by at least one more.

The clerk of the band was named Ambrose, sometimes
"Brother Ambrose" because of his pious demeanor. He was
the only one of the group who had been born in the village of
Serpent Grimsby. He had served as altar boy in the church and
later as pot-boy in the tavern. He had known of the dragon
since his own childhood; thus far, he had avoided any of the
places where Cauchemar might hunt. Since he knew that evil
thoughts attracted the dragon, he mixed his ill deeds with
thoughts of higher things. His comrades were sometimes
shocked to see Brother Ambrose, his dagger and clothing
splashed with blood, walk along with pious steps, reciting
lengthy prayers. He also remembered the dragon's taste for
alcoholic beverages, or rather for those who consumed them.

Brother Ambrose reflected long on the dragon's nature
while he sat with his book of records in his accustomed place,
behind his bold captain and equally bold lieutenant, the one-
legged "Lopped Cedric." Ambrose's fresh, smooth face was
sorrowful, his blue innocent eyes almost weeping as he recorded
the loss of yet another member of the band. From one of their
raids he hid a small cask of rare fortified Rhenish wine, for
later use.

A month afterwards, the captain and the lieutenant returned
from another raid, leading a pack-train of goods from which all
the guardians had fled. Only the fat cook and a slim, pretty
kitchen wench remained, tied together on one of the mules.
The cook was howling with indignation, the girl was pale with
fear. The clerk brought the wine cask out to the victorious
warriors and volunteered to lead the mules with their burden

49

of treasure into the ruined castle walls. He also suggested,
winking, that he relieve them of the company of the cook, who
could be better employed making supper for the band.

Brother Ambrose stopped to watch the two heroes break
open the wine cask and begin to toast each other and the girl
with their silver flagons. Then he continued on to the castle.
Once inside he saw that the spoils were safely stowed away.
He mildly but firmly discouraged any of the others from joining
the captain and the lieutenant, who, he said, had quite enough
company as it was. The fat cook wailed and lamented. The
clerk, bowing in mockery, handed her a great kitchen ladle.
She looked at the ladle, then grasped it firmly. She used it to
clear away a robber who was sleeping in the cold fireplace.
She chased two robbers out to get more wood, made another
sweep the floor, and soon had cooked them their first decent
meal in months. Brother Ambrose fetched some more wine,
almost as good as that which he had given to the heads of the
band. He insisted that they take time to savor it properly. So
that, when he finally led the men outside with pinewood torches
to join their leaders, he found what he had expected: a large,
mud-colored dragon with huge shining eyes that dropped giant
tears as he listened to the melodious lamentations of the innocent
kitchen girl, who was tethered by one foot to a tree. Of the
captain and the lieutenant nothing was to be seen, except the
hand of the former, too laden with rings to be digestible, and
Lopped Cedric's wooden leg.

The dragon was quite drunk. His sighs resembled an old
drinking song; their sound convinced the superstitious rob-
bers that their two leaders were still singing in the dragon's
belly. Some fled, others fell on their knees and crossed them-
selves. Only the clerk kept his presence of mind. He ran back

50

to the ruined castle for two small barrels of gunpowder, which
he placed beneath the dragon's wings. In doing this, he gained
great respect from the rest of the band, who didn't know, as he
did, that the dragon, when intoxicated, remained motionless
for hours. The clerk unpegged the kitchen wench, called the
band back to a safe distance, laid a train of gunpowder to the
barrels, and dropped an ember at the far end of the train. As
the explosion blasted the dragon into three pieces, the amazed
robbers saw his eyes light up, just for an instant, with fierce
joy at this new experience.

This episode was the true beginning of Brother Ambrose's
career. After his chief rival for the post was found floating in a
pond one dark night, Ambrose was unanimously elected leader
of The Undergrowthe. He directed it with great success. The
band became more respectable and hired out as mercenaries.
Eventually Ambrose joined the winning side in the civil war.
As a reward, he was later given the castle for his own, money
to rebuild it, and a noble title.




And while all these events, of greater or less impor-
tance in human history, were taking place, None-
such continued to shrink.

For some time he was still the largest creature
in the vicinity. He judged it wiser to keep out of human sight as
much as possible. He flew mostly at night; people seeing his
silhouette against the moon could easily believe he was as
large as ever. No one realized he was growing smaller, except
for children, who whispered about it among themselves; but
who cared what they thought? Nonesuch began to find the
night a more comfortable time to be abroad. He would stay
aloft, or sometimes perch in the highest trees until shortly
before sunrise, when he would fly back to his cavern.

51

One bright moonlit night, he found the contours of the
beech forest over which he was flying strangely familiar. Though
it made him uneasy to do so, he lighted on a tree and waited
until dawn broke. Yes, directly beneath him was the same
round blue pool he had seen in his childhood.

By this time Nonesuch, though much older, was almost
the same size as when he had first visited the pool. He flew
down between the trees. This time, he realized, he was much
more skffled in flying and could zoom between the branches in
an elegant and daring fashion. Even the butterfly would be
impressed to see such flying from a dragon, he thought; though
of course the butterfly was long dead.

He landed by the pool's brim. The hawthorn bush on the
bank had grown; there were two lily-pads where one had been
before. At first there was no other
sign of life on the pool's surface,
except for a line of skating water-
bugs. Then a turtle's head broke
water, a wrinkled head with wise
eyes that peered keenly at the
dragon.

"So," the turtle remarked
after a time, "you've learned
some manners. Now you wait
before you stick your nose in."
He cleared his eyes by dipping
his head in the water and looked
at the dragon again. "You're
older, but no larger. How is
that?"

52




"I was larger before; now I'm growing
smaller," Nonesuch told him modestly.

"Extraordinary!" the turtle remarked. "Can you stop
growing smaller?"

' 'If I like,'' the dragon replied.' 'So far, I haven't found the
proper size."

"You're not a bad size now, especially since you've lost
some of your youthful bumptiousness.'' The turtle swam around
the pool, always keeping his eyes on the dragon, regarding
him from different perspectives.

"He flies very well!" a shrill voice remarked.

"For his size, he's hardly clumsy at all," said a second
shrill voice. Two butterflies skimmed the surface of the pool,
their bright-yellow wings almost touching.

' "They told us all dragons were awkward in the air,'' the
first butterfly said.

"Because of their size," said the second.

' 'But you seem to have caught on to the knack of flying,''
the first added. Nonesuch looked down modestly and saw in
the water the reflection of the two butterflies, who flew in a
circle around his head until he grew dizzy watching them.

"What happened to the toad?" he asked.

The turtle shook his head. "A hopeful but unlucky crea-
ture," he replied. "A snake caught him."

' "That's a pity,'' Nonesuch remarked, surprising himself.

"It was years ago," the turtle said. "late the snake later,
though usually I'm a vegetarian; there's all the nutrition you
need in water weeds, really. But now, in a sense, I can speak
for the toad too." He frowned thoughtfully. "Ever since I
absorbed the rest of him, along with the snake, I've become
much more aware of the changes within my own body. I can
feel my shell thickening, infinitesimally, as I grow older. Where

53

the skin of my neck rubs off against my shell, I can feel it
growing again. What it must be to live as a toad! But speaking
for both of us, we would be happy if you chose to stay here.''

• 'Oh yes!" the butterflies piped up together,' 'a dragon of
our own!"

"You want me to stay here?" Nonesuch asked in a sur-
prised but pleased voice.

' 'Indeed yes,'' the turtle replied.' 'It would add a touch of
distinction to our little pool." Seeing the dragon's look of
wonder, he added,' 'Dragons have often been associated with
water: one of their traditional roles is to guard springs. Many
large lakes have their own dragon to watch over them. You,
for example, might make your lair over the spring that feeds
this pool, just there beneath the yew trees." He nodded. "Also,
you could lurk around the perimeter of the pool itself, make
threatening displays on occasion, fly over it from time to time,
now that you can fly so well.''

Nonesuch looked around the quiet forest glade, over the
fresh cool surface of the pool. He sniffed the shady air, full of
woodland odors. There was plenty of game all about, he knew,
should he wish to stay by the pool and keep his present size.

The turtle added,' 'I have a more selfish reason for wanting
you to stay here. I think that we are in danger. Humans often
come here. At one time we never saw any from one year to the
next. Now they arrive in bands. They water their horses in
the pool - fat, juicy horses,'' he added slyly.

The butterflies, who had trustingly perched on Nonesuch's
head, one behind each ear, spoke up together. "They build
their fires among the trees and leave the ground all scorched
and black. They scatter their waste everywhere. Disgusting!''

' 'I understand, from their talk, that times are hard out
there in their own world," the turtle continued. "Apparently

54

they think that gives them die right to trespass on our property.
They've even put fishing lines into our pool; not that there are
any fish worth catching. But I have to keep out of sight: they
might take a fancy to make soup out of me. If only there were a
dragon near the pool, they'd keep well away from us."

"A dragon of our own!" the butterflies repeated, more
excited than before. Their shrill voices tingled in Nonesuch's
ears. "We'd spread the word, and all the other butterflies
would come: blue, and green, and black ones with white eyes
on their wings. We'd fly in a wreath around your head! We'd
bring you word of everything and everyone in the forest!''

' 'Including the humans,'' one butterfly added.' 'But they'd
keep away."

"It would be beautiful and peaceful," put in the other.
"Except that a knight could come to fight you."

"They do, you know," the first butterfly said.

"Then we'd see such a battle!" cried the second.

' 'Which you'd win, of course.''

' 'And the other knights would come for the body of their
comrade."

"And carry it away, very solemnly."

"At night."

"With candles burning, like golden butterflies."

"And never come back again."

Then both butterflies said together,' 'It would be lovely!''

The prospect excited Nonesuch too; for a moment he
swished his tail, as if one of those valiant knights were now
before him. He thought, briefly, that it was all very well for the
butterflies to imagine such a gallant scene: they wouldn't be
alive to see if it really happened. For himself, he might be
willing to take a chance on this future, as the guardian dragon
of the spring. But then he realized that by accepting the offer

55

of these friendly creatures he would be turning back from the
adventure he had set himself in becoming smaller, which might
be the greatest adventure of aB. Besides, though he hardly liked
to admit it, he was finding the world outside, the world of
humans, too interesting to leave it completely.

"No, I can't stop now," he said regretfully, at last. "I
must grow smaller still. I have to continue: how much further,
I still don't know."

The turtle nodded gravely. Nonesuch was grateful to him
for not attempting to change his mind. "But I may come back
one day," he added, thinking that, since he could always
grow larger at wffl, he could still return to this pool, if he chose
it out of all the world.

"We'll always be glad to see you, in whatever size," said
the turtle. And the butterflies cried,' 'Oh yes, if you were small
enough we could play with you. We could really teach you
how to fly!"

Nonesuch let this last remark pass. He walked away from
the pool, thinking that if he stayed much longer, he would stay
forever. He flew off into the highest trees, waiting for dusk
before he returned to his cavern, where he still slept.




Now Nonesuch's size began to decrease more quick-
ly. In a few weeks he was no larger than a full-
grown mastiff, though much stronger and a much
better fighter. He came to know this in an encounter
with the black hound Feroce, who guarded the bed of Brother
Ambrose after he assumed the leadership of The Undergrowthe.
So far, Feroce had killed one prospective assassin and crippled
another. In the daytime he wandered about the forest to keep
order there. Seeing a strange new creature, slightly smaller
than himself, he advanced to the attack, grim and silent. In a

56

minute Feroce was in wild retreat; he fled to the castle for
shelter, yipping and howling in terror at this flying thing that
could bite and slash from any direction.

For a moment the excitement and pride of battle raised
Nonesuch's hunger again. Perched on an oak branch, he licked
the blood from his teeth and looked thoughtfully after the
fleeing black and bloody dog. Should he finish the battle properly
and eat him? Then Nonesuch shook his head. Let the beaten
animal go and heal its wounds, if it could. It was no contest
now: Nonesuch would see what he could do when he was
smaller still, perhaps with the same dog.

He was not to have the chance. Brother Ambrose had
become very fastidious. He insisted that his surroundings be
perfect, his clothing without spot, the manners of his table
servers polished. When the tattered Feroce limped into his
presence, the dog read his own death warrant in Brother
Ambrose's cold eye. He fled faster than he had from the little
dragon and never returned.

Two months later, when Nonesuch was the size of a cat,
he learned very well what he could do when he was smaller.
Feroce's brother, the white-and-liver-spotted Grimace, who
was accustomed to guard the outer walls of the ruined castle,
challenged the green-winged creature that had perched inso-
lently on the coat of arms of the late Earl of Grunsby above the
main portal: a stone griffin above two crossed lances. None-
such, who had simply been enjoying the sun-warmed stone,
descended to do battle. Disdaining to take advantage of his
wings, he fought entirely on the ground. Even so, his move-
ments were so much swifter than those of Grimace, his teeth
and claws so sharp, that the astounded dog soon backed away
through a hole in the broken wall, howling dolefully. After
this, Grimace took care only to attack creatures larger than
himself, and became a superb and noted watchdog.

57

Meanwhile, Nonesuch flew to his perch again and crouched
below the griffin, looking up at it as if for approval. The base of
the coat of arms protruded enough to shield him from the sight
of any humans directly below. The stones of the shady wafl
were green with moss, so that he could not easily be seen from
farther away. He stayed there, growing smaller still, until
peace brought workmen to repair the castle gates. These
workmen also tore down the stone griffin and set up the new
coat of arms of Brother Ambrose, now Sir Ambrose: a fierce
weasel rampant on two foolish-looking sheep.

Nonesuch returned to the forest, fasting as before. He
continued to grow smaller. And the smaller he became, the
more fierce and savage did he find the world around him.
When he was the size of a large rat, he was able to conquer a
wild, starved tomcat, but it was a hard fight. His foe was able
to leap as well as he, and Nonesuch's wings gave him little
advantage; though finally the cat made a snarling retreat.

Nonesuch found that his own courage grew as he became
smaller: perhaps it was all the courage of a great dragon now
concentrated in his tiny body. Sometimes, it was true, he felt
curiously empty. At first he thought this was due to hunger,
but the feeling was different: as if nothing now tied him to the
world around him. He puzzled over this at times, then decided,
without understanding why, that it must be a feeling natural to
anyone who became smaller.

When his size approached that of large insects, Nonesuch
began to eat these insects so that he would not grow any
smaller. It was the ways of the insects themselves (except for
the butterflies) that made him decide to keep his size. He did
not want to be like them in any way. He was not ashamed of
his horror at their cold eyes with so many separate lenses, their
expression of cold ferocity. Their fighting habits seemed too
sneaky to him, not really worthy of a proper animal. Many

had poisoned fangs. Others could lay their eggs in, or shoot
them into, the bodies of other insects, so that the eggs would
hatch there and devour their hosts from within. One of these
creatures even tried spraying its eggs at Nonesuch, but they
bounced off his scales. He ate his opponent, and its eggs as
well, and resolved to grow no smaller. Let the insects fight
each other, in their own way: he would stick to foes with more
dignity! There were quite enough of these now.

All the changes in his life did not involve bloody adven-
tures . Ward had gone out among the birds that this new green
bird- as they thought-was not to be trifled with, but that he
was not dangerous if you let him alone. He shone so in the
sunlight that many of the more agile birds began to play with
him, flying close and round about him, as if he were really one
of their own. On one especially gusty day, when fine, stinging
dust filled the air. Nonesuch realized the true difference between
the birds and himself. He had taken shelter from the dust in
the lee of an exposed boulder at the top of a steep hill. The
birds stayed in the air; the wind whirled them about like dried
leaves or snowflakes. Such light, fragile creatures they were!
They seemed to move almost as fast as the dust grains, so that
the dust hardly stung them. Whereas he, a dragon, however
small, was so much more solid and heavy, even in the air. He
was not the air's plaything: he made his own way through it.
He might envy the birds' ease and lightness, but he also thought
of them condescendingly: of course they were light, they had
no treasure.

Then a voice spoke within him: Neither have you!
Nonesuch stayed motionless on the rock. while the light
birds soared crazily in the tumultuous wind. They whirled
high above him, watching with interest this shiny spot of
green on the rock- for the sun had come out though the wind

59

was as high as ever-this spot that didn't budge for hours, as
if it too were stone.

What was a treasure, after all? Nonesuch asked himself.
Though his body didn't move, his mind leaped and searched
the past. He pictured the treasure back in the cave: all the piles
of coins, the jewels, the halberds inlaid with gold and ivory.
When he was very young indeed, when he had first realized
that this large pile of objects, not all of them beautiful, was a
"treasure," something to be kept and increased, he had
wondered why. He remembered, now, his grandmother talk-
ing to his grandfather, the Warm ofGrimsby Bog, who was so
full of his dinner of a herd of prize white cows that he could
scarcely keep his eyes open. "What do we want it for?" his
grandmother asked. • 'We treasure the things because humans
do. And how did tfieyget it? Better not to ask. Why should we
want it?"

This woke the Worm up. "It's treasure, my dear," he
said, mildly but firmly, and fell asleep again.

Then Nonesuch heard his grandmother mutter, "The worst
of it is, he's right! A dragon without treasure has part of his
soul missing: his heart is hollow." These words seemed to
resonate in Nonesuch's heart now, though he was sure his
grandmother had added in a very low voice,' 'And we care for
these things only because humans do!"

Nonesuch stirred on his rock as he remembered these
words; above, the birds twittered excitedly. He thought he had
rid himself of his family's treasure easily when he became
small. But apparently he had not lost the need of one. He could
not go back to the old treasure again: he could not bring it back
to the surface, and if he did, he could never guard it. But the
thoughts of the treasure, and his family lying among it, brought
him back to the cavern again that windy evening.

60

It was no longer empty. Firelight flickered on the arched
stone walls. Smoke drifted out of the entrance; Nonesuch flew
through it and perched on a dark ledge. A herd of sheep
covered the cavern's floor like a dirty black-and-white carpet.
Against the pile of stones by the old entrance to the tunnel two
shepherds sat over a fire.' 'Fetch us another log, Dickon,'' the
larger one said.

The smaller man reached over and pulled a tog from beneath
a sleeping ewe, who baa'd indignantly. "They say a dragon
lived here once," he remarked. "And watched over his
treasure."

The larger shepherd lifted a leather bottle to his mouth.
"A likely story!" he said at last. "He never would have left
it."

The sheep baa'd together, as if they agreed with these
words. Nonesuch looked at the whole sleepy crew of them,
wondering if a few bites would stir them up. It hardly seemed
worth it. He rose and flew out into the night.

Soon he was high in the air, as high as when he had been a
great dragon silhouetted against the moon. He flew in one
wide circle at first, keeping the cavern in view by the glow of
firelight in its entrance. When the trees hid this from sight, he
continued, high and lonely in the air. In the dawn, after a long
and weary flight, he was perched on a tree in the beech forest.
He must be above the pool, he thought, though he could only
see a small crescent of brown water. Possibly it was a rain
puddle, left from the wild boars' battles. The pool must be
elsewhere, not far away. Nonesuch waited until full daylight
to descend. Even then he did not go to the pool at once, but
skimmed here and there in descending sweeps, as if to recon-
noitre a land that would be his new home. AH night, as he
flew, he had thought of the wise turtle's wish that he guard the

61

pool. A year had passed since he had last visited it. Now it
must be time to stay there: to eat and grow and keep the pool
and its inhabitants from harm.

But when he saw, unmistakably, the hawthorn bush at the
pool's rim, Nonesuch knew it could never again be as it was.
There were gaps in the vegetation on either side of the bush.
Two strange brown sticks projected in the air. These, when he
flew closer, proved to be the hind legs of a dead horse. The
horse's body lay in the pool, atop the body of its rider, of
whom only the legs could be seen. Green and blue trousers,
red leather on the stirrup, and long pointed golden shoes, now
all sadly discolored, proclaimed that the rider had been a gallant
squire.

Other things had been tossed in the pool, too: a tent, also
slashed, one banner still waving brightly above the water; two
broken, submerged barrels; a wagon wheel; a small ladder; a
coil of scorched rope. These objects covered the surface of the
pond; much of the water had drained off elsewhere. Nonesuch
flew quickly over the ruined pond, glad at least not to see signs
of the turtle or of any other living creature, except for a host of
buzzing flies. There must be some story behind all these objects,
he knew, but it seemed hardly worth while to learn it.

A quick spot of sunlight flashed at him from high in the
trees. It was a butterfly, descending to see him closer.

Nonesuch perched on the hawthorn bush, which hardly
stirred beneath his weight. The butterfly circled round him ten
times, then lighted on a thorn. "Oh, you are a dragon!" it said
in a shrill, melancholy voice.

"Why did you come?" Nonesuch asked.

"Only to see you," the butterfly replied. "We don't visit
the pool now. Once, they said a dragon had come and would
come again to protect it. For a moment I thought it was you,

62        ____________________________

come too late. But you're much smaller than the last dragon. I
never even heard of such a small dragon as you are now.'' The
butterfly began to circle higher and the spirit in its voice lifted.
' 'Come with me to the meadow; we live there now,'' it invited
Nonesuch.

But the thought of playing among the butterflies tempted
Nonesuch only for a moment: they were such creatures of the
air that to live with them would be like turning into air himself.
He must leave the pond, and the forest as well, and never
think of returning. There was no reason now to come back.

He thanked the butterfly politely, and flew away; the
butterfly accompanied him to the tops of the beeches before
turning back. Nonesuch continued out of the forest in a rising
wind that sped him along. He was very careful not to look
down, lest he see any trace of where the pool had been.



CHAPTER   VI

BROTHER
THE OPHILUS

65

HE WIND HAD RISEN WHILE
NONESUCH WAS IN THE I-

forest. Now it was stronger than he had
ever remembered it. Even when he was still
among the trees it reached for him, blowing
him near the branches. He flew above the
highest trees and spread his wings to ride
along the moving air. A swarm of torn,
flying leaves followed him in a green cloud
as he was blown out of the forest and over
country he had never seen before. Without
any effort of his own, he passed over a
small village that did not seem to have been
damaged in the human wars. The wind was
lifting the thatch from the roofs. One wattled
house was on fire, burning brightly, as if
the flames wanted to escape into the sky
too.

The wind never slackened. Nonesuch
was carried over a leafless apple orchard,
where bright apples were being blown from
the boughs. He flew past the round tower
of a squat castle. He soared over a group of
low gray stone buildings surrounded by a
lower gray stone wall. The last, and tallest,
of the buildings, still within the wall, was a
narrow but lofty church. The wind paused
suddenly, then with a quick puff deposited
Nonesuch gently on the glass of a high
window at the end of the church's nave.

He had landed between two upright strips of stone on a
slab of colored glass, held in place by strips of iron. The wind's
pressure increased again, forcing him against the dark glass.
He pushed himself back, but the wind would not let him fly
away. Then Nonesuch realized he was not alone on the window:

across the next rib of stone was a small brown bat, upside
down and apparently fast asleep. Nonesuch could see its little
pig's snout and sharp white teeth. The bat, who was breathing
quite peacefully, seemed fastened to the glass by the pressure
of the wind. Then, when the wind dropped again, he started to
slide down. He reached out a winged arm, somehow seized
one of the stone ribs, worked himself down to a crack where
the glass had come away from its metal frame, and squeezed
through. In a moment, Nonesuch also flapped down to the
hole in the window and followed the bat inside the church.

The swift clouds that had covered the sun until now sud-
denly broke away from it. On the inner side of the window,
Nonesuch found himself flying in a wonderful world of light.
Colors shone all around him. In astonishment he flew away
from the window until the spots of color that composed it
gathered themselves together.

The window was made up of twelve oblong frames, each
of which contained a man in a long robe. Wide gold rings
circled their heads. One of the men held a great gold key in his
hand. Another man held an open book, another a fisherman's
net, yet another a carpenter's square. Each figure had solemn
features and dark, shining eyes, which seemed to look directly
at him.

Nonesuch hovered in the air, staring back at these twelve
men. Then he felt the emptiness of the church behind him and
turned away from the window to look down the nave, the

66

main aisle. It was dim, shadowy, with rays of colored light
entering from other windows at the sides. At the far end, past
the altar, a circular rose window filled the upper wall. None-
such flew towards it, over the empty benches of the congre-
gation, and lighted on a high wrought-iron screen that sepa-
rated the choir and altar from the rest of the church. On each
side of the choir were two rows of seats, separated by richly
carved partitions. Before every three seats was a small table,
on which lay what seemed to be a pack of brown leather, about
two feet square.

A distant bell rang; another nearer one answered it. There
was the sound of feet. From the far end of the church a double
file of monks, each in a long black cloak, paced down the
nave, chanting more or less together. They passed under the
screen, and each took his place in the choir. A few peasants
entered the church behind them.

While the monks continued to sing, a short and rotund
monk climbed the stairs to a pulpit on the right side of the
screen. Nonesuch realized that if any of these monks looked
up, they could see him. He quietly sidled to the edge of the
screen, which ended at one of the columns that supported the
roof, leaped out, and. in the shelter of the column, flew up to
its capital, a wide stone platform two-thirds of the way up.
Above this platform the column soared upward, dividing into
many ribs of white stone that flowed up to the roof like a stone
fountain. Nonesuch gazed up in wonder: the spread-out stone
seemed to float there, as if the roof were holding it in the air.

A voice spoke directly at his feet.' 'It's called 'fan vaulting'.
One of the characteristics of Perpendicular Gothic, if you'd like
to know. Human beings are often as much affected by it as you
are."

67

Nonesuch had leaped into the air as soon as the voice
spoke. He flew away from the column, then turned and hovered
just below the capital. The lower part of the platform was
decorated with carved stone faces that looked down into the
church. Between the faces were carved bunches of grapes and
plums. The brown bat was there too, hanging upside down,
his feet gripping a carved branch, slowly chewing on a fat
moth.

The bat swallowed, licked his lips, and looked up at the
dragon.' 'When the light from the Heaven window strikes the
stone fruit, the insects think it's real. See." He pointed with
one wing, and Nonesuch saw that a shaft of glorious blue light
from a high window had made the stone plum glow like a real
one.

"But I have to be careful," the bat added. "On other
columns some of the fruit has insects carved as well. I've
chipped my teeth on them."

Below them, the chanting stopped for a moment. As if on
a signal, every third monk in the choir bent over, seized the
corner of one of the packs of brown leather, and flung it back.
In an instant, eight large books, each four feet wide and two
feet high, lay open before the monks in the choir. Three read
from each book as they chanted the responses.

Nonesuch had never seen or heard of a book before. It
seemed to him as if light were shining out of the pale vellum
pages. He looked at the rich black letters and the decorations
between them with deep attention. To see them more closely,
he flew below the capital, peeking round its end to get a better
view.

The bat opened one eye and looked out at him. Nonesuch
landed on the top of the capital again. • 'If you're really interested

68

in such things," the bat told him, "you should go to the
Scriptorium."                                    ^S^
"The Scriptorium?" Nonesuch asked,           i^afe
From the Latin scribere, to write," the bat explained.
"The room where books are made. Only Brother Theophilus
works there now. He's the next to the last one on the right.''
Nonesuch looked and saw a monk, taller than most of the
others, with red hair poking out of his cowl, who was running
his finger over the page of the book before him, an action that
made the monks on either side shake their heads in disapproval.
' 'But he'll be here a while yet,'' the bat continued.' "There's a
hole under the window by the fifth column on the right-hand
side.'' He nodded down the nave.' "That lets you out over the
roof of the cloisters at one comer. The Scriptorium is under the
diagonal corner." The bat closed his eyes again.

Nonesuch hesitated a moment. Then, while the monks'
chanting continued in the choir, he flew where the bat had told
him, high in the ceiling, along the white vaulting, down by a
red-and-gold window, then through a hole in a broken pane.
The cloister was an open square
surrounded by a roofed passage.
At the opposite comer was ano-
ther window that opened into a
white-walled room.




The first thing that Nonesuch
noticed about the room when he
flew through the window was
the amount of light; it seemed
brighter than the open air. All
the windows were of clear glass,
and there was a wide skylight in
the ceiling. On a table in one

69

comer, well lighted by the skylight and by windows on either
side, was a book. Not so big as the great books in the choir:

each page was only as long as a man's forearm from elbow to
fingertip, and broad in proportion.

It was not a finished book but one in preparation: the
pages had not yet been bound together. Each was laid loosely
in a leather binder on one side of the desk. A single page, next
to the pile on the binder, was still incomplete. On the desk
were small pots of paint, mortars for grinding the different
colors, pungent oils, and a container with dark brushes. Under
the disturbing smell of oil in which the colors were suspended,
Nonesuch could tell immediately that one of the pots contained
real gold powder.

But the images on the top page in the binder and on the
unfinished page drew his attention more closely. The middle
part of each page was covered with black letters. In the wide
margins around the text were more familiar shapes. A vine
started in the lower right-hand comer and spread all around
the page, its branches meeting again at the upper left-hand
comer. Small tendrils of the vine ran right into the text, marking
certain letters with tiny red and gold flowers. Away from the
text, the vine became alive with larger flowers in fantastic
shapes and colors. Here and there faces peered out of the vine:

unicorns, gnomes, mischievous monkeys, solemn toads. From
one leaf a tiny bat hung, head down. In the blank spaces away
from the vine, bright butterflies fluttered, looking as if in a
moment they would fly away from the pages.

Nonesuch had seen all this while hovering above the page.
Now he landed on the table, next to the unfinished page.
Clouds passed rapidly outside, bringing moving shadows
through the window, and the deep-black letters seemed to be
moving too. They bent towards each other, as if they were

whispering together. Nonesuch became so absorbed in watching
these letters that he did not notice that Brother Theophflus,
the tall red-haired monk, had returned.

He was carrying an on lamp, which he carefully hooked on
a chain that hung over the center of the table. In doing so, he
leaned over, so that when Nonesuch turned at the shadow that
suddenly covered him he found himself hemmed in by the
man's body, his wide shoulders and his long black robe. It was
impossible to Qy up and away!

The small dragon crouched down, looking for a way out,
perhaps a spring sideways. His eyes lingered on the page
beneath him for a last time; he saw a wise turtle's head that he
had not noticed before; it seemed to be winking at him.

"A dragon!" the tall man exclaimed. "A true small
dragon!" He stretched out his hand. Nonesuch drew back his
head with a warning hiss. The man's hand was long and
scholarly; white, except where it was stained with color. Even
so, it could easily have crushed the tiny dragon, and the man
realized this immediately. He withdrew his hand gently and
sat down, gazing at Nonesuch with large, shining eyes.

Then, moving very cautiously, he took up a brush, dipped
it in green paint, and sketched a small dragon, less than one-
quarter the size of Nonesuch himself, in a space between two
vines. Making sure that his movements did not alarm the
dragon, he picked up another brush, then another; he tipped
in a bluish tint to match the edge of Nonesuch's wings, gold
for his eyes, and a hint of red where his belly showed. He laid
his brushes down and looked carefully from the dragon to his
portrait of him. "It's not so beautiful," he remarked sadly,
"but how could it be? I always wanted to see a dragon and
now, at last, one has come.'' He crossed himself, then pushed
his chair back from the table. "Go in peace," he told None-
such gently, "but come again."

71

Though he knew there was no danger, Nonesuch thought
it proper to leave now. He flew out of the Scriptorium, back
through the church, which was empty again, to the column by
the choir screen. The bat still hung there, motionless. When
Nonesuch landed on the capital above him, the bat spoke
without opening his eyes.' 'Brother Theophilus is a scholar and
a scribe. I visit him from time to time. When he prepares his
colors, it's my duty to keep insects away.'' The bat licked his
lips thoughtfully. "He acknowledges my function, and even
set a bracket in the wall for me to hang on.''
"He painted you too," Nonesuch told the bat.
' 'Did he, now?'' After a time the bat remarked,' 'I hope it
doesn't bring me visitors.'' His legs tensed so that he hung a
little higher. "Could you tell if it was me, particularly?"

Nonesuch had never seen a bat so close before; this one
looked like any other. "The picture was so small that I really
couldn't see," he replied.

The bat relaxed. "Good. I prefer the quiet, anonymous
life. You are happier if no one notices you at all. Though it will
be good if one of us is in the book.''

"He painted me too," Nonesuch admitted.
The bat opened his eyes and looked thoughtfully at the
small dragon for some time. "Well, I should imagine so," he
replied. "One doesn't see your sort every day. In fact, this is
the first time for me as well. Are you very young? You don't
seem so."

"I was large and grew smaller," Nonesuch told him.
The bat thought this over. "It was probably a good thing
to do," he said at last. "If you were too big to get into our
church, you could never see the Apostle window there" —he
nodded at the twelve upright glass figures — "or the rose
window. There are some carvings behind the choir stalls that
are absolutely unique. I'm sure the humans can't see them at

72

all. The carver made them, so he must have wanted someone
to see them, perhaps only you and I and the beetles; though
naturally we don't all have the same kind of interest in the
carvings."

The bat sighed, as if weary of so much talk,'and closed his
eyes again. In a moment he began to breathe deeply, fast
asleep. Nonesuch flew away from the column and explored
the upper reaches of the church. He chose as his own resting-
place a capital on which three smiling dragon's heads had
been carved. There he had a good view of the two great windows
at either end of the nave, as well as of the choir with its stalls
and books. From it, he could fly to the Scriptorium without
being seen, even when the church was not empty.

He and the bat never had the church to themselves for
long. There were services throughout the day and one late at
night. For this one, every fourth monk carried in a dim lamp.
When the chanting stopped, and a long sermon was being
preached, a lantern went here and there among the choir
stalls: one of the monks was making certain that none of the
others had fallen asleep.

Whenever the bell rang for services. Brother Theophilus
joined the other monks. Between times, he returned to his
book. Nonesuch often flew out of the church to the Scripto-
rium as soon as the service ended. He would wait on a deep
window ledge until Brother Theophilus sat down; then he flew
to a shelf near the monk's table. Finally he perched on an unlit
oil lamp that hung directly above the table.

Though the monk never looked up, he knew where None-
such was. When the little dragon landed on the lamp, Brother
Theophilus would finish whatever he was painting, and then
paint another dragon, or, rather, a part of a dragon. He would
paint a wing with its individual scalloping, just emerging from

73

behind other figures; a head peeping out of the bushes; or a
tail flying away. Soon there was at least one dragon on every
page. Only their colors varied. Some were red, some gold,
several green, one deep-black with red eyes.

In time, Brother Theophilus began to talk to the little
dragon. For a while he seemed to be speaking to himself.
Nonesuch had seen his lips moving silently before, when Brother
Theophilus thought he was quite alone; and sometimes he
might laugh, almost as silently. But now Nonesuch realized
that the monk's words were directed at him.

At first Brother Theophilus spoke of the book he was
writing and illuminating. It was a "Book of Hours," which
contained prayers appropriate for each hour of the day. Though
the words on each page were holy, the pictures that accompa-
nied them often had little or nothing to do with these words.
Rather, as Brother Theophilus explained, since the words came
from God, it was permitted to adorn them with any aspect of
His world. Other Books of Hours that have come down to us
show a detailed picture of the life of their time. You can find
ploughmen and weavers in the pages of such books, wood-
cutters and stonemasons, splendid knights, bright ladies,
ships and soldiers, scenes of battle and scenes of peace.

Thus far, Nonesuch had only seen two pages of Brother
Theophilus's book. In the week that had now passed since the
dragon's arrival, the monk had finished the page that None-
such had first seen and had started on another one. The rest of
the pages rested in their loose cover. Whenever he had finished
for the day and all the pictures he had painted were quite dry,
Brother Theophilus would close this cover, which was of leather,
adorned with four blue enamelled crosses, and store the cover
and pages in a heavy black box that lay at the back of his
work table. This box had been inlaid with strips of iron by

74

a clever metalworker, so that it seemed encased in an end-
less net of iron. The heavy lock was inlaid in the wood too. A
light chain attached the box to the table. Whenever Brother
Theophilus closed the lock on its contents of precious pages,
he would remark, as if to himself: ' 'Now my treasure is shut
up again." These words made Nonesuch shiver strangely.

In those days, when most books were still made by hand,
and when many required years of skilled work, they were rare
and costly objects. Noblemen counted their wealth in books
owned as well as in land, flocks, manors, and gold. The books
Nonesuch had seen in the choir represented part of the abbey's
wealth. There were thirty more in the Abbot's library, making
this a rich abbey indeed. But the book that Brother Theophilus
was making was not for the abbey's use.

When all the pages were completed, when all were bound
together inside their cover, this particular Book of Hours was
to be an important part of the marriage portion of Lady Blanche,
the youngest daughter of Hungerford Castle, by which None-
such had been blown before he fetched up against the window
of the church of this Abbey of Oddfields.

Once Nonesuch, motionless on his lamp as if he had been
an ornament, saw Lady Blanche herself. She was tall, just
turned eighteen. Her eyes shone; her cheeks still glowed from
the ride to the abbey. She had persuaded the young page who
had accompanied her to see to a horseshoe, which might be
loose, and talk to the blacksmith's pretty daughter, while she,
Lady Blanche, entered the Scriptorium alone.

She was delighted with the progress of her book. As Brother
Theophilus turned over the finished pages, she exclaimed over
each detafl. She was properly impressed by the religious scenes
that appeared in the first pages: Christ walking on the waves
of the Sea of Galilee, with a bemused seagull perched on his

75

shoulder; Job sitting among the ashes, watched by his three
friends, a sad-eyed mouse and two black crickets; Lot's wife
just on the point of looking back at the burning Cities of the
plain. But she expressed most enthusiasm at the more recent
pages with their animals among the vines. "They might be
alive!'' she marvelled.' 'How can you bear to close the pages
on them, good brother?"

' 'Creatures in my book can live without light and air, my
lady," Brother Theophilus replied, smiling gently. "They come
to life again whenever the pages are opened."

Lady Blanche also smiled. Then she drew in her breath
sharply.' "There is a dragon hiding here! And here is another!''

• 'Very small ones, my lady,'' Brother Theophilus replied.
He did not look at Nonesuch, The tiny dragon shivered on his
lamp, which swung a little, as if in a breeze.

"Bigger ones would hardly fit on your pages," Lady
Blanche commented. "I have often heard of dragons," she
added thoughtfully, "but never seen one. Perchance they are
all only a dream."

"I hardly think so, my lady."

"In any case, they've kept away from us; as have the
wars. Perhaps we should be equally thankful for both." Lady
Blanche turned over a couple of loose pages in the cover. On
one was a wedding scene, a peasant wedding with the bride
and groom marching proudly at the heads of separate proces-
sions. She sighed. "My bridegroom still has not come. He
may be far away on other business.''

Lady Blanche's future bridegroom, whom she had only
met a few times, was often away on other business. He was
Sir Ambrose, the lord of what had once been Grimsby Castle.
He was now of sufficient importance in the great world of
human affairs to be considered worthy of an alliance with the

76

ancient but almost bankrupt Hungerford Castle. Lady Blanche
had been greatly impressed by the stories of his energy and his
rapid rise at the royal court. At their brief meetings in the
presence of her parents, she had found her suitor curiously
distant, though always polite, and so refined that she almost
thought it strange he could do so wen in this rough world. She
had been distressed by the look of pain on her father's face,
though she supposed this was because he was soon to lose
her, his favorite chfld. All betrothals must be like this, she
thought.

"Other business indeed, my lady," Brother Theophilus
replied.

Later that day, when he was alone, except for Nonesuch,
who had flown down to the table from his lamp to look more
closely at the book. Brother Theophihis began to speak of the
nature of dragons. Many considered them completely wicked
beasts, he said, but not he. If they were, surely God would not
have made them so beautiful. He must have a purpose for
them.

In other lands, he said, they were called guardian spirits.
They guarded springs, or lakes, or their own treasure. At
these words. Nonesuch flew oS the table, circled the room,
and perched on a high shelf above Brother Theophilus's work-
table, twitching his tail from side to side. The monk looked at
him keenly. "Is it possible that you understand my words?"
he asked. "Can it be that I am not only talking to myself, as I
do so often?'' He looked long at the little dragon. • 'Well, I will
imagine you can understand me," Brother Theophilus said at
last. The bell rang for Vespers. He sighed, closed his book
carefully, and locked it in its box.

CHAPTER   VII

INTO THE BOX

79

S THE DAYS PASSED, NONE-
^ SUCH CONTINUED TO WATCH

Brother Theophflus at work. The monk was
the only scribe in the abbey at present. In
other abbeys, whole groups of writers and
illustrators worked busily on sacred manus-
cripts. Perhaps they knew, or felt, that soon
their work would no longer be needed. A
few years earlier, Johann Gutenberg had
printed his Bible and introduced printing to
Europe. In time, books were to become
accessible to all, but their loving manufac-
ture by hand would cease.

Brother Theophflus, however, worked
on in a tranquil spirit. He was quite satis-
fied to do his beautiful task as well as he
could. He did not mind being alone. "We
are a jealous lot,'' he told Nonesuch.' 'Oth-
ers would certainly comment on my work;

they might say that afl these dragons have
no place in the text among the holy words,
but only in the margins where more liberty
is permitted."

While he spoke. Brother Theophflus had
been painting yet another dragon. This one
was at the top of the page. and to see it
more closely without disturbing the painter,
Nonesuch left the lamp and flew to the shelf
above the side of the table. The new dragon

was unlike any that Nonesuch had seen, either in the book or
in real life. It had a long, flexible body, a round face with long
whiskers, and a look of deep wisdom and benevolence.

"I have seen such a beast in a beautiful scroll that a
learned traveller brought from far in the east, from the land of
the Emperor of China," Brother Theophflus said. He went on
to speak of other Oriental dragons. People in their lands often
worshipped them as gods, who brought storms and sunshine,
rain and drought. Perhaps, he smiled, they represented the
arbitrary powers of nature, signs from the Almighty to humans
that they should never take anything for granted.

Suddenly he stopped talking. Footsteps sounded outside
the door, and in an instant the Abbot entered. Nonesuch, who
had not had time to fly away, remained frozen on his shelf.

' 'Are you talking to yourself again. Brother Theophflus?''
the Abbot asked.' 'Recently you seem to be doing so more and
more." The Abbott bent over the table, as far as his ample
belly would permit. "Excellent!" he sighed. "Beautiful! How
you praise the Creator's works!" He straightened up. "But
what is this?" he cried. "An image of a dragon?" He was
looking directly at Nonesuch, who had not stirred a whisker.
The Abbot moved as close as he could and leaned forward,
pressing his belly against the table. "Offinejade, witheyesof
pure gold!'' he exclaimed.' 'Where could you have found such
a statue? I have never seen it before in our Treasury.''

"It is not really a holy object, Father Abbot," Brother
Theophflus replied.

' "True,'' said the Abbot.' 'But it is a very beautiful object,
wherever it came from."

The bell rang for Lauds then; the two monks departed,

80

and Nonesuch was able to fly back to the heights of the church,
where he reported the Abbot's words to the bat.

' 'Yes,'' the bat told him. ' "The rule of our Order is much
less austere than it once was. When St. Benedict founded us,
only a few holy objects were permitted. But now we have
become much more of the world. Our rooms for noble guests
are better-furnished than most of those in the guests' homes.
Not all of the statues in these rooms are of saints, by any
means. It wasn't surprising if the Abbot, who is a tolerant
man, thought Brother Theophilus had a statue of a dragon for
his own pleasure. You should see some of the pictures on his
walls."

The bat, who had spoken while hanging upside down,
peered keenly at the vault above him. Three black-beetles
were crawling up a curved granite rib in a single file. The bat
released his hold, turned in the air, flew up swiftly, and cleaned
the beetles off the stone. He returned to his perch and hung
there, chewing thoughtfully.

' 'All the other bats roost in the great cedar of Lebanon in
the cloister,'' he told Nonesuch at length.' "They wonder why
I choose to stay here in the church. They don't realize how
quiet it is, between services, how good and varied is the diet.
Air currents and the light of the rose window seem to attract a
particularly tasty land of moth. Then there are the death-
watch beetles in the stalls. They'd do even more damage if I
weren't here to keep them under control. After all, it's my
church."

The bat began to talk of the church's history, but had
hardly got past its beginnings as a pagan shrine before he fell
asleep again, still hanging upside down.

In the next few days Nonesuch, who was by no means
content to stay inside the church at all times, learned much
more about life in the abbey. He perched in the cloister, watching

81

the monks parade solemnly round and round. From a shelf in
the well-stocked pantry, he watched them at meals, at the
wooden trestles of the refectory, all eating well and silently,
except for the monk assigned each day to read to the others.
From high in the air, he saw the monks at work in the wheat
and oat fields, finally gathering in the harvest. He saw the
work of the bakehouse and the brewhouse, the saddlery and
the cobbler's shop.

A few of the monks commented on the strange green bird
that had appeared recently. Only old Brother Angelicus, who
waved pigeons away from the herb gardens, blinked his milky-
blue eyes and remarked,' 'We have a dragon among us.'' The
other monks smiled kindly at him. Thereafter, even those who
had wondered at the shape of the green bird said nothing
about it, for fear of being thought as witless as Brother
Angelicus.

You may think that such a life would be too quiet, too dull
for a dragon, however small. Nonesuch did not find it so. He
made himself the protector of the grounds. Several rabbits,
who had grown fat on the abbey's excellent green beans,
carrots, and celery, found their quiet feeding disturbed by
what they took to be an obnoxious insect. Finally they went
back to scavenging in the gardens of the peasants, who,
however, were much more vigilant than the monks. The Abbot's
pet poodle became more sober, kept to the gravel paths, and
completely abandoned his favorite game of scratching up the
radish beds. Nonesuch even tried to keep the wasps away
from the juicy pears, just ripening now on the north wall.
There were so many of these determined insects that his
raids on them made little difference. Still, the monks remarked
to each other that the wasps were especially restive this year,
and more apt to take ofiense.

Nonesuch saw people other than monks on his rounds. In

82

the past, the abbey had been able to supply all the skilled
workers it needed from its own ranks, but no longer. A small
group of weavers from a nearby village now furnished them
with cloth. A tailor had set up shop almost in the shadow of
the walls, for the abbey and its guests, who often needed their
clothes mended.

A skilled mason had been employed to repair one of the
outer walls of the cloister. With his wife and two sons, he lived
in a caravan beside the village inn, a stone's throw from the
abbey walls. The mason, known as Supple Will, was also a
clever juggler who sometimes performed for the inn's guests.
Nonesuch saw him before a small crowd by a bonfire one
evening, maintaining an ellipse of three golden rings in the air.
The little dragon flew through the smoke, sniffed at one of the
rings at the apex of its flight, immediately realized that it
was only gilded tin, and flew on to perch on a branch.

' "There is a dragon!'' a young voice cried. Nonesuch looked
down and saw a boy staring up eagerly through the flames.

"Ha! More of your fancies, Simon!" The speaker was a
broad young man in red trousers that bulged and shone in the
firelight. "Father's foolish tricks must have made your mind
wander too.'' He gestured at the juggler's flying golden rings,
then added in a sour voice, "He's more interested in the look
of his precious toys than in the money they bring.''

"That's likely true, Hubert," the juggler said cheerfully,
adding another ring to those in the air and catching yet another
on his forehead, where it shone like a diadem. The onlookers
applauded and tossed some coins on the ground. The juggler
bowed, skilfully kicked the coins up into the air and caught
them in his hands without interrupting the flight of the shining
rings.

The broad young man sniffed and said, "Maybe you'll ask
the dragon to guard your gold. Father."

83

"I'd be grateful to him, Hubert," the juggler answered
mildly, catching his rings one by one and dropping them in his
pouch. ' "Though he wouldn't find it a hard task.''

Hubert snorted. "Dragon, indeed! There are no dragons
here now that Sir Ambrose is keeping order. They'd be afraid
to come."

' 'He brings monsters of his own,'' the juggler said, but so
low that only Nonesuch heard him.

Although he realized that the juggler was a poor man,
Nonesuch felt an unaccountable interest in him and his family.
He found a comer of the wan, choked with vines, where he
could hide and watch the juggler at work. Supple Will fitted the
stones together carefully, breaking off small pieces to fill in the
gaps, applying the mortar with patient skill. His young son,
Simon, worked with him, seriously learning a mason's craft.
Sometimes, as Nonesuch watched them through the vines, he
saw the boy's eyes looking in his direction.

Whenever his father could spare him, Simon walked in the
cloister. He stared hungrily at the faces and the strange beasts
carved on the columns. The boy had found a stone-carver's
chisel somewhere, and a crude mallet. He cut away at scraps
of stone, forming them into shapes that so far only he under-
stood. His father watched him closely. When Simon carved a
sinuous shape just emerging from the stone in each of three
squared blocks that were to crown the wall, he remarked, ' 'It
seems as if there were dragons rising out of the stone, my son.
But if we put them on the wall, they will soon be covered with
vines."

"That's how they should be. Father," Simon replied.

The juggler shook his head thoughtfully. The same day, he
set the three stones in a row atop the wall. Later, he spoke to
one of the stone-cutters who was repairing frost damage to a
cornice on the south side of the church. He volunteered to set

84

up scaffolding for him if, at the same time, his younger son
could work with him as an apprentice.

Hubert, the older son, sometimes gave his father a hand;

but when the work became heavy, he explained that he could
not help them further. He always wore'his finest clothes,
which he should certainly not make dirty with sweat and
mortar: he had to make a good impression on prospective
employers.

As the bat had remarked, the abbey was by no means
separated from the world. It contained several rooms where
travelling nobles and wealthy men might stay a night or a
week. Hubert thought that one of these should be willing to
employ a clever young fellow like himself, who would not
scruple to take on any kind of work. He stole his mother's pies
to bribe the stewards of passing lords. He opened the gates of
peasants' pig-pens so that the lords' soldiers could dine well
round their night fires. He always carried a flagon of wine to
grease the gullet of any likely serving-man. So far, he had
received plenty of praise and encouragement, but nothing more
definite.

Then, one day after Hubert watched his father and Simon
work on the wall for a full hour, he informed them, smiling in a
superior fashion, that he was virtually certain of a position in
Sir Ambrose's personal guard. Sir Ambrose himself was now
visiting Hungerford Castle on business connected with his
betrothal: some minor detail of the contract that needed to be
set right. Sir Ambrose was attentive to the smallest detail,
Hubert said proudly. More than this, his personal secretary
had passed the night only steps away, in one of the guest
rooms of Oddfields Abbey. The secretary pretended he had
done this to give less trouble at the castle where his lord was
lodging; but really, Hubert said with a wink, it was to keep an
eye on the surroundings, to learn as much as possible of the

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sentiment of the local people. Sir Ambrose was well aware
that knowledge was power. He had learned that men visiting a
monastery spoke even more freely among themselves and to
the monks than they would do in a tavern. The secretary, a
subtle, smiling man, who turned every word into a joke, knew
how to inspire confidences and to collect information that his
master might use.

Nonesuch got a good look at Sir Ambrose's secretary when
he came, as if by chance, to visit the Scriptorium. He looked at
the book that Brother Theophilus was making, the book that
one day would become his master's property through Lady
Blanche. He spoke pious, appreciative words, all the while
stroking his short beard; his eyes shone gaily on the pages as
if counting up their worth. Then he went away to leave an
offering in the poor box of the church, leaving behind also a
whiff of the perfume with which his beard was scented.

Brother Theophilus had spoken little during his visit; this
was quite different from his usual enthusiasm when others
came to see his book. He remained silent for a long time
afterwards. Then he took up his brushes and drew the figure of
a man, a neat, cold figure, richly but quietly dressed, standing
in the middle of a small grove of trees. Brother Theophilus
spent much time on this figure and on its surroundings. Finally
there was, beside the man himself, a number of humble small
forest creatures: a squirrel on a branch who seemed to be
holding himself especially still lest the man see him. There was
also a rabbit trembling beneath a bush; there was an owl in the
air, who did not seem to be in flight, as were all the other birds
Brother Theophilus had drawn. No, this owl hovered as if
frozen in place, as if he were happy to remain forever out of
the sight of the quiet, well-dressed man in the center of the
grove: a man who looked around him as though whatever his
eye fell on became his: the trees, the grass, the sky - and even

86




the words on the page outside the forest grove. Indeed, the
viewer felt that if the quiet man raised his head he would look
out of the page, around the room, or through the window into        te
the sky, and possess all of it.

Brother Theophilus looked for a long time at the page he
had made. "There are such men," he said at last. Then he
took a new brush and touched its tip with green. Warking
quickly and carefully, he painted a dragon, all green and gold,
at the back of the grove. By a trick of perspective, the dragon
seemed as large as the quiet man, or much larger. Brother
Theophilus touched its scales with red and deepened the gold
ofitseyes. "Where such men exist," hesaid, "there mustbe
a dragon too.'' He stood over his work until all the colors were
dry. Nonesuch, who had crouched motionless on his lamp at
the approach of Sir Ambrose's secretary, remained still. Finally,
Brother Theophilus laid this page on the others in the leather
cover, closed the cover, and locked all together in the box at
the back of the table.

In the next few days. Nonesuch, unwilling to go far from
his book, kept close to the church and the Scriptorium. He had
already seen signs of battle in the church, reminders of how
humans treated their own kind. Above the great altar and
scattered about the columns were statues of a man nailed to a
cross. In the chapels were pictures of soldiers thrusting swords
into babies and of a man, tied to a tree, being shot full of
arrows. There was even a painting of a winged man killing a
dragon. It had been a most unfair fight, Nonesuch thought.
The dragon was small, no larger than the man; it was probably
very young and inexperienced. It was lying on its back while
the man thrust his spear through it. Nonesuch decided that he
must have surprised the dragon while it was sleeping.

88

The air in the church hummed with a more exciting kind of
combat. The eyes of the Apostles, in their window, seemed to
command him to do mighty deeds. The faces of demons carved
on some of the columns radiated hatred out into the air; other
faces were mild and benevolent, but strong. As Nonesuch flew
among these faces, he felt that a battle between them was
raging about him. Was this a battle in which he might join?

In the Scriptorium, Brother Theophilus was still touching
up his picture of the quiet man in the grove of trees. The Abbot
saw him one day and put his broad, fleshy hand on the page.
"Who is that man?" he asked. Then he shook his head. "I
think I may know. He won't thank you for such a picture,
especially with that dragon in the forest measuring him with

its eyes."

"There are no more large dragons. Father Abbot," Brother

Theophilus said sadly.

"Who can be certain?'' the Abbot replied.
When Nonesuch flew back to his own capital in the church
again, he found the bat waiting for him. For the first time, the
bat seemed excited. * 'I need you tonight,'' he told Nonesuch.

It concerned the new carvings, portraying the raising of
Lazarus from the dead, that had been added to the north outer
wall of the choir. The bat loved this subject, and would hang
for hours from the choir screen to watch the carver at work.
He was a timid Flemish artist who spoke neither English nor
Latin. He had worked almost in complete silence; sometimes
he would sing to himself in his own language, in a low, sweet
voice. The carvings were done now. Soon they were to be
painted in bright colors, all but the wood-colored body of
Lazarus, which was to be covered with a clear lacquer. The bat
had learned this from the conversation of the monks, who did
not approve of unpainted holy objects. But the wood would

89

not be dry enough to paint for a month; meanwhile, the carver
was working elsewhere.

The fresh surface of the wood, the bat said, would certainly
attract boring beetles. He had been able to take care of these
by himself, thus far. But a greater danger threatened the
carvings. The other bats had told him of a half-wild cat in the
forest that would even climb their own cedar to hunt them. It
used to sharpen its claws on tree bark; by chance, its favorite
elm tree had been cut down for these new carvings, and it
wanted revenge. It had already scratched savagely at the
Flemish carver as he walked quietly around the abbey walls.
The cat had entered the church while he worked and watched
the carving from behind the altar with a sly, malign expression.
"He will attack the finished carvings themselves," the bat
whispered.

The bat wouldn't think of interfering with such a creature.
' 'He'd crunch me like lettuce,'' he told Nonesuch. • 'But you'd
make him think twice, small as you are. I think he'll come
tonight, very late."

This was indeed proper work for a dragon! The bat's
words made Nonesuch forget all his other thoughts of the
secret battles within the church. So it was that, long past
midnight, when a glorious moon painted the stones with soft
colors and tall shadows, Nonesuch sat, very still, at the foot of
a statue of a sorrowful king with a curly beard, in a niche in the
wall facing the carvings outside the choir, listening for the
pat-pat and whisper of the cat's paws.

But it was human feet that sounded nearby: heavy foot-
steps. A bulky body deposited itself on the altar steps, then
a lighter one passed by to the foot of the nearest choir seats
and sat down too. There was a smell of sweat, of rosewater,
and of smoke. Nonesuch recognized Hubert, the juggler's

90

son, and Greasy Clement, a tiny, ignorant man who did the
jobs no one else wanted. Greasy Clement cleaned out the kitchen
ovens, the spit, and the cauldrons, and his face and clothes
were always covered with grease from his mean tasks. Of all
the monks, only the Abbot and Brother Theophilus would talk
to him. Brother Theophilus let Greasy Clement watch him at
work, as long as he kept well away from afl the pages. Clement's
voice now showed that he was delighted that a person with as
much presence and apparent importance as Hubert would actu-
ally want his company.

Now he waited for the larger man to speak. Only after a
long time, in which Hubert's hoarse breathing showed that he
was too full of sorrow for words, did Clement venture timidly,
' 'Imagine him treating you that way!''

Hubert remained silent. He was remembering again how
Sir Ambrose's secretary had let his eyes stray over him thought-
fully, taking in his red trousers-which were, in fact, the very
reddest he owned, put on just for this interview—and remarking
in a regretful tone but with twinkling eyes, "Alas, my good
man, we could never find a uniform to suit you. You would not
be comfortable."

' 'Anything would do for me, my lord,'' Hubert had mum-
bled. He writhed as he thought of it now. He could almost hear
his own voice saying these words again.

The secretary had raised his eyebrows. "But 'anything'
will not do for Sir Ambrose. He is most particular that those
who are around him should be happy and well at ease. Those
who are not happy—for example, those who bulge out of their
uniforms - are of no use to him." And the secretary had
continued to smile until Hubert found he could do nothing but
back away.

He did not know, of course, that the secretary had never
once thought of him as a possible recruit for Sir Ambrose's

91

personal guard: a single glance had made that idea ridiculous.
Instead, the secretary had for a time considered Hubert for the
job of tax-collector. Sir Ambrose had adopted the practice of
employing collectors who were strangers to their district and
who made this unpopular profession still more so by their
gross manners. His most useful collectors would take the peas-
ants' cows, grain, and pigs. trample through their huts, slit
their straw mattresses, and laugh as if it were all a great joke.
Such treatment loosened people's tongues. It was a good device
to learn which ones were disaffected, so that later Sir Ambrose's
men could deal suitably with them. But after talking to Hubert
and watching him when he was not aware of it, the secretary
had decided he would not be capable even of this occupation:

he was just the kind of man, the secretary thought, whom the
peasants would delight in outwitting, let him bluster as he
would.

All these points of higher policy had been lost on Hubert.
"I wronged myself by aiming too low,'' he declared at last.' 'I
should have spoken to the master himself, not one of his
minions. I know where Sir Ambrose passes on his way to
church. I will stand where I can speak to him; where he cannot
avoid speaking to me."

Greasy Clement cleared his throat quietly.' "They say that
Sir Ambrose puts complete trust in his secretary. Even if you
could find a post with Sir Ambrose, you would not wish to
have an enemy even closer to him.''

"Once I was with Sir Ambrose, I would need fear no
enemy," Hubert declared. Then, after a time: "Still, he is a
malicious man, that secretary. One can see it in his eyes.''

Both men sat quiet. Greasy Clement spoke timidly.' "There
is work here, at the abbey, which avoids an malice.'' He handed
Hubert an apple from beneath his cloak.

"W)rk here!" Hubert cried. He looked down at the apple

92

and flung it from him. It bumped along the floor to the center
of the choir.' "To watch all the fat monks, who live as if they
were lords themselves!''

"Some make beautiful things," Greasy Clement offered.
' 'Do you mean the one with the book?'' Hubert demanded.
"It is a beautiful book; it has all the world in it."
"It is a wicked book. from what I hear,'' Hubert declared.
' "They say it has dragons in it."

"What is that sound?'' Greasy Clement's voice was fearful.
' "I heard a hiss, and the beating of wings!''

"You are a craven!" Then Hubert snickered. "Perhaps it
was a dragon itself; one of those great wicked beasts. I never
could stand the thought of them. It's lucky indeed that none
could come into this holy place."

Nonesuch settled down again, crouching tensely at the
foot of the sorrowful king.

Greasy Clement did not venture to contradict Hubert's
judgement of dragons. After a time, the fat man continued:

' 'But there are other things in that book, I'll wager. He paints
with gold, does he not?" He waited, staring before him, until
the small man shook his head and grunted in agreement.
"There 2s true gold on his pages," he admitted.
"True gold, you say!" Hubert retorted. "Who knows how
much of it is true gold? Gold can be mixed with other things; I
know this for a fact. Do you think my father's toys are gold,
though they shine so? No a whit of it!"

"But Brother Theophilus does get gold for his book,"
Greasy Clement objected. "I heard the treasurer and Brother
Aureus, the gold-beater, talk of it once.''

• 'Ah,'' said Hubert,' 'he got it indeed, but did he use it? Of
all the gold that was given him, how much is really in the
pages of his wicked book? There must be sheets of gold still,

93

between the pages, or stored in that box. Indeed, who knows
what else is in the box? Who keeps order in this place? That
wicked man, with his paints and brushes, and his dragons,
can wander where he will. All but I are too innocent to suspect
his real purpose! Did you not tell me that jewels were missing
from the Treasury?''

"They were only mislaid; they were found since."

"Who knows how many were lost and how many re-
turned?" Hubert retorted. "The rest of them must be in that
box, too." Then Hubert looked at Greasy Clement, who was
nodding his head in wonder. No one had ever said so many
words to him in his life. "In that box," Hubert repeated.

Nonesuch waited to hear no more. He had felt the hunger
in the fat man's voice as he spoke of the book and the box and
the riches he supposed they contained. It was a growing hunger,
not to be withstood. Very soon, he knew, the man would rise
and make his way to the Scriptorium.

The bells rang for Matins, the darkest hours before dawn.
Greasy Clement slid away without a sound before the monks
could enter the church. Hubert rose, too, ran stooping to the
wall. and slouched along it towards the back of the church as
die file of monks with their torches entered. One of them stooped
to pick up the apple from the floor. Nonesuch flew up, the
shortest way, taking no care to hide himself in flight. He heard
gasps below him, and an old voice that cried, "A dragon! I
have seen it!" But he did not pause. Out the hole in the
window he flew, out over the cloister and through the window
of the Scriptorium.

Brother Theophilus was in the room. He had worked late
the day before and had left a page to dry when he was called
away by the bell for Vespers. Now, on the way to Matins, he
had stopped to look at die book again. He was halfway between

94                       ______________

the wall table and the door, his back turned to the table. The
last page was dry, glowing in the fresh young moonlight. On
this page Nonesuch landed, ready to defend it with his life
when Hubert entered.

But it should not come to that, he thought. When, instead
of sheets of gold in the book and jewels in the box, Hubert
found a real dragon, even the smallest one, how he would run!
How he would howl! Nonesuch ruffled his wings and stretched
his claws, ready for his enemy.

But Brother Theophilus had turned back from the door, his
face troubled. Two monks passed the door on the way to the
church; they looked at him in surprise. The bells rang again.
Brother Theophilus looked at his book. In the moonlight, he
did not notice Nonesuch, who, indeed, was almost the size of
the dragon painted on the page, the dragon watching a quiet
man in a grove of trees. The monk walked to the book and shut
it firmly. He slid it into the box and turned the key in the lock.
Then, his face still troubled, he followed the other monks into
the church.

As Brother Theophilus's shadow passed out of the Scrip-
torium, Hubert entered it. He didn't hesitate. He picked up the
box, then realized it was chained to the table. But the staple
that held the chain to the box was weak. Hubert sat on the
table and pulled the chain free from the box with a frantic jerk.
He spent a minute trying to hide the box under his shirt.
Finally, he took it openly in his arms and ran out the door,
along one side of the empty cloister, and out through a crack
in the broken wall. No one saw him go.

CHAPTER   VIII

rp—————————

IHE LONG SLEEP

97




THE THEFT WAS NOT DIS-
COVERED UNTIL THE NEXT

morning, when Brother Theophitus returned
to the Scriptorium. His cry of woe woke the
bats in their cedar of Lebanon. They Buttered
up, blackening the sky around its green
branches. The monks who heard him turned
here and there, distracted, sharing his toss
before they knew what it was. No one but
Greasy Clement suspected that Hubert was
the thief; and he did not dare to speak. AD
kinds of folk passed in and out of the abbey.
The monks, who had laughed at Hubert's
size and his red trousers, could hardly
imagine that he would have enough enter-
prise to steal anything.

Messengers were sent out to search for
the thief, in vain. Hubert hid in the forest
by day and travelled at night. Whenever he
rested, he tried to pick the lock; but this
was far beyond his skffl. He had no tools
with which to break the box open. He ate
nothing during his flight, so that by the
time he entered London he was able to slip
the box under his waistband.

At last Hubert was sure that no one
would recognize him. He sat in the comer
of a low tavern in Cheapside with the box
resting on the bench beside him. A small,

pock-marked man, dressed as a respectable artisan, approached
in a friendly manner, not appearing to notice how fearfully
Hubert clutched the box beneath his elbow. The pock-marked
man hailed Hubert as a stranger, a traveller from the great
world outside. He was sure, he said, that Hubert had news to
tell of these troubled times. But, first, he must drink a mug of
ale to ease his throat.

Then, very courteously, the pock-marked man listened to
Hubert's stories of life at Sir Ambrose's court and of his own
importance there. With each new, imaginary step in Hubert's
advancement his new friend insisted on treating him to another
mug of ale.' 'I can see they know how to appreciate merit out
there," he said. "You'll find it the same here, in London:

you'll go very far. Drink up, now."

So it was that in a short time, when Hubert was sound
asleep, his friend was able to ease the box from under his arm.
Two hours later Hubert awoke with a desolate cry. Amid the
laughter of the tavern he ran off, bulging and bumping through
the dirty alleys of London, where his fate need concern us no
longer.

The new thief did not carry the box far, just to the low
window of a cellar in a nearby mews. He knew how to ease the
window catch and slip into the cellar. There he deposited the
box carefully between some old pieces of timber near a pile of
coal. He had decided to leave the box in here, his favorite
hiding-place, while he tended to other urgent business.

His business involved a bolt of fine satin in a draper's
shop, a shop that seemed to be poorly guarded by its sleepy
owner. The thief had not suspected how quickly the owner
would wake up when there was any danger to his goods. The

98

crowd in the street eagerly joined in the chase. The thief was
caught and, after proper legal formalities, hanged.   ^K^

No one came for the box in the cellar; it stayed there a very
longtime.

Nonesuch had not submitted tamely to being shut up.

But though the pages of the book were too loose to crush
him, he was so pressed between them that he could hardly
move. The box was closed and locked, and he was in the dark.
He struggled furiously and wiggled to the edge of the page.
Even in his haste and anger he kept his claws in, for fear of
tearing the fine vellum. Still, he moved forward until his nose
bumped against one of the iron strips that bound the box
together.

He was turned in an directions as Hubert shifted the box in
his arms. Nonesuch could hear the fat man's fearful panting
and the beat of his heart. Through cracks in the box he could
smell Hubert's sweat, which by now was making the box
slippery to hold. Once Hubert let it fall, which loosened the
book's cover and jarred Nonesuch down to the bottom. When
he recovered they were once more on the way. He was jammed
against the wood of the box, this time at a spot that was not
crossed by an iron strip. He began to bite at the wood to make
his way out.

But the wood, seasoned oak, was very tough. His jaws
were made for slashing and devouring, not for gnawing. As
time passed, it seemed that he was making no progress at aB.
Or perhaps this was because he was growing very sleepy.

It was the effect of his own breath in this enclosed space.
Many old stories tell us that the breath of dragons was poison-
ous, or at least that it could make humans become very drowsy.
Whatever the truth of such tales, Nonesuch found his eyes

99

always closing. The box was quite still now. He slept deeply;

for a time his dreams were more vivid than the thoughts of his
waking life.

Dragons' dreams are far-ranging: some ancients thought
that the whole world may be contained in such dreams. The
lives of the people with whom Nonesuch had been concerned
passed through his sleep in bright images.

Hubert had boasted to his family of his hope of a position
with Sir Ambrose but naturally had said nothing of his treat-
ment by the secretary. The family agreed, each keeping his
doubts to himself, that Hubert had got the post, and had so
gone up in the world that he would no longer associate with
them.

The juggler and his younger son continued to work at the
abbey, where some wall or pavement was always in need of
repair. In time Simon became a stone-carver himself, whose
skill took him around the countryside. Whenever possible he
would embellish his work: a portal, a window, or a capital
with the head or whole body of a small dragon. He liked to
work in high places. Two hundred years later, at the time of
the Puritan revolution, all of his work escaped the destruction
by the religious reformers' hammers and long poles. If you
visit these churches today, you can still see the dragons,
smiling down on headless saints and apostles without hands.

SES Though Sir Ambrose certainly didn't show it, he was
more pleased than otherwise at the theft of the book. He
took its loss as a reason to break off his proposed match with
Lady Blanche. He had already found a richer alliance; if the
bride was dull and coarse-featured, what of that? He need not
see much of her. He would have dropped the connection with
Hungerford Castle in any case. But this loss of the book, an

100

important part of the marriage settlement, gave him a conve-
nient excuse. Because of it, he did not have the thief pursued
as vigorously as he would otherwise have done.

Lady Blanche grieved for a time, as was only proper. But
she soon realized that she was mourning more for the book
than for her bridegroom. Being a sensible girl, she hinted to
her relieved parents that she was not quite ready to retire from
the world. After a suitable time she was married to a scholarly,
absent-minded knight, with whom she got on very well.


 The loss of the book struck Brother Theophflus hardest of
all. "I had come to love the little dragon too well," he
said to himself, "so that it flew away. Even the book was
taken from me." In time, he made other books, though none
as beautiful as this one; he never painted another dragon.

 Nonesuch woke from a dream in which Brother Theophilus
I was gazing at him sadly and thought sleepily that he
really should look at the world outside the box. He began to
bite at the wood again, but fell asleep before he had broken off
more than a few splinters. After a time, he woke and nibbled
at the wood again; but he grew bored and began to look about
him, using the light of his own eyes.

He was lying between two pages. By arching his back, he
could spread the pages and look down on the one beneath
him, which happened to be the one he had seen on his first
visit to the Scriptorium. There were the vines and the flowers,
and the small animals Brother Theophilus had drawn, all sur-
rounding the thick black letters that lay there quietly as if they
too were sleeping. Nonesuch decided to follow the path of a
vine all around the page, and he crept along, from letter to
letter, until the vine seemed to be a path through a black

101

forest. He crawled up one side of the page, across, and down
the other side. He looked across at the words as he went by;

soon they seemed to be chuckling at him, daring him to find
out their secret. He could almost hear them say, "We are all
here, waiting for you."

And, in time, he slept again. When he awoke (and he
realized that this was long afterwards), he began to explore
the book again, crawling between other pages that he had never
seen before.

; Now that he had all the time in the world, and more, to
examine the book, he found new wonders everywhere in
it, and many familiar things that made him remember his days
in the Abbey of Oddfields.

In the margins of such books, scribes often drew pictures
that they would not dare put among the holy words in the
main parts of the pages. Nonesuch saw the abbey again, from
the east, as he had first approached it. He also saw it from the
south side, where the wall was broken to show the "Neces-
sarium," as the common lavatory was called. Just emerging
from the yellow-and-green doors of this building was the Abbot:

fat, sly, loose-jowled, kindly, in the act of knotting his robe
about him. In another margin, Nonesuch found an old monk
whose task it was to watch the corn, but who always fell
asleep in the sun; the crows used to take turns fanning his face
gently, Nonesuch remembered, so that he would go on sleep-
ing. There was a crow by him in the margin now, keeping him
asleep forever.

There were other monks as well: pious Brother Catechismus,
who sold some of the poultry from the kitchen and kept the
money for himself. Brother Theophilus had caught him in the
very act of handing over a goose with one hand and accepting

102

some coins with the other from the owner of the castle inn.
Brother Catechismus's robe was spread wide so that no one
could see him. But very little had been missed by Brother
Theophilus's mild, bright eyes.

As time passed. Nonesuch must have crawled through
every page of the book; but he always seemed to find some-
thing new.

And often he slept. He was not hungry at all. Only some-
times, when pale earwigs squeezed through cracks in the box,
he took care of them. He had all he wanted to eat. But he was
growing still smaller. He realized this once when he came to a
large golden "T" at the beginning of a chapter. When he had
passed it before, his body just fit nicely over the top of the
letter, from end to end. Now large bars of it extended past his
nose and past his tail. His left wing, which before had easily
covered the upright part of the "T," now scarcely reached
two-thirds of the way down. Really, Nonesuch thought, he
should eat more or he would shrink away to nothing. But he
forgot this danger and slept again; he dreamed that his
grandmother was singing to him in her cracked, vibrant voice,
as she had when he was very young.

Sometimes, because there was, after all, a world outside
the box - though he thought of it less and less often -
Nonesuch bit at the wood again. His gnawing must have
attracted some wood-boring beetles from the outside, because
once, when he bit at the box, half asleep, the wood broke
suddenly and a dim, dirty light shone through. Then it was
easy to enlarge the hole; once he had begun, he didn't want to
stop. In a short time, no more than a month, in fact, he was
able to stick his head out of the box and squeeze his body
through the hole.

103

It hardly seemed worth while coming out. He was in a
cellar full of junk. Above him was a patchy framework of loose
beams and broken sticks, laced with cobwebs. Scraps of cloth
hung here and there, pieces of broken chairs, fragments of
crockery; a stained straw mattress swarming with straw-colored
bugs lay against a beam. At one side, beneath black wooden
stairs, was a small coal heap, up and down which black-
beetles were marching in two orderly lines.

Nonesuch flew up - almost surprised that he still remem-
bered how to fly. The light, such as it was, came from a
shuttered window. Nonesuch peeked between the shutter's
doors and saw the glass, thick with dust and sealed shut.
Through it he could see another trash heap in an alley outside.
No one passed by.

He flew back to his book, and just in time. A venturesome
cockroach had stuck his head into the hole in the box. He
scuttled away - fortunately for him, out of the box - as None-
such approached. The dragon crawled back into his box, and
sniffed around it carefully to be sure that no other insect had
entered. But he realized that the hole left the box open to any
passing insect. He crawled out of the box, and looked round
the cellar floor until he found a wooden peg whose broad end
just closed the hole. He took it in his jaws by the thin end and
backed into the box, plugging the hole after he had entered.

He returned to his book; but soon he realized that a larger
animal was roaming among the cellar beams. He could hear its
feet patter and the thumps as it leapt from one level to another.
Thus far, it had kept away from his box.

Sometimes Nonesuch slept again, but his sleep was light
and his dreams were troubled. He saw an angel with a proud,
stem face, like one he had seen in the church, flying around
the city streets among great crowds of people, striking them

104                           ___________

with a black rod. The rod left black marks wherever it touched
them and the people fell to the ground and lay still. Men were
gathering up the bodies. The faces of the bearers were covered
with masks; some had long beaks on them, like birds. Others
chewed herbs, or burnt pungent herbs in small vessels so that
the smoke covered their faces. They were piling the bodies
into carts and hauling them away to deep pits, which were
almost full but still had enough room, it seemed, to contain all
the bodies in the world. Nonesuch awoke and looked at the
figures on the pages of his book, which seemed to be living
peacefully without any such dreams. He heard the sound of a
leap outside: a substantial body landed on one of the beams.
Nonesuch pushed out the plug of wood and squeezed out of
the box.

On a slanting beam was the longest rat he had ever seen.
The rat's patchy black body was more than a foot long and his
tail, which hung down out of sight, longer than that. He had a
thin neck and a narrow, bald head. As Nonesuch approached,
the rat turned his head to look at him with an expression of
mild surprise.

CHAPTER   IX

IHE RAT'S STORY




THE RAT TURNED HIS ^
BODY TO FACE NONESUCH

squarely. The dragon flew to a higher beam,
in case the animal had any idea of attacking
him. The last time he had faced a rat, he
had been much larger. It had been long since
he had fought anything at all; so long that
the very idea of fighting had grown strange
to him. Still, he would not flee. It might be
foolhardy, or even stupid, to stand up to an
animal as large as this, but he could not
think of abandoning his box and its contents.

As the rat continued to watch him,
swaying his long neck to and fro. None-
such rose on his claws and curved his wings
forward. If he attacked, he thought, he
should launch himself at a spot on the rat's
spine, too far back for the animal's teeth to
reach him. The rat was not so securely
perched on his beam: if he turned quickly
on it, he might fall off.

But the rat showed no desire for battle.
His eyes remained mild and inquisitive.
Clearly he thought Nonesuch was some kind
of insect. But rats ate insects. Well, None-
such thought, when he had seen how this
particular insect could sting, he would leave
it well enough alone. The rat only continued
to look at him curiously, as if he could not
believe what he saw.

"Who are you?" he asked finally.

107




"A dragon," Nonesuch replied.

The rat seemed to be making an effort not to laugh.' 'Apart
from your size," he replied at last, "which makes the whole
idea ridiculous, your shape isn't quite right."

"What did you say?" Nonesuch demanded. He curved
his wings and bristled his neck scales.

The rat looked at him even more closely. "At least," he
said in a courteous voice, "you are different from any of the
dragons I have seen."

"You saw a dragon!" Nonesuch exclaimed. "Where?"

The rat gestured with his long nose towards a very messy
pile of paper in one corner. "Over there some place."

"Where is he now?" Nonesuch demanded.

The rat considered the tone of the question.' 'Not a living
one, of course," he explained. "He'd hardly fit into the cellar,
would he? There's a picture of one in that pile. I'll find it for
you presently."

He looked at Nonesuch again, at some length, and cleared
his throat. "I must admit," he told the dragon in a more
respectful tone, "that I've never seen anything like you,
whatever you are. You kept yourself well hidden.''

"I had no reason to come out before." For the moment,
Nonesuch had decided not to tell the rat about his box, much
less about the book it contained.

The rat nodded wisely. "You have even less reason to
come out now," he declared. "This cellar is no better than a
dank and foul prison."

Nonesuch looked around again. The cellar was certainly
untidy, but also quiet and sheltered. "It doesn't seem as bad
as that," he remarked. "Still, if you don't like it, why don't
you go outside?"

The rat looked startled at the suggestion. "Oh no," he

108

whispered,' 'I never go out! Death is out there! They all fall in
the street, my people as well as the humans. From the upper
windows I can see carts coming to carry them away. But there
is no need to go outside to learn what is happening in the
world. I'll show you,'' he added.' 'Just let me fetch'the dragon
I was mentioning.''

While the surprised Nonesuch watched him, he leaped
from his beam, disappeared behind the mattress, and soon
returned dragging a large sheet of paper. He bit a hole near one
edge of it and, stretching up against a beam, hung it from a
nail.

The paper was covered with letters, except for a picture in
the upper left quarter. Nonesuch looked at the sheet for a long
time. This, his first sight of a printed page, did not attract him.
The coarse and runny letters that covered the paper left no
room for a proper margin, and had clearly been put on without
love or skill. Furthermore, he wondered who could have had
the audacity to paint such a picture as the one he saw. It
showed a man standing on a rock in the middle of a river,
dressed in armor unlike any Nonesuch had seen before. Sharp,
curved blades were attached to the outside of the armor,
projecting at all angles. In the water was a large, clumsy,
crudely drawn dragon, who was just crawling onto the rock.
The knight held out his sword stiffly and smiled at the dragon
in a superior fashion.

' "That was a notable encounter,'' the rat informed None-
such. "It was the Dragon of Wantly Fell: a beast of great
terror; whenever it was cut, its wounds healed of themselves.
But the noble knight covered himself with this wonderful
armor. When the Dragon seized him, the blades cut its body
into pieces, which fell into the river and were washed away
before they could join together again."

109

The rat looked at Nonesuch, waiting for him to be properly
impressed. He started back when the little dragon said, "I
don't believe it."

' 'You don't believe what?''

"Any of it. Dragons don't heal by themselves. But, even
more, no dragon would be so stupid.''

"No, no," the rat replied quickly. "The dragon wasn't
stupid; but the knight was too clever for him. You can see how
the blades covered his armor. It took all the armorers in
Sheffield a week and a day, working together by candlelight,
to make that armor.''

' 'It might have taken them a year and a day,'' Nonesuch
retorted. "But why would the dragon throw himself on the
blades?"

' 'Why, to devour the knight,'' the rat told him.' 'Wauldn't
you have done that — that is, if you were somewhat bigger?''

' 'If I had wanted to eat the knight, which I wouldn't have
done, even when I was as large as the animal in the picture —
and, in point of fact, I was once a good deal larger — I would
have seized that log on the cleft in the rock with my tail and
pounded him a bit until the armor was loose enough to come
off easily. Then, I suppose, I would have eaten him, if I had the
least desire to do such a thing. In my day, we had learned to
leave humans alone. Your Dragon of Wantly must have come
from a degenerate family. I'm surprised he lasted as long as he
did, even if he was able to heal his own wounds, which I don't
believe. Did all this happen very long ago?"

"Oh, no," the rat told him.' 'It says, "The wicked beast of
Wantly Fell, not twenty years ago. The terror of all that did
there dwell, in truth I tell you so.' "

Nonesuch looked at the picture for another minute before
answering.' 'Well, the people of Wantly Fell, wherever that is,

110

couldn't have been very intelligent either. I suppose they and
the dragon deserved each other. In my time, I'm sony to say,
people knew of ways to deal with dragons besides single
combat. Where in the world did you learn all this?"

The rat seemed surprised at the question. "Why, I read
it,'' he replied.' 'It says so there.'' He pointed with his nose at
the hanging sheet of paper.

Nonesuch stared at him.

"The cellar is full of books," the rat explained. "Iknowa
great deal, more than any other rat, I think; and it all comes
from books and from broadsheets, like this one about the Dragon
of Wantly Fell. You may not believe it, but it's all written
down, so it must be true.''

Nonesuch reserved his judgment on this last sentence.
The fact that the rat knew how to read interested him much
more than the truth and falsehood of what was written. And
the rat, who was not a little proud of his knowledge, was glad
to tell him how he had come by it.

A family of weavers had once occupied the house, the rat
told Nonesuch. They were busy, practical, prosperous people
who made good cloth and sold it at good prices. They had
broad, tidy showrooms upstairs. Only, they threw all their
waste material down the cellar and never cleaned it out, leaving
room only for the coal-pile. This had gone on for generations.
' 'A rat knows what goes on under the surface of things,'' he
said proudly. They had all packed suddenly and gone away
now, he added; he didn't know where. Surely they would
return soon.

All this family had looked down on the old grandfather,
who had once been a skilled weaver, but whose hands had
grown too stiff for any real work. The tall, mild, white-haired
old man kept to himself and took his simple meals alone in his

111

room, in which he had many books: mostly the so-called
chap-books sold for a penny or so by peddlers. He read these
for company, and taught the children to read as well, until
such time as they took on their elders' attitude and became
ashamed to visit him.

The rat had often watched the old man and his books
through a hole in the plaster of the wan of his attic room. He
explained to Nonesuch (hat the waDs had many tunnels and
passages, through which he could readily crawl. He could
watch the family's activities without being seen; which was
just as well, since they would have smoked him out or sent a
ferret after him. Only the grandfather saw his bright eyes in a
crack in the wall one day; but he told none of the others.
Instead, he left out scraps of bread and cheese from his own
supper and shut out the family cat.

In return, the rat kept the old man's room clear of earwigs
and cockroaches, who would have nibbled at the chap-book
pages. Then, when the grandfather taught the children to
read, taught them how letters were put together to make
sounds, the rat watched from his crack in the wall. Some-
times, indeed, he imagined that the grandfather placed his
lesson books so that he, the rat, could see them. Because he
was a curious but patient animal, he had learned to read much
more quickly than the children. He believed the grandfather
knew how much he had teamed. During the last few months
of his life, the old man would often read aloud from his chap-
books. These stories, the Fables of Aesop, were the ones the
rat still loved best. He told Nonesuch the story of the fox and
the crow, and of the frogs who chose a king.

After the old man's death, the family tossed his chap-
books down into the cellar. The rat had been reading them
ever since. Now he was the proud guardian of his own library;

112

he knew many stories he could not have learned otherwise.

In the following days, the rat was very eager to share with
Nonesuch the stories he had read. He told him of a knight who
travelled in magic lands, performed marvellous deeds, and
married the emperor's daughter, and other stories of brave
knights who rescued beautiful maidens and helped the poor.
The dragon thought of the knights he had seen, who had
certainly helped no one but themselves. "If you could only
read," the rat said, "you could learn many such stories by
yourself."

"If I could read, I could choose any book I wanted,"
Nonesuch replied. "I'd prefer that. Why shouldn't I read?"

"Why not, indeed?" the rat said. "I'll teach you."

This took only a few days. It might seem an unbelievably
short time; but you should remember that many animals must
learn things much faster than humans can. The rat, at the age
of seven, was already full-grown, even past his prime. And
Nonesuch, in the present year, 1665, was over two hundred
and fifty years old. He was already full of his grandmother's
wise sayings and more experience of the world than any human
could possess. Besides this, he had been sleeping for two
centuries inside a book that had contained all the learning and
love of Brother Theophilus and other good and wise men. So
that. once the rat had told him the names and sounds of the
different letters and showed him how they were put together,
he began to read as if he had always known how. It disturbed
him that the spelling of words was sometimes irrational - as
English spelling was, and still is — but he accepted this as the
sort of thing to be expected from a human invention.

Of course, he tried to read his own book inside the box. At
first he was almost afraid to look at it, lest its stories turn out
to be as frivolous and unlikely as those of the chap-books. But

113

he soon realized, almost with relief, that though he liked the
sounds of the words, he could not understand them. The
words were Latin, a language he did not know. Though many
of the monks in the abbey had spoken to each other in Latin,
Brother Theophilus had used English in Nonesuch's presence,
probably realizing that he was an English dragon.

He was happy to note that the people, and the animals, in
his book were much more beautiful than those in any of the
books or broadsheets in the cellar. The dragons seemed
especially beautiful. None of them, he was sure, would act in a
way that would bring discredit to his race.

One evening the rat came to him and whispered, in great
excitement, that he had been listening to the birds on the
rooftops. A rumor was going around that far to the north, in
Sherwood Forest, where the famous outlaw Robin Hood had
once ruled, the situation was again as it had been before man
ever came there. There were no traps, no ferrets or dogs, no
plagues or wars, only a few friendly, harmless forest creatures.
Many of the birds were flying there.

' 'I have been thinking of going to find such a place myself,''
the rat told him.' 'Indeed, I will go: its pull is so strong that I
can stay here no longer. More than likely I will die on the way.
But you could come with me. It would be company for both of
us, and you could look out for danger better than I. And drive
it away, too, if it came near. One day we could live peacefully
in the beautiful forest and never see the inside of a cellar
again."

Nonesuch looked around him at the dead, dusty cellar.
Even at this great distance, it seemed that he could smell the
clean woodland breezes. He flew up to the window and looked
at the empty street outside. He let his eyes sweep the cellar
floor. They came to his box and stopped there. Voices seemed

114

to be calling to him: voices of the words inside the pages -
though he still did not understand these words. There were
smaller, clearer voices, which must be the little dragons painted
in the book, calling to him too.

' 'I can't go," he told the rat sadly.' 'I must stay here with
my treasure."

"Your treasure?" The rat seemed puzzled, then he nod-
ded his head. "Of course, all dragons have treasures; I read if
somewhere. So the books were right about that, at least."

"My treasure is different," Nonesuch told him.

' 'It must be," the rat agreed.' 'You yourself are hardly c
usual dragon."

Still, he said, he would make the trip to the north, to th(
great forest. His eyes shone. "I have read about so man}
adventures that now it is time for me to undertake one of m;

own. Since you will be here in the cellar, I will often think of it
Otherwise, I would be glad to forget it, books and all.''

Nonesuch had gone back inside his box when the rat let
the cellar for the last time.

CHAPTER   X

A FIERY DRAGON

117

THE FAMILY OF WEAVERS
NEVER RETURNED TO THE

house. What Nonesuch had dreamt and the
rat had seen from the window was the great
plague, the "black death," which had Idled
more than one-quarter of the population of
Europe three centuries before. It had struck
again and again since, and was now mak-
ing its last appearance in the streets of
London. For safety, the weavers had dedded
to leave the city for the north, near Bamet,
where they owned a small shepherd's hut,
and wait out the plague there. Many Lon-
doners were leaving the city at this time,
often carrying the plague with them. All
the members of the family died of it in the
isolated hut where they had hoped to find
safety.

Nonesuch slept; the years slipped by.
The plague came to an end; the great city
licked its wounds and buried its dead. Many
Londoners regarded the Great Fire that
destroyed so much of the city in the next
year, 1666, as a final cleansing. The fire
narrowly missed the weavers' house-very
narrowly indeed: the house was right in its
path but, unaccountably, the flames swerved
aside just before they reached it. A second

cousin of the head weaver took possession of the house but,
fearing it might still contain the miasmas of the plague, refused
to live in it. For the next hundred years the house was leased
as a low hotel, then as a tavern, then as a warehouse for a firm
of ironmongers. None of the tenants bothered to clean up the
cellar properly.

In the eighteenth century, a gentleman with a spacious
house in a more fashionable part of London and an estate in
Scotland bought the house to use the old showroom as a
laboratory for studying the new science of chemistry. His
prudent steward gave the cellar a good cleaning, burning most
of the trash. He brought up Nonesuch's box, which he took for
a black block of wood, to serve as a support for laboiatory
apparatus.

Nonesuch awoke from a dream of a fiery lake to the
sound of human voices. The accents were quite
new to him. Even from within his box the air smelled
different than it had when he had last been awake:

no longer moldy and dusty, but sharp and disturbing. There
was a bubbling sound, too, which he could not identify.

A door opened and shut as the humans left the room.
After a time, Nonesuch began to push out the plug of wood
from his box. A new coating of paint, which had been laid on
two months before, had sealed it shut. He had to grab one end
of the plug in his teeth and jiggle it back and forth before it was
loose enough to be forced out.

As he squeezed out of his hole, Nonesuch was surrounded
by a draft of hot air. His box lay on a wide table beside an iron




118

brazier full of burning charcoal. A metal rod rose from the box
to support a fat polished-brass vessel with a curved, tapering
neck that sat in the center of the charcoal.

Nonesuch flew up, away from the heat, and circled the
contraption curiously. But someone might come'in at any
moment. He dropped to the table top again. Further down the
table was another brazier with another bubbling flask. A sec-
ond table was covered with brown and green bottles, boxes,
piles of paper, and two upright charts with strange symbols.
On one wall was a large picture of a golden dragon swallowing
its own tail. From holes in the dragon's breast, drops of black
blood fell into the foreground of the picture.

Before Nonesuch could examine this picture more closely,
the door opened and a beam of light swung over the table. He
flattened himself on its surface. A sandy-haired man in a
brown coat, with a tartan neckerchief above his collar, entered
the room clutching a full pile of books in his arm. These blocked
his vision, so that even when he turned he would not be able
to see the little dragon. Nonesuch realized this immediately;

he flew low over the table towards a fireplace with a bright
coal fire, and hid behind a massive fire-iron shaped like a
grinning dog.

The man arranged the books on a shelf, grumbling to him-
self as he looked at each title. "Mair o' his lairdship's folly!
The Properties of Matter m five volumes! Pagan nonsense!" He
knocked the books' dust from his hands and left the room. All
grew stffl again, except for the breathing of the fire at None-
such's back. He looked at the flames.

You may know that if you stare long enough at a fire you
can see many different shapes in it. Sometimes the flames look
like groves of trees or standing lines of people. They may seem
to rise from burning houses or burning cities. The sparks look

119

Hke snowflakes faffing upwards. The upper levels of the fire
can seem to move like flocks of birds. Or, if you look very
closely, you can imagine you see small dragons hovering and
dancing in the flames.

This was what Nonesuch saw now: a dragon in the flames,
indeed a dragon that was part of the flames, so that it was
impossible to say where the flames ended and its body began.
Though the dragon's shape stayed the same as it flew happily
back and forth, its size did change. In the yellow, or least hot,
part of the flame the dragon was smallest. When it flew to the
hottest, blue zone of the flame it grew, so that its wings
spanned almost three inches.

Nonesuch watched the dragon for some time without daring
to speak. If he did so, he thought, she might blend completely
into the flames and vanish. She was more sprightly than he
had ever seen her: as happy as only a creature can be that has
found its true element. But she looked infinitely old too, glowing
wisely in the fire, with an eye so bright that Nonesuch could
scarcely look at it.

"Hello, Grandmother," he said at last.

His grandmother did not answer him immediately; but he
could tell from the expression on her face, from the way that
her flight became more elegant and precise, that she knew he
was there. Indeed, she must have known it before he saw her.
She had been waiting for him to speak. She hovered skillfully
over a burning coal, flapping her wings to settle down on it.
"So, here we are again, you and I, just as in the old days."
She nodded towards the back of the fireplace, which, None-
such now saw, was of rough stone, arched like the roof of a
cavern.

But it wasn't really as in the old days, he thought. They
had both changed, he in his way almost as much as she. Many

120

years had passed since their days in the cavern above Serpent
Grimsby, and many adventures. He had been out in the world
of men, in that very world his grandmother had so distrusted.
Now, he thought, there were things he could teach her, if she
would only listen to him. But he kept his voice very respectful
as he replied, "Not exactly the same: I'm a good deal older
now."

' 'And wiser too,'' his grandmother answered.' 'I can see
that for myself. Though not as wise as you might be." She
chuckled, with a silvery, hissing sound.

Nonesuch decided to let that comment pass for the present.
His grandmother might think otherwise soon. "How did you
come here, Grandmother?" he asked.

Again she laughed. "Oh, I can go anywhere now! Since
the unimportant part of me was burned away, I am lighter
than air. If I explained how I was made, you wouldn't under-
stand it yet. I am only visible from inside a fire. You might
think of me as pure flame; that would fit your present level of
comprehension."

"You can only live in fire?" Nonesuch asked, distressed.

"I can only be seen in fire; I can live where I like. But I
have seen enough from within fires too; there was a change of
religion in this country a few years ago — not to bore you with
the details - and humans tend to burn each other at such
times."

His grandmother became very thoughtful. • 'One occasion
sticks in my mind," she said, flying upward again while her
red eyes shone. "Two old men in long robes, whom they
burned by the gray walls of Oxford, their seat of learning as
they called it; they had learned to burn each other there, at
least. The old men could have run away, it seemed, or said
some words that would have saved themselves. But they would
do neither. That would not have been consistent with their

121

natures. They almost welcomed the fire. One of them told the
other to be brave, because they would light such a candle
together that it would never be put out. I wondered what he
meant.

"They were both true and brave, I thought. I was almost
tempted to turn the fire aside for them-though they wouldn't
have liked that. If they had seen me, they would have taken
me for their Devil.

"But I found that all this was filling my mind with too
many thoughts of humans; since then I've kept away from
them. I've avoided their traps. I've travelled light."

Very light indeed, Nonesuch thought. His grandmother
had become a creature without any substance that he could
understand.

' 'I can turn fire aside, you know,'' she added with modest
pride. "See!" She spoke to the flames and they all roared up
into a far corner of the fireplace, so that for a moment his
grandmother disappeared.' 'When the flames were approach-
ing this house, some years ago, I spoke to them and they
turned aside. I didn't want you to be disturbed."

' 'I had a good sleep,'' Nonesuch said gratefully. "Besides
that, you protected my treasure."

"That too," she told him. "Your book. You seem to be
guarding it well, small as you are.''

"You saw my book? How could you have seen it?"

Again his grandmother laughed.' 'I've been with you for a
long time. I was there to watch your Brother Theophilus mak-
ing your book.'' Nonesuch stared at her as she hovered in the
flames. "That was a fine time you had, so close to humans.
You took a great deal of trouble over them."

"I had to," Nonesuch told her stiffly. "They were my
people."

' 'Careful there! You'll have more than enough to do if you

122

go on that way. But you left them behind in the end. You flew
away in time, like a proper dragon."

Nonesuch thought of the people he had known. "I was
sorry to leave them," he said at last.

"There's no need to be sorry. There will be others and
much the same. Humans do tend to repeat themselves over
the centuries. There's no end of them, but only a few dragons;'

Nonesuch looked away to consider what she had said. His
eye was caught by the picture on the wall, the picture that
showed a dragon eating its own tail.' 'What dragon is that?''
he asked.

His grandmother stared at the picture and hissed angrily.
'' That's no dragon at all!" she snapped.' "That stupid picture
represents a misconception of the alchemists, a seedy bunch
even for humans. I spent some time in one of their 'laboratories',
and I can tell you that you have never seen such muddlers,
such incompetents."

She looked again at the picture of the dragon eating its
own tail with such fury and fire in her eyes that Nonesuch
almost expected to see the picture burst into flame. "They
said that dragons represented the material, imperfect part of
matter that had to be destroyed to change 'base' metals such
as lead into 'noble' ones like gold." His grandmother hissed.
"Can you imagine humans regarding dragons as imperfect?

"No," his grandmother told Nonesuch, who by this time
was perched on the dog-headed fire-iron, listening to her with
as complete attention as he had done long ago in the cavern,
' 'we dragons know about the nature of matter. We know that
matter is nothing, unless there is a dragon to watch it. Now I
have mingled so with the elements that I begin to understand
their ways. I suppose I could change lead into gold if I saw any
reason to do so.




123

"Indeed," she continued, "we have a story that once all
matter was much denser than gold, denser than you can
imagine: so that all the universe occupied a space smaller than
this fireplace. And there was a dragon who watched it all. In
time, so the story goes, this dragon grew bored with so much
density and let the matter expand to its present form. The
results have been interesting. I suspected all this before my
change and have learned much more of it since. But now we
have started to grow tired of such a thin and frivolous state of
matter: for we are a restless breed, we dragons, never really
satisfied; we love change for its own sake. Now and then we
return stars to their original compact state. Things seem more
tidy that way. Soon it may be time for your galaxy as well.''

It took Nonesuch another moment to realize what she was
saying. "And our earth?" he asked her.

"It is part of the galaxy, I believe," his grandmother
replied primly. * *A very small part.''

"And the humans on it too?"

"Of course." His grandmother seemed surprised that he
should ask.

"I wouldn't like that," Nonesuch told her.

His grandmother stared at him, concerned. "You have
become too fond of them! It's a natural reaction, I suppose;

but you'll get over it. They're of little account, really. Occa-
sionally their minds seem to aim at wisdom, but they are too
much creatures of the flesh ever to reach it."

"They are often kind to each other," Nonesuch told her.

His grandmother sniffed. "So are rabbits."

"They help each other; they work together."

"Usually for no good purpose."

"But they can help each other; and the poor, too.''

"If you are thinking of your abbey, at Oddfields, or what-

124

ever its name was," Nonesuch's grandmother replied, "it is
no longer there. One of their kings turned the monks out of all
the abbeys and gave their gold and property to his followers. It
was his older daughter, the one they called Bloody Mary, who
burned my two old men and so many others to make amends
for her father's crimes."

Nonesuch did not answer immediately, thinking of the
abbey.' "They make beautiful things,'' he said at last. Perhaps
it was still true.

His grandmother did not seem to be in a mood to give
humans credit for anything.' 'Only because they are not content
with the world as it is," she told him.' "They want to prop up
their own vanity."

"Their church windows make the light more beautiful."

"If you like that sort of thing,'' his grandmother retorted.
"Personally, I find their stained glass full of simple-minded
fables and naive symbols."

"They cut stones that hover in the air like fountains of
water."

"They should have left the stones where they belonged,
in the earth. I have crawled through veins of marble, through
galleries of stalactites and stalagmites, more beautiful than a
hundred palaces."

' "They make books,'' Nonesuch told his grandmother.

She spread her wings and fanned the coal beneath her.
She did not reply immediately. "Ha!" she said. "Your book,
for example."

"And many others."

"They do that, I admit," his grandmother said. "For
what final purpose I am not sure.'' She paused again, swelling
and shrinking in the flames. "So you are fond of your book?"

"It is the most beautiful thing in the world," Nonesuch
told her.

125

• 'Perhaps the onfy beautiful one that humans have made,''
said his grandmother. "Still, as you are so fond of it, you
should keep it. I'll pass the word that you are not to be disturbed
for a time." She looked at him for a long moment. "There is
another saying: 'A true dragon always remains with what he
loves; if he can.' "

As she sat there in the flames, thinking deeply, the door of
the laboratory opened. A tall man in a long blue coat with gold
buttons, wearing a thick wig and thick spectacles, entered. He
looked at the bubbling flasks and opened a draft in a brazier to
adjust the heat under one of them. He sniffed at the liquid in a
bottle and wrote down something in a black notebook.

The grandmother watched him with close attention until
he had left the room. "Your new gentleman is an amateur,"
she told Nonesuch.' 'He will learn nothing new. But he is in for
a nasty surprise. Though the terms haven't been invented yet,
he is generating hydrogen and oxygen gases in those flasks.
They combine violently to make water when given the chance.
They have all the chance in the world with these open flames. I
think you had better be inside your box when the combination
occurs."

She left the coal bed and hovered halfway up the fireplace.
' 'Definitely, you should go back to your box and stay there,''
she told Nonesuch.' 'You may hear some noise and commotion:

stay in your box. There will be even less to see outside than
there is now."

His grandmother rose in the flames, while Nonesuch
followed her lovingly with his eyes. As she reached the upper
levels she began to fade. She hovered there a moment more so
that he could still watch her; then, with a wink, she vanished.

CHAPTER XI

THE BOOKSHOP

129

IS GRANDMOTHER HAD
BEEN WISE TO INSIST THAT

Nonesuch stay in his box. The explosion
occurred the very next day. The blast swept
the table clean. The brazier, the flask, and
all its attachments were thrown against the
wall. Acrid smoke filled the room, seeped
into Nonesuch's box, and made him sneeze.
He heard shouts and running footsteps.
There was a sound of blows and flapping as
men beat out the flames, of scraping as
burning fragments of wood were gathered
and tossed into the fireplace. Shutters were
flung apart, and the door was opened and
shut rapidly to drive away the smoke.

After a time new footsteps entered the
room. Nonesuch recognized the steps of the
man in brown who had carried in the books
and of the bewigged man whom his grand-
mother had called an amateur. This one
spoke first. "It was a damned near thing,
Angus! I might have been in the room
myself, or any of us."

"It was God's mercy, sir," Angus re-
plied.

The master's footsteps walked up and
down the room, crunching glass heavily.
' 'I'll tell you what, Angus,'' he said at last.
"Some excitement is very well, but this

has ceased to be amusing.'' He sniffed at the air.' 'A frightful
sunk—but it really wasn't so much better at other times. They
noticed it at Court. The wits have had some profit from it at my
expense." He sniffed again, loudly. "Well, they'll profit no
more!" Glass crackled under his feet as he turned to look
around the room. "This chemistry is a disorderly nonsense!
Nothing will come of it.''

Angus coughed politely. The master continued, "This
episode has decided me on a more gentlemanly occupation.''

"Indeed, sir." Angus's voice was grateful.

' 'But they'll hear of it all the same,'' the master said in a
moment. "How they'll laugh! I'll have to shun my coffee-
houses as well."

Angus coughed gently. "Perhaps if you were away for a
time, sir. Your friends will find some new diversion."

There was another pause.' "That's true,'' the master said
at last. "I have been neglecting my proper concerns. I had a
letter from Scotland, from the steward at Kilprankie, about
repairs to die stables. I should go there myself and see to it.
And you too, of course, since you understand the humdrum
details better than I. You wouldn't mind that, I imagine."

' 'Indeed, sir,'' Angus said,' 'the country air would do you
a world of good.'' He paused, then coughed. • 'And the equip-
ment?"

"All destroyed, I should imagine."

"There are no glass bottles intact, sir. But the flasks are
only a wee bit damaged. And the balance and mortars were
sheltered somewhat from the blast."

"I have no interest in any of them now! They can be
thrown into the Thames, for what I care.''

130

"That would be a waste, sir," Angus said respectfully.

The master chuckled.' 'Hm, still clinging to your Highland
ways, I see. Well, do as you like. But get them from my sight.''

Angus said, after another pause, "They'll never be noticed
in the stable storeroom at Kilprankie, sir.'''

"Whatever you want; I leave such details to you."

"I'll see to cleaning all this up, sir," Angus told him.

"The sooner the better."

Both men left the room. Others entered, and in a short
time Nonesuch felt himself moving again. His box, with the
flask still attached, was placed in the bottom of a large crate. A
second flask, whose supporting blocks had been burned away,
was also placed in the crate, together with books and other
pieces of laboratory equipment. The crate was nailed shut.

While all this was going on, and later, when the crate was
loaded on a wagon and taken to the gentleman's country
estate fifty miles north of Edinburgh, Nonesuch stayed inside
his own box. He was aware of the wagon's movements; he
could feel the roads grow rougher and more hilly as they
travelled north. He could hear the drivers talking and the
voices of stable-boys in inns along the way. These voices
changed from sharp London tones to slower, broader accents
and later to Scots accents like that of Angus, the steward, who
was riding ahead of both his master and the luggage to see
that all would be proper at the Kilprankie estate.

At last, one day the crate was lifted out of the wagon.
Nonesuch smelled the smoke of a peat fire and the sweat of the
two men who were carrying the crate. • 'Ach!'' said the one in
front, "mair o' the maister's London nonsense!"

"Patience there. Sandy," an older voice from the rear
replied.' 'He won't bide here long to trouble us. You maun just
bear it."

The men set the crate down and walked away, chuckling

131

together. The room became very still. Nonesuch left his box,
crawled through the packed laboratory equipment, and looked
out the side of the crate. He saw a storeroom, with farm
implements and a stack of faded brown carpet from which two
earwigs were advancing towards him. There seemed to be
nothing outside worth examining, he thought, and he had
better guard his own book.

In a short while he slept again. In the country stillness,
with only the sound of wind over the fields or a distant neigh
from the stables, he slept deeply.

It was long before he so much as dreamed again. Then, it
was a strange dream indeed. He found himself in a large room,
lit with bright hanging globes such as he had never seen
before. In the center was a long table piled with objects of all
kinds, including his own box with the flask still attached. A
man stood at one end of the table calling out numbers. A thick
crowd of people filled the room. Some waved white cards,
others called out numbers too. The tones of their voices were
different from those Nonesuch remembered, though some
reminded him of the voice of the steward, Angus, who was
not there. Nonesuch's grandmother was in the room, though,
perched happily on one of the globes, whose light shone through
her.' 'You've come to the right place!'' she hissed at him.' 'A
number here or there will decide your fate!"

While Nonesuch tried to understand this strange statement,
his dream changed again. Now he was flying high in the air, so
high that at first he mistook the clouds beneath him for snow
on the ground. Air rushed past with a smooth hiss, though he
did not feel the wind on his skin. This could happen only in a
dream, he thought. He could see no humans or their buildings.
When the clouds cleared away, he found himself still flying,
but over an endless sheet of wrinkled gray-blue water. He saw
a queer boat very far below. Its wake showed it was moving

132

along, but it had no sails, unlike the ships he had seen in his
own early days. Far off to one side, going in the opposite
direction, was a flying creature — another dragon, he thought
with a thrill. But this one flew without moving its wings at all.
As distant as it was, he realized it was much larger than any
dragon he had ever seen. How could such a large one have
survived this long?

Even though he reminded himself that it was all a dream,
this last thought disturbed Nonesuch greatly. Had he been
wrong to grow so small? It was comforting when thick clouds
came around him again and the dream left him to his deep
slumber.

But the reality when he truly woke was stranger still. He
opened his eyes. Bright daylight, shining through a clear
window, had slipped between the pages of his book. A fresh,
salty breeze was blowing between them as well. For the first
time in hundreds of years. Nonesuch smelled the sea. But it
was a different smell from that of the sea that had washed the
beaches south of Serpent Grimsby, or that had broken on the
rocky islands by the coast of Scotland. The seaweed, the dried
driftwood, and the fish scales were not quite the same. And
there was another smell unlike any that he had encountered
before: one that he came to recognize later as motor oil from
the boats in the marina just offshore.

But he had no time to sort out these odors now. There
were humans close by, three of them. His book was out of its
box, and one of the humans had just turned over a page! How
many more were still above him? Nonesuch flattened himself
down and slipped sideways so that he lay between two branches
of a vine. If the page above him was lifted, he might be mis-
taken for a painted dragon there.

"Beautiful!" It was an old man's voice. The accent was

133

quite new to Nonesuch, but not the tone of enthusiasm, which
he found strangely comforting.

A clear woman's voice, also old, said, "And you got this
at an auctforf? Did you mortgage the whole shop to pay for

it?"

' "Twenty-five pounds,'' the old man's voice replied proudly.
"I don't believe you. The Scots are not so stupid."
"Not for the book. For the box, and its attachments."
A young man's voice was heard. "You should have seen
Dad in action!" He waited for the older man to speak, then
continued. "I wanted the flask, even though it was damaged.
But someone else was bidding for it too; a little dry fellow, a
pharmacist, I think. We got to ten pounds, but he still seemed
stubborn. The bidding went to fifteen. Then Dad touched my
elbow. He had been looking at the table and had seen some-
thing I had missed. He said, 'I'll add a bit for the box,' and
called out, 'Twenty-five pounds.' That shut the pharmacist
up, and it was all ours. The pharmacist was shaking his head
at this extravagance. After all, perfect specimens of these
flasks were listed in catalogues for forty pounds. Who would
pay more than fifteen for a damaged one? I gave Dad a look as
if to say, what are you doing? He whispered, 'You can have
the flask; I'll just take the box.' "

The older man said,' 'I had noticed the ironwork around the
box, under the paint. I thought, if someone had wanted to
guard a box so carefully, there might be something in it."

"We had to rush to catch the plane at Glasgow," the
young man said.

The woman sniffed. "I suppose that in your rush you
didn't have time to buy any books at the auction - books that
weren't in boxes?"

The older man said, "Peter picked up the remains of a

134

treatise on alchemy - in very poor condition. They had all
come out of a storeroom in some decayed manor-house. All
the books were in shreds. The beetles had gotten at them. I
wonder how this one escaped. It was in a box, but that probably
wouldn't have protected it from a really determined insect."

The young man said, "There just wasn't anything else.
But Dad only had eyes for the box. He didn't like to ship it in
his suitcase. If he hadn't been carrying the porcelain, he'd
have taken it to his seat on the plane. He said he wanted to get
it home before he opened it."

"I had a feeling," the older man remarked.

• • You opened it?'' the woman asked.

"I got Bartholomew to do it. Even he had a hard time. He
said, "They don't make locks like this now. They have no
respect for the dignity of labor. Where did you get it?' But I
didn't tell him. I carried it back without an explanation. I
didn't want to open it anywhere else but here. I hope he didn't
think I was rude. I'll give him that Italian edition of Lenin's
letters."

Another page of the book was turned. Nonesuch crouched
lower still.' "The pages seemed warped,'' the old man remarked.
"Should I press them? I'll read about it before I do anything.''

' 'And I only wanted the flask,'' the younger man said.

"The flask you can have. Let it be my gift."

"It's eighteenth-century," the younger man protested.

"Practically modern. This is fifteenth-century. A Book of
Hours. It seems all to have been done by one hand."

A small bell jingled. The three people stopped talking. A
door swung open and a boy's voice said, ' 'Where are they?''
A stronger breeze from the open door lifted the page above
Nonesuch just a fraction. He raised his head and saw that his
book was on a wide table that ended near a layer of shelves,

135

no more than a foot away from him, filled with more books
than he had imagined possible. The sunlight that filled the
room still left the depths of the nearest shelf in shadow. None-
such crawled to the edge of the page and looked sideways. An
adjoining table was covered with paperback books stacked in
rows, their spines upwards.

The newcomer, a plump, cheerful boy with his hair in all
directions, wore a black T-shirt with a picture of a spaceship
and a satellite circling the planet Saturn. He had placed a pile
ofschoolbooks on an empty part of the table and was stacking
paperback books on these. The two men and the woman were
standing with their backs to Nonesuch, close to the boy, as if
to shield him from the sight of Nonesuch's book.

Now! The little dragon crouched at the edge of his book
and sprang into the air. In all this time, his wings had not
forgotten how to fly. In a moment he was deep inside the
bookcase, well hidden, and able to survey the whole room.

The boy left with a large pile of books clutched between
his arms and his chin. The woman held the door open for him,
but he stumbled at the threshold; books tumbled around his
feet.

' 'Careful, Samson,'' the woman said. She helped him pile
up the books again and steered him carefully out the door.

"He seems to devour them," the older man remarked.
"I'm afraid he'll run out of food soon."

"He read all our comic books," the woman explained to
the young man, "including the annotated Krazy Kat. Now
he's going through all the science-fiction we have. I wonder
what he'll try next."

"He'll find something," the older man said. "But we'd
better close up temporarily." He locked the door.

Nonesuch watched these new humans with deep attention

136

from the depths of his bookcase. The older man was tall, and
partly bald, with a neat fringe of white hair and gold specta-
cles. The woman had thick grey-blonde hair, tied back in a
bun. The young man was dark-haired, and unlike either of
them. He had a busy look about him and soon left, saying he
had to prepare his lecture.

The woman locked the door behind him. He climbed into a
green closed wagon that could be seen through the wide
windows of the room. Nonesuch was astonished to hear it
start to roar and then to see it roll away by itself. The white-
haired man did not turn his head at the departure of the
Volkswagen Beetle. He continued to turn over the pages of
Nonesuch's book, so carefully, and with a look of such respect
and concentration, that the dragon had an unexplainable urge
to fly out of the bookcase and perch on his shoulder.

The woman had come to watch the book too. "He liked
dragons," she remarked.

"Yes, didn't he?"

"They seem friendly. Or at least, diffident," the woman
said.

"Most of them, yes. But look at this one. See how he's
watching the man in the trees. Measuring him for his coffin,
I'd say."

"Or for his own lunch," the woman remarked. Both
laughed and continued to study Nonesuch's book.

While they are doing so, and while Nonesuch is watching
them, it is appropriate to tell the reader more about these
people. You will have understood, of course, that we are now
in the present day, quite late in the twentieth century. We are
somewhere on the northeast coast of North America, in a city
whose population is between 50,000 and 200,000. But I will
not give the name of the city, or even of the bookshop, though

137

DISTANT VOYAGES, as it will be called from now on, is a close
approximation. If people knew where the bookshop is to be
found, too many of them might want to visit it; and this, as
will become clear later, would not be at all desirable. So, let us
just say that in a certain city was a certain bookstore. The
owner, Mr. Samuel Gotdieb, had lived there, in an apartment
above the bookshop, for some years with his wife, Ingrid, and
their daughter, Rachel.

The building that now housed the bookshop had originally
been a chandler's shop, for outfitting sailing ships in the harbor,
which lay at the foot of a steep slope one hundred feet below.
The road from the harbor zigzagged up this hill around small
blue-and-white houses that perched bravely on the slope. In
time, the lower part of the hill had been excavated and a new
line of shops built, closer to the water. Among them was
another chandler's shop that had taken over all the business.
Thus, Mr. Gottlieb had been able to buy this one, together with
the apartment above it. He kept a few of the ropes, fishnets,
belaying pins, and grappling hooks for ornaments and filled
the rest of the shop with books.

From its door, he had a fine view over the harbor, the
wooded hills of the shoreline, and three small, rocky islands.
Customers browsing among the books could look at the ships
- mostly freighters now, but a few sailing vessels as well, and
any number of small motor boats — and think of distant lands.
There was always some unexpected book to be found on the
shelves. Casual visitors to the shop tended to stay a long time
and usually took a few books away with them.

When Rachel completed her studies at the university in
the city behind the harbor, she decided to stay with her par-
ents and work in the bookshop. She sent out detailed lists of
their old travel books and built up a substantial mail-order

138

business. Several customers came to the city to examine books
from the list at first hand.

A frequent customer was Peter Levy, a young assistant
professor of chemistry at the university. He came there first in
search of books on the history of science, a subject that he had
begun to study in depth. After he had seen all the books, he
still came to see the bookseller's daughter. They had been
married three months before, in March, when Peter Levy could
not get away for a long honeymoon. When the term ended,
Rachel's parents had treated the young couple to a trip to
England.

Mr. Gottlieb had gone over too, separately of course, to
investigate the books in a couple of estates that were for sale.
He had always loved England, from the year he had spent
there on his way west from Germany in 1939. Peter Levy had
become deeply interested in the history of chemistry — a sub-
ject on which, later, he built his academic career - and was
especially fascinated by old equipment. When, in Edinburgh,
he had heard of the sale, by auction, of the contents of an old
laboratory, including the books, he called his father-in-law in
London.

Nonesuch learned all this in the next few weeks from
hearing his humans talk as he made himself at home in the
bookshop. After the discovery of Brother Theophilus's book,
Mr. Gottlieb could hardly be bothered with anything else. He
kept the book in his office, to which he had added a new lock.
He would sit over it for hours. Peter Levy came often too and
examined the book with great interest. Once he approached
the pages with a small scalpel. Mr. Gottlieb look worried.
Nonesuch, who had found a good hiding-place within the
crammed pigeon-holes of an old desk, bristled. But Peter only

139

removed a tiny scrap of paint from a vine, where it did not
show, and took it away in a test-tube.

He reported next day, "The gas-liquid chromatograph
showed it couldn't have been made after 1500."

"I knew that," Mr. Gottlieb said.

' 'The pattern oflipids was very definite,'' Peter added. "If
you could spare a bit of one page, I could do some carbon
dating."

"Never mind," said Mr. Gottlieb. "But I'm glad your
measurements confirm my judgment." When he left the office,
he locked the book in an old maple cabinet.

It disturbed Nonesuch to see his book shut away so, but he
soon found that there were enough cracks in the back of the
cabinet for him to slip through and lie down among the book's
pages.

Now his periods of sleep were very short. Mr. Gottlieb
might disturb him at any hour of the day or night. Often he
padded downstairs from the apartment in his dressing-gown
and slippers, a large cup of tea in his hand. He would take the
book from its cupboard, spread it out on his desk under a
bright light, and study the pages, writing detailed comments
in a red notebook.

One day, Peter Levy came with a camera and tripod and a
set of bright lights. He photographed all the pages of the book.
Later, he proudly showed the color prints to his father-in-law.
"Very impressive," Mr. Gottlieb said politely. "Now you can
study it too." Nonesuch could tell from his voice that the
photographs interested him much less than the original. This
pleased the little dragon, who had been curious about the
copies, and had seen in them yet another example of the new,
shiny things of the world to which he had now come. But he

140

had realized immediately that such images could never replace
the real book.

"But keep these to yourself and Rachel, if you please,"
Mr. Gottlieb told his son-in-law.' Tor the time being, the book
will be a family secret.'' Nonesuch, crouched in his bookcase,
well hidden in the shadows, nodded in approval of the book-
seller's wisdom.

CHAPTER XII




VIEW OF THE
HARBOR

143

T FIRST, NONESUCH PLANNED
1 ALWAYS TO STAY NEAR HIS

book, but he soon realized that this was not
necessary. He kept a close eye on Mr.
Gotdieb and quickly became convinced that
the bookseller was guarding his book almost
as jealously as he. Then the dragon began
to study die ways of the shop and of the
wodd outside it. He soon learned to watch
for the movement of the hands of the old
wan clock: at ten every morning Mr. or
Mrs. Gotdieb opened the bookshop doors.

Usually the first customer was Samson,
the boy Nonesuch had seen on his first day.
His school was only two blocks away, at
the top of the hill, and he often visited the
bookshop at recess. As Mr. Gotdieb had
said, Samson was at present eating his way
through science-fiction books, up to three
an evening. He had read almost all the
shop's small stock of these books. By spe-
cial arrangement, he was permitted to bring
back within a week any books he didn't
want to keep. Even so, up to the present he
had kept enough to use up all his allow-
ance. He paid for the others by running
errands, especially taking books to be mailed
to the post office on the other side of his

school. This was very helpful, since Mr. Gottlieb's leg had
been troubling him and he didn't like to take his car for such a
short distance. It was Mrs. GottBeb who had suggested putting
the boy on a small salary.

In the morning there also came mothers on the way home
from the supermarket on top of the hill. They pushed shopping
carts or baby buggies, which they left outside the door while
they selected books on child care or gardening or vegetarian
cookery or political science. At noon someone was sure to
come in to buy a book to read whfle eating lunch at the restaurant
next door. Now that the weather was fine, you could see them
reading at the tables set out on the sidewalk, or across the
road on the parapet overlooking the harbor.

Nonesuch soon learned to recognize other regular cus-
tomers. There was a short, gray woman who lived in a small
apartment in the city and bought books on formal gardening.
A lecturer at the university often came to look for works of
British explorers of Africa; a garage mechanic was building up
his collection of books on old cars. Then there was Professor
Ash.

Nonesuch had, of course, taken care that no one saw him.
He understood very wefl that the sight of him would cause
much more commotion than in the days when he had first
entered his book. Fortunately there were many good hiding-
places. In most of the shelves, there were gaps where books
had been removed, and he could stay well back in the shad-
ows. He found hidden roads between rows of books. Many
shelves were built against the walls, but not too snugly: it was
easy to pass from one level to another. Some free-standing

144

shelves with double rows of books, however, were open on
both sides. In these, he had to be especially careful to move
only when no humans were near by.

He thought he was doing this. But late one morning when
the shop was quiet, Mr. Gottlieb was in his office, and Mrs.
Gottlieb was cutting the leather in her back room to cover a
tattered nineteenth-century diary from Newfoundland, None-
such worked his way across from one side of a double shelf to
the other; then, thinking himself quite alone, he flew across to
the next standing shelf. There was a flash of eyes beneath
him. He crouched, turned, and looked quickly down the wedge-
shaped gap between two books.

A large, bearded man, his vest covered with ashes, was
sitting on the floor between the shelves, an open book in his
hand. The man kept staring up, so that daylight was reflected
in his eyes; then he closed them and said, "Now I'm seeing
dragons!" He reached into a baggy side pocket of his old
tweed jacket and pulled out a flat bottle, one-third full. He
shook it, looked at it sadly, and thrust it back again. Then he
rose, grunting, and shuffled out of the shop.

Nonesuch learned to watch out for this man who could sii.
so quietly in one place. He kept completely out of sight when
he smelt his odor of old tobacco smoke and whisky; but he
watched him with great interest. He heard the Gottliebs talk-
ing about the bearded man, whom they called "Professor
Ash". He had been a distinguished scholar, Mr. Gottlieb told
his son-in-law. He still was: his knowledge of myths and legends
was profound. But he had published little; he could never
write down what he knew in a way that satisfied him. He had
taken to drink years ago, lost his university position, and
retired on a very small pension. Now he spent his time acquir-
ing more knowledge in the city library or at this bookshop. He

145

would sit in an old chair in the comer or, as now, on the floor
for hours.

When he had had a drink or two from his pocket flask,
professor Ash had enough sense to close his eyes and pretend
to be sleeping. At such times, Mr. Gottlieb would not disturb
him. Indeed, he said he often thought of hanging a "Do not
disturb" sign on the old man's broad shoulders. And some-
times Professor Ash really did sleep, and he dreamed about
books.

Occasionally Mrs. Gottlieb looked at him critically, for he
never bought any books, though he sometimes sold them
some. Mr. Gottlieb would say mildly, "Leave him alone; he
knows where all our books are. He can even give me the
prices, as if he had a catalogue in his head." His wife could
only nod in agreement.

Nonesuch learned how much confidence Mr. Gottlieb had
in Professor Ash when he called the old man into his office at
the end of a day and showed him Nonesuch's book. "Oh yes,"
Professor Ash said, running his fingertips over the pages. "A
treasure indeed."

Mr. Gottlieb turned over another page. "Here are more
dragons," he said. "I wonder why he painted so many
dragons."

"Perhaps he saw them," Professor Ash replied. He looked
closely at the page. "What's this in the vines, his signature?
I can't make out the words."

"Let me see." Mr. Gottlieb pushed his glasses up to his
forehead and bent over the page. "Itsays, "Theophilus fedt.' "

"Theophilus made the book, eh?" Professor Ash com-
mented. "Theophilus means 'Lover of God,' almost the same
as your name."

"That's right," said Mr. Gottlieb, very pleased.

146

No one besides the old professor had seen Nonesuch, and
he was all the more careful to keep himself hidden. He stuck to
the dark, shadowy places where he - no bigger than a large
cockroach, now that he had eaten a few such insects - could
conceal himself.

But hiding was easy really: his humans had their thoughts
on other things. Mr. Gottlieb would know, without counting, if
one of a twenty-volume set of the short stories of Anton
Chekhov was missing, but he would not really notice if his
socks did not match. He could not count on Mrs. Gottlieb to
remind him, either, since she was often immersed in books
about calligraphy or techniques of bookbinding. She had a
small bookbinding press in the tiny room behind the shop
where books were unpacked, and spent much of her time
there. She was the most likely one to see Nonesuch, since she
had taken on the responsibility of dealing with any insects in
the shop, though not on an individual basis. She had been
attacking these hated destroyers with roach powder, but shortly
after Nonesuch's arrival, there were no roaches to eat the
powder.' 'Where did all my clients go?'' she would ask, puzzled.

If he was discreet, he would be safe enough inside the
shop, Nonesuch thought. He could start to examine his sur-
roundings. Naturally, he had looked into some of the books,
but this was not easy. Most were so tight in their shelves that
it was impossible to crawl between their pages. Those that
were loose enough for him to force his way in included a
Mexican cookbook, which he did not understand, and a good
edition of Treasure Island, which was much more interesting.
However, he could only read as quickly as he could move, and
he found it very frustrating to follow the story so slowly.

When he was sure that all was in order in the bookshop,
Nonesuch decided to explore the outside world. At first, leaving
the building presented some problems. The door was locked at

147

night, and he did not dare fly through it in daylight. He carefully
examined the inside walls and at last found a promising crack,
above a row of dusty early-twentieth-century romantic novels
at the top of the tallest bookcase. Through this crack, None-
such could squeeze to the open air, just above the bookshop's
sign.

Directly below him was the road, then a flagstone terrace
that ended in a low stone wall. The ground dropped so steeply
beyond the wall that a flat green rooftop with a flapping
clothesline seemed to be directly below. Beneath the clothesline,
two girls in bikinis were sunning themselves on a blanket.
Other rooftops appeared at different levels on the hill, some
flat, most peaked, with worn, glowing brick chimneys.

To the left, past a row of tables with red-checked cloths
that were set out on the terrace, the hill withdrew from the
shore. Nonesuch looked down on a small business district
with a park and a shopping mall.

But the more distant scene soon commanded his atten-
tion. As Nonesuch looked at the harbor spread out before him,
he stayed for a long time crouched on the sign, moving noth-
ing but his head to take it all in. He saw two freighters riding at
anchor and another one docked beneath a huge crane on rails
that was piling on containers as if they had been blocks of
wood. A few motor boats moved about like water-bugs on a
pond. Further out, two sailboats, one with red and one with
blue sails, were chasing each other around a small island.

Evening was falling; a flight of swallows dotted the windy
air. At last Nonesuch spread his wings and joined them. The
swallows, rising on a draft from the harbor, looked at him
curiously but continued swooping and snapping up insects.
One swallow turned to snap at him too, then flew quickly
away, leaving two of its tail feathers floating. Nonesuch glided
far out until he was past the hill and over the water. Now he

148                 ____________________

saw that the bookshop was the middle one of three plain
two-storey buildings. To the right of the bookshop, as he faced
it, was a small restaurant with a wide new picture window and
a sign, THE BALCONY (formerly THE SAILOR'S REST) . On the other
side of the bookshop was a shop with a door in the center, and
a window on one side full of shoes and on the other side, of
locks and bolts. A sign above the door read, B SACCO. THE GOOD

SHOEMAKER (ALSO KEYS)

The low sun shone past the front windows and glowed on
the face of a small, wrinkled man who sat at a bench hammering
away at the heel of a shoe with deep concentration. On the
sidewalk in front of him was a large gray parrot, tethered to a
perch.

The parrot turned his head so that the setting sun flashed
up from his bill into Nonesuch's eye. The bird's eye flashed
too, with such a look of wisdom that in a short time Nonesuch
flew down and lighted on the window molding above the
parrot's head.

The parrot tilted his head again and looked at the dragon
for a long time.' 'Did you come on a banana boat?'' he asked
at last.

Nonesuch took his own time in answering.' 'Hardly,'' he
said.

"You have something of a jungle look about you," the
parrot explained. "All sorts of tropical creatures come in on
the ships: tarantulas, even small boas; I don't know what all.
Usually, they die in the cold weather, so 1 hear. You should take
care to keep warm."

' 'I do,'' Nonesuch told him.

The parrot nodded. "I don't want to give unsolicited
advice," he assured Nonesuch. "I can't get the jungle out of
my mind. Sitting here, with this northern sea and sky, I still
recall the damp, green, rotten jungles of the Amazon River




where I was hatched, a green world
as it must have been at the begin-
ning of time, with more forms of
life than you can imagine. That's
what I knew when I was very small,
before I was captured and lived
among men and learned human
speech."

Nonesuch flew quickly out over
the road to look inside the shop
again at the man bent over his shoe.' 'Did hTcapture you?'' he
asked the parrot.

"No, indeed," the parrot said. "He would never have
done that. I was taken by an Indian boy. He carried me and my
brothers to market inside a dried calabash. I was purchased by
a young missionary at the very end of the market day. Often I
have wondered what happened to my brothers: if they were
also sold the next day, or set free, or left to dry in the calabash.
But my first master was good to me. I learned much of their
Bible as he read it aloud to himself in the jungle. Later he fell ill
and had to return to England. He gave me to his housekeeper,
who had seemed so fond of me, but who sold me immediately
to a sailor.

"That was my present master, Mr. Sacco. He took me
with him on his ship, the Matilda McClintock, where he was
second engineer. We were torpedoed during the war, in the
North Atlantic. He ran back to rescue me from his cabin before
he would leave the ship, and he broke his leg jumping through
the flames into a lifeboat. They set it badly in the boat, and he
stffl limps."

The parrot sighed. "What a voyage that was! Icebergs
came trundling down from the North Pole, cold castles that
sneered at our little lifeboat. Snow squalls beat down on us;

150

we were in a white world without color or warmth. I kept Mr.
Sacco's spirits up in the lifeboat with words my first master
used to read: 'For thou didst cast me into the depth, in the
heart of the seas. And the flood was round about me. All thy
waves and billows passed over me.' I won't,say all those verses
cheered him up,'' the parrot added, ' 'but he seemed amused.
One able seaman in the lifeboat would weep and say, 'A parrot
quoting from Jonah! Next we'll see a whale.' We saw several,
in fact, but they kept their distance. Ever since we were rescued,
Mr. Sacco has kept me with him."

Nonesuch looked at the parrot with new respect.' 'Where
was your war?'' he asked him.

"Oh, far away and years ago."

Nonesuch nodded.' 'I have seen human wars, too. I thought
it was the only thing they could do. To get away from them
you had to go to the forest, say to a quiet pool among the
trees. But here they seem at peace together.'' He looked again
at the boats moving around the harbor, keeping well away
from each other. In the little business district below to the left,
the lights were now turned on. People were strolling down the
mall without fear. The automobiles moved in an orderly fashion,
stopping at the traffic lights. Sounds of music reached them
from a band in the park.

' 'So many of them,'' Nonesuch said,' 'but 1 have seen no
soldiers. They must have learned to live together after all this
time." In fact, though he was not ready to tell the parrot so
much of his own past, the scene all around him: the bookshop,
the man at his bench repairing shoes, the few early customers
at the restaurant tables reading by twilight, even the busy
world below, reminded him of the Abbey of Oddfields. He saw
Peter Levy, who must have just come into the bookshop, leave
it together with Rachel. They crossed the road and sat on the

151

stone parapet, facing the harbor, with their arms about each
other.

The parrot cleared his throat.' 'Not to be a spoil-sport, but
I doubt if my master would agree with you. He is a socialist.
He'll talk to his customers for hours about the exploitation of
one man by another. If he weren't such a good shoemaker,
he'd lose all his business."

The parrot looked closely at Nonesuch. "And a good
locksmith, too; the best. I've heard it said that there's no lock
he can't open. Though he had some trouble two weeks ago
with a box the bookseller brought to him. It was all very
mysterious, that box and its contents. You wouldn't happen
to know about it, by chance?''

Nonesuch kept a discreet silence. The parrot looked at him
even more closely, but did not question him further. "By the
way," he added, "if you're going to be in the neighborhood,
watch out for the white cat from the restaurant. He's death on
most birds and might mistake you for one. I've had to give him
a few knocks with my bill to teach him a lesson.''

"I've never had to bother with cats," Nonesuch told the
parrot. Shortly afterwards, he flew back to the hole over the
DISTANT VOYAGES sign and entered the bookshop again.

Samson was in the shop, looking over the table of science-
fiction books with little interest. Professor Ash stuck his head
out from between two bookcases.' 'Have you read them all?''
he asked.

"Just about," Samson admitted. He pulled out a book
from the middle row, looked at the back cover, and leafed
through it. ' 'Yechh!'' he said.

"What's that one?" Professor Ash asked him.

Samson shrugged. Conquest ofthe planet Adalbaran 12.
He turned over some more pages. "The natives don't like

152

anyone," he explained. "They have anti-gravity rays and
deep-penetrating lasers. The explorers have to set up force
fields or they'll be made into inter-galactic chicken soup." He
made a face. "It's all too easy: he writes down whatever he
wants. It doesn't seem any harder than exploring the North
Pole."

"That was easy?" Professor Ash asked him.
' 'Well, you didn't have to leave Earth to find it.''
' 'Enough did. Here,'' Professor Ash said,' 'since you men-
tion polar exploration, you might want to read about it." He
reached behind him, without looking, and pulled a book from
the shelf.' 'It deals with the Antarctic, which is an even more
hostile region than the Arctic." He laid the book before Sam-
son, who grimaced at its size but opened the cover.

"The Worst Journey in the World." He read the title with
interest.

"The name refers to a winter journey the author took to
collect penguin eggs,'' Professor Ash said.' 'He made the trip
for the sake of knowledge, like all good explorers, and had to
endure temperatures of seventy degrees below zero. He was
young and strong and recovered from that journey. But his
real worst journey was the trip he took later to find the bodies
of Captain Scott, the leader of the whole Antarctic expedition,
and his two companions, who froze on the way back from the
South Pole just eleven miles from a fuel depot that might have
saved their lives. To the end of his own life, the writer of this
book blamed himself, unjustly, for failing to rescue them."

Samson picked up the book again, turned to the inside
cover, and winced at the price. "I'll have to save up for this
one,'' he remarked. He left the book, which remained open on
the table. That night, Nonesuch started to read it, hovering
over it, then crawling beneath the pages and walking towards
the spine, with his back arched, to turn them over. He read the

153

brave and tragic story of Scott's party, who arrived at the
South Pole only to find that the Norwegian explorer Amundsen
had already been there. He read, through Scott's journals, of
the desperate journey back towards the base camp, all of them
growingweaker on inadequate food and fuel. He read of' "Titus''
Gates, who, knowing he had no chance to reach the base
camp and realizing he was a burden to his comrades, had
deliberately walked out into the blizzard to die and give the
others a chance.

But the chance came too late. Nonesuch carefully read
Scott's last entries in his journal, which was found with his
body. "Outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of
whirling drift,'' he read. The words reminded him of the par-
rot's own winter journey, and of the cold white world he had
seen; the parrot's account gave him more confidence in that of
the human. Then he came to Scott's words, "We are weak,
writing is difficult, but for my part I do not regret this journey,
which has shown that Englishmen can endure hardships, help
one another, and meet death with as great fortitude as ever in
the past. We took risks, we knew we took them; things have
come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for
complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still
to do our best till the last...." No, Nonesuch thought, carrying
on a silent conversation with his grandmother, this was the
way in which a dragon might speak. These humans seemed
worth saving after all, even if one of them had not written his
special Book of Hours. That evening, Mr. Gottiieb did not
come downstairs to look at this book. When the dragon saw
the sky outside begin to pale, he carefully, with some labor,
turned the pages of The W>rst Journey in the W&ridback to
their original position, slipped under the locked door to the
office - fortunately, the door had warped enough to make this
easy—and returned to his own sleeping-place in the cupboard.

CHAPTER    XIII

MR. ABERCROMBIE

157

THE BOOK ON THE ANTARC-
TIC EXPLORERS REMAINED

on the table much of the next day. None-
such had hopes of continuing to read it that
evening. Towards the end of the afternoon,
however, a new customer entered the shop
and eventually took the book away with
him. This was a tall, distinguished, silver-
haired man who wore an elegant brown
cashmere sweater. His face was fresh and
smooth, and he smiled easily. For a time
after he entered, he stood just inside the
door, looking the books over. Nonesuch
bristled: the stranger seemed to be passing
his eyes over each book as if he were add-
ing them all up, but with little interest in
their contents.

Mr. Gottlieb had been watching him too.
"Can I help you?" he asked.

"Possibly," the stranger replied pleas-
antly. ' 'I was driving by and saw your little
comer." He continued to look around the
books, smiling. Then he leaned forward and
pulled one from a shelf. "Foxe's Booke of
Martyrs," he announced.

"That's a good edition," Mr. Gottlieb
toldhim. "It's abridged, of course. The origi-
nal would fill up the whole shelf. There may
be a complete one at the university library.''

"I'm sure this will have the well-known passages." The
stranger turned the pages. "Ah, here's old Bishop Latimer:

'Be of good cheer, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall
this day, by God's grace, light up such a candle in England as,
I trust, will never be put out.' ''

Nonesuch, who with trembling wings had been watching
the stranger's every move, now froze with astonishment. His
grandmother had described that very scene!

' 'Are you especially interested in that period?'' Mr. Gottlieb
asked him.

The stranger shook his head. "No more than in other
times of idiocy. There's only a certain amount of interest in the
reasons men burn each other." He looked at the book again.
"How they did carry on!" He hummed a little tune. "Have
you seen the place?"

"I'm afraid not."

' 'In Oxford, you know; by Balliol College. There's a cross
there now; in a parking lot. If the taxis move, you can see the
very spot."

That was where Nonesuch's grandmother had said the old
men were burned: at Oxford. But why did the stranger find it
so amusing?

' "The old fools could have escaped, you know,'' the stranger
said.

' 'Or renounced their faith,'' said Mr. Gottlieb.' 'They chose
to do neither."

The stranger clicked his tongue. "Such stupidity."

The bookseller did not answer, and the stranger continued
to read. His next words distressed Nonesuch. "Still, as you
say, it seems a well-printed edition. I think I'll buy it."

158

Mr. Gotdieb coughed hastily. "I'm afraid that book is
promised to someone else. I should have taken it off the shelf."

"Really!" The stranger smiled again. "I wouldn't have
thought the subject would be so popular."

Mr. Gotuieb blushed. "A specialist in the wars of religion."

"Really?" The stranger pointedly looked away, to ignore
the blush. "I really do want this book, you know."

Mr. Gottlieb shrugged, embarrassed.

"Well, in one way or another," the stranger said, almost
to himself. His eyes fell on the book about the explorers of the
Antarctic. He picked it up and turned over the pages.' 'Is this
one also reserved, perhaps for a polar specialist?"

Mr. Gottlieb shook his head. The stranger turned to the
price on the front cover. He extended a ten-dollar biB. "Then
I'll have it."

Mr. Gottlieb dumbly accepted the money.

The stranger was in no hurry to leave. He continued to
turn over the book's pages, son humming his Btue tune.' 'Death
in a lonely tent,'' he remarked.' 'Of course, today he could see
it all by airplane with little or no risk. What a wasted effort!''

"He thought the search for knowledge was worth white at
the time, I believe," Mr. Gottlieb observed dryly. "Others did
too. They still do, in fact."

The stranger smiled. • "Indeed. A romantic view but not a
realistic one; especially considering that Scott's party arrived
at the South Pole after Amundsen did. They needn't have gone
at all." He looked at the book in his hand again and shook his
head. • 'All these efforts that come to nothing: history is full of
them. Inventors who have their work stolen. Poor mad Van
Gogh, who hardly sold a single picture in his short life. How
many art dealers has he made rich? It's better to be a dealer
than a creator. You were wise to decide to be a dealer."

159

• 'Well,'' Mr. Gottlieb replied, • 'it wasn't so much a matter
of wisdom. I have no special creative talents, though I admire
them in others, more than anything else in fact. But I simply
sell books. People seem to need them."

' 'How sensible to recognize your limitations,'' the stranger
said. He added, "I wouldn't mind having an early copy of
Scott's Jouma/if it comes your way. Or of the Books of Martyrs
if you find another copy or if your, uh, specialist on wars of
religion doesn't caB for it. Let me give you my card." He
handed one to the bookseller. As it passed. Nonesuch could
read the words "Brian Abercrombie."

"I live on Butcher's Point," the stranger added.

Mr. Gottlieb nodded. "You have a fine view there."

"Yes, of course." Mr. Abercrombie walked to the door
and stopped, struck by the panorama before him. "But you
have a view!" he exclaimed. He stepped out to the road,
crossed it, and returned to the bookshop. "What space and
what a location, just for the three of you! How could you have
remained undiscovered for so long?"

' 'We're pretty weB known locally,'' Mr. Gottlieb told him.

"Locally?" Mr. Abercrombie glanced around the empty
shop. "I must leave you to your local customers."

But he did not leave immediately. He stayed a long time on
the sidewalk, looking at the three buildings. He walked out to
the parapet as well, studying the slope of the ground below,
and walked past the restaurant to examine the hill behind it.

Mr. Gotdieb was stffl disturbed that evening.' 'Why did I
make up that story?'' he asked his wife.'' What is it to me who
buys my books? And he knew I was lying all the time.''

"He sounds like a nasty piece of work," Mrs. Gottlieb
remarked.

"More of a joker, I think," Mr. Gotdieb said, more toler-

160

antly. His mind was again on Nonesuch's Book of Hours. He
had been studying some of the marginal drawings. Here and
there he had seen a kind of food chain in progress: a mouse ate
a cricket and in turn was eaten by a cat, who was devoured by
a wolf, who was shot by an archer, who was drowned and
eaten by fishes. Sometimes the chain would be broken by the
smaller creatures (but not the larger ones) escaping into the
vines. These tiny stories calmed Mr. Gottlieb's spirit. "We
probably won't hear from him again," he remarked, putting
Mr. Abercrombie's card away in a file.

Because he was ashamed, Mr. Gottlieb did not mention his
visitor to his daughter. The next day a new customer entered
the shop when she was alone, except for Nonesuch, who was
looking wistfully at the front of the Booke of Martyrs, which
was too tightly wedged in place for him to peek inside. He had
to scuttle behind the next book when this one was suddenly
withdrawn from the shelf. He ran up the front of a book and
looked out.

A stout man in a soiled, rumpled suit with broad blue
stripes was holding out the book to Rachel. "This one," he
said. Nonesuch saw him reach into a bulging pocket of his
jacket and withdraw two pink gumdrops which he popped into
his mouth.

"You'd like to buy this book?" Rachel asked doubtfully.

"That's the one."

Rachel bit her lip slightly but pulled out a sales slip from
beneath the cash register, "what is your name, please?"

"Huberman," the fat man said.

Rachel wrote it down. "This is an unusual choice, Mr.
Huberman," she observed.




"Isn't it for sale? It was on the shelf."

"Oh yes, it's for sale."

________                        161

"So, I've bought it." Then the fat man smiled, showing
discolored teeth. Rachel stepped back. "But not for myself.''
"A present?" Rachel asked hopefully.
• "For my employer,'' Huberman explained. "He has wide
tastes. He said to tell you he was interested in the wars of
religion. When he has an interest, any interest, he satisfies it.
Did something hiss?''

Nonesuch, furious, backed away to the depths of the shelf.
"It must have been the wind," Rachel said.
' 'You should get it fixed,'' Huberman told her.
As he left the shop. Nonesuch left by his own route to
follow him. Huberman drove away in an old black Buick,
down the hill to the throughway along the coast. As Nonesuch
watched from high in the air, he saw Mr. Abercrombie again.
standing by two automobiles on a lookout point beside a smaller
road. With him was another man who was examining the
bookshop terrace with field-glasses. The dragon let Huberman
go in order to watch this new pair. In a short while they
separated; the man with the field-glasses, a jolly, balding fellow
in a plaid coat, drove to the restaurant beside the bookshop,
drank a soft drink on the terrace, then walked up and down
carefully studying the hffl behind the three buildings.

Two days later the bookseller received a call from a real
estate agent asking him if he was interested in selling his
building. No thank you, Mr. Gotdieb replied. A pity, the agent
said: he had a client who was very interested in that part of the
city and who would pay quite a good price. I like it here too,
Mr. Gotdieb told the agent. Perhaps you'll be more interested
in selling at a later time, the agent said politely.

Mr. Gotflieb would hardly have remembered the call, though
it was the first such he had ever received, but he learned that
on the two following days his neighbors had received similar

162

calls: Mr. Sacco, the shoemaker, hearing from another real
estate agent; and the owners of the restaurant, two widowed
sisters who had married two brothers, from a lawyer. None of
them were interested, they agreed. They were sitting, as was,
their custom on Friday evenings, en the restaurant terrace
overlooking the harbor. Nonesuch had been out flying and,
shortly before the humans came, had descended to the deep
green leaves of a lilac tree that hung over the table. He was no
more than a yard from Mr. Gottlieb's nose and was able t,?
hear everything that was said.

"The very idea!" said Mrs. Amanda Pickersgill, the olde
sister. ' 'Why should we move? This is just like home.''

"It is, almost," Mrs. Eliza Pickersgill agreed. "Though i
do find the winters hard to bear.''

"It's only a question of determination," Mrs. Amanda
told her.

"I'm sure you're right," Mrs. Eliza replied. A short time
afterwards, Mrs. Amanda had to return to the restaurant by
the back door, to keep an eye on the chef, whom she suspected
of secret drinking. Mrs. Eliza shook her head. "She'll never
admit it," she told the two men, "but the cold puts a strain
on her heart. This hill, too. She insists on walking up to
the supermarket." In a moment she followed her sister inside
the restaurant.

The shoemaker had been thinking of other things.' "There's
a conspiracy in the air; all these offers at the same time. I think
I'll ask a few questions.''

For someone who considered himself a socialist, Bartho-
lomew Sacco had many lines of information in the political
establishment. He had run for city council a few years before,
in a comfortable district where no one was interested in poli-
tics, and had won by default. In the brief period he had held
office, he had almost lowered property values by his efforts to

163

have a disused school turned into a haven for the unemployed.
At the next election, of course, his opponents had got together
and, at great expense, mounted a successful campaign against
him. But in his time in office he had become friendly with
many policemen, taxi drivers, reporters, and others who could
search for information.' 'I'll find out about this," he told Mr.
Gottlieb.

Two days later he entered the bookshop. "It's a man
named Abercrombie," he told Mr. Gottlieb.

"Ah," the bookseller said, with little surprise. His wife
remained silent. Nonesuch, who had been watching from the
bookcase nearest the door, grinned with his needle-sharp teeth.
The shoemaker explained. "He wants to put up a big hotel
here. The plans are all drawn up, and there are even some bids
on them. All he needs is the land."

"That's too bad," Mr. Gottlieb said. "It's our land."

"We'd better be careful," Bartholomew Sacco told him.

"Why?"

"He's new to the city, but he has quite a reputation. He
came with a lot of money and bought a big house, a regular
country estate. He seems to be a whiz at putting together real
estate deals, often with more of other people's money than his
own. He's also very adept at getting out of deals before they
fold, with his own money intact."

' 'He seemed a well-read man,'' Mr. Gottlieb remarked.' 'I
wouldn't expect we have anything to fear from him."

" You can say that?'' his wife put in.' 'Haven't you known
enough well-read men in your own time?" Mr. Gottlieb smiled
in a guilty fashion.

"He didn't become rich by being a nice guy," the shoe-
maker insisted.

' 'Whatever he is, he can't drive us out of our homes and
businesses."

164

"No. But he might try," the shoemaker said.

In the next few days, all of the owners received further
telephone calls from the real estate agents and the lawyer. The
prices offered went up, by the same amounts, they noticed.
"Did he think we wouldn't talk to each other?" the shoe-
maker commented.

The Pickersgill sisters received another telephone call that
night, though fortunately Mrs. Eliza picked up the receiver.
' 'Don't you find the climate unhealthy?'' a young man's voice
asked.

"What?"

"It's much more healthy elsewhere. I don't understand
how you can stay here.''

"Who is this? What do you want?"

"You are living in a very unhealthy location," the voice
said.' 'You really should decide to change it.'' The caller hung
up.

"Who was that?" Mrs. Amanda called.

"A wrong number, dear," her sister replied.

But she could not sleep. Past midnight, two motorcycles
roared past the terrace, turned, and passed again and yet again,
pausing to gun their motors before the restaurant each time.

Mrs. Eliza told of the call only after the next incident, two
days later. Samson was carrying a number of parcels to the
post office after school. As he walked along a hidden part of
the road, by a high fence, two young men came up on either
side, knocked his feet from under him, and scattered the par-
cels in the gutter. When Samson tried to stop them, they
knocked him down again and rubbed his face in the mud. Then
they ran off, giggling.

Fortunately the boy was able to rescue most of the books
in the parcels before the water could get through the wrappings.
He dried them off on his pants and carried them back to the

165

bookshop. He had also been carrying a book he had just bought
for himself, an old geology text. As he had told Mr. Gotdieb,
"I think it's time I really learned something." This book had
fared much worse. It was completely soaked, and a fold-out
chart that showed the different ages of the earth, with dinosaurs
here and there, was ripped half across. Mrs. Gotdieb spread
the chart on the table to dry, where it stayed all day long.
• 'But it's ruined, really,'' Mr. Gottlieb said. • 'It suffered in the
line of duty. I'll find you another one."

Over Samson's and her father's protest, Rachel took the
newly wrapped parcels to the post office to be mailed in the
little green Volkswagen, of which she had the use today. When
she came out of the post office, she found a tire half deflated
and heard the sound of a commotion further down the street.
A blond young man in a blue windbreaker was running, his
hands over both ears, cursing loudly, though without imagi-
nation. "I saw them letting the air out of your tire," the
grandmother on the comer, who controlled traffic at this time
for the schoolchfldren, told Rachel. "I would have stopped
them, but I had to watch the comer. Then, when I could look
again, I saw that one begin to jump up and down and swat at
his ears. There seemed to be some kind of big green insect
buzzing around him. I never saw one like it before. At first I
thought it might be a bird, but a bird that size surely wouldn't
attack people. Anyway, his friend, the bald one, tried to swat
it with a piece of lumber and hit blondie on his head instead. I
called out, 'Police!' and they both began to run, with the
insect, or whatever it was, following them. His friend took off
down the alley with the creature buzzing around his head
too."

"Who are they?"

"Trouble makers. They dropped out of school last year;

now they hold up little children for their lunch money. They're

166




the ones who roughed up your boy earlier. I was really going
to call the police, but maybe I won't have to."

Nonesuch kept watch along the route to the post office for
the next few days. Samson had insisted on carrying the par-
cels again, in order to be able to pay for^more advanced texts
on geology. He was not disturbed during this time. However,
the dragon was sleeping inside when the next attack came.

Very early one morning, a few days later, several cans of
garbage - well-ripened old restaurant refuse - were emptied
out before all three buildings. Mrs. Eliza Pickersgill was
fortunately out early enough to clear most of it up before her
sister saw it. "I dread to think what it might have done to her
heart, coming on it all like that," she told Mr. Gottlieb, who
was shovelling up his own sidewalk. "She was furious at the
little she saw."

Professor Ash watched them from the terrace. Shortly, he
walked across, beside the shoemaker, who was hosing down
his part of the sidewalk and waiting until the bookseller had
finished shovelling so that he could wash his sidewalk as well.
Professor Ash spoke to the shoemaker, who nodded briefly in
agreement.

That evening, all the owners received telephone calls,
with still better offers for their property. Mrs. Amanda said
dryly that she wasn't interested. Mr. Gottlieb said, ' "What is all
this? Are you threatening us?''

' 'A threat?'' the agent asked.' 'Have you heard a threat?
Our firm is the most respected in the city. We don't do business
that way."

"Who wants to buy the property?" Mr. Gottlieb asked.
' 'A confidential client.''                     rs^^
' 'You should watch such clients.''           ffb^^
' 'I can assure you our client's financial position is sound.''




167

"I'm sure it is." Mr. Gottlieb hung up.

Bartholomew Sacco simply hung up without any discussion.
"Why waste the effort?" he said. He began to make some
telephone calls, in Italian.

' 'He's talking to some of his friends in the longshoremen's
union," the parrot told Nonesuch, who was keeping his own
watch outdoors and who had perched on the shoemaker's
sign. "They owe him favors from the time he fixed their
mimeograph machine during the strike, when none of the
regular printers would handle their leaflets."

"What will they do for him?" Nonesuch asked.

' 'Who knows? They unload ships; maybe he wants them
to do some loading for him.''

Two nights later a pickup truck driven by a blond young
man drove by the three buildings. At each, a young man with
a shaved, polished head, riding in the back, emptied out the
ftill contents of a very large garbage can. Neither of them noticed
Professor Ash, who sat at a table on the terrace, wrapped in
an old gray blanket. In the darkness he could easily have been
mistaken for a bundle of laundry. The professor, who often
had difficulty sleeping at night, had volunteered to keep a
lookout instead of reading in his own room. Now he tossed
some pebbles at the window above Mr. Sacco's sign. Instantly
a light went on and the shoemaker picked up the telephone.

They learned what had happened the next day. The truck
had stopped halfway down the hill, just long enough for the
unloader to jump down and into the cab. At the bottom of the
hill, the pickup found its way almost blocked by an old panel
truck that had skidded across the road. As it stopped to nego-
tiate around this obstacle, two large longshoremen opened the
doors on either side and pulled the occupants out. They held
them silent with hands over their mouths while a third long-

168

shoreman very quietly set down two empty garbage cans from
the truck. He helped the others load the young men into the
cans, which they then pushed down the sloping street. The
cans rolled quite a way before crashing over a low curb and
into a ditch. Two of the longshoremen drove'away in the panel
truck, following the third in the pickup. It was driven past the
harbor to a soft stretch of beach, where it was parked so that
the incoming tide would cover the motor. Someone sent a tow-
truck to haul the pickup to the scrap-yard next day.

"We might have a little peace now," the shoemaker
remarked.

However, the lawyer who had called the Pickersgill sisters
now called them all the following evening with another offer.
All refused. "He's not pretending any longer that different
buyers are interested," the shoemaker remarked. "I wonder
what will happen next.''

What happened next was partly due to the physical nature
of their hill. One side rose so steeply that at its peak it almost
overhung the restaurant. From this point, two nights later,
someone tossed a small bomb with a timing device that made
it explode at four in the morning. The small greenhouse behind
the restaurant was shattered; its side was blown over into
Eliza Pickersgill's herb garden. The kitchen window was blown
out as well. The cook, who slept beside the kitchen and dreamed
of atomic bombs, rose up shouting that one had come at last.
Mrs. Amanda ran out with a baseball bat in her hand, cutting
her feet on the broken glass. Her sister, talking in a soothing
voice, finally persuaded her to come inside.

The police arrived almost immediately, but they were never
able to discover the culprit. In another half-hour an ambulance
came to the door. Mrs. Amanda had suffered a heart attack,
fortunately a mild one, as Mrs. Eliza told her neighbors the

169

next day.' 'I was so afraid this might happen. She can't stand
such excitement,'' she said. She had to leave immediately for
the hospital. Mr. Gottlieb promised to keep an eye on the
workmen who were starting to repair the kitchen.

The damage was not so great after all. The restaurant
opened again for business two days later, with an unusually
large number of customers because of all the excitement. The
cook and the waitresses handled them valiantly. Mrs. Eliza
had to keep leaving to see her sister in the hospital. When the
bookseller and the shoemaker called to her, she answered
briefly, averting her eyes.

Three days later they learned from the same lawyer who
had called before that Mrs. Eliza had agreed to sell the
restaurant.' 'She's thinking of her sister, of course,'' the lawyer
remarked, very sympathetically. "I understand Mrs. Amanda
Pickersgill really needs a less active life. There are wonderful
quiet places in Florida, with no hills and no conflict."

"They are joint owners," Mr. Gottlieb pointed out. "Has
Mrs. Amanda agreed to sell too?"

"I'm not sure if she has,'' the lawyer said, ' 'but she will
decide to, out of consideration for her sister if not for reasons
of prudence and health." He did not repeat his offer for the
bookshop, but urged Mr. Gottlieb to contact him if he wanted
to sell.

CHAPTER   XIV

IN A FOREST GROVE




173

IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS,Tir
NONESUCH HARDLY LEFT

the bookshop. This was not only on account
of his own special treasure, the Book of
Hours. From time to time he crawled into
the cupboard in Mr. Gottlieb's study to look
at it- for the bookseller was too worried to
take it out. But mostly, Nonesuch realized,
he spent his time watching over the other
books in the shop.

Why was he so concerned with these
books? They didn't even stay in the shop.
They were sold; people took them away,
often with eager faces, and sometimes
brought others to take their place. It was
like the old days in the Abbey of Oddfields,
he finally realized, when he had set himself
to guard the crops which, he knew, would
be harvested and eaten, and replaced with
fresh plantings. These books were the crops
of the bookshop, Nonesuch thought. Curi-
ously, this idea pleased him. My friends
have good crops, he said to himself.

Friends! How he had come to be in-
volved in the ways of humans! Sometimes
he wondered if his grandmother would
approve. Then, he thought, this must be an
aspect of human life that even she had never
really known. If we must be involved with

humans, he told her in his mind, these are the kind of humans
we should choose.

The next message from Mr. Abercrombie was delivered
personally. Nonesuch was there to see it arrive. He had found
a convenient upper molding that gave him a good view of the
shop - and from which he could surprise the occasional black-
beetle, for he knew he must keep up his strength these days.
From there, he heard the bell on the door announce Huberman,
the fat man who had taken away his Booke of Martyrs. He
stood in his blue suit, his side pockets bulging, drawing pink
gumdrops out of one pocket and yellow ones out of the other.

The little dragon left his molding, flew down, hoping Mr.
Gottlieb would take his time to enter, and crossed between
the free-standing shelves to the one closest to the fat man. As
Mr. Gottlieb came into the room, Huberman bumped against
the table of paper-backs, knocking a dozen to the floor.

"So many books," he remarked. "They're so crowded
you can scarcely pass through."

Mr. Gottlieb picked up the books and looked politely at
Huberman's girth.' "There's more room on the other side,'' he
observed.

' 'Oh, but space is definitely a problem here; I can see that.
You really need more space. You should expand, even. There's
a lovely shop on Brick Street, next to the bank. You could get it
for a very good rent; the owner is in trouble, as I happen to
know."

"Who are you?"

• 'Huberman's the name. Already I'm a customer.'' The fat
man held out a sticky hand.

Mr. Gottlieb ignored it. "Are you working for the man
who wants to buy my shop?"

174

"I have that honor," Huberman said fervently. "That
man is a genius!'' he added.' 'I'm not worthy to touch the hem
of his garment, as the Book says."

' 'Are you speaking of Mr. Abercrombie?''

"Shh," Huberman warned him, "no names, please." He
looked soulfully at Mr. Gotdieb. "You really should sell."

"Thanks for the advice."

"No, honestly." Huberman's voice became very earnest
indeed. "You should see the plans for his hotel."

"So it's at the planning stage already."

"And far advanced. It will be a palace! Three towers, the
middle one fifteen stories high, flanked by others of ten sto-
ries. A revolving restaurant at the highest point. A beacon for
ships in the harbor! On this very spot will be a glass-fronted
promenade, so that the guests can lounge or stroll in all weather
and enjoy the view. You should see the plans yourself: you'd
be proud!"

"No thanks."

"But really," Huberman said, "I must tell you that
construction of such a hotel on such a hill is a major engineering
feat. It requires untold skill and imagination. This is why you
have all been left alone so long.''

"We've been grateful." Then Mr. Gotuieb added, "Fifteen
stories! That will cut the light from the houses above. What
does the building code have to say about that?''

Huberman shook his head and swept his left hand back
and forth.' "This whole section is in process of being rezoned,
restructured, reorganized. I won't bother you with the details.
What is today a senior citizens' home tomorrow may be a
parking lot, and vice versa. This is progress. You wouldn't
stand in the way of progress, surely?''

Mr. Gottlieb looked at the harbor and the old houses on the

175

hffl. "This edifice, this monument we are discussing: do you
plan to call it the Hotel Abercrombie?''

"There is certainty no thought of that. In fact, my mere
suggestion made his lip curl. No, it's sufficient that he knows
it is his. My employer is a very simple man, basically.''

"I'm sure," Mr. Gotdieb said.

Huberman looked very sad and flicked a speck of dust,
which might have been a tear, from his eye. "But you are
making him unhappy. You should agree to sell. Perhaps the
offer was too low; if so, that is a problem that can be over-
come. Money heals all griefs, as the old saying has it. Confi-
dentially, what was offered to you is less than it will take to
furnish one floor of the hotel. Name your price."

"But I like it here."

"Of course," Huberman told the bookseller sympatheti-
cally, "but we all have to give up something.''

"I've given up enough already," Mr. Gotdieb told him.
"I've moved around enough, too. I'B stay here."

Huberman sighed.' 'Such obstinacy! You know,'' he added
confidentially, "there win be a small bookshop at the hotel
itself." He looked around and shrugged. "Of course, lighter
reading than your present stock.''

"I imagine."

"I could arrange for you to have that concession. You
would sun be a bookseHer, in practicaHy the same spot; but
with no financial worries."

Mr. Gotdieb merely smiled.

Huberman nodded sadly. "That was my suggestion. My
employer didn't think you'd be interested, but he said I could
always ask you. He's reluctant to take more direct action."

"What direct action does he have in mind? More garbage
or a better bomb?"

176

' 'What are you saying!'' Huberman raised his hands, as if
in horror, and stepped backwards, crashing against the shelf
on which Nonesuch was crouching. His coat pocket pressed
back, an inch from the dragon's nose. On an impulse, None-
such slipped inside it. It contained lint-covered gumdrops, an
old pencil, a rubber band, and a grimy notebook. What was he
doing here? the dragon asked himself. The fat man might put
his hand in his pocket at any moment. Then he saw a hole in
the lining and put his head through it. Daylight shone beneath,
where the lining had become detached from the fabric. If he
remained quite still, he could travel wherever the fat man
went, in the pocket or hidden between the lining and the
fabric. The conversation continued over his head, muffled but
still clear enough to guide him.

' 'We admit no knowledge of any such incidents,'' Huber-
man told the bookseller. "But, in any case, we'll soon have
the restaurant next door."

' 'If the other owner agrees to sell.''

"We have her sister's signature. We have made commit-
ments on that basis, heavy financial commitments. Mrs. Eliza
Pickersgill will be responsible if Mrs. Amanda Pickersgill per-
sists in not agreeing. Mrs. Amanda is a very strong-minded
lady, a very admirable relic of the old school, but she has a
weakness for her sister. She would not want to see her financially
ruined."

' 'Did you think of all that?'' Mr. Gottlieb asked.' 'Or was
it your employer?"

"I give him full credit," Huberman said.

"So do I."

Huberman mopped his forehead. "Why do you make me
talk this way? Do you think I like it? I'm a kind person, basi-

177

calty. If afl those concerned considered their real interests,
there would be no conflict.''

Mr. Gotdieb nodded, thinking. • 'Well,'' he said at last, "a
wanner climate might be more suitable for both the Mrs.
pickersgiDs. So perhaps we'll be neighbors."

Huberman looked surprised. "Unquiet neighbors, however.
We'll tear the restaurant down. The dust and noise wffl be very
disturbing. I was told to mention this. We might rebuild the
whole place from the inside, making new foundations, which
would generate an incessant pounding. I should imagine your
customers like a quiet atmosphere."

' 'Yes, and I'll see that they get one!''
p   "But what can you do?" Huberman asked, genuinely
|curious.' 'Everything on our part wfll be done with strict legality.
j'As you will find if you bring the matter to court." He had
"^aopened his hand and was studying a note in his sweaty palm.
"You have heard of 'the law's delays,' but probably have not
yet experienced them first-hand."




Mr. Gotdieb saw him reading. "Are those your employer's
words?"

"He does have a gift for words." Huberman returned the
note to his pocket. It touched the head of the dragon, who did
not stir. Huberman looked around the shop again. "So many
books! I hope you are wen insured.''

"Insured!" Mr. Gotdieb said.

"Against fire. All these dry, inflammable objects might be
thought to be a fire hazard. Can books be insured against fire?
But, even if so, could they be replaced?''

"You'd better go," Mr. Gotdieb told him.

"Smoke detectors?" Huberman asked anxiously. "Do you
have smoke detectors? You should. My apartment is tiny, but I

178

have three of them. You must keep the passage to the outside
door clear, too, in case you have to leave suddenly."

"Get out!"

Huberman sighed again. "Such hostility! Why do you
direct it at me? I'm only a messenger.''

"I got your message," Mr. Gottlieb told him.

Huberman looked at the bookseller's white face. "Yes, 1
think you did. We hope to have your message soon." He
looked at the table and half drew out a book about luxury
automobiles. He glanced at Mr. Gottlieb as if to ask the price,
then changed his mind, sighed for the last time, and walked
out of the shop.

Both Nonesuch and Mr. Gotdieb had thought they were
alone in the shop. However, shortly after Huberman had left,
Professor Ash shambled in from a dark corner where he had
been quietly sleeping. He watched the bookseller, whose eyes
were passing over each volume in turn as if he could thus
protect them. "I didn't see you," Mr. Gotdieb told him.

Professor Ash scratched his head and began to search the
shelves labelled "Myths and Legends." "Where is it?"

"What?"

"I'm sure I read it," Professor Ash said. "Among the
dragon myths. I've been thinking about dragons recently. Those
that hold back the waters, and release them; those that hold the
earth together but could very easily let it be destroyed. In fact,
some of them may want to do this.''

"I know the legends," Mr. Gottlieb said.

"But I read another one somewhere." Professor Ash's
voice was puzzled. "That some dragons are thinking of
destroying the universe but that they refrain because that
would make other dragons, who still live among humans,
unhappy. Have you heard that one?"

179

"No, I don't think so," said Mr. Gottlieb, his mind on
more important matters.

' 'I'm sure I've seen it somewhere.'' Professor Ash continued
to search the book shelves.




Mr. Abercrombie sat on the terrace of his house,
overlooking the sea by Butcher's Point, which had
taken its name from the slaughterhouse that had
been there years ago. Times change, he thought:

this would be the theme of the talk he would give to the
Chamber of Commerce when his hotel was opened. He would
recall the very humble beginnings of his own estate, now
located on some of the most valuable property on the coast.
New roads, which had permitted one to drive to the city in a
quarter of an hour, had brought the value, a sure sign of
progress. He made a note in the leather book at his elbow on
the glass-topped table.

His speech would depict himself as an agent of change, of
progress, a good citizen who had replaced three piddling
businesses employing two waitresses and a drunken chef, in
addition to the owners themselves, with a modern hotel, the
pride of the city. He could picture the faces of the city council
members, their eyes shining with greed. He had arranged that
each one would profit from the hotel. How they would be
edified to think that they, too, were good citizens!

His smile faded as he thought of his last conversation with
Huberman. It might have been a mistake to use him at all,
though the man was energetic, could follow instructions, and
was too stupid to be disloyal. But his manner was gross, it
must be admitted; and that dreadful suit, which before had
been another sign of the man's inferiority, had now become
disgusting. He even picked up insects, it seemed! After he had

180

arrived two weeks ago, to report on the success of his hints
about a fire, some large green bug had emerged from a hole in
the tail of his coat and flown swiftly into the bushes. Since that
time, Mr. Abercrombie had carried out all his business with
Huberman by telephone.

In any case, it was better to keep his distance from
Huberman from now on, in case the strong-arm stuff brought
repercussions. Violence could be useful. It had, in fact, showed
the weak side of the two sisters and given him the foothold he
needed in the property. Though the others had dug their heels
in. He had been surprised to see them offer this much resistance.
It was just as well that he himself had visited the bookseller.
How surprised the old man must have been to find that another
literate man would want to take his little paradise away. And
what a joke that Mr. Abercrombie's interest in books had
brought him to the shop in the first place and shown him this
fine opportunity.

Well, other steps would have to be taken soon. Mr.
Abercrombie made a few entries, in code, in his notebook. It
was unlikely that either the bookseller or the shoemaker were
heavily insured against accidents on their property. Such peo-
ple usually looked on the bright side of things and trusted to
human nature. Huberman had already hinted at reliable peo-
ple who could take a fall inside a shop, trip over an obstacle -
say a crate of bargain books on the sidewalk- or dart in front
of an automobile on the way to the post office: all accidents
that could lead to ruinous lawsuits. He, Mr. Abercrombie, had
also spoken briefly to the inspector from the fire department,
who was dissatisfied with his present position and was ex-
tremely interested in a post in the new hotel. Both buildings
could easily be declared fire hazards, to be set right at greater
cost than their owners could afford.

181

Mr. Abercrombie sighed. To have to step around so, when
it really wasn't necessary! Sooner or later these people would
have to bow to the inevitable.

Raoul, the gardener, passed by with a wheelbarrow. Mr.
Abercrombie called to him. He stopped, bowing respectfully.
his face turned aside. Mr. Abercrombie had thought to put
mirrors here and there so that he could see the hidden look of
hatred on that face. "Have they found the sheep yet?" he
asked.

"No, senor," Raoul answered. "Not a sign of them."

"Not a sign? That's too much to believe. Even a rustler
would have left some sign. Your friend must have stolen them.''

"He is honest, I swear!"

' 'Of course he is." Mr. Abercrombie smiled and dismissed
Raoul with a nod.

• But it was a mystery, he had to admit to himself. Where
had all those animals gone? There was, of course, no chance
that Raoul's friend, Henri, the old French herdsman who worked
for the gentleman farmer in the next estate, had stolen them.
This neighbor had a fine flock of Nova Scotia sheep. A week
ago they had started to vanish, that was the only word for it.
At first, one, then another; then two, then three, then six in
one night. The fences had been triple-checked. The watch-
dogs would have been on guard, too, but they had vanished as
well as the sheep; the first one when two sheep were taken,
the next on the following night. There were a few scraps of
wool where the sheep had disappeared, but there was hardly
any blood. It was almost as if something had flown off with
them. And not only from his neighbor's farm. The same thing
had been happening in farms all along the coast. First one or
two lambs, then an older sheep, then more. The newspapers
said that as many as fifty full-grown sheep had disappeared.

182




Where could they aB have gone? Someone must be having a
fine feast, the reporter concluded.

And the mystery had not begun with the sheep either.
Now Mr. Abercrombie recalled hearing Raoul and Henri talk-
ing together in the kitchen before all the troubles began. All
the mice had disappeared from the barn; the rats were no longer
prowling around the garbage dump. "All God's little creatures
have fled," Henri said. "The Devil must be ranging." Both
men had crossed themselves, trying clumsily to hide the motion
from him.

Mercedes, Raoul's wife, appeared on the terrace and
gathered a basketful of logs from the pile by the wall. He had
told her to light a fire in the stone fireplace just inside, in the
library, against the cool evening. She was a squat Indian woman
from Guatemala, who had entered the country illegally, with
her husband, a year before. She never smiled. From what
Raoul, that excellent gardener, had said, she kept thinking of
her sister, whose husband had disappeared and who had refused
to travel north with her; Mr. Abercrombie had stored this piece
of information away, if only to warn himself that to ask about
her family, in ordinary politeness, would evoke a flood of
tears.

He had been right to keep his distance, he realized again
suddenly. Mercedes came running out on the terrace. "Un
dragon en el fuego!" she cried. "Un dragdn entre las
llamas!"

Mr. Abercrombie looked at her until she controlled herself
"A dragon in the fire?" he asked.

"Yes, senor," she gasped, becoming overwrought again.
"A small dragon, in the flames. She is laughing at me!"

Mr. Abercrombie shook his head patiently. "Have you
been drinking again?"

183

• 'I don't drink, senor.'' Mr. Abercrombie continued to smfle,
shaking his head, until Mercedes began to sob and ran from
the terrace. He knew that she would control herself soon
enough. Perhaps she would even want to apologize for her fit
of hysterics, as she had tried to do before for bursting into
tears when he had called her in to a dinner party to meet the
guests who had enjoyed her excellent cooking. Now, as he had
done at that time, Mr. Abercrombie would remain scrupu-
lously polite, as if nothing had happened, as if he could not
understand why she was becoming upset again.

Neither she nor her husband could leave him. They knew,
for he had told them, that the immigration authorities would
investigate them more closely than they could stand, if they
tried.

He recalled that his fourth wife had referred to this couple
when she had left him, to the fact that he kept their salaries so
low, even though he himself was relatively indifferent to money.
"You could pay them so well that they'd never want to leave
you," she had said. "All these manipulations, an the wheeling
and dealing, all your activities on the fringe of the law. That
horrible goon of yours, Huberman, who tracks mud on my
carpet! You're a bright man. You could be completely ethical
and still rich. Does it give you any pleasure? You just want to
see people dance to your tune!"

He had looked at her with more respect than at any time in
the year they had been married. He had almost asked her,
' 'What else is there to do?'' If he had given himself away, he
would have added that people bored him. They held no more
surprises for him. He knew how they were motivated, how
they could be forced to act. It was better to be one of those who
called the tune, not one who danced.

A trace of wood smoke had passed through the open door.

184

That was a queer conceit of Mercedes: a dragon in the fire. It
must be an old Indian belief; he could ask her about it, but he
preferred never to admit being ignorant of anything. The
university library would certainly have something about it or
even—he grinned—the bookshop. Perhaps when the old man
finally gave up, he would sell it books and all.

On the table beside him were two decorating schemes,
already submitted to him for the hotel's lobby. One was silver
and blue, sea colors. He had almost chosen this one, but now
the second, of silvered mirrors, black, and old gold, appealed
to him more. The photographs made him think of palaces of
Renaissance Italy, of rulers who were absolute tyrants, answer-
able to no one. He would think about this on his evening walk.
A scheme like a Renaissance palace was not ideal for a seaside
hotel, he knew, but the view would more than make up for
that, and, really, he need please no one but himself.

That period of history must have been on his mind. On the
table was also a copy of Machiavelli's The Prince. Now he
leafed through it to the passage that told how princes should
deal with conquered people: "For it must be noted, that men
must either be caressed or else annihilated; they will revenge
themselves for small injuries, but cannot do so for great ones;

the injury therefore that we do to a man must be such that we
need not fear his vengeance."

He himself hardly need fear vengeance, be the injuries he
had done small or great, Mr. Abercrombie thought. In these
tame times people were civilized and slow to vengeance—or at
least vengeance of the kind the Italian diplomat had meant.

He put The Prince on the decorators' files and set off for
his evening walk, his head still buzzing with thoughts of times
long past. He was in the wrong century, he told himself, one in




186

which he still had to observe some forms of law and pay some
lip service to what was called "democracy."

Mr. Abercrombie followed his customary route: down the
gate to the main road, along it for a quarter-mile, back into his
own property by a hidden path, through a meadow to a small
forest of spruce trees. There was a clearing in this forest,
around a grove of three old willows that filled up most of the
space. From the center of these willows he could look back at
his own house; at Raoul spreading mulch on the rose beds; at
Mercedes up on a stepladder polishing the glass door to the
terrace, glancing fearfully at the reflection from the fire. In the
other direction, he could look across the bay to the harbor, and
to the hill above it, which, in one way or another, would soon
be his. This was his view every evening: he could look over his
property, present and future, without saying a word.

But he did say a few words as the great green shape
rustled through the spruce trees and fixed him with its golden
eyes. "A dragon," Mr. Abercrombie said. "Ridiculous!" The
dragon moved closer.

' 'I don't believe in you,'' Mr. Abercrombie told the dragon
"You are an illusion. You can't possibly exist. I don't accept
you," he stated boldly to the gaping mouth, to the fierce,
pointed teeth.

CHAPTER XV

A

BOOK DRAGON




189

EATENG MR. ABERCROMBIE^
WAS THE HARDEST ACTION

of Nonesuch's life. Killing him was no prob-
lem: his head came off at the first snap, and
landed in a bed of chrysanthemums, looking
very surprised. If that had been all there
was to it. Nonesuch could have taken the
proper satisfaction in dealing with his mor-
tal enemy, roared in victory, spread his
wings, and flown away. But he knew he
couldn't just leave Mr. Abercrombie's two
parts lying there. This might give him away
or, worse, implicate his friends of the book-
shop terrace. No, Mr. Abercrombie had to
disappear completely; and in a few minutes
he had done so: cashmere sweater, gold
Rolex wrist-watch, and afl, everything went
down the dragon's throat. He made a very
large, full meal. Before it was over. None-
such, who was still no more than twelve
feet long, began to think he should have
waited until he was larger still. But he had
not dared. Huberman's threat of fire, an
attack on both his home and his treasure,
had made it imperative that Nonesuch deal
with the source of these threats as soon as
possible. "Get your tasks done as well as
you can, even if not as well as you like."
Had his grandmother said that? She might
well have done so.

But he learned, as he could have done in no other way, the
real reason that dragons in their wisdom had stopped eating
people. After he had clawed up the ground to cover Mr.
Abercrombie's blood — the police would wonder about these
marks, but what could they make of them, after all? — he
paused to look around him. How the world had changed! At
some distance was Raoul, the gardener, quietly weeding the
chrysanthemum beds. Before, Nonesuch had always liked to
watch this man at work because of his skill, his love for growing
things, and the deep sadness in his eyes. Now he thought,
"The ignorant peasant. From the way he looks at me, he
doesn't appreciate how well off he is here. He must have
forgotten about the death squads. I should remind him."

Nonesuch looked at Mr. Abercrombie's house, built fifty
years before by a wealthy man who loved beautiful work.
' 'It's all mine,'' he thought.' 'All the carved-walnut shelves in
the library, all the planning of the gardens, the ornamental
shrubs that took thirty years to come to full beauty: they are
mine, I bought them." He looked at the city. A new hunger
seized him, full as his stomach was, as if he could never be
satisfied. "It is not mine yet," he thought of the city. "I hate
everything that is not mine!''

Nonesuch shook his head at this new madness. It cleared
sufficiently for him to realize he must hide. He had already
picked out an almost deserted island offshore on which he had
planned to stay, fasting, until he had regained his old, small
size. The rational part of his mind told him he must go there as
soon as possible, even though another part suggested that he
wait here until people came looking for Mr. Abercrombie and
give them a real surprise. He waited impatiently for darkness.
Automobiles passed on the through highway half a mile away.

190

The idiots, he thought, going from one place to another, as if it
mattered where they went! He was grateful when an evening
fog came down, masking his flight out to the island.

The reason dragons should not eat people, he said to
himself, as he lay among sumac bushes not far from an empty
cottage, was that they took in the people's thoughts along with
their flesh. How long would Mr. Abercrombie's thoughts stay
with him?

During the following days. Nonesuch rested within sight
of a quiet tidal pool full of seaweeds and starfish. He sneered at
any fishing boats that passed, but was careful to keep out of
sight. At night he set out on long flights, to use up as much
energy as possible and reduce his size more quickly. He soared
along the coast, just within sight of land, not wanting to
approach the world of men any closer. Always he returned to
the tidal pool. It was so exposed to any passing boat that at
first he had to look at it from a distance. Later, when he had
shrunk enough so that the tall grass hid him, he would lie by
the pool for hours in the daylight, watching butterflies flit
along its surface. Mr. Abercrombie's thoughts had, at last,
vanished along with the rest of him.

It took Nonesuch several weeks to reach his old size, but
before that, while his wings still spanned a foot, he flew back
to the bookshop. He knew it would be more prudent to wait
longer, but he was quite unable to keep away. "Wen, you've
certainly grown,'' the parrot told him.' 'If it's stiB you."

"It is."

' 'You really do look like a dragon now.''

• 'I always was a dragon,'' Nonesuch said. • "I always wffl
be."

"I never really doubted it," the parrot told him. "My
eyesight must have been at fault. Why are you larger now?"

191

• 'In fact,'' said Nonesuch, "for a time I had to be a great
deal larger than this; there was something I had to do. I'm
growing smaller again."

"By choice?"

"Yes; it's a question of diet."

The parrot shook his head. "Well, whatever suits you,"
he said politely.

Nonesuch flew out over the parapet to look into the book-
shop window, then returned.' 'I'm eager to get home again,''
he confessed. "I've been worried about my people. These ones
know how to live but sometimes they need help. I have to look
after them. And my book too, of course,'' he added dutifully.

The parrot looked at him with new respect, then cleared
his throat. "In your present size," he observed, "you might
teach that cat a lesson. He's become very aggressive."

Nonesuch's eyes gleamed. "I'll consider it."

The parrot nodded, then changed the subject.' 'You certainly
missed a lot of excitement around here.''

"Tell me about it."

The main events, the parrot said, were visits from the
police inquiring about the man who had wanted to buy all the
property, Mr. Brian Abercrombie. He had simply disappeared,
without apparent reason and leaving no clues. He had gone
for a walk one evening and never come back. It was true that
the surface of the earth had been disturbed in a small grove of
trees on a remote part of his property, but further digging did
not turn up a body. Certainly, the police had said, he would
have been unlikely to leave of his own accord just when he
was on the verge of completing an important business deal.

"My master said to your bookseller afterwards, 'Maybe
the Devil himself carried the wretched exploiter away. If so, I'll
thank him.' "

192

Mr. Gottlieb had seemed relieved, but less happy, the par-
rot said. Perhaps he had been moved by the plight ofHuberman,
who had been hanging around the terrace like a lost soul ever
since his employer had vanished. Huberman had lost his center.
He bothered the police with so many questions and fruitless
leads that they told him to keep away from the station. He
begged those he had threatened and harassed before for any
news, for any suggestions of the cause of Mr. Abercrombie's
departure. He kept coming back to the bookstore, which seemed
to provide some contact with his departed master. He also
took the opportunity to sell back the Booke of Martyrs and
other historical books, all excellent editions, which Mrs. Gotdieb
suspected he had stolen from Mr. Abercrombie. "From what
I hear, he must have had quite a library," she remarked. "I
hope we have a chance to bid on it."

' 'Why do you think it will be for sale?'' Mr. Gottlieb asked
her.

"I just have a feeling. Wauld that fellow dare sell any
books if he thought his boss was coming back?''

Huberman apparently did not think Mr. Abercrombie would
return, for after two weeks he had gone in search of his lost
master. "I'll seek him throughout the world,'' he had told the
shoemaker at this very spot on the street, just in front of the
parrot's perch.

"It may be his fate to search a long time," the dragon
remarked. "Possibly he'll never stop looking."

The parrot had still other news, much of which he had
learned first-hand. The shoemaker, not feeling it safe to leave
him alone, had started to bring the parrot to the restaurant
table on the terrace on Friday evenings. When it had become
clear to the PickersgiB sisters that no further attempts were
being made to take their restaurant from them, Mrs. Amanda
began to think more seriously of her health. She and Mrs.

193

Eliza were now planning an automobile trip to the deserts of
New Mexico, which, they understood, combined warmth and
dryness with space, a view of mountains, and a sense of
history. If they found a place they liked well enough, they
would retire there. For the time being, they had asked the
Gottliebs' daughter to manage the restaurant in their absence.
Rachel, who had found that the bookshop did not keep her
busy enough, had accepted gladly. There had already been
some talk that if the Pickersgill sisters did decide to retire, they
would sell the restaurant to Rachel and her husband. The
bookseller and his wife had already told the young couple that
they could help them make this purchase.

Nonesuch learned all this in conversation with the parrot
over several days. While he was still as large as a pigeon, he
stayed on the flat roof of the shoemaker's shop beside a tiny
greenhouse full of cucumbers. He watched all the comings and
goings from a concealed spot beside a drainpipe. Once, when
the white cat, Powder-Puff, who would climb anywhere in
pursuit of a bird, disturbed his rest, Nonesuch sent him off
screaming across the roof-tops and down to the ground by the
restaurant's back shed. Cats in this century didn't show as
much fight as they had done five hundred years ago, he
reflected: perhaps the earlier felines were more accustomed to
the sight of dragons. From then on, Powder-Puff took so many
precautions to assure himself that any bird he stalked was not
really a dragon that most escaped him.

By eating nothing and by flying vigorously at night and on
misty days, Nonesuch soon became small enough to slip through
the crack in the wall over the Distant Voyages sign and enter
the shop again. He is there to this day.

So far, with the help of the humans in the shop, he has
kept quite busy enough. Perhaps he has had help from another
source, too. When the weather became cold. Mr. Gottlieb decided

194

to reduce his heating biDs and installed an efficient wood-stove
in the bookshop. The stove's fire shines brightly through its
glass front, and it gives out enough heat to warm the upstairs
apartment as well; the basement furnace is seldom needed.
Professor Ash, who has been finding the cold weather harder
to bear, likes to sit by the stove, reading and dozing, sipping
occasionally from his bottle and watching fire shapes through
the glass. The old man talks more and more with Samson,
whose reading has branched out from geology to paleontology
and archaeology; now he is back to reading myths, which he
once considered too childish. He has become bored with school,
always does his homework at the last minute, and as a conse-
quence is only third in his class. One day he spoke to Professor
Ash about the belief of some primitive tribes in taboos and evil
spirits.

"They see nature that way," Professor Ash told him.
' 'But some spirits are friendly as well. The Irish peasants put
out milk for the fairies, the 'Little People.'" He laughed. "If I
was superstitious, I'd put out something for the spirit that
helped us when it seemed we were going to be replaced by a
hotel."

' 'Do you mean the big financier who disappeared?'' Sam-
son asked him. "Do you think the Little People carried him
away?"

"I wouldn't be surprised."

Samson made a face. "He'll come back yet."

' 'I wouldbe surprised at that. I had a feeling
of finality about his departure."

"So, are you putting out a bowl of milk?" Samson asked.

"No, that wouldn't be suitable. In fact," and here the
professor laughed, embarrassed, "I don't quite know why, I
think the right thing is a book.''

195

"Well, there are plenty of those."

"No, I mean to put a book out. I had that idea, somehow. I
left a book open on the table there.'' Professor Ash pointed to
a small desk by the window. "I was interested to learn that
the late Mr. Abercrombie, or at least the departed Mr. Aber-
crombie, had been reading Machiavelli's The Prince on his
last day with us."

"What's that about?" Samson asked.

"Oh, how people act; how to keep power in the real
world. You'd like it."

"I'll put it on my list," Samson said. "But did the Little
People read it?"

"The pages were turned, but that might have been the
wind."

' 'Didn't you watch?''

"Oh, you mustn't do that," Professor Ash said anxiously.
"The good spirits don't like that, and you might lose the
blessing." He yawned. "But I'm becoming forgetful. You'll
have to remind me from now on; or you can do it, when I
can't."

So, certain books have been left lying out on the little table
near the stove, towards the end of the day when it is unlikely
that the Gottliebs will replace them on the shelves. Sometimes
the pages have been turned, and sometimes not; from the
number of pages, Professor Ash and Samson can judge the
progress and the literary tastes of the invisible reader — if it is
not all an effect of the wind. After The Prince, they tried the
short stories of Guy de Maupassant (in English translation),
some novels of Dickens and Mark Twain, and a history of
Rome by Tacitus and of Greece by Thucydides. The invisible
reader apparently preferred history to fiction. Special interest
was shown in the first part ofMacaulay's History of England.

196

though eventually even this reader found it heavy going. One
day Professor Ash had the idea of taking the Booke of Martyrs
again from the shelf. In the morning it was found open to the
account of the deaths of Bishops Ridley and Latimer. One page
was weighted down with a small pebble; on the facing page
was a fragment of a gold chain bracelet that must have fallen
through a crack in the floor.' 'Someone must want to give us a
present," Professor Ash said.

After other books, other gifts arrived, also presumably from
beneath the floorboards: a sapphire that must have fallen out
of a brooch and a rare 1914 quarter. Professor Ash looked it
up in the coin catalogue and whistled at its current price, but
neither he nor Samson has any thought of selling it.

No one else has been let into the secret of this game. Mr.
Gottlieb may suspect something, but he has the feeling that
when good luck has come, it is foolish to endanger it by too
close questioning of any little local mysteries. At times, Sam-
son is sorry that he cannot come back to the shop at night to
discover the reader. But he does not even think of discussing
the question of its identity with anyone besides Professor Ash.
He is especially afraid that if Peter Levy learns what is going
on he will lie in wait for the reader, or even set up an infra-red
video camera to observe what occurs at night.

During all this time, Nonesuch has kept a good watch on
Brother Theophilus's Book of Hours, his treasure. It is as
beautiful as ever, and he regards it with deep affection, since it
brought him into the present world of books, which, frankly,
interests him more now.

But, of course, he has no thought of leaving the Book of
Hours. He remembers his grandmother's comments, which
once led him to believe that the continued existence of our
galaxy might depend on the safeguarding of this book. Now

197

that he lives in the present day, in what might be considered a
more rational environment, he does not know if he should
really believe his grandmother. Perhaps she was only recounting
a grandiose myth, as an old lady dragon might do. But he does
not think it wise to take a chance: he has lost enough homes
already, and he realizes that conditions that will keep his Book
of Hows safe will also preserve the bookshop in which it is
lodged.

For the same reason - since it may be
very important to all of us that Nonesuch
not be disturbed—the exact location of
the bookshop cannot be revealed,
nor its name, though DISTANT VOYAGES
is a close approximation. If you
wish to know more about this
shop, you can pass over the
northeast coastline of North
America with the wings of your
imagination and scan all the islands,
bays, and promontories. If you find a
likely spot and look at it very closely
indeed, you may see a small dragon
perching among the bookshelves.

THE    END