Prince Edward sprang into what I assumed was legitimate action, yelling around as convincingly as any soldier. He and three other men had already mounted their horses by the time Simon and I found them in the blinding smoke.
“What is this?” the prince demanded. The four of them on their horses surrounded us. One of the soldiers had a bow raisedand pointed at me. Suddenly I felt my disposability and cursed myself for not having tried harder to win the prince’s favor all this time spent sitting around. Smoke continued pulsing through the surrounding trees and filled the meadows.
“I don’t know, I’ve never seen it this thick,” I said.
“So you admit this has happened before?”
“You heard what I said to the king—I know just as much as anyone else. I don’t know what’s going on, I swear. I always thought it was smoke from our neighbors down in the valley. It might still be that, just burning rubbish, I don’t know. It should pass soon.”
“This is no rubbish fire. We have to track the source.” Despite his quick jump into action, there was an accusatory strain of panic in Edward’s voice. He commanded Simon and I to share horses with the two other soldiers and our hands, he commanded, were bound with rope. All trust was gone. Whatever boytalk we had been having only minutes ago was forgotten.
The flood of fog and smoke turned from a dome of muddy orange into a bluer, deeper hue as the sun continued setting, followed by a sullen, darkening gray. We could only see twenty feet in front of us, then only ten. Edward shouted orders that sounded convincingly tactical, guiding the soldiers into a spread-out formation as we rode around the side of the hill of our smallholding to where there was a modest peak on the other side. The idea was to get above the smog, to have a better view of the land and see wherever it was coming from. The prince shouted through the blinding smoke, his voice farther and farther away. The soldier I was bound to followed the slope of the hill, but the horse was spooked and going too fast. Visibility was down to barely five feet. I told the soldier to slow down,that we were nearing the other side of the hill, but suddenly there was no peak and not because I couldn’t see it through the smoke. The peak was gone. The ground was going.
Where the peak of a steep hill had once been was now a sudden drop into a vacuum of moving, sinking earth; the land was crumbling, scattering. A wall of sound rang out as if the earth itself was roaring. The soldier I was with had run our horse too fast. It was too late to stop. Suddenly I saw the horse’s legs as if they were my own, splayed out, pawing at the air as we went right over the disintegrating, crumbling lip of the ground and went down, straight down. The soldier heaved back, pushing me forward, pulling on the reins, horse screaming, all three of us falling in a somersault into a foggy orange void. The gray fog was orange then red. The ground—the peak that was now a downward slope—came at us startlingly fast. The horse hit first, then me colliding with the horse, rolling over it, with the soldier right behind me, his armor rattling, tangling up with me, all the ropes, hooves, rocks, and the scrambling and tearing of skin and limbs.
The pile of us reached the bottom and came to a final, fatal stop. The soldier was under the horse and both were unmoving. I had been tossed a few feet away and was bleeding—I couldn’t tell from where, my clothes were a mess, I was covered in debris, I struggled to right myself. The gummy maw of adrenaline-diverted pain stung throughout my body as I stood up. My ears rang. There was a thundering, roaring bass line. The sound of sliding earth. The smoke was darker and harsher, more saturated with red and deep purple, violent flashes of orange. Smoke gushed, but inconsistently now, varying in opacity with rushes of wind, steam, and particles because I was here, I was at the source.
Clouds of smoke swirled and broke.Itstopped and started. Something was breathing, something was clearing. There was a parting, and I saw it.
I can only say exactly what I saw, which was first: a spine.
A black jagged spine moved faster than seemed possible only because it was larger than seemed possible. Each exposed vertebrae was the size of a horse, moving and bending as part of a sentient whole being. Earth washed around its frame like tidewater. Its long neck wormed across the ground, with its angular viper head alight with eyes and veins of orange and spilling orange, spilling bright orange molten lava from its mouth, opening and closing, the detritus splattering.
It was a dragon. As clearly as I could understand such a thing, it was that.
I couldn’t scream. The air was too scorched. My throat was seized in tight retraction, as if to reject this wild falsehood. My mind flipped through scenario and conundrum like flash cards: snake, lion, man, owl—nothing befitting the creature in front of me that I could only call ginormous, Babylonian, this apocryphal stain.
Black charred lips opened and closed around gnashing teeth, clearing the last of the lava from its mouth. It didn’t just breathe fire, it spit hot magma from its mouth like a volcano. Plumes of smoke flooded out from its nose. Then it saw me. Its eyes widened like full moons. Its neck sprang upward and backward into an alert position with startling speed. I don’t know how my brain knew to saymovebut I moved right as the dragon pulled back, inhaled, and spewed a new river of destruction right at me. I tripped into a sprint as fire and sparks ran after me. Fire and rock, fire and molten debris—it wasn’t a simple line offire, there were breaks to it, rocky fireballs and liquid lashings of flame. There were seconds where it nipped at the back of my legs and seconds where the flow broke. The dragon stopped. It closed its mouth. I reached the pile of dead horse and dead man and through the flames that now engulfed them, I pulled out the soldier’s sword. It was heavier than anything I had expected—nothing like the regimental swords Simon and I had been training with, nothing like a machete or a baseball bat, which were things from a previous life I also had no experience holding. I gripped the hilt and held the sword like a baseball bat—was that what I should do? All knowledge and logic went out the window. The dragon approached and words finally formed—my throat allowed it—but all I could say was “No, no, no!” like chastising a dog off the furniture, a slobber of lava dripping from its mouth. “Go away! Get back!” Still the monster crawled after me, slithered over. I noticed its wings for the first time, batlike and retracted until the dragon suddenly leaned back on its hind legs and both wings unfurled wide. The lake of lava illuminated the leathery screen from behind. The dragon beat them and embers spun in the air. I shielded my face. Like a black swan, the dragon held its neck back and beat the air with its wings, leaning backward and exposing its stomach, which expanded. It was inhaling again. It took a sharp intake of nearly oxygenless air. Its stomach muscles contracted, a groan sounded from deep within, sparks flew from its teeth as it slowly opened its mouth. I had seconds to either dash out of the way or think my last sweet thoughts of Simon, but did neither, wasting them instead on sheer terrorized awe at the size of this thing, at the horror of the mouth as it came down, screaming, exhaling, lighting, ejecting.
But nothing happened.
No fire was produced, no lava spilled.
Through a wince, I opened my eyes and found myself looking straight down the empty hangar of the dragon’s open throat, through its sharpened reeds of teeth, and there was nothing. Bits of ash and dying embers fluttered on a faint, hot breeze, but there was no flame, it was a darkened, empty funnel.
A strangely human moment passed between the dragon and I where we shared a cautious, questioning look. Then the dragon sneered, or reconfigured, or rolled its eyes—I don’t know what to call it because I don’t know what dragons do, becausedragons don’t exist, but this one did and whatever it was doing wasn’t any less threatening, flames or not. It was angry now.
I dropped the sword and ran but tripped. I backed up. I crawled. I held up my hands in a plea for mercy, or an acceptance of futility as the dragon lumbered forward, claws and teeth at the ready, just as there came a flash of new metal between us. Something ran in front of me. A soldier and his steed. A blinding slice; or a cut, sliced blindly. The dragon whipped its head around. An arrow flew through the air and missed. Arms enveloped me, grabbed me like I was the last thing on earth. I grabbed Simon back, both of us suddenly barreling away, neither one of us able to speak or cry, the air having evaporated all sound, and our muscles, so feeble and spent, faltering as we scrambled up the crater’s slope, avoiding stray flames and pockets of magma, avoiding a man’s body as it flew through the air and crashed to the ground, clawed and bitten, blood like I had never seen before, dragon behind us again. I felt the pulse of displaced air, the snapping at our heels, the frustrated breath, bottled snorts of disgruntlement and strain, the dragon wheezing, then theshouts of the prince over there, flagging us down, the monstrous footsteps behind us growing slower, quieter, almost—in some strange way—contemplative, like it was deciding it had something better to do. Then its footsteps disappeared altogether. I dared to look behind me and with just as much disbelief as when the dragon had been there, the dragon was now gone, lost in the vacuum of smoke and sinking earth. And just as resistant to breath and life as this moment had been only seconds ago, there was now only just that: the inflation of collapsed lungs, a last gasp of hope, a getting the hell out of there. We fled.
12
I don’t know what I would say to someone in the past. I don’t know what I would say to someone in the future. I thought myself a rarity up until that point—that singular moment of solitude I had experienced in Greenwich, when I first arrived in 1300—how like a coin I had felt, slipping through some impenetrable fabric all on my own, the terror of that loneliness and how it was edged, I’ll admit, with the smugness of being chosen. But later, in 1301, in the summer, in northeast England, all of us had seen it. Simon, Prince Edward, three soldiers—two of them now dead—and myself. We had all seen the dragon. The world I thought I knew had tilted by another degree.
We all retched and mourned privately for our ideas of reality that were fracturing and splitting open, but we confronted the impracticalities together—namely the lapping lake of fire the dragon had left behind, the magma it had been spitting. We needed to get out. The lava was spreading. We ran across the border of the crater’s crumbling lip, away from the sliding rock and ash, feelingthe earth still making adjustments. I felt like a bug-man, a pitiful shrew with no legs to stand on, not a time traveler who had slipped through the fabric of the universe but an idiot who had tripped, a glitch in a system that had made him permanently its mite, of which there were already millions, scattering, sprinting away like fools, passing out and coming to, then passing out again.
The four of us woke up to a deathlike white morning along the shores of a smoldering pyroclastic flow. We nattered and stuttered, paced, but mostly sat on the ground, exhausted from the adrenaline that had petered out and put us to sleep. We wondered how long we had been out. We poked at the ashes with our swords. Two surviving horses stood shell-shocked and black against the rising sun. No one mourned the other horse. No one mourned the two other soldiers.
Simon and I were the most levelheaded. I had time traveled, so I already knew what sick surprises the universe could pull, and Simon was the innocent who already believed in such easy magic. I thought about the angel he’d said had appeared to him back in Greenwich. I thought about the dragon’s hulking frame in the middle of the lake of fire and magma. I didn’t know how to prioritize my levels of disbelief.
We all took turns vomiting.
The lava flow cooled and hardened into a thick black scab across the landscape. I scraped the skin of the ground with my sword and it ripped open, spitting bright orange magma from the vein. It took my breath away—literally sucked the oxygen from the air, leaving a dense sulfuric scent. My lungs burned and I coughed.
In other places, the cooled magma was already flaking away into ash. Reams of gray fluttered into the air like paper, and fora moment I thought it actually was paper, or plastic, or some kind of man-made material, and when I looked closer: I saw that it was. Butterflies of something unnatural. Something wasn’t right. I dug my sword into the ashes. Black broke into white, into uneven chunks of material. Burning things. Metals. Dripping puddles of—
“Look,” said Simon. He raised his sword. Speared on the end of it was still-burning, melting and deformed, but very obviously a plastic bottle, dripping into ribbons like tipped wax from a candle.
My stomach dropped. I riffled through the ashes with my sword, coughing and spitting ash. Flames sparked anew, smoke flowed and cleared. The magma was not completely viscous. Parts of it were thicker and broke apart in chunks, melting slower. Materials burst into flames, thinner plastics melted and seeped, fibers and wires bent and stretched, but all of it—the entire pool of flaming earth—was junk.
