I wished my boyfriend had been angry or cold or even fascinated, anything. Instead he acted completely normal—not even acting likenothinghad happened, but accepting what had happened as casual fact, an occurrence, like weather changing. He was in bed on his phone, scrolling through regular things. Mindlessness. We talked about tomorrow’s flight home, remember to check in, where should we eat, what was the weather back in London; so afraid of sin that we had excluded ourselves from any narrative form and become these magnetized bobblehead ah-hyuck-hyucks. I almost said, “So that was a crazy night,” to get some kind of closure at least, but I knew that doing so would only claw back all the airy words we had used to blow ourselves so far away from each other. And part of me was afraid of what he would say in response: not anger, not sadness, but something worse. “Yeah, that was pretty crazy, George. G’night.”
What is George going to do you don’t have to tell me.All in the same fucking breath.
I craved reality, I craved punishment. I wanted to believein the universe’s counterbalances and that the vicious gluttony of having sex with a stranger on a beach had a calculable heft to it that eventually would swing back into me; something deeply human inside me had cried out for this, and look, finally, it took seven hundred years of time travel and a five-hundred-and-fifty-fucking-whatever-year-old dragon but I finally had it. I had wished for a world of consequence and raw humanity and I was given one: beat, imprisoned, living in shit and met with life’s limits in a land where morality was a tangible, foreseeable element that interlaced all things. When I moved, Simon moved. When I moved, a dragon appeared. This wasn’t God-fearing obsessive compulsion, this was gravity and evolution. Love, commitment, consecration—these are mechanisms with more command over the world than anything else, and when I had reached a point where I had so exempted myself from their reach for so long, they had pulled me rapturously through time itself. I deserved everything that was happening to me and more.
I looked back at the crater and saw the dragon’s whole frame emerged from the earth now and I threw up. A ceramicist’s gray splattered the ground. It felt incredible actually—a euphoric mixture of endorphins and adrenaline slid up and down my spine and I felt mania, crying until I was laughing, laughing until I was crying, here on the border between hell and home.
Did I want to go home?
And which one was that?
In the distance, the dragon stretched its magnificent wings, a silent, blackened moth. It stretched out its body, shook out its hind legs, laid its neck out long, and yawned—but it held its mouth open, it didn’t close it. I held back and watched, waiting for fire or something, but there was nothing. He held his mouthopen while resting it on the ground. Then I saw something. A figure ran across the crater’s open plain, running toward the dragon. I squinted—it was a person, a man. He was dressed all in white and he wore a helmet, a round, circular helmet, not like a helmet from here because it wasn’t metal, it was glass—and there was a light. An electric light. I gasped at the sight. The figure was unnaturally lit up with brilliant white against the dark blue dusk. For the first time in a year, I was seeing an artificial light. Inside the man’s glass helmet, a ring of light illuminated his way forward as he ran toward the dragon, which was still holding its mouth wide open. When the man finally reached the dragon, he went—what?—yes, he went inside.
The man ran inside the dragon’s mouth.
The dragon closed its mouth.
And then the dragon took flight. The largest bird on planet Earth flapped its wings. It hardly needed to run for takeoff, only needing to catch the slightest breeze with its sturdy sails. As soon as it was fully airborne, it reached a speed I couldn’t make sense of, like it was both sprinting in place and zooming forward. Its body both stretched out and magnified itself. There was a blur and a contraction as it shot across the sky, and then it was gone. It disappeared like a fine loose thread pulled free.
“What is George going to do?” asked Mum, third-person, saving all parties from direct confrontation. I hung up.
Twilight bloomed around me in the forest, all manner of green things had turned blue, spreading coolness and leafy sighs. Oak trees towered over me—I had never seen oak trees this tall in modern England. Perfectly vertical lines of thick timber went straight up to the moon, where they exploded in a symphony ofbranches, squiggling in the sky, going every which way. Wood creaked and leaves fluttered and shook. And down this corridor of trees, appearing in flashes and spurts at first, was a torch. Light approaching. My man. What had I done?
I cursed. I wiped my tears and cleaned my face but this triggered a new wave of upset, a horrific self-pity and shame, and I had to wipe that away as well. I walked toward the light, steady but completely unsure. I walked toward Simon, but just seeing him made me cry again, made me run to him. I crashed into him, we embraced. In a perfect world we would have both reached the same apologetic conclusion, but I’m afraid mine was... I’m afraid... I’m just afraid.
“I’m sorry,” I said. All I could do was say it over and over again, speak over the fear of the idea that roamed on the very edge of my mind. I wanted both of us to fall through the earth, no explanations, just meld and melt away. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” My heart snapped like a magnet to all the different ways it could betray Simon at the same time as I nuzzled my face into his chest.
But Simon was in tears as well. “No, I’m sorry,” he said, and the pain of it twisted inside me. “You’re right, we have to get out of here. Let’s leave. Let’s go to Scarborough or back to London or York. Let’s run away and start over.”
As much as my heart soared with how much of him was back in my arms after our days of distance, it dropped just as easily with what horror my mind had wrapped its slithery folds around. “No, no, no,” I cooed. “You were right all along. I think we need to stay. We need to defend ourselves. We’re meant to be here. This is our home.” I tried to assure him. I don’t know ifwhat I was saying was a lie. I’d like to think I didn’t know what I wanted yet, that I just needed a minute to think. I wanted to hide behind that minute for days. But we had run out of time.
“No—seriously, George—I don’t think this is our fight anymore.” Simon’s face was white and sharp in the dark. “We need to get out of here because they’re all here now. The army is here. They’ve arrived.”
Human plague had swept over our smallholding. The land was barely recognizable. Prince Edward’s abandoned tent had expanded into a sweeping festival of men, nearly as big as the king’s battalion at Thirsk. A sea of men and horses and battle equipment and filth littered the land. Their occupation had come as instantaneous as if they had arisen right up from the ground.
“They arrived a while ago,” said Simon. “While you were gone.”
The men had come from the most exhausted front lines of the north. Like Prince Edward’s harem of men, this new regiment seemed relieved at their dispatchment out here, a respite from the real war going on elsewhere. The men were joyous. This was a party. One of our sheep had already been slaughtered and was roasting over a fire, there was music, buckets of mead, the ground muddy from the overflowing canal, ruined by too many men bathing, pissing, wrestling, no order, ultraviolence, unintelligible speech—this was a horde not an army.
Prince Edward had made good on his promise. We could not pass through the encampment without pinballing into a man, a bonfire, a stack of metal armor, a tanklike pony, a pile of swords like toothpicks, a pile of arrows like hairs on a head,and even what appeared to be a catapult, complete with a gang of men crowding around it, hands on hips, chins stroked, deep in drunken discussion about wind direction and ammo and one of the men breaking away, spotting Simon and I, marching toward us.
A sentient mountain of fleshy bulbs introduced himself as Commander Smear.
“Spear?” I clarified.
“Smear, boy, Commander Smear,” he bellowed. Four teeth in total lined a bread-flecked tongue too big for its own mouth. He clasped my shoulder with a giant, calloused hand. “Smear like what I do to my enemies. We’re here to slay the dragon. Your squire said you’ve been out plotting its movements, examining its dung.”
I almost corrected the commander and said Simon wasn’t my squire but then I looked behind me and saw him—saw him carrying the cloak I had taken off, carrying my cough medicine, carrying a flask of water for me—and for a moment I didn’t know what he was. Campfires and clowns reflected in his darkened eyes, and I did not see myself in them.
Commander Smear pulled me into our stone hut, which he and his men had completely taken over. We couldn’t get through the front door and Commander Smear had to yell and barge his way through. He introduced me to other soldiers under his command—their ranks nonsensical, their names more variations of grunts. Our bed had been turned over to its side and pushed against the wall. On the ground was a crude map of the surrounding woodland and nearest towns. Scarborough and the sea to the east, Wykeham to the south, an expanse of forest to the west and north, with a crude drawing of a dragon in the middle of it.
Commander Smear garbled through his plan of attack, something about a staggered ambush, a surprise from all sides, the advantage of that western ridge where they could set up the catapult. The other men stuffed in the hut shared grins and even smug chuckles among themselves. This was all merry amusement, I realized, war as hobby. The battle-scarred commander was playing toy soldiers and the toy soldiers were just gig workers, half dressed, clutching flagons of beer. What looked like dirt and mud across their ragged tunics and leather armor was actually dried blood. They had seen the worst of humanity already. Hunting a reclusive lizard would be a holiday.
“You’re all going to die,” I said. I held a piece of charcoal in my hand. The commander had wanted me to indicate the size and location of the impact crater. Suddenly I had become possessed by a time traveler’s hubris. “I’m sorry, but I can’t take you there. I don’t want to be responsible for sending you all to your deaths.”
Some of the soldiers smirked and shared looks with each other, unbelieving. I felt Simon’s questioning eyes on me. I had said we needed to stay and defend our home, but not like this, not with soldiers. I didn’t know how to convey the dragon’s clarity—the business meeting I had just had with him—how he wasn’t a wild beast beyond imagination, but something worse. He was a coherent, coordinated thinker and speaker, and we were a dot on his schedule.
“The dragon doesn’t give a toss what you want,” said Commander Smear. “This is about what His Majesty wants and he wants that monster’s head on a pike.”
