One of the soldiers called out, “Is the dragon freshwater or saltwater?” He broke into laughter with the goons who had dared him to ask.
“The dragon’s bigger than this whole smallholding,” I said. “It’s real and none of you will stand a chance. Simon—you saw it, tell them. It’ll kill everyone here with a swipe of its tail.”
“Yes, it’s huge,” said Simon. “It took out a whole chunk of the forest, we can’t let it do that again. There’s a huge field of ash, we’ll take you all there tomorrow.”
“We can’t,” I said directly to Simon, my eyes pleading with him. I said to everyone else, “The dragon won’t attack if we just leave it alone.”
“And let the devil instate his globe of fire?” said the commander. Another soldier snorted with laughter. An elbow was thrown.
“I’m saying just wait,” I said. “The dragon killed two soldiers already, but only because they were foolish enough to try and attack it. He isn’t blowing fire because he wants to.” Eyebrows were raised at my degree of personal insight. “He does it because it’s part of his feeding process. They’re his... expulsions. He has to hack them up and we have to stay out of the way.”
“Like a cat,” someone said.
“How do you know it’s ahe?”
Everyone was laughing except the commander and Simon. Simon looked at me like he didn’t know who I was. I might as well have been wearing a suit and tie and giving a presentation—something I had never done in my old life, just as meager and helpless then as I was now, unrallied by cloying men, my own mind nefarious and tucked away, horny with nostalgic grief. “Simon,” I said feebly, with nothing more to say, just his name like a plea to trust me, be the squire.
A torch was raised. Commander Smear stood in the center of the hut with a flame held high. “Here’s the deal, Oh BenevolentGeorge. You’ll take us to the dragon tomorrow, or we’ll burn down your house.” Flames crisped a stray piece of straw that dangled from the roof above us. “If you don’t take us to that fiery furnace of Satan’s pet, then we’ll just have to build one here. Choose the place you want to die.”
15
We marched in the morning.
March, march, march.
It felt embarrassing, corny, even. Because is there anything more brainless than this? Is there anything more embarrassing than picking up a shiny stick and thinking you can use it to hack the world into whatever shape you think it ought to be in?
Of course the soldiers formed a line. Of course Commander Smear gave a rousing, inaudible speech. Of course the horde cheered and stomped their feet, ejaculating blanks into the empty air, mouths still full of mutton right off the bone. The dragon could arrive any second, the dragon could arrive any hour, day, week; who cares when we can just play pretend and get the same result: a surge of adrenaline, animal yips, muscles flexing under fat.
I led the horde from our smallholding through the forest, everyone galloping and whooping at first, but slowing down asthe reality of the narrow trails set in. All the horses and equipment struggled to condense. Plants and offshoot trees were flattened and the catapult got stuck multiple times. It took all day for everyone to make it through the forest and their awe at the crater’s grandeur was tempered by the reality of needing to set up camp again, light the fires, feed the masses. War and conquest were an exhausting logistics game. At sundown, I left the crater and went looking for firewood and spent the whole time sitting on a log alone. I thought of nothing. I tried to empty my mind, be the peasant I was always meant to be.
Something licked my hand. I was back in the forest. Echoes of laughter and shouts from the soldiers weaseled their way through the trees. I heard the whiz bang of a firework—I didn’t know fireworks had been invented already. Flashes of green and red lit up the sky, lost in the black teeth of towering trees. Then something licked my hand again.
I looked to my side and flinched.
It was a wolf. Its blue eyes locked with mine, cautious as it licked a faint crust of dried blood and ash from my hand. Its fur was mangy and gray, its ears tawny and alert. The wolf finished with my left hand and I presented it with my right, but it shrank and ran away when it saw Simon coming toward us, stepping through the thicket. The wolf disappeared like a ghost, like a dragon, and only the slobber on my hand convinced me it had been real.
“What are you doing out here?” Brambles cracked as Simon pushed through them. “They’ve slaughtered another sheep. They took all our animals out here. They’ll be eaten by morning. You didn’t want them to burn down our house, but you’re fine withthat? You don’t want to fight the dragon, but you still led them here. Now you’re hiding?”
“I’m looking for firewood.” I stood up. Simon grabbed me.
“What’s happened, George, what’s going on?” He put his arm around my waist, he put his head close to mine and closed his eyes as if to listen to what was going on inside. I pulled away.
“What do you mean ‘what’s going on’? Your angel didn’t tell you about this part? It told you all about me but neglected to mention the dragon and the thousand soldiers?” The sourness of my own words stung me and I stopped myself. “Sorry. I just think—” My head pounded with all the things I couldn’t say, or couldn’t decide—I couldn’t do this but I wanted—I didn’t want but I needed... “I think we just need to let the dragon do its thing. If we try and fight it, it’s going to kill everyone here. More people will come, and more people will die, and it’s just going to keep happening over and over.” We needed to go but we needed to stay.Ineeded to stay. I closed my eyes and felt the purposelessness of the past, the dragon’s denigration of it and how the myth of the future was just a pale imitation of the present. The date had tasted so derogatory on my tongue—he had called them entropy. The entropic zone. We were random chaos, viruses colliding. Simon reached for me, hands pulled for me again, pushed through the purposelessness I knew he also had to feel lapping at his ankles.
“Do you love me?”
I didn’t ask it. I was stunned to hear it because it didn’t come from my mouth. It sounded modern enough like I should have said it, but I didn’t.
“Do you love me?” Simon asked again. “George. I need to know.”
Tears pulsed down my cheeks. I felt an immense pain in my throat, a stifled cough I clung to, tasting ash and barrenness. I nodded my head, knocking more tears from my eyes like a child.
I said, “Yes.” Meager and weak.
“Yes,” I said again, into Simon’s chest, closing my eyes, muffling my cries, “Yes” in this foreign tongue, “Yes,” but I didn’t know what love meant anymore.
The ring of encampments circled the lava field. We sat and ate dinner and watched soldiers run drills across the crater’s darkened plain, horses riding back and forth in different alignments. Echoes swirled around the massive space like an open drain, their torches like fading embers. The catapult was set up and tested. Someone slipped and fell through a lava tube. Another sheep was roasted, two lambs were left to go—they stared at me like strangers with their oblong pupils. It was indeed another moonless night, but only because we had blocked the sky with our campfires, this traveling tailgate.
