“That strange bottle I had the vicar send with my letter—that’s from its debris.”
“That could have been left from years ago. There was only one dragon and I killed him. He was five hundred and fifty-five years old and he spent his life traveling back and forth through time; we would have known if there were more than one.” Suddenly, two thoughts dawned on me. The first was the nature of the dragon itself—it’s possible Edward’s men had really seen thedragon, but a younger version of it as it flipped through time. If that were true, there was still nothing I could do about it—the dragon’s death was right back there in 1301 and any portion of its life before or after was beyond stopping now. The second thought I realized was more imminent: the king wanted to use it.
“I need you to take me there,” Edward said.
“Have your men take you.”
“They’re not”—his voice broke apart—“they’re not my men anymore. They left.” He looked away in teary shame. His arms twitched slightly with the thought of maybe raising the bow again and threatening me with force but turned into a self-defeated shrug. His solitude and loneliness settled like a fine dust across the floor. Elsewhere in adjoining quarters of the church, dishes were stacked, basins of water were cleaned out, dogs were given scraps. A fly danced in candlelight. A threadbare kingdom stood on the brink. A heart was at the point of breaking.
It took us all night to reach the crater. I was surprised by how much I could remember of the terrain, even in the dark. We walked there, just the two of us, off main roads and cutting through forest trails, and I was amazed at how the land, as its own living breathing creature, seemed to have eroded and pulsated at will, each year washing away old trails and hewing new ones. The woods and marshes, rocky bluffs—they enveloped me like Simon’s arms and I nearly forgot that I was alone with a king of England, alone with the pure weight of history’s fate in my hands. If I were to direct the king off the wrong peak, if I were to push, provoke, or even just say something, an idea, what chain of events was I toying with? What history book was I rewriting?But no, that wasn’t right. Long ago, the dragon had sworn up and down that the past was immovable. Anything I did now would only contribute to history books already written. My life was a neutral zero, unfolding in a history already unfolded. Yet still, I felt the presence of something way beyond me, reaching.
We arrived at the crater just as the sun was beginning to rise. The lava field was covered in greenery now. Heather and reeds of red and yellow were dusted with a springtime down of emerald needles. Waterfalls of moss poured from the charred husks of felled trees, and lazy hawks in the sky relished the open landscape, dipping with ease for breakfast mice and rabbits and I thought to myself if only Simon could see what our world had become, how beautiful it still was. He was right, the volcanic rock was good for the soil, I’d have to tell him that—I didn’t correct myself. I forgot where I was for a moment. I almost didn’t care for the king’s desperate fossil dig, for the caution needed as we scaled down the gentle slope of the crater, to the lip of a narrow ravine, the well of the disaster.
“It’s down there,” I said. I looked around the bowl of greenery. There was no indication of another dragon having appeared here. I pointed this out to Edward but he only shrugged and moved past me, beginning the final descent down the hole. I recognized the single-minded expression on his face and knew I could only follow. I knew the hopelessness that awaited him. I filled my lungs with green and blue and descended.
The ravine opened like an hourglass hewn into the earth the deeper we went. I took a few desperate leaps across the rocks and cut my knee. The aerated lava rock crumbled too easily, bothcushioning and cutting, and that old familiar acrid scent filled the air. My cough was unperturbed—sticking to its usual rhythm of one cough every twenty minutes or so like a running tally of how much time had passed since the fateful day I was last here.
At the bottom, a cavern opened up, forming a long, tubular space. There was stagnant water, moss, and fungi. Tiny birds startled and flashed into the open air above us. And there, entombed in matte black sand and solid curving rock, were the craggy remains of a dragon. Bones. Scales. Claws. A flesh of dust more delicate than cobwebs. Its body was a broken globe of jutting ribs, deteriorating into the whims of nature. Edward rallied himself and made one final leap onto the sandy ground. He stumbled over to the dragon and ran his hands across its bones, the segments of broken neck, the pieces of what could have once been its legs and claws. The skull was half submerged in sand. I brushed some of it away, wiping sand and dust from divots in the eye sockets, feeling the cold coarse rock that had once been white-hot. There were massive teeth, a jaw, a pointy snout. This had all once been of so much consequence. And now?
This was all so solidly in the past and the past was dead space. The future was a myth. But what about the present? What about all the people existing in their own immediate realities at any one point in time? What if we were all present, wherever we were?
“Do you remember Simon?” I asked aloud.
Edward was inside what had been the dragon’s abdomen, under a cage of bones. He was digging in the blackened sand.
“You called him my squire, but he was my boyfriend. He disappeared the day I killed the dragon.” I touched a hole in the dragon’s skull that I must have created all those years ago.“I spent so much time back then being afraid of what I wanted, being stubborn. Simon’s devotion came so easy for him, which scared me because I thought it meant he was neglecting some other part of himself and I was expected to do the same, but that wasn’t the case. There were no expectations. I didn’t understand that his devotion to me was a baseline, not a branching path. He had given me his whole heart but I had been so balled up in myself, so scared of newness, that I ran back to all the old ways I knew how to love, when they weren’t really ways at all.” A calming breeze flowed through the ravine and disturbed nothing. No sand shifted, no plants moved, not even a delicate fern, but my mind was further drenched in memory. Our old smallholding was only a few miles away. I remembered the calculus of the fields and their harvests, the digging of the canal, the felling of timber, and how I had once thought myself so clever with my modern know-how, my imagined unfair advantage, my laundered intellect. I had based my survival out here on the subjugation of the world to me, but the truth was that vitality, goodness, and peace all hinged on the subjugation of myself to it—to long hours spent in fields under the sun, boiling snow in winter, gutting fish, tracking stars. All this had been embodied by Simon, how he treated me, how he loved me. We had survived because we were together. “I think I really was his squire all along,” I said aloud. “I was meant to have learned something from him, but it happened too late.”
Edward was paying no attention to me. He was furiously digging, only finding darker and darker veins of sand. He was a curious, scavenging animal. When he gave up digging, he went to one of the hanging ribs and tried snapping it in half. He hung on it like the limb of a tree and pulled, straining to break it. Therewere tears of frustration in his eyes. His cheeks were flushed and hollow.
“How did you do it?” he cried. “How do you use these?” He gathered a handful of shattered bone and held them toward me. I backed away. “Go on,” he said. “Do it. There has to be a way. You have to try.”
“Try what?” I said. “Time travel? This is why you had me bring you out here?”
“Well, there’s no living dragon but we can use the dead one. We can do something with the bones—the marrow—something, anything—I’ve read about it. You have to try.” The king was on the very brink. A desperate madness wired through him.
“There’s nothing you can do,” I said. I moved farther away. “It’s a dead animal. It’s bones and dust. And even if it were alive... I never time traveled with the dragon. You need specialist equipment if you want to do that. That’s not how I got here.” I looked for a clear pathway out of the cave. The mysterious letter, the bottle—it had all been for this nonsense. It was a mistake to have come back here and indulge this. I started climbing back up the ravine.
“They’re going to kill Piers,” said Edward, his voice breaking. He called out with wretched despair. His skin, still smooth with its perfect royal sheen, was stained by blotchy red anguish.
I exhaled long and steady, of course recognizing that anguish. “I’m sorry,” was all I could say. I wished I knew more about history to say something of comfort. All I knew now was from gossip and hearsay. I felt the strange honor of being in his presence and the holy shame of having nothing of value to offer him. I felt like a peasant.
I turned away from the king and climbed out of the ravine.The snapping of bone and cries of despair continued behind me as sunlight and birdsong greeted me back on the surface of the crater. A sea of wildflowers undulated and glittered. I felt oddly at peace. For a moment, my worst fears had walked back into my life, but there was no sign of another dragon. There was only a memory buried deep underground and I could walk away from it.
Back on the surface, I looked along the treeline, in the direction of the smallholding, contemplating a decision to leave or stay, the mathematics of grief and hope. Then there was a flash of light. Farther up the slope where there were fewer wildflowers and the grass was shorter and blunter, sharpened sunlight reflected strangely off something in the ground. A glare shone right in my eyes. I held up my hand and walked over to it, curious. I thought it would be another bottle. A piece of leftover debris. A piece of—
PLASTIC.
The word finally dropped from a ledge in my mind. That was the word for it—but this wasn’t another plastic bottle. This was larger and more curved. I knelt down and carefully dug around the shimmering object, moving small rocks to reveal not a bottle, but a large glass bowl or a sphere. It wasn’t fully glass and it wasn’t fully plastic. The rim or the opening was lined with rubber and inside were metal wires and plastic components strung in different formations. The glass was a perfect sphere slightly larger than my head and it was in perfect condition, it wasn’t broken or covered in debris. It was as if it had been hidden here intentionally, not buried and forgotten. A tightness caught in my throat. A memory, a vision awakened in my mind.
Then something hit me hard in the back. I turned around. Edward had climbed out of the ravine and thrown a chunk of bone at me.
“Help me!” he cried and ran toward me. I dropped the glass sphere right before he tackled me to the ground. He punched me in the ribs but he wasn’t made for this. His fists crumbled before they could cause any real pain. He broke into clumsy tears and wallows. “You time traveled! You know what’s going to happen to us! You know what I need to do!”
“I don’t!” I said. All I could think to do was hold him as he wept. “And even if I did, you can’t time travel and fix things like this. You’d just make things worse or get trapped in some paradox and I’m sure the dragon knew that from the start. It’s only fit for rubbish, nothing good comes of it.”
Edward got off me and we sat side by side. He cried big heaves of sorrow and I saw myself in him, the loneliness and incessant want.
“It’ll be OK,” I said and patted his back. “I wish I knew something, anything, that could help you, but I guess I never paid enough attention to history at school.” I had never heard of Piers Gaveston in my former life. Granted, I had never heard of Edward II either, or at least nothing memorable enough to keep him sorted from all the others. I’m sure one day his face would be on a kitchen magnet at a gift shop along with all the other kings and queens. I knew some met grisly ends and I hoped he wasn’t one of them. “I think you’ll make it out of this,” was the best I could think to say.
