Lenna and the Last Dragon

Prologue

The infant was bundled in swaddling like a mummy’s wrappings, keeping the fiery cold away. Her face was bright red in the howling wind. The messenger stepped out of the tomb and leaned into a snow-flecked torrent of air. Pressing the bundle to his chest, he made his way across the short rocky promontory, around the buttress of rock that hid the tomb from sight, and out onto the sparkling white slope of the frozen island mountain.

The baby wailed. He bobbled her gently. As he did so, the ice under his feet broke apart. He fell onto the bare face of the slope and twisted to keep from crushing the baby. Together they slid half a mile down the desert of ice. The messenger plummeted headfirst on his back, his arms tight around the tiny bundle, sliding. He received a painful knock as they flew over the barrier rocks and spun out onto the solid frozen sea, wheeling flatly across the blue-white expanse. They finally came to a dizzying stop on the ice. The baby sneezed and began crying again. Groaning, the man lifted her over his head and bounced her up and down again until she calmed. Digging his boots into the slick ice, he pushed himself gradually upright and looked around.

The Irish Sea slopped at the crust of ice he stood on. Looking over his shoulder, he saw that the mountain was probably unscalable now without an ice pick and pitons; there was no going back up into the tomb. The shraww and screee of gulls sounded above the peak. The man arched his aching back and sighed as the baby began to wail again.

Placing one boot after the other on the treacherous ice, the messenger crept back over the rocks to the land. It was time to bring the child to the Lady for safekeeping. First he lay her in a bundle on the ground. From his fanny pack he took out a still-twitching orange salamander tail, a pinch of saltpeter and a pinch of powdered cinnabar and rubbed them all together. His hand glowed hot red as the materials connected. Wincing as heat built up, he breathed steadily, trusting his training to keep the magic from burning him. His broiling hand touched the ice. He sighed as it melted, hissss, revealing the weatherworn soil beneath. The minerals flamed out suddenly and his hand faded back to cool pink. As the last of the ice vaporized to steam, he returned the slightly shriveled salamander tail to his fanny pack and took out new ingredients.

Turmeric for precision.

Duck eggshell for distance.

Powdered plum pit for height.

And a living yellow snapdragon on a ball of mud.

Checking a pocket compass, he set the snapdragon on the melted-clean turf and adjusted the direction of the flower to match the compass heading. He rubbed the other three items together in his palm and sprinkled them on the little flower.

Then he breathed on it.

Erupting, the snapdragon’s stem flexed and heaved as it thickened. The flower grew until it was as tall as a person, as tall as a house, as tall as the island’s peak. The lemon-colored flower at the top groaned as it blossomed into a sleigh.

The man slung the baby to his chest. Stretching his thick arms, he began to climb.

As they rose toward the top, the air was sharper and thinner. The wind wailed and rasped like angry spirits. The child was wailing, too, but he couldn’t stop to tend to her. Any moment now, the spell would end and they would fall. Feeling every twitch and bend of the great stem as a warning, feeling the seconds tick away, feeling the weight of his calculations bearing down on him, the man found the draped yellow petal in his hand at last. He pulled himself up and over into the flower and sat on one of the furled petals, clutching the shrieking bundle. Leaning over the precarious side, he began screwing a heavy-duty steel clamp over the snap-jaws at the base of the flower. The icy ground below was dizzying. With each turn of the vise he felt the sleigh-mouth widen, felt the sepals compress and the tension rise. He lay back in the sleigh as the jaws opened, twirling the handle of the vise with a fingertip until the spring-loaded flower was shaking from the pressure of the powerful forces.

One more turn.

And one more after that.

And one--

The connection between the flower and its stem snapped. The pressure was unsprung. Flung.

And they flew.

Accelerating with enough force to billow the messenger’s eyelids open and his nostrils apart, the yellow snapdragon sleigh was catapulted up into the clouds, above the clouds, into the lower atmosphere. His legs were tucked into the petals, his hands on the swaddling tied around him. The baby had stopped crying, and the man was able to relax a little and trust his calculations:

The height of the plant.

The angle it would grow, calculated from magnetic north.

The size of the snapdragon blossom.

The pressure that the flower’s torsion-spring could sustain until it released its kinetic energy.

The distance from Avalon to Iceland.

Chapter One

Pigs

or, Sleep Light This Night

The roof of the barn creaked under the weight of the endlessly-falling snow. Lenna’s feet burrowed into the yellow prongs of the straw pile, trying to keep warm. The dragonscale comforter clinked as she turned over and over. Wool blankets bunched around her skinny legs. On the far end of the dark loft lay the other servant girl, Binnan Darnan, who smacked her lips and snurfled into her pillow. Wind rose up outside, whistling through the gears of the heavy barn doors below. Chill tendrils of wind trailed in and climbed the ladder to the loft. Lenna shivered in the moonless early spring, waiting for the thaw. She finally slept, dreaming of a perfect world where no one ever hit her.

* * *

In the morning, the lemon-yellow chanticleer dragon woke her, squawking from the top of the dragon tower. When the squawking started, the day began. The farm in the inland of Iceland was stretching its arms, and Lenna stretched along with it. She washed her wet-straw-colored hair in the rain basin and opened the dragonproof barn doors.

The start of every day was a slow trudge through deep snow. Making the first footprints in the open white canvas, Lenna trod up the low hill to the servant’s entrance behind the farmhouse and opened the top half of the Dutch doors. The hairy arm of Kaldi the cook hefted the leftovers bucket and handed it down to her. She carried the bucket with both hands toward the tarpaulin canopy over the pigpen. Her feet slid down into the chill, flaky snow as she went.

At her call, the piglets came running, crowding around her. Resting the rim of the slop bucket on the wooden trough, she got her fingers under the bottom of the bucket and lifted. The remains of Kaldi’s cooking slid messily into the wooden V. There were potato skins, meat nubbins, and mushy stalks of green things like peppers and parsley. The piglets made a wagging line and dove at the food as soon as the bucket was out of the way. The sows watched from a distance, waiting for the piglets to finish.

Uh oh. That awful marauding boar was out again. A trail was dredged out through the snow from the back of the pen toward the little ecological-study forest. If that sneaky old boar wasn’t home by nightfall she’d have to go looking for him. Ugh. Usually he came back by himself, though.

An hour of scrubbing and shovelling later and the pen was sort of clean. Returning the tin wash-bucket to its hook, she went to watch Binnan Darnan.

The stone dragon tower was on a hill aways from the farm’s big house. The tower was a circle of gray above the treetops, surrounded by roots and low-hanging fir branches. Lenna jumped root-to-root and rock-to-rock, balancing carefully when a rush of wind took the trees aside.

Binnan Darnan was running in a circle just inside the low, square entrance. Lenna ducked to get inside. They built the doorway very low, since the draglets wouldn’t walk anywhere they could fly. The older girl was always smiling when she was playing with the draglets. Her pointy nose was draped by floofy black hair. She was shorter than Lenna, very short, tiny-short, even though she was older by a year or two. Her black hair streamed as she ran and collapsed as she slowed. Her orange plastic following-stick led the flapping draglets in a bobbing line around the inside of the tower. The four draglets always followed her. They thought she was their mother.

Lenna sat on the flagstones just inside the threshold. Circling and weaving above her were four draglets: two smoky gray, the greenish-black and the salamander-orange. The stubby crosseyed Icelandic breed had flared nostrils and short snouts. Down the top edge of their wings hung quills, and little vestigial arms were folded like praying mantis arms at their chests. Binnan Darnan skipped and leaped and clucked at them, holding the stick high, high above her head. Always smiling.

Lenna was so envious.

After a few minutes of circling the floor, Binnan Darnan gave the beasts a last, fast fly around the tower and tossed the orange stick into the air. Diving after it were four bundles of wonder. They argued over the stick in their croaking voices, pecking and clawing, trying not to let it drop. Binnan Darnan sat cross-legged on the hard floor beside Lenna.

The boar’s out again, Lenna began.

Kaldi would help you look for it if you helped out in the kitchens, the black-haired girl replied.

Lenna picked a fallen green primer scale apart with her thumbnail. I don’t need any help, Binnan Darnan. I was only complaining.

"Ohhhhh. Lenna, you don’t need to be this way. I told you how lucky you are. When they took me from my home, I was--"

You were sleeping on a hard floor and cooking potatoes-on-a-stick every night over a trash fire. You told me this before. Some days Lenna liked hearing Binnan Darnan’s pretendy tales, and some days not.

You still don’t believe me. Binnan Darnan strung her fingers along her black hair like a harp. But it’s all true. My parents were the worst.

Lenna hugged herself. You remember them, she said.

Yes, I do, Binnan Darnan replied. They were bad parents. I’m glad the Lady took me away from them. They beat me a hundred times worse than Brugda ever hit you. I had to dig up potatoes with my bare hands. This life is like a dream compared to them.

A gust of wind flew through the low doorway. You get to play with dragons. I never will, said Lenna, glaring at the flapping gray twins above her. They had the stick clamped in their beaks, flying like synchronized swimmers.

It’s a small enough gift, Lenna. Leave it be.

The orange following-stick clattered to the ground. The draglets began to fight. Binnan Darnan picked up the plastic stick, waved it in a circle, clucked and began to walk. Lenna uncurled herself and returned to the pigpen.

By the afternoon, the sows had had a rubdown, Kaldi had brought the girls some lunch in a pail, and the boar was still missing. Time to go looking. Lenna took a spare sweater from the oak dresser in the barn and began prowling the grounds to the edge of the forest. The trail that had been dredged through the snow was a straight line from the canopied pen to the triangular woods. The boar had surely gone in, but the forest was thick with undergrowth and pricklies. Maybe the boar was just around the ... no.

And she was not going to ask for any help, no sir.

There was a break in the poky wall of juniper shrubs and pine, a little path leading to a secret place that only Lenna knew about. It was somewhere to start. She went in. Winter needles blanketed the ground, crunch, and Lenna had to keep her head ducked under looming snowladen branches.

Heyy-ip! Heyy-ip! Boar! she called, gently at first, then louder. The sun cut across the treetops in gold. The wrapped leather tied Viking-style to her legs held steady on the rough path. A fawn bounded, bounded away. Gusts shook more orange needles down. The boar was nowhere around.

Heyy-ip! Heyy-ip!

Normally it would be rooting out morels and mushrooms at the edge of things, but it had gone this deep into the forest before. There was no reason to panic.

Heyy-ip. Boar? Rustle. No, it was only a mota, patchy fur and bright orange teeth on little legs. She watched, fascinated, as the mota dug up a root, alarming a mouse and sending one scurrying after the other. Lenna walked on.

There was her special tree stump, a nice place to sit and think. Here was the burrow where foxes would sneak around like red ghosts. She stepped past the familiar tree shaped like a troll. Around the corner ... there was the secret place ... and there was the boar! A stripy bundle of trouble. It was laying on its side, probably sleeping, the silly boy. She ran up and pushed aside a bendy tree limb, ducked under the hanging bark of a rotting tree and stopped short.

The world spun. There was Brugda, the nasty old woman who ran the farm. She was kneeling over the boar, her balding red hair hidden under a white bonnet. A huddled hunch of shawls bent over a striped brown back. They were in Lenna’s secret glen.

Rags in rainbow colors lay scattered on the ground. A circle was scraped clear in the dirt and snow around the boar. The handle of one of Kaldi’s kitchen knives stuck upright out of the back of the boar’s head. A terrible lolling tongue lay motionless along the dirt, sticking out from the boar’s open mouth. Brugda had killed it. She had killed the boar and was chanting over it.

Lenna wanted to scream at her. Instead she stood frozen, helpless, and watched. As the low chanting continued, a filmy pillar like water rose up from the circle, enclosing Brugda and the boar.

The colors of the rags drained to gray like an optical illusion. A rainbow of cellophane colors spun upwards into the air in ribbons. From these ribbons, bright pictures wove themselves into being above Brugda’s head. Brugda stared up at the images, concentrating. Lenna watched as swimmy visions appeared, one after the other:

She saw a canvas bag, knotted loosely at the top, washing astream in the old runoff brook in the wood.

She saw fire from a distance, burning orange and hot white.

She saw a huge dark dragon the color of charcoal swooping down to the big house.

Lastly she saw herself, standing just outside the secret place in the wood.

Gulping, she watched herself step across the rippling boundary of the circle. Brugda saw it, too.

Would she run away, now that the old woman knew she was there?

No. She was braver than that.

The colored pictures faded from the air.

Try that trick, Little Len, Brugda said without turning.

So she did. Lenna took a step, took another. Taking a big breath, she stepped up to the very edge of the shimmering boundary. There was a smell of pressed apples and blood.

Like sticking her fingers into bathwater, Lenna felt the cold border of the magic circle pass around her, from warm to cold to warm again. Then she was a foot away from a dead animal and five feet from old Brugda, who smiled grimly and looked up at her.

Sharply done, said the old woman. Only a few could cross my circle. That wasn’t a hand-me-down magic.

I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lenna shouted. I don’t know what you did or what those pictures were. All I know is I look after the pigs and you’ve killed my boar and now there won’t be any more piglets for the dragons to eat.

Twelve years of suppressed anger came rushing out: And I hate that you did it. And I hate living here. And I hate that I get hit when I do wrong. And I hate you and everything. I even hate the pigs.

Bravely said to your keeper, said Brugda in a measured voice.

Why? Why the boar? Why did it deserve this? Lenna asked, pointing.

Terrible times call for terrible deeds, child. Brugda rose and pulled the knife from the boar’s head with a sickening slurp. With flicks of her wrist, she dabbled red slime along the dirt toward the scratched circle. Lenna felt a flutter in her stomach as a drop of blood hissed and slid along the edge. The watery pillar dropped away.

Are those pictures held in mind? asked Brugda. The dragon? The fire? The bag?

Lenna nodded dumbly.

All will be, near in time. Brugda dropped the knife, wiped her hands on her linen skirt and took the girl’s hand. Come.

They returned along the darkening path in silence. Lenna’s mind whirled, but she was too scared to ask any questions. Breaking into the open expanse of the outer fields, she sighed to see the intact buildings. All was the same as it had been.

All was the same except the boar.

I trust the swine have eaten? said Brugda.

Lenna nodded.

Sleep light this night. The woman strode off to the farmhouse. Lenna ran to find Binnan Darnan.

Chapter Two

Remembering Airplane-land

or, Will You Be My Daughter?

You expect me to believe your stupid story when you never believe mine? snapped Binnan Darnan, kneeling on the oval rug