The Dragon Book Read Free Page B

little round stone rolled out. As the beast still slept, its long red tongue licked over its lips, and it settled deeper on the sand.
    The sun went down. In the night, she thought, she could escape, and she edged closer to the beach. Just as she reached the mouth of the crevice, the dragon’s near eye opened, shining in the dark, fixed on her. Perla scuttled back into the deep of the crevices, all her hair on end. She thought she heard a low growl behind her.
    She wept; she wept for Marco and Lucco and the other men, and for herself, because she knew she was lost. At last, she slept a little. When she woke, it was morning, and she was so hungry and thirsty she went back to the mouth of the crevice.
    The dragon was still there. It stood looking away from her, the sun blazing on its magnificence, the red scales, darker at the edges, and the shining spines along its backbone. Then the narrow-jawed head swung toward her, high above her on the long, arched neck. On the broad space between its eyes was a disk of gold. Its eyes were big as washtubs, brilliant red, flecked and edged with gold.
    It said, in a voice so deep and huge that she imagined she heard it through the bones of her head, not her ears, “Why don’t you come out so I can eat you?”
    “Please don’t eat me,” she said.
    “Why shouldn’t I? You’ll just die in there anyway.” It gave a cold chuckle. “And by then you’d be too thin to bother digging for. Tell me what you’ll give me if I don’t eat you. Will someone ransom you?”
    She stood at the mouth of the crevice, her hands clammy and her throat thick with fear. No one from her village had anything to ransom her with, if the village even still survived, with all its men gone. She thought desperately of what she herself could do: weave, sew, cook, haul water.
    “Can you dance? Sing?”
    “I—”
    The dragon said, “Tell me a story.”
    A cold tingle went down her spine. “A story,” she said.
    “If it’s good enough, I won’t eat you.” The dragon settled himself down, his forepaws curled under him like a cat’s, waiting.
    She gulped. The village’s stories were old and worn, which was why the villagers told them, and retold them, like the imperishable favorite about how old Pandan had his eye put out while looking through a knothole in the bathhouse at the women bathing. She knew at once such stories would not satisfy the dragon, much less save her life.
    He was waiting, patient, his jeweled eyes on her. She realized that since he had begun speaking to her, she had thought of him as “he.”
    That gave her a wisp of an idea. She sat down in the mouth of the cave, her heart thundering, and began, “Once there was a King. An evil King.” Like the Duke. Her mind sorted through the possibilities. “He stole everything from his people, and he killed many. But he did have one thing he loved, his beautiful daughter.”
    She spent some time describing the beautiful daughter, so that she could plan the next part. The dragon was utterly silent, his eyes steadily watching her, his long lips slightly smiling.
    “He was so jealous of her that he put her in a tower by the sea.” The story was growing stronger in her mind, and she let her voice stride out confidently, telling of the tower, and the wild storms, the sunlight, and the birds that came to sing to her in her window. “There she lived lonely, singing to the birds, and grew even more beautiful, but no man saw her except her father.
    “But one day a Prince came by.” She made the prince like Marco, solid and honest and brave. Dead now, probably, dead in this dragon’s belly. Her voice trembled, but she fought herself back under control. She gave the Prince a red charger and red hair, which she saw amused the dragon. “The Prince heard her singing and climbed up the tower wall to her window. They fell in love at once, because she was beautiful and good, and he was handsome and brave and good. But before he could carry her off, the