Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [62]
“The size of it, Jesus Christ the size of it,” John Copper said.
Dan showed nothing. Just a mysterious smile.
“Why didn’t we go after it?” I asked.
“Ill prepared,” said Dan. “No hurry. Now we know what we’re up against.”
He went a small way apart with the Malays for a parley. There was an air of tense celebration, a burst of quick laughter among them.
“Jesus Christ,” said John again. “Got any blunt on you, Jaf?”
We four—me and Tim, Dag and John—sat down and lit a couple of pipes.
“That’s it, all right,” Tim said. “Fucking monster.”
“It’s not a dragon,” I said. “It’s like he always said. A big crocodile.”
“Big though.”
“Still, not a monster.”
“I never saw anything like it. It’s like—”
“Ugly, horrible-looking thing. Did you see those claws?”
“And the teeth?”
“Jesus, how we going to—”
“Slow though. Not nifty.”
“Didn’t you see it run? Before? Back on the path. Didn’t you see that?”
“It shifted, all right.”
“It’s only an animal,” I said.
“What were you expecting? Saint George and some girl tied to a rock? Of course it’s only an animal.”
“It’s just a wild animal. We can catch it. Dan’s caught a tiger, he can catch this.”
“That’s what he does, he brings them back alive.”
Dan came tramping over and told us we were camping here for the night, and tomorrow we’d move on a little farther and find a place to set the trap. Here? With those things roaming about? Come tomorrow all there’d be left of us would be our packs, lying forlornly among our scattered bones. But Dan said, no, here was fine, we’d light a fire and set a watch, and so we did, and it was in fact quite comfy and sweet the way we all sat round that warm glow of a fire in the midst of the dense black wild all about us. Dan passed around a small flask of brandy and we drank and smoked our pipes, and the Malay with blue tattoos told what sounded like jokes in his own language and made us all laugh even though we didn’t understand a word. It was just his face and the way he talked. And in the end I slept well, waking only when the others were already moving around and the sudden morning light was about to break.
We ate a little hardtack, packed up and moved on. I thought we would have made the trap soon, but Dan was in no hurry. That fierce-looking beast and everything that happened last night seemed a dream as we plodded on and on, the sun rising higher and higher and hotter and hotter, the clouds clearing above some high ground ahead. In front of us a baldy crag rose up, and water came down the face of a rock, splitting round a jutting spur of jungly growth much farther down. We were walking into a lusher part of the island, at least in these low places. Low, I say. I had forgotten how high we’d climbed from the beach. Up here the air was sharp and ripe like a bursting plum. Why didn’t we set the trap? I didn’t like this, walking on into a territory of good cover. As well as the long grass in which any low thing might lurk unseen, we now had a growing shrubbery on our left-hand side, a patchy place of scattered, bushy clumps, behind any one of which a dragon might lurk, two dragons, three, who knows, there could be a dozen of the things out there. Why not lay the trap now? Wasn’t one place pretty much as good as another? But no, not so, says Dan, God knows why. What good if we’re all exhausted when we have to face it? So on and on, till we sensed a foulness on the air and came to an edge no one expected and looked over and saw …
A mess of them like eels slipping wormily over one another in a muddy tussle over a foul carcass, a red and pink rag trailing festoons, the grinning head of which, half severed and hanging back, revealed it to be one of their own. Another watching, a huge thing, solid and impassive as a rock, huge, trunk-like legs planted before it. Yet one more, smaller, flicking its flat forked tongue as it slowly crawled away, full. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten dragons, I don’t know. They were messy feeders, worse than sharks, drooling as