Jamrach's Menagerie - Carol Birch [64]
In the fading dawn, the island birds whistled and chattered and carked in the forest beneath us. Blue Tattoo had gone scouting. The smaller Malay sat cross-legged, picking sleep out of the corners of his eyes with patient zeal. I went out for a pee and saw how dark the sea was on the horizon. Indigo. You could see islands from here. And how still it all was, just for a moment, till I was joined by Tim.
“Shouldn’t come out on your own,” he said, peeing beside me.
So the morning rolled on as the day before, waiting, watching, seeing centipedes the size of worms come out of the rough thatch of the hide, thinking of the crawly bodies in the mud like a bunch of maggots at a bit of liver. Nasty things. Muddy things. The dragons of stories were beautiful, flying the sky wonderfully winged, deadly but magnificent. But these—these were massively ugly, with a brutal, careless power more nightmare than fairy tale. Their eyes lacked anything a human could comprehend. More so than a whale, more so than a snake, more so than a frog. That one had looked at me. I was sure it had. It looked at me and it was like being seen by a demon.
Blue Tattoo, our silent scout, came silently beckoning, two hours after sunrise. “Dragon,” he said, the first English word I’d heard him speak. Dan, pulling up his breeches as he emerged from the bushes, nodded once sharply. You’d have thought he was just strolling back from the privy. The rest of us went in twos, having a horror of being disturbed in the middle of a shit by a big, scaly head with evil teeth emerging from the undergrowth. It was hard to go, even with Dag keeping watch and saying “sure, no dragons” in a hearty whisper every twenty seconds. Dan was mad though. Maybe you had to be mad to prosper in his line of work. Mad or stupid or in possession of a sixth sense; all three perhaps.
“So, lads,” he said, calm as can be, “this may be the one,” and set off with a worried-looking Tim in tow. I knew Tim was worried not because he showed it, but because he’d gone very quiet and was keeping away from everyone as much as possible, apart from Dan, with whom I was vaguely aware he’d been going off into little huddled conferences all night long.
Stealthy as cats, licking our lips and squaring up bravely, the rest of us followed.
The hide was cool and green, out of the sun, tamped down flat from the watches. Through the overhanging leaves we saw the dragon edging along the fringe of grassland, then striking across open scrub towards the trees. It was a big beast, mightily draped in skin, a syrupy drool dripping from its closed jaws. It had seen the boar, or at least smelled it. I could hear the buzzing of lively, early morning flies from here. The dragon approached steadily, with purpose. There was something of the elephant in the stolid girth of its legs. A few feet away from the trap it stopped, one foot slightly in front of the other. So close. So big! The brows hung over, the small, still eyes not dead, but full of a sharp, alien consciousness. It looked straight at the hide and us.
And so, a frozen moment that went on and on, long enough for a million itches to come and go and for the long, red crawlers to wrap themselves unimpeded round your cringing shanks like the worms of Thames mud. Long enough for us to note the curved cruelty of the creature’s claws, the slippery