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By Root 926 0

now. It was me stayed with it rowing back in the boat, me stayed with it when they hauled it over the side, me loosed it from the cage into its pen under the fo’c’s’le head. It was me and Dan hosed it clean as we could, gentle as we could. The hogs started going mad at the smell of it, and Wilson and Gabriel had to shift them away aft. And when we’d cleaned the poor dragon, we hosed ourselves clean, and threw our filthy clothes over the side as a bad lot and got fresh ones. To be clean and dry and safe on-board Lysander. To sleep tonight in my bunk. The smoky old fo’c’s’le my home. I was dreaming on my feet, awake and talking as you do when really you know you are asleep. You begin to think you’re in one of those dreams where you think you’re awake, and then you’re not sure, and then it all starts to go funny and you know you must be dreaming, but you’re dreaming in a dream, and suddenly it’s all layers going in and in and in, like the rings round an old tree stump or striations in an elaborate rock, and you get scared. Then you wake up. But sometimes I wonder whether I ever really did wake up again. These dreams are so real and true, I don’t suppose it much matters one way or the other. You could say I got lost in the rock striations.

The pen was the size of a small room and had a pool about six foot square in one corner, drainable from the deck, and a trapdoor to put food through. It was sheltered from the weather, with straw and greens and sand, and even a rock or two to make the creature feel at home. No one should go near it but me and him till it was settled, Dan said, shooing everyone away.

“Give it peace,” he said. “Pity the poor thing.”

Wilson made a great feast of best salt beef and sweet potatoes, and we ate and drank till stuffed and told our tale a hundred times. However we told it, something was missing. How say? The awe, as if I’d come to the edge of a big hole in the earth and peered in and seen something wild and unspeakable looking back. Tim wore a constant, diffident smile and joked about the whole thing, and the laughter of relief, slightly mad, billowed in gales about the deck. They must have heard us on the island, all those strange creatures, and the lonely beast must have heard us in his pen. I thought of him in his misery. I would restore him to life and health if I could, and bring home to England a thing of wild splendour that would do me proud.

That night I slept dreamlessly, waking bright and sparkling from a crystal spring, renewed.

It was with some cockiness that I performed my ministrations to the wretched thing that first morning under the gaze of dozens of eyes. No more slaving for me. No more swabbing and scrubbing, hard sand in my cuts. My new responsibilities gave me a leg up the pecking order. Already I was the one they were consulting on questions of dragonology. As if I knew. They were mad to see it, but I’d only let them near one at a time and not too close, not wanting to upset it again now it had quieted down. It had gone into a corner of the pen and was lying flat with its eyes closed, breathing hardly at all. When Dan went in it didn’t move. We had sticks, but we didn’t need them. I thought it was dying. Actually it was gathering strength.

The last thing I remember of that island is the sound of things crying in the trees as we sailed away.

We paid off the two Malays and said goodbye to them on Flores, where women pounded roots and children crowded our boats, and a man with a milky eye made bamboo cages for birds, domed on top and gorgeously painted. An hour or two I watched as a palace took shape, three storeys joined by wooden pegs, each one smaller than the one beneath. “Will you paint it like the others?” I asked, but he couldn’t understand me. There’s a nice life, I thought. Skill and patience and a beautiful thing coming into being. I’d have watched him all day, but there was work to do. We took on fruits and greens then headed north through the Makassar Strait between Celebes and Kalimantan, sailing east across clear coral seas, east of the Philippine Islands, on