The Dragon Tamers and Other Tales Read online

  The Dragon Tamers and Other Tales

  Varla Ventura, Ed.

  Introduction by Clint Marsh

  Magical Creatures

  A Weiser Books Collection

  This ebook edition first published in 2012 by Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC.

  With offices at:

  665 Third Street, Suite 400

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  www.redwheelweiser.com

  Copyright © 2012 by Red Wheel/Weiser LLC. All rights reserved.

  Excerpted from The Book of DRAGONS by Edith Nesbit. Harper & Bros.: London & New York, 1901. Fairy Tales from the German Forests by Margaret Arndt. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906. The Red Romance Book by various authors, ed. Andrew Lang. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1921.

  eISBN: 978-1-61940-028-3

  Cover design by Jim Warner

  Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

  On the whole, dragons get a bad rap. I'm talking about European dragons, the kind who slither through the three stories you're about to read, and their reputation is mainly deserved. These dragons are of the greedy, grouchy, gluttonous kind—armored toothy snakes with a taste for gold. If they could be persuaded off their treasure hoards, each of them could find a comfortable perch in the family tree of Smaug, the dragon visited by Bilbo all those years ago.

  We must remember, though, that dragons are complex creatures. So is there anything about them we might find admirable? It's not difficult to list their more or less commendable traits—unrivaled longevity, an aptitude for thrift, and the ability to start fires easily. These are all merits we'd love to have ourselves. But if you go any further than skin deep (which all dragons are hesitant to have you do), you'll find that every last virtue of the dragon has its dark side.

  Chiefly, dragons are hungry things, like the one encountered in “The Dragon Tamers.” They are hungry for food, hungry for gold, hungry for dominion. Hungry for, in a word, power. Dragons are not generous unless they think there's something in it for them, which as you may or may not know isn't generosity at all, but business-sense. They love to bargain, but they're poor at holding up their end of things. You would be, too, if you'd been unemployed for as long as they had, unused to work and a virtual stranger to situations where you can't just smash, burn, and grab your way to the top. And don't ever enter into an agreement whereby you take some of a dragon's gold, because the dragon wants as much gold as it can get, and can't bear the thought that someone else has some, especially if it was once theirs.

  Dragons can have intellects as fiery as their breath, which makes them terrific thinkers, but ever for themselves. They're clever, and when it suits them (or when they think they're outgunned) can have more of Smeagol in them than of Smaug. (The wyrm in “The Dragon's Tail” begs and scrapes with the best of them.) They are famously vulnerable to flattery. Lastly they are confident creatures. They don't ever expect to meet anyone quite so great and hungry as themselves, and this leads to a haughtiness which is easy for aspiring dragon-slayers to take advantage of.

  All these bad qualities have their root in the same soil—the dragon's terrible myopia. That their physical eyesight might have degenerated during their long lives is no surprise. But one would think that ages spent resting in dark, smoky caves atop mounds of gold would have led them to contemplations a bit loftier than the cruelest ways to get more of—or at least just hang on to—all this shiny stuff. Where there's fire, though, there is also smoke, and dragons produce so much of it that it very often clouds their vision.

  In a word, dragons are fools, and this is inevitably their undoing. (But for goodness' sake don't say so to their face!) The Red Cross Knight takes advantage of this fact in our collection's final story. There is perhaps only one creature alive more foolhardy—the hopeful dragon-slayer. What sort of person does it take to gird up, leave home, and seek a monster who itself has the power to flatten entire towns? If I'm foolish enough to do it (and I am), then I venture to guess you are, too. Here are some things to keep in mind on your journey.

  Ditch your “sensible” friends. When you get right down to it, dragon-slaying is a lonely business. The best dragon-slayers live mainly within their own imaginations. Take a lamp with you—dragons are usually found in dark places—and a heavy sword for the dragon to mock. And pack a lunch, for if you get to talking with the dragon, you'll be there for hours, and he won't have a scrap of food to offer you.

  The path to the dragon's lair may be direct, or it may be a veritable maze of trials. Persevere and you'll find it soon enough. Dragons don't move house without notifying everyone for miles, and most of them have a supernatural tendency to draw seekers closer to them.

  Once you're there, you may be surprised to find that the dragon doesn't look like the one you expected. These days not all dragons are endowed with long necks and terrible jaws. Some aren't even scaly. But all continue to be greedy, broken, spiteful things who've more gold than they'll ever need, and many have forgotten their only truly noble skill, which is their ability to fly.

  And what does one do when finally in the presence of the terrible majesty of one of these beasts? Don't be too hasty with that sword. What dragons need more than a swift and sure death—what dragons need more than anything, really—is your pity. For these days dragons are cornered animals, hemmed in by memories of their past glories and obscured by a general disregard from the public. They hate that they've been reduced to such a state. And so the gravest danger we face when we step into the den of a dragon is not its fearsome breath, or its jagged teeth, or its quick claws. It's not even that our encounter might end with the dragon still alive. It's that we might accidentally kill one which is secretly noble, or merely past its prime.

  The question becomes then, do we slay the dragons we find—all the dragons—or are there some who deserve a reprieve, the freedom to creep back into their crevices and caves so that they might be discovered one day by our own children? Don't feel badly if you're unsure of the answer. All of the greatest heroes have faced this dilemma, and it's grown more difficult with each new generation.

  You'll see how three very different heroes grapple with this question in the stories which follow. May their examples help you the next time you're standing face-to-face with a dragon, the sharp rays of your lantern's light causing your sword to gleam and your dragon to squint and splutter. When that time comes I wish you all the strength, wits, and heart necessary for the task of deciding whether or not to let the magical old thing live.

  Clint Marsh

  Berkeley, CA

  2011

  Dedicated to the legacy of Anne McCaffrey (1926–2011)

  Clint Marsh is a dear friend and fellow lover of magical creatures. He is also an avid collector of ephemera, lost literature, and devilish delights. You can find him at www.wonderella.org.

  —Varla

  Table of Contents

  The Dragon Tamers

  Edith Nesbit

  The Dragon's Tail

  Margaret Arndt

  How the Red Cross Knight Slew the Dragon

  Ed. Andrew Lang

  The Dragon Tamers

  Edith Nesbit

  There was once an old, old castle—it was so old that its walls and towers and turrets and gateways and arches had crumbled to ruins, and of all its old splendor there were only two little rooms left; and it was here that John the blacksmith had set up his forge. He was too poor to live in a proper house, and no one asked any rent for the rooms in the ruin, because all the lords of the castle were dead and gone this many a year. So there John blew his bellows and hammered his iron and did all the work which came his way. This was not much, because most of the trade went to the mayor of the town, who was also
a blacksmith in quite a large way of business, and had his huge forge facing the square of the town, and had twelve apprentices, all hammering like a nest of woodpeckers, and twelve journeymen to order the apprentices about, and a patent forge and a self-acting hammer and electric bellows, and all things handsome about him. So of course the townspeople, whenever they wanted a horse shod or a shaft mended, went to the mayor. John the blacksmith struggled on as best he could, with a few odd jobs from travelers and strangers who did not know what a superior forge the mayor's was. The two rooms were warm and weather-tight, but not very large; so the blacksmith got into the way of keeping his old iron, his odds and ends, his fagots, and his twopence worth of coal in the great dungeon down under the castle. It was a very fine dungeon indeed, with a handsome vaulted roof and big iron rings whose staples were built into the wall, very strong and convenient for tying captives to, and at one end was a broken flight of wide steps leading down no one knew where. Even the lords of the castle in the good old times had never known where those steps led to, but every now and then they would kick a prisoner down the steps in their lighthearted, hopeful way, and sure enough, the prisoners never came back. The blacksmith had never dared to go beyond the seventh step, and no more have I—so I know no more than he did what was at the bottom of those stairs.

  John the blacksmith had a wife and a little baby. When his wife was not doing the housework she used to nurse the baby and cry, remembering the happy days when she lived with her father, who kept seventeen cows and lived quite in the country, and when John used to come courting her in the summer evenings, as smart as smart, with a posy in his buttonhole. And now John's hair was getting gray, and there was hardly ever enough to eat.

  As for the baby, it cried a good deal at odd times; but at night, when its mother had settled down to sleep, it would always begin to cry, quite as a matter of course, so that she hardly got any rest at all. This made her very tired.

  The baby could make up for its bad nights during the day if it liked, but the poor mother couldn't. So whenever she had nothing to do she used to sit and cry, because she was tired out with work and worry.

  One evening the blacksmith was busy with his forge. He was making a goat-shoe for the goat of a very rich lady, who wished to see how the goat liked being shod, and also whether the shoe would come to fivepence or sevenpence before she ordered the whole set. This was the only order John had had that week. And as he worked his wife sat and nursed the baby, who, for a wonder, was not crying.

  Presently, over the noise of the bellows and over the clank of the iron, there came another sound. The blacksmith and his wife looked at each other.

  “I heard nothing,” said he.

  “Neither did I,” said she.

  But the noise grew louder—and the two were so anxious not to hear it that he hammered away at the goat-shoe harder than he had ever hammered in his life, and she began to sing to the baby—a thing she had not had the heart to do for weeks.

  But through the blowing and hammering and singing the noise came louder and louder, and the more they tried not to hear it, the more they had to. It was like the noise of some great creature purring, purring, purring—and the reason they did not want to believe they really heard it was that it came from the great dungeon down below, where the old iron was, and the firewood and the twopence worth of coal, and the broken steps that went down into the dark and ended no one knew where.

  “It can't be anything in the dungeon,” said the blacksmith, wiping his face. “Why, I shall have to go down there after more coals in a minute.”

  “There isn't anything there, of course. How could there be?” said his wife. And they tried so hard to believe that there could be nothing there that presently they very nearly did believe it.

  Then the blacksmith took his shovel in one hand and his riveting hammer in the other, and hung the old stable lantern on his little finger, and went down to get the coals.

  “I am not taking the hammer because I think there is something there,” said he, “but it is handy for breaking the large lumps of coal.”

  “I quite understand,” said his wife, who had brought the coal home in her apron that very afternoon, and knew that it was all coal dust.

  So he went down the winding stairs to the dungeon and stood at the bottom of the steps, holding the lantern above his head just to see that the dungeon really was empty, as usual. Half of it was empty as usual, except for the old iron and odds and ends, and the firewood and the coals. But the other side was not empty. It was quite full, and what it was full of was Dragon.

  “It must have come up those nasty broken steps from goodness knows where,” said the blacksmith to himself, trembling all over, as he tried to creep back up the winding stairs.

  But the dragon was too quick for him—it put out a great claw and caught him by the leg, and as it moved it rattled like a great bunch of keys, or like the sheet iron they make thunder out of in pantomimes.

  “No you don't,” said the dragon in a spluttering voice, like a damp squib.

  “Deary, deary me,” said poor John, trembling more than ever in the claw of the dragon. “Here's a nice end for a respectable blacksmith!”

  The dragon seemed very much struck by this remark.

  “Do you mind saying that again?” said he, quite politely.

  So John said again, very distinctly: “Here—is—a—nice—end—for—a—respectable—blacksmith.”

  “I didn't know,” said the dragon. “Fancy now! You're the very man I wanted.”

  “So I understood you to say before,” said John, his teeth chattering.

  “Oh, I don't mean what you mean,” said the dragon, “but I should like you to do a job for me. One of my wings has got some of the rivets out of it just above the joint. Could you put that to rights?”

  “I might, sir,” said John, politely, for you must always be polite to a possible customer, even if he be a dragon.

  “A master craftsman—you are a master, of course?—can see in a minute what's wrong,” the dragon went on. “Just come around here and feel my plates, will you?”

  John timidly went around when the dragon took his claw away; and sure enough, the dragon's wing was hanging loose, and several of the plates near the joint certainly wanted riveting.

  The dragon seemed to be made almost entirely of iron armor—a sort of tawny, red-rust color it was; from damp, no doubt—and under it he seemed to be covered with something furry.

  All the blacksmith welled up in John's heart, and he felt more at ease.

  “You could certainly do with a rivet or two, sir,” said he. “In fact, you want a good many.”

  “Well, get to work, then,” said the dragon. “You mend my wing, and then I'll go out and eat up all the town, and if you make a really smart job of it I'll eat you last. There!”

  “I don't want to be eaten last, sir,” said John.

  “Well then, I'll eat you first,” said the dragon.

  “I don't want that, sir, either,” said John.

  “Go on with you, you silly man,” said the dragon, “you don't know your own silly mind. Come, set to work.”

  “I don't like the job, sir,” said John, “and that's the truth. I know how easily accidents happen. It's all fair and smooth, and ‘Please rivet me, and I'll eat you last’—and then you get to work and you give a gentleman a bit of a nip or a dig under his rivets—and then it's fire and smoke, and no apologies will meet the case.”

  “Upon my word of honor as a dragon,” said the other.

  “I know you wouldn't do it on purpose, sir,” said John, “but any gentleman will give a jump and a sniff if he's nipped, and one of your sniffs would be enough for me. Now, if you'd just let me fasten you up?”

  “It would be so undignified,” objected the dragon.

  “We always fasten a horse up,” said John, “and he's the ‘noble animal.’”

  “It's all very well,” said the dragon, “but how do I know you'd untie me again when you'd riveted m
e? Give me something in pledge. What do you value most?”

  “My hammer,” said John. “A blacksmith is nothing without a hammer.”

  “But you'd want that for riveting me. You must think of something else, and at once, or I'll eat you first.”

  At this moment the baby in the room above began to scream. Its mother had been so quiet that it thought she had settled down for the night, and that it was time to begin.

  “Whatever's that?” said the dragon, starting so that every plate on his body rattled.

  “It's only the baby,” said John.

  “What's that?” asked the dragon. “Something you value?”

  “Well, yes, sir, rather,” said the blacksmith.

  “Then bring it here,” said the dragon, “and I'll take care of it till you've done riveting me, and you shall tie me up.”

  “All right, sir,” said John, “but I ought to warn you. Babies are poison to dragons, so I don't deceive you. It's all right to touch—but don't you go putting it into your mouth. I shouldn't like to see any harm come to a nice-looking gentleman like you.”

  The dragon purred at this compliment and said: “All right, I'll be careful. Now go and fetch the thing, whatever it is.”

  So John ran up the steps as quickly as he could, for he knew that if the dragon got impatient before it was fastened, it could heave up the roof of the dungeon with one heave of its back, and kill them all in the ruins. His wife was asleep, in spite of the baby's cries; and John picked up the baby and took it down and put it between the dragon's front paws.

  “You just purr to it, sir,” he said, “and it'll be as good as gold.”

  So the dragon purred, and his purring pleased the baby so much that it stopped crying.

  Then John rummaged among the heap of old iron and found there some heavy chains and a great collar that had been made in the days when men sang over their work and put their hearts into it, so that the things they made were strong enough to bear the weight of a thousand years, let alone a dragon.