A Den of Dragons

Eight Dragon Tales

by

Emma Laybourn

This is a free ebook from

www.megamousebooks.com

Copyright 2012 Emma Laybourn

Table of Contents

1. Two and a Half Knights and a Dragon

2. The Earthwyrm

3. The Nestingbox

4. The Winter Dragon

5. The Drinker of Time

6. Rabbithead

7. Magpies

8. Wordhoard

Two and a Half Knights

and a Dragon

Once there was a village called Shillingford, which was a very ordinary place until it acquired a dragon.

The dragon arrived out of a clear blue sky. It scorched across the wheat fields, plummeted down into the orchard, and grabbed a pig rooting under the apple trees.

Then it hurtled up with a thunderclap of wings. It left behind a thick trail of smoke and several hundred baked apples, gently swinging from the blackened branches.

The dragon sat on the church steeple, tearing the pig apart. The townspeople crept out to look, and shuddered at the sight.

The dragon was as red as blood. Every time it took a mouthful of pig, the townspeople had a clear view of three rows of vicious yellow teeth.

The Mayor got pushed to the front of the crowd, since dealing with dragons was one of his Mayoral duties. This was the first time he had had to carry it out.

“O esteemed dragon!” he shouted anxiously. “Pray what do you want from our humble village?”

The dragon curled its tail around the steeple and stared down with unblinking eyes.  Since it made no reply, the Mayor tried again.

“O noble dragon –”

“I heard you the first time,” said the dragon, in a voice like a sawmill.   “My name is Sanguinarius. Too hard for you, I daresay. You may call me Sanguin.”

“Noble Sanguin,” shouted the Mayor, red in the face, “what do you want from us?”

“Oh, just pigs, sheep, horses,” said the dragon, “the usual. I’m not averse to maidens, either.”

The crowd shivered and groaned.

“What will you take to leave us alone?” bellowed the flustered Mayor. “Gold, silver? We’ll give you all our wealth!”

“No, we won’t,” objected Mrs Honey from the sweet shop.

Lazily the dragon stretched out its wings, which were as wide as the church roof.

“No, thank you,” it said. “Really, I have all the treasure I need. The horses and so on will do nicely. I’m very partial to horses.”

“But illustrious Sanguin–”

The dragon folded its wings and closed its eyes. Soon it was snoring loudly, wisps of smoke coiling from each nostril. It was hard to be sure if it was really asleep or not.

The Mayor turned to the crowd. “Bring me all your gold and silver!”

“What for?” objected Mrs Honey.

“You want to get rid of this dragon, don’t you?” said the Mayor impatiently.

“Yes, but it doesn’t want our gold. It just said.”

“We need to hire somebody to kill it for us.”

“Can’t you do that?”

“Dragon-slaying isn’t in my job description,” snapped the Mayor. “We need a knight. And knights cost money!”

*

“A knight?” said the Mayor’s wife. “Round here? You’ll be lucky. Where are you going to find a knight?”

“We’ll advertise. I’ve got plenty of silver and gold to offer him.”

“You’re not paying some fancy-pants knight all our money!” she objected.

“Of course not. It’s the town’s gold and silver, not ours.  Though once he’s killed the dragon, I believe we’re expected to give him our daughter’s hand in marriage.”

“We haven’t got a daughter,” his wife pointed out snappily.

“Then we’ll borrow one of the town maidens.”

“If there are any of them left! This dragon’s already eaten ten sheep, seven pigs, three horses and a cow! That knight had better turn up soon.”

“I’ll advertise in the Shillingford Gazette,” the Mayor promised.

However, it was two weeks before anyone answered his advertisement.

By then the town had no pigs left, and hardly any sheep. The dragon had burnt down all the barns and stables, and those people who still possessed uneaten horses were keeping them in their kitchens. This was not a very satisfactory arrangement.

“Please step inside,” said the Mayor to the knight. “Oops, mind the dung.  Just push the straw off that chair, and do sit down. Your name?”

“Sir Percivayle,” replied the knight mournfully.

He was tall, gaunt and pale, with watery eyes, and wore a badly-fitting suit of ancient chain mail.

“You’re an experienced knight?” asked the mayor doubtfully.

“Of course! I have won many a joust and tournament.”

“Slain any dragons?” inquired the Mayor.

“I have no fear of dragons! I bear a famous sword,” Sir Percivayle said proudly. He drew it with a flourish. Gleaming runes flickered along its edge. “I inherited it from the Black Knight of the Forest.”

“The Black Knight, eh?” said the Mayor, very impressed.

“Its name is Duarfasti. It was forged by fairy folk in the endless depths of time,” whispered Sir Percivayle.

The Mayor rubbed his hands. “Excellent! Sounds like you’ll have no trouble with that dragon. You can go and kill it tomorrow.”

“And my reward?”

“All the town’s gold and silver,” said the Mayor blithely. Since Sir Percivayle still looked undecided, he added, “And my daughter’s hand in marriage.”

“Albert–” whispered his wife, as the knight bowed in agreement.

“Ssh! I know. We’ll adopt.”

*

Next day, Sir Percivayle set out to meet the dragon.

Sanguin, having just finished off the last and toughest goat, was hunting through the town for food.

The townspeople had locked themselves in their houses. When Sir Percivayle arrived, the streets were deserted but for the dragon which was busy raiding the butcher’s shop. It sprawled on the pavement, gobbling lamb chops.

Sir Percivayle drew his famous sword.

“Begone, vile serpent!” he cried in his thin, quavery voice.

The dragon turned its back on him disdainfully.

“Begone! Or I shall set cold steel to your hideous flesh!”

Sanguin ignored him and went to work on a rib of beef.

“Away, foul worm!” The knight’s voice rose. “For I bear a charmed sword! And with it I shall cleave your loathsome head–”

The dragon belched, and flicked its tail.  It knocked the sword right out of Sir Percivayle’s hand and sent him tumbling over backwards.

He scrambled to his feet and looked round for his sword. With horror, he saw a hundred metal fragments littering the street.

“Duarfasti!” he wailed.

The dragon began to stalk towards him, swaying from side to side.

“Duarfasti, eh?” it hissed. “Now there’s a coincidence. I met the Black Knight of the Forest only last month. A very pleasant fellow – if a little crunchy.”

Sanguin’s vast jaws opened wide.  As Sir Percivayle took to his heels, he heard the clash of giant teeth behind him, and the dragon’s raucous laughter.

*

“I hope this knight’s better than the last one,” the Mayor’s wife said acidly.

“Don’t worry! He will be. – Sir Agravayne! Come in, come in! Don’t mind the horse, he’s just hungry. Oh, I’m sorry, did he step on your foot?”

“It’s nothing,” said Sir Agravayne, limping into the house. “I hear you’re having a spot of bother with a pesky dragon. I’m the chap you need.”

“Indeed!” The Mayor eyed him hopefully. Sir Agravayne had hair as yellow as a lion’s mane, though somewhat glossier, and a florid, handsome face.

What really caught the Mayor’s eye, though, was his dazzling suit of armour.

It was pure gold, engraved with a thousand tiny twirls and careful curlicues. So fine and flashing was it that it took the Mayor’s breath away.

“Like the outfit?” asked Sir Agravayne, flicking a speck of straw from his gleaming shoulder. “Brand new. Made to measure. Cost me fifteen hundred guineas.”

“Magnificent! Have you got a famous sword as well?”

“Sword? Sorry, no. Should I have?”

“No, no, not at all,” cried the Mayor. “I’m sure your – um – whatever it is will do the job just as well.”

“My mace?” Sir Agravayne held up a club studded with red and green jewels.

“Fabulous, isn’t it?” he said admiringly. “The latest thing. I’ve got a matching lance, solid bronze, weighs a ton. Cost me five hundred for the set. Should be a match for any dragon.”

“Wonderful, wonderful!” said the Mayor.

But his wife pulled him aside to hiss, “Five hundred? We’ll never afford his prices!”

“Hush, dear!” he whispered back. “We’ll worry about that once the dragon’s dead.”

By now, the dragon Sanguin had finished with the butcher’s shop and was half way through the baker’s.

The road was strewn with doughnuts; fruit cake was trampled into the cobblestones. Sir Agravayne picked his way carefully through the crumbs.

“Um, I say!”

The dragon’s snout appeared.

“Hey, you there, you dragon fellow!”

The dragon clambered over the counter. It looked decidedly angry. Sir Agravayne took a hasty step back and trod on a Swiss roll.

“Have you brought me meat?” roared Sanguin. Flames scorched the doorframe.

“Er, what?”

“Meat! I want meat! Buns give me indigestion.”

“Now look here, this has got to stop,” said Sir Agravayne. He clanged his golden visor shut and tried to hoist his lance. It was too heavy and fell on his foot.

He gripped his jewelled mace instead. His new armour was guaranteed fireproof and biteproof, a fact which gave him courage.

“It’s about time you jolly well shoved off, you know,” he declared hollowly into his visor.

Then he gulped, as the dragon opened its mouth wide.

There was a deep rumble. Black smoke filled the cavernous mouth.

Sanguin huffed. Inky smoke billowed out, completely covering Sir Agravayne. Coughing and choking, he flapped his hands until the cloud disappeared.

“By Jove –” he began indignantly, and then stopped dead as he spotted his reflection in the bakery window.

His heart stood still.

He couldn’t believe it.

His beautiful armour was coated in soot. He was no longer gleaming gold. Instead, he looked as if he was carved out of coal.

Sir Agravayne dropped his cudgel onto an iced bun and burst into tears.

*

“I told you we couldn’t afford him,” scolded the Mayor’s wife. “And this is just his cleaning bill! Now what do we do?”

“I don’t know,” groaned the Mayor. “Nobody else has answered the advertisement. We’re all doomed.”

There was a rap at the door. The Mayor’s wife opened it and looked down. Her eyes widened.

“Excuse me,” said the small figure in the doorway, as it clanked around her into the kitchen.

“What are you doing here, boy?” demanded the Mayor.

“I’m a knight,” said the boy. “I’m Sir Egg.”

“Sir Egg, indeed!” scoffed the Mayor. “What sort of name is that? And as for your armour…!”

“I made it myself,” said Sir Egg proudly. “Sardine tins.”

“You might have cleaned them first,” complained the Mayor’s wife, holding her nose. “Why are you clutching that old dustbin lid?”

“Shield,” explained Sir Egg. “I couldn’t get a metal lid, but I expect rubber will do just as well.”

The Mayor pointed a quivering finger at the object in Sir Egg’s other hand. “And that?”

“It looks like a mutton bone,” said his wife suspiciously.

“It is,” said Sir Egg. “It’s a very famous mutton bone.”

The Mayor could stand no more. “Out!” he yelled. “Get out, you impudent brat! And mind that horse, it’s valuable.”

Sir Egg skipped nimbly away. “Don’t worry,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ll get rid of the dragon for you. And then I’ll be back for my reward.”

Sir Egg walked through Shillingford looking for the dragon. He passed the butcher’s and the baker’s, and paused at the greengrocer’s.

A trickle of smoke rolled through the door, followed by four apples and a melon.

“Hallo, Dragon!” he shouted.

The dragon appeared in the window. It looked extremely cross.

“Lettuce and spinach,” it grumbled. “What kind of dinner is that?”

“Revolting. I hate greens too,” agreed Sir Egg.

The red eyes glinted. The dragon came slithering out of the shop, scales grating on the pavement.

“And just who do you think you are?” it rasped.

Sir Egg squared his tin shoulders and raised his dustbin lid. “I’m a knight!”

“Huh! Half a knight at most. Still, you’ll be tastier than lettuce…”

And suddenly the dragon spread its wings and leapt upon Sir Egg, bowling him over. The mutton bone was flung from his grasp. Dozens of huge teeth clashed around his armour.

Sir Egg could not shout: the breath was squeezed out of him. He was lifted into the air, shaken like a rag on a clothes line and finally hurled down upon the pavement where he landed in a painful clatter of sardine tins.

“Pah! Pah!” spat the dragon, shaking its head. “Fish! I can’t stand fish! Are you trying to poison me? You young rat-bag. I’ll fry you to a crisp!”

It snarled, baring its triple rows of teeth. Long red flames poured from its mouth.

Sir Egg, staggering, held out his dustbin lid. A blast of searing air scorched past him, frizzling his hair. There was a terrible smell of burning rubber.

“Phew! What a stink!” exclaimed the dragon in disgust. It began to lollop heavily away down the street.

Picking up his mutton bone, Sir Egg ran in pursuit. The dragon turned, ready to fry him.

Then its eyes fixed on the bone. Its nostrils twitched.

“What have you got there?” it rumbled.

“It’s a very famous mutton bone,” panted Sir Egg.

“Famous?”

“Brampton Wick mutton, best in the country.”

“Really?” Sanguin edged closer. “I love mutton. Where is this Brampton Wick place?”

“I’ll tell you, if you promise to go away and leave us alone,” Sir Egg suggested.

Sanguin snorted. “No chance. I haven’t finished with this place yet!”

“Yes, you have,” said Sir Egg firmly. “You’ve raided all the shops. There’s only the fish shop left – and you don’t like fish.”

Sanguin looked sulky. “Is that really all that’s left?”

“That’s right.” Sir Egg did not mention the sweet shop hidden down an alley. “Here – try the mutton bone!”

He tossed the bone to Sanguin, who caught it expertly and crunched it up like a giant biscuit.  Two gulps later, it was gone.

“Aaah,” said the dragon dreamily, licking its lips. “That was excellent.  Have you got any more?”

“No. You’ll have to go to Brampton Wick to find some.”

“I’m tempted,” said Sanguin thoughtfully. “Very tempted. If only I could go! But you see, there’s just one problem…”

“What’s that?” asked Sir Egg.

The dragon scratched its ear in an embarrassed sort of way.

“It’s like this,” it said. “I’m tired of this village. I’ve devoured all the animals, and I don’t really care for maidens. Too stringy. So I might as well be off – but I can’t just fly away at your command.”

“Why not?”

“What, be driven off by an insignificant little scrap like you? It’s terrible for my image! Imagine how my reputation would suffer! Now if you were a proper knight, it would be different.”

“But I am!” cried Sir Egg.

The dragon sneered. “You? A knight?”

“Yes! My name’s a short-for, just like yours.”

Sanguin’s eyes narrowed. “Short for what?”

Sir Egg sighed.

“Sir Egremont Horatio Lancelot Sagramore de Gramercy,” he said reluctantly. “I try not to let people know.”

“Egremont – what was that again?”

Sir Egg repeated it, and the dragon rolled the name around its tongue.

“Yes,” it announced. “Yes, that might do. Would you mind being six foot six and a master of wizardry? I really couldn’t settle for less.”

“Certainly,” said Sir Egg politely.

“It’s a deal!” Sanguin cackled. “Do you realise this is the first bargain I’ve ever struck with a human?”

“Really?”

Sanguin thought for a moment. “Well, no. Generally I strike the bargain and then eat the human anyway. You are privileged. Now – where’s this Brampton Wick?”

Sir Egg whispered in its ear, and the dragon launched itself up into the air.

High over the rooftops it braked, turned a somersault and hurtled back downwards. Sir Egg wondered if it had changed its mind.

Arching its neck, it roared a devastating spout of flame straight at the fish shop.

The door burst into flames. Fillets of cod curled up and turned black on their slabs.

“Can’t stand fish,” growled the dragon, as with huge, heavy wingbeats it flapped away.

*

“I don’t think we should pay you,” grumbled the Mayor. “You didn’t kill the dragon at all.”

“I got rid of it, didn’t I?” said Sir Egg. “Anyway, I don’t want gold and silver.”

“You don’t?”

“No, thanks. A half share in the sweet-shop will do fine.”

The Mayor didn’t argue. He had enough problems, what with the townspeople demanding their money back with interest, and a horse that refused to move out of the kitchen.

Mrs Honey from the sweet-shop didn’t argue either. She was so grateful to Sir Egg for saving her shop from being caramelised that she offered him lodgings and all the toffee he could eat.

So Sir Egg lived happily over the sweet-shop, learning to make humbugs and gobstoppers and being much fussed over by the old lady. Although she was not quite so sweet as her name, she was as nice as lemon pie to Sir Egg.

She even offered to adopt him.

So, to his delight, Sir Egg became Egg Honey. He sincerely hoped that he would never again have to reveal his ridiculous old name to anyone.

As for the dragon Sanguin – it raided and rampaged to its black heart’s content around the unhappy village of Brampton Wick, until, in despair, they advertised for a knight to sort it out…

But that’s another story.

The Earthwyrm

Annie was the gardener’s daughter, and she was in trouble.

Her father was not just any gardener: he was the Royal Gardener. Day after day he tended the palace gardens, mowing and hoeing, seeding and weeding. When she wasn’t at school Annie followed him around with the wheelbarrow. She was supposed to be learning the trade.

“This will be your job one day,” her father told her. “It runs in our family, being Royal Gardener.”

Annie just smiled and turned a cartwheel. She didn’t say anything because she didn’t want to disappoint her father; but she would much rather play in the garden than work there.

The beech avenues were perfect for hide and seek. She could climb the apple trees in the orchard, roll down the grassy knoll from the sundial on the top, or pretend she was lost in the Maze.

Best of all, she liked to lie on her stomach on the palace lawn, watching the tiny garden creatures battle through their miniature jungle. She hunted spiders and followed ant-trails and observed the bees, all the time with the comfortable click-click of her father’s shears in the background.

Then one day, the shears stopped.

“Ow!” said her father. “Ouch!” He clutched at his back.

“You’d better go and lie down,” said Annie.

“Lie down? I’ve got far too much to do! I’ve got to get everything ready for King Florizel’s Garden Party tomorrow.” He tried to straighten up, and winced. “Ooh, that’s painful!”

“Don’t worry,” said Annie. “Go home. I’ll do the garden for you.” She took him firmly by the arm and led him back to their house.

Her father tried to protest, but not very hard. His back was hurting too much.

“Don’t forget the shrubs –”

“I’ll prune them.”

“And the lawn –”

“I’ll mow it.”

“And the maze –”

“I’ll weed it.”

“It all has to be perfect for tomorrow!” he called anxiously as Annie left.

“It will be!” she answered blithely.

Back in the palace gardens, she climbed to the top of the grassy hill and stood by the sundial, leaning on her father’s spade. She was in charge now.

From here she could see the whole garden. And now that she took a good look, there was far more to do than she had supposed.

The lawn really was shaggy. The shrubbery needed a good haircut too.  The brick paths of the maze were blotched with weeds, the nursery beds were overgrown, and all the glass panes in the greenhouses were broken.

She turned to look over the high wall into the kitchen garden. It was full of birds busily stripping the blackcurrant bushes bare.

Quickly she switched her gaze to the rose garden: the King’s pride and glory. Today the air above it shimmered – but not with heat. A haze of greenfly swarmed around the roses.

Annie groaned almost as loudly as her father had.

“Why did I tell him I could do all this?” she cried. “Where do I begin?”

Angrily, she plunged her father’s spade into the ground.

“There’s far too much! I’ll never get it done!”

Then she sat down rather suddenly, because the ground had moved.

A ripple ran through the hill like a small earthquake. Annie sat on top of it with her mouth open and her eyes popping.  She stared at the gash that her spade had cut in the grass.

It was slowly widening. The sundial tilted and fell over. Longer and longer grew the crack, spreading like black lightning, until it ran all the way round the hill.

“Just like a boiled egg about to be opened,” thought Annie. “And I’m sitting right on the top!”

She threw herself across the crack and rolled down the slope.

She was only just in time.

The crack was still spiralling its way down like an apple unpeeling itself. And then the top started to lift off.

The whole hill shuddered. The grassy peel was tossed away into the air. Clods of turf whizzed over Annie’s head and thudded softly on the lawn behind her.

She stared at the unpeeled hill. It was made of neither soil nor rock, but something else: something coiled, green and wetly glistening.

A long, thin neck uncurled. It looked like a snake – but it was far, far bigger than the grass snakes that sometimes dozed around the sundial.

The head turned a sleepy yellow gaze on Annie, stretched out towards her and yawned in her face. It had a great many teeth which looked extremely sharp.

Shutting its mouth with a snap, it opened its golden eyes very wide.

“Well?” it said with a hiss. “What did you wake me up for?”

“P-pardon?” stammered Annie.

“Slugs in the cabbages? Locusts in the greenhouse? Or just an invading army of ants?”

“None of those,” said Annie, quite bewildered. “I didn’t mean to wake you up at all. Who are you?”

The yellow eyes gleamed at her balefully.

“Who am I?” it hissed. “Don’t you know? I thought everyone knew me. Why, King Florizel the Fourth even gave me the freedom of the city!”

“Did he?”

“Certainly! For I,” announced the creature with great dignity, “am the Earthwyrm.”

“You don’t look like an earthworm,” said Annie.

“Not a worm. A wyrm. With a y. Otherwise known as a wyvern. Oh, all right then, a dragon, but of a most superior sort. I suppose you have heard of dragons?”

“Oh, yes. But where are your wings?”

The Earthwyrm uncoiled itself a little more. A single pair of legs appeared. Annie waited for the other pair, but that seemed to be all there were. With a creaking sound, two rather damp and crumpled wings unfolded and waved feebly.

“Ouch,” said the Earthwyrm. “My back! I’ve been curled up for too long.”

“My Dad gets backache,” said Annie sympathetically. “He’s the Royal Gardener, but he can’t work because of his back, so I’ve got to do it. Oh, dear! And now look at the state of that hill, on top of everything else!”

“He’s what?” roared the Earthwyrm.

“Who’s what?”

“Your father! Royal Gardener? A human?” It spouted an angry blast of orange sparks. Annie took a few steps backwards.

“Why not?” she said stoutly. “So was his father, and his grandmother. It’s in the family.”

“Disgraceful! I’m the Royal Gardener! An Earthwyrm has always been in charge. Why couldn’t King Florizel have waited for me to wake up?” It blew out another cloud of sparks with an affronted WHOOF.

Annie wondered how to put it tactfully. “Maybe because King Florizel the Fourth isn’t around any more,” she said. “He hasn’t been around for three hundred years. We’re onto King Florizel the Fourteenth now.”

The golden eyes dulled. “Hmmm,” said the wyrm. It stared around the garden.

“I must have overslept,” it said regretfully at last. “That’s the trouble with hibernating. Never know when you’re going to wake up. I can see now that things have changed considerably. And not for the better!”

“My father does his best,” said Annie. “But there’s an awful lot of garden, and there’s only him and me to do it. And tomorrow it’s the Royal Garden Party. I’ll never manage it all!” Despair overcame her.

“I should think not. A human, indeed! What this garden needs is an Earthwyrm.”

Annie was nettled. “I suppose you think you could do it in no time!”

“Certainly,” it answered haughtily. “However, I’m not going to. It’s not my job any more.”

Annie took a deep breath. If the garden wasn’t ready, her father would be in disgrace. She swallowed her pride and said humbly,

“I wish you would show me how it could be done.”

The wyrm half-closed its eyes. “Like I said, I’m not the Royal Gardener now.”

“But you could be again,” suggested Annie, “after my father, if you don’t mind waiting twenty years till he retires.”

The eyes snapped open. “Twenty years? That’s nothing,” said the Earthwyrm. “Could it be arranged?”

“Oh, yes,” said Annie earnestly, giving away her inheritance without a sigh. “But only if the garden is ready by tomorrow!”

“What time is it?”

“Two o’clock.”

“Hmm.” The Earthwyrm unfurled its claws, stretching like a cat. “Let’s see. It really has been dreadfully neglected. It’s a challenge all right! I shall start with the lawn.”

“The lawnmower’s in the shed.”

“Lawnmower? Modern nonsense!” said the Earthwyrm scornfully. And with a loud clap of its wings it rose straight up into the air, unrolling the last of its long, long tail.

It was a very thin tail, Annie noticed: as thin and flat as a knife. The end of it was barbed like an arrowhead.

“Watch this!” The Earthwyrm hovered for an instant high above her, then turned and swooped towards the lawn. It gathered speed so fast that Annie was convinced it was going to crash right into her.

She dived into the shrubbery. Behind her came a rush of air as the Earthwyrm skimmed the lawn. Gliding fast and low, it began to sweep its tail from side to side.

It was raining grass. The wyrm swooped to and fro, scything with its tail until the entire lawn was shaved in a rather unusual fantail pattern.

“Pretty,” said Annie, shaking grass cuttings from her hair. “What about the bushes?”

“Easy,” said the dragon tersely. It landed by the shrubbery and whipped its tail back and forth, slashing at the leaves.

Annie ran to gather up the clippings, ducking to avoid the tail whenever it swished past her. Soon her wheelbarrow was overflowing.

“The maze is full of weeds,” she began; but the Earthwyrm was already on its way. It moved with something between a crawl and a slither, dragging itself on its two scaly legs.

At the entrance to the maze, it lowered its head and breathed long, red tongues of flame across the paving. The weeds turned black and shrivelled up. The wyrm crawled further into the maze and disappeared around the corner.

“Hallo?” called Annie after several minutes. “Are you lost?”

The Earthwyrm reappeared. “The very idea! I planted this maze.”

“It’s a very good one,” Annie said politely.

“Mazes are my speciality. And that avenue of beeches: that was mine. And the kitchen garden…”

It broke off and cocked its head, eyes glinting.

“Birds? What are they doing there?”

It rapidly slithered to the high wall round the kitchen garden. It sprang to the top, wings arched high above its head, its tail swishing furiously. Opening its jaws wide, it roared.

Dozens of startled birds shot up from the blackcurrant bushes, screeching with terror, and flapped away as fast as they could.

“Good riddance,” grunted the Earthwyrm. “They won’t be back for a while.” Reaching down to take a mouthful of blackcurrants, it chomped them thoughtfully. Purple juice trickled down its neck.

“How are you with greenfly?” asked Annie. “The roses are covered with them.”

“Greenfly don’t scare so easily. Different tactics are needed.”

The Earthwyrm crawled swiftly to the rose garden. Rearing up, it cleared its throat with a sound like sand being shovelled.

“WHOO!”  It huffed a cloud of dense black smoke that wafted gently across the flowers.

Annie coughed and choked. Her eyes were watering. As the smoke drifted away, she saw thousands of tiny green bodies tumbling from the roses and hitting the ground.

“Harumph,” rasped the Earthwyrm. “Excuse me. Now, what’s next?”

“The orchard? The apples are starting to fall, and the King won’t want them squishing underfoot.”

“I’m not a fruit-picker,” said the dragon haughtily. “That’s servants’ work. But I’ll give you a lift.”

So with a basket over each arm, Annie hoisted herself gingerly onto the Earthwyrm’s back. Its skin was cool and slightly damp.  When it sprang into the air, there was nothing to hang on to but the slippery edges of its wings.

She did not enjoy the apple-picking. The Earthwyrm kept moving just as she was reaching for the furthest apples, and she decided that it was doing it on purpose. But at last there were several baskets full of apples lined up on the grass.

“I think that’s everything,” the Earthwyrm said, and yawned. “Dear me, two hours to spare till sun-down.”

“It’s not everything!” cried Annie. “What about that hill you unpeeled? Look at it! It’s in a worse state than the rest of the garden put together!”

“Oops,” said the Earthwyrm.

It slithered back across the neatly shaven lawn towards the bare, black mound. After crawling twice around the hill, it lay staring up at it, tail twitching.

“Problem,” it muttered.

Annie began to pick up the ragged shreds of turf and stack them in her wheelbarrow. “It’s no good trying to patch it up with these!” she said severely. “I’ll have to put them on the compost heap.”

“Bring back some glass.”

“What?”

“Glass! From the greenhouses. Hurry up! What are you waiting for?”

Annie shook her head. “Crazy,” she muttered. All the same, she fetched a barrow-load of broken glass and tipped it in a crashing heap by the Earthwyrm’s tail.

“Now go and get some more,” it ordered. “Lots more. And bring those overgrown seedlings from the nursery beds.”

Annie opened her mouth to protest, but the wyrm had turned its back on her to nose through the shattered glass. She sighed, and set off again with the wheel-barrow.

In between barrow-loads she watched the Earthwyrm, trying to puzzle out what it was doing. It had laid glass in jagged paths all around the hill, right the way up to the sundial at the top. The whole thing looked rather untidy and decidedly dangerous.

“Crazy paving,” commented Annie under her breath. She didn’t think much of it.

The earthwyrm slithered down to where she stood.

“Stand well away!” it warned. Then it sucked in hard, and breathed out a stream of fire.

The flames that licked around the hill started off red, as before. But this time, as the Earthwyrm puffed out more and more, they gradually changed colour to orange, then to yellow, and finally to dazzling white-hot.

Annie had to back away, shielding her eyes. The hill steamed and hissed. Round and round stalked the Earthwyrm, pausing only now and then to take huge, gasping breaths and breathe out yet more fire.

At last it stopped and lay down, panting. The hill was covered in a cloud of steam. When the fog parted, Annie gasped.

“Oh, my!”

The spiky trails of broken glass were gone. In their place lay a shimmering maze whose myriad paths intertwined in elegant crystal knots.

The glass had melted. It was jagged no longer, but smooth, and full of bubbles. As the sun broke through a cloud, the twisting paths shone like rivers of liquid gold.

“Just the planting up to do,” whispered the Earthwyrm hoarsely.

“But you look exhausted!”

It shook its tired head. “You do the top, I’ll do the bottom. Watch out for the glass. It’s hot.”

Together they planted the seedlings between the loops of glass. Annie worked down from the sundial, the dragon worked up, and they met in the middle just as the sun was setting.

“If the King doesn’t like that, there’ll be no pleasing him,” said the Earthwyrm gruffly.

“He’ll like it,” Annie said. “I do.” She made a low and sweeping bow. “Thank you, Earthwyrm. Would you like to come home for some supper?”

The Earthwyrm inclined its long neck gracefully. “How kind.”

“What do you eat?” asked Annie with some trepidation.

But the wyrm said promptly, “Eggs. Keep the pesky birds down, I say. Think they can fly! Hah!”

So the Earthwyrm came to Annie’s house for supper, and stayed for three days. It sat in the garden with Annie’s father, drinking ginger beer and smoking. Annie’s father smoked a pipe; but the Earthwyrm just smoked. Every now and then it crunched up a raw egg, shell and all.

It got on very well with Annie’s father. They talked about pruning and propagating and layering and grafting until Annie grew quite bored.

“I’d be glad if you took over as Royal Gardener,” said her father at last. “You don’t need to wait for twenty years. I’d like to retire early. The job doesn’t suit my back.” He turned to Annie. “Would you mind very much, Annie?”

Annie looked up from the grass where she was watching beetles.

“Actually, I never wanted to be Royal Gardener anyway,” she admitted. “I’d much rather be Royal Beekeeper instead.”

“That’s all right then,” said her father; and they sat peacefully listening to the sounds of the Garden Party drifting over from the palace. It sounded like a great success.

“Just one thing puzzles me,” said Annie’s father, pulling on his pipe. “You dragons are supposed to love treasure, aren’t you? Don’t you all have hoards of gold? Or are Earthwyrms different?”

“Not so different,” said the dragon. “Gold is my favourite, too.” It gazed around the little garden at the petals glowing in the evening sun: marigolds, nasturtiums, goldenrod, and sunflowers.

“Treasure,” said the Earthwyrm softly.

The Nestingbox

There was a raucous scream outside the kitchen window. Ernestine jumped, spilling cornflakes all over the floor. Something large banged on the window, squawked and flapped away.

“Blast those dragons,” said Ernestine’s mother, still reading the book propped up against the teapot. “There’ll be no peace until they fly the nest.”

“It was your idea to put up a nestingbox,” Ernestine reminded her, scooping cornflakes back into the carton.

“I know, I know,” said her mother ruefully. “I thought it would be educational. I didn’t expect banshee howling half the night and dead rats all over the place.”

Ernestine frowned through the window. At the far end of the garden, the nestingbox was swaying alarmingly on its pole as the nestlings fought over something grey and red and ragged.

“They’ve caught a squirrel,” she said. “Look, one of them’s trying to flap its wings. I wonder when they’ll learn to fly?”

“Sooner the better,” said her mother glumly.

The baby dragons were already the size of crows. The morning sun flashed off their coppery scales as they fought over the squirrel. Their mother Yoyo, who was as big as a goose, watched fondly.

“School?”

“I’m just going, Mum.” Seeing that her mother looked dejected, Ernestine tried to think of something nice to say about the dragons. “They really are educational. No-one else in my class keeps dragons.”

“Really?” Her mother’s face brightened. “You could always invite some of your friends over to have a look at them.”

Ernestine packed her astronomy books without answering. She had already invited several friends to come and see her dragons: there was little point in telling her mother their response.

“Common dragons? No thanks. They’re not real dragons, are they?”

“Those little dragons are boring,” Alberta had added. “And they smell.” Ernestine no longer counted Alberta as one of her friends.

Unfortunately, however, it was true. They did smell. Ernestine breathed through her mouth as she walked down the garden path to the coach stop. There she stood panting miserably, and wondering how it was she could still smell dragon even when she wasn’t using her nose.

Yoyo shrieked and swooped at her head.

“Ouch! Get out of my hair!” Ernestine brushed the mother dragon off irritably and watched her erratic flight across the fields on yet another hunting trip.

Terrible flyer, thought Ernestine. She nearly hit that tree. Not even a scrap of grace.

With a clatter or hooves, the school coach pulled up.

“That your dragon?” asked the coachman, as Ernestine clambered aboard. “Wouldn’t touch them myself. Can’t tame them, you see. Give me griffins any day. Now there’s a lovely beast, your griffin. Loyal as they come and good for burglars too.”

“Really,” said Ernestine politely.

“Not much to look at, is it, your common dragon? Shame that’s all you’ll see round here these days. You don’t get the Great Green Dragons any more like in my pa’s day.”

“Really.”

The coachman shook his head regretfully. “I remember him saying how all this forest used to just swarm with Great Greens. Huge they were, roosting all over the place. Not any more.”

“Really,” repeated Ernestine as haughtily as she could, but there was no stopping the coachman.

“The air used to be thick with them, he said. Magnificent they were. Not like your common dragon…” By the time she arrived at school, Ernestine had had quite enough of dragons.

Stepping off the coach, she looked around, puzzled. The school courtyard was much noisier than usual. Instead of lining up in silence, girls raced around shouting, or huddled in murmuring clumps. The teachers were huddling too, pointing and gazing up at the school roof.

“What’s going on?” asked Ernestine grumpily. “Not another fire drill?”

Before anyone could answer her, she saw.

A shape detached itself from the granite gargoyles ranged along the roof. Its shadow fell across the courtyard and silenced the shouts.

It was as big as a barn. Slowly raising an arched neck, it spread wide a pair of enormous wings, dark green veined with red.

Down below, everyone sighed in unison.

“Aaaaah!”

The Great Green Dragon ignored its enraptured audience. With a thunderclap of its huge wings, it took off. Soaring high above the spires of the school, it circled the observatory dome before drifting away, scarcely flapping, towards the forest.

A thin haze of yellow smoke hung in the air behind it; and there was a powerful smell of sulphur.

Ernestine wrinkled her nose. “And you call my dragons smelly!”

“It nested on the roof over half-term,” said her friend Marsha dreamily. “Isn’t it huge! Wasn’t it beautiful!”

“Hmph,” said Ernestine.

“It’s laid four eggs up there. We’re going to have a whole dragon family! I can’t wait for them to hatch out. We’ll be in all the papers!”

As someone with five dragons in her own back garden, Ernestine wasn’t about to be easily impressed. She marched into school and unpacked her books for the first lesson as if nothing unusual had happened.

She soon found out, however, that she was the only girl in the school whose head was not full of Great Green Dragons.

All through Astronomy, her chattering classmates peered hopefully out of the windows. In Illuminations, everyone scrambled for the dragon manuscripts to copy, and complained when there weren’t enough to go round. Ernestine pointedly chose a manuscript about toadstools; but nobody was paying her any attention.

Zoology was the worst. The teacher cancelled the lesson on salamanders to talk about dragons instead. For once, everyone in the class was agog, full of questions and ideas. Everyone, that is, except Ernestine.

Marsha put her hand up.

“Please, Miss, Ernestine’s got common or garden dragons in a nestingbox at her house.”

“That’s nice, Ernestine,” said Miss Delavere. “And can you tell us what they eat?”

“Rats,” said Ernestine. “Mice. Squirrels. Birds. They ate worms when they were small.”

“Oh, yuck!” cried Alberta.

“Of, course, the common dragon only eats small animals,” began Miss Delavere.

“Rabbits,” said Ernestine defensively. “Weasels. Dogs, if they can catch them.” This was not strictly true, although she had once seen Yoyo make an unsuccessful attack on a poodle.

“Thank you, Ernestine. Of course the common dragon is not really comparable to the Great Green. It’s rather like comparing a tabby cat to a tiger. Who can tell me what the Great Green Dragon eats?”

“Sheep!”

“Horses!”

“Pigs!”

“Deer!”

“Children,” muttered Ernestine.

“Oh, yuck! That’s horrid, Ernestine. Anyway,” said Alberta, “it’s not even true, is it, Miss? Great Green Dragons never eat people. Everybody knows that. Ernestine’s just jealous because hers only eat worms.”

Ernestine fell silent. Since no-one wanted to talk about anything but the Great Green Dragon, she stayed silent for the rest of the day.

*

It turned out that Marsha was right about the newspapers. Within a few days, the school was famous. When Ernestine got off the coach in the mornings, crowds of sightseers were already pressed against the school gates, hoping for a glimpse of green.

After the eggs hatched, things got worse. It was like being under siege. The Headmistress resigned herself to the situation and threw the gates open to visitors at a guinea a time. “To go towards the new Observatory,” she announced.

The dragon-watchers weren’t deterred. The school grounds were always full of people milling around with cameras and ice-cream and binoculars. When they departed, they left behind a carpet of empty crisp packets.

“Disgusting,” said Ernestine severely. “And those dragon fledglings are disgusting too. I can’t think why anyone would pay to see them. Nasty scrawny screechy things. And the whole school reeks of sulphur and dragon droppings.”

She was talking to herself, because it was lunchtime and Marsha had gone up to the battlements to look at the dragons.

Ernestine sighed. All her class had started taking their lunch up on to the turrets, where they could dragon-spot and make rude comments about the people down below. Ernestine kicked a pencil across the floor and the rattle echoed round the empty classroom.

If even Marsha abandoned her, she might as well go up there too. Unwillingly, she trudged over to the West Tower and climbed the dank and narrow spiral staircase to the roof.

“Hallo!” Alberta greeted her. “Here’s our resident dragon expert condescending to pay us a visit! What do you make of these, then, Ernestine? They’re a bit more impressive than your tidgy dragons, aren’t they?”

They were. Ernestine had never been this close to the young Green Dragons before. They squawked and yelped and tried to hustle each other out of their tatty nest of branches wedged behind the gargoyles.

They were already twice the size of Yoyo. Their mother, ignoring them from the roof ridge, was at least ten times bigger again.

Far down below, a coach pulled up by the school gates. Something large and pink came flying out of its window and landed heavily in the courtyard. The crowd of sightseers shrank away from it.

“What’s that?” demanded Ernestine.

“Leg of pork,” said Marsha. “They’re always bringing things like that. Watch!”

There was a noisy rush of wings. The mother dragon launched herself from the roof, screamed once and plunged towards the ground. As her talons sank into the meat, the man in the coach was busy snapping with his camera.

“It’s like a butcher’s shop down there some days,” said Marsha. “Look! Here’s another one.”

As the dragon delivered the pork to her raucous, greedy babies, a second coach pulled up. This time it was a dead chicken than thudded onto the ground. The driver waited hopefully, camera at the ready.

“That won’t work,” said Alberta scornfully. “It doesn’t like chicken. Or rabbit. Or worms,” she added with a sidelong glance at Ernestine.

“It likes pork and beef best,” said Marsha. She pulled a piece from the beefburger in her hand and tossed it daringly up into the air.

The mother dragon, gliding lazily above the parapet, swerved in mid-flight to snap at it. The great head loomed alarmingly close; a yellow eye gleamed at Ernestine. The dragon banked, swooped again – and then it landed.

It alighted on the battlements only a few metres away. It steadied itself, and folded its wings.

“Oh, glory be!” breathed Marsha.

The dragon did not move. Towering over the girls, it merely stared at them with expressionless eyes. They shrank back against the wall as its sulphurous breath wafted over them.

“It wants some more beefburger, stupid!” hissed Alberta.

Marsha hurled the rest of the beefburger at its head. The dragon ignored it.

“What’s it doing?” she whispered.

The dragon hopped awkwardly down from the parapet and took two ungainly steps towards them. It was much clumsier on its feet than in the air; and much uglier too, close up. Ernestine could see every knob and wrinkle on its skin.

She pressed her back against the wall, feeling for the door to the staircase. She was praying that her textbooks were right in asserting that dragons never attacked people. All dragons? How did they know?

“Shoo!” said Marsha feebly.

The dragon took no more notice of this than it had of the beefburger. Instead it stared directly at Ernestine with its enormous, black-slitted eyes. It lowered its huge jaw until it was level with her face, and snorted.

Ernestine decided not to wait to find out if the textbooks were right or not. She turned and dived through the doorway, and half slid, half fell down the spiral staircase. She thought she heard the beating of massive wings behind her.

A moment later, the other girls came racing down.

“It’s gone! It flew away as soon as you disappeared!”

“I thought it was going to eat me,” said Ernestine. Although she did her best to sound jokey, she was shivering. “I thought it might have decided to try human for a change.”

“I know why it did that!” declared Marsha. “You must smell of dragon! Dragons have a very good sense of smell, you know. I expect you have the scent of your little dragons on you, and that confused it.”

Alberta gave a yelp of laughter. “It probably thought you were its little worm-eating cousin! Why didn’t you shake hands?”

“I think it was being friendly,” said Marsha.

“I don’t want it to be friendly, thanks very much,” said Ernestine.

“But you’re the dragon’s friend!” hooted Alberta. “The dragon expert! It’ll probably follow you around now wherever you go.”

“Of course it won’t,” said Ernestine firmly. “What nonsense. Total rubbish.”

*

Ernestine climbed down from the school coach outside her house and glowered up at the sky.

Sure enough, it was still there. Like an oversized vulture, the Great Green Dragon was circling high above her with outspread wings.

Yoyo bounced up and down in the air, chattering noisily. The babies were cowering in the nestingbox, silent for once.

Ernestine’s mother was digging the garden.

“Great Heavens,” she said, staring upwards. “Is that what I think it is?”

“It followed me all the way home,” said Ernestine gloomily. “It thought I smelt like a dragon. Marsha says it wants to be friends.”

Her mother watched the dragon wheeling slowly down in huge arcs.

“Friends?” she said uncertainly. “I hope you’re right.”

“Oh, it won’t hurt us. They don’t eat people.”

Lower and lower drifted the Great Green Dragon.

“Whatever’s got into our little one?”

Yoyo was dancing in the air, wings whirring madly, screaming at the top of her voice.

“She wants to be noticed,” said Ernestine.

“Well, it’s worked. Here comes the big one...”

As the Great Green came gliding down to land, Yoyo shot upwards. She flew straight at its head, darting in its face, trying to peck at the yellow eyes.

With one shake of the great head, she was buffeted to the ground. She lay on the grass, crumpled and still.

The Great Green Dragon turned its attention to the nestingbox.

The huge jaws opened to reveal a triple row of stained and jagged teeth. They closed over the nestingbox and began to yank and wrench at it. There was a crack of splintering wood.

“Friends?” exclaimed Ernestine’s mother. “Friends? It wants to eat them!”

She ran up to the dragon, swinging her spade aloft, and walloped it on the nose. “You leave them alone! You big bully!”

“Mum!” wailed Ernestine, aghast, because the dragon had let go of the mangled nestingbox – which toppled to the ground – and was contemplating her mother with a surprised stare.

“Cannibal!” yelled Mum, and walloped it again.

The dragon snapped at the spade with its jaws and crunched, once. Her mother was left holding a handle.

Spitting out the spade, the dragon turned back to the nestingbox. But Ernestine had got there first.

The box lay uprooted on the ground, its top and one side ripped away. The baby dragons were trying, uselessly, to hide in its corners.

The Great Green Dragon opened its mouth wide.

“Oh no you don’t!” yelled Ernestine. She threw herself face down on top of the broken nestingbox. The young dragons squeaked beneath her, but lay quite still. Ernestine could feel someone’s heart beating, very fast, and it wasn’t her own.

There was a croaking roar behind her. A sulphurous blast of heat scorched her back. Ernestine gritted her teeth. Another blast like that and her clothes would be on fire – but she mustn’t move.

“Take that!” cried her mum’s voice, followed by a clang. “And that!” THUNK.

The dragon hissed like an overheated frying pan. There was a deafening clap of winds, and Ernestine felt a breeze blow across her.

She risked a glance over her shoulder.

The Great Green Dragon was up above her in the air, wings beating so heavily that branches swayed in the wind they created. Croaking harshly, it began to ascend.

“Good heavens,” said Mum. “I think it’s going. We won. Well, I never.”

“What did you hit it with?” asked Ernestine, levering herself up cautiously.

“The watering can. It hardly noticed that. But it didn’t like the Wellington boot in the eye. What a coward.” Her mother sounded amazed.

They watched the dragon flap heavily away over the treetops and out of sight.

“It’s lazy,” said Ernestine. “It can get pork and beef back at school with no trouble, no Wellington boots.” She inspected the subdued and shuddering dragonlets. “How’s Yoyo?”

“She’s winded, but I don’t think anything’s broken.” Mum carried the little dragon over and set her down next to her babies. At once they began to wriggle and squawk for food, while their mother sat dazed and quiet.

“You might have to feed them for a little while,” said Mum, “while she recovers. Back to the worms, I’m afraid! Or you could try mince.”

“I know where there’s plenty of chicken,” said Ernestine. “I’ll bring some home tomorrow.” She sat back on her heels to study her ugly, squally, smelly little brood of dragons, now tumbling around their mother on the grass.

“Well, well,” she said. “So now we know what Great Green Dragons like best of all to eat. And it’s not people, is it, my darlings?”

The Winter Dragon

High on a cliff, overlooking the plain, the dragon Inferna had her nest – if nest was the right word for a few rocks balanced on a windy ledge. In it were four large, pointed eggs.

Over the years, the people of the scattered villages below had grown used to Inferna’s presence. It was something they had learned to live with.

Once in a while, to be sure, some brave and foolish youth might vow to climb the cliffs in spring and destroy the eggs before they hatched.

And once in a while, his broken body might be found at the bottom of the cliff-face – or never found at all. So, on the whole, the nest was left alone.

This spring, the dragons hatched as usual: two males and two females. Inferna, their proud mother, watched the babies stumbling around on the rocky ledge.  They were ungainly and quarrelsome, and already very strong.

As soon as they could speak, the baby dragons told her their names.

“Ferox,” snarled the biggest, a handsome rust-red male.

“Atrox,” croaked the other male, long and sinuous and orange as a flame.

“Dura,” growled the third, a muscular green female.

“Nivalis,” breathed the fourth, so softly that her mother could barely hear. She bent her head down to her daughter.

“Nobilis?” she asked her hopefully. “Mirabilis?”

“Nivalis,” whispered the baby dragon.

Inferna had never heard this name before. This did not surprise her; she had never seen a dragon like Nivalis either.

For her daughter was the colour of a cloud. She was not quite white, and not quite grey. Her eyes were of the same uncertain milky colour as her scales. When Inferna looked down at her own fiery red skin, and remembered the babies’ handsome green father, Noxius, she could not understand it.

Still, what did it matter? All four dragons were healthy and growing fast. They were always hungry, so that very soon Inferna was hunting night and day to keep up with their demands. Luckily the baby dragons were not fussy. They would eat anything that ran or hopped or flew.

Only Nivalis was proving awkward to feed. When the others tore enthusiastically at a lamb’s carcass, she would pick at it half-heartedly. She preferred her meat cold-blooded: snakes, lizards and especially fish.

As the dragons grew bigger and the nest more crowded, the other three started to complain about Nivalis.

“She’s always cold!” whined Atrox. “She makes me shiver!”

“Move over, then,” Inferna snapped.

“Dura won’t give me room!”

“I’m not going next to Nivalis,” grunted Dura. “She chills me right through.”

“Well, why should I?”

“I’m not,” declared Ferox, “because I’m the biggest.” Atrox bit him.

So it went on. Atrox tried to push Nivalis out of the nest when nobody was looking: but she gave him such a raking with her claws that he did not try again.

As they grew larger, the young dragons grew noisier as well. The evening air was filled with their harsh screeching as they tried out their voices. But the voice of Nivalis was as thin and clear as glass.

By early summer they were testing their wings, bounding up and down on the edge of the nest. It was none too soon for Inferna. She was exhausted by their ravenous demands. The sooner they could fly and hunt down their own food, the better.

Perching on the cliff-top, Inferna scrutinised the plain below. She saw tangled thickets hiding deer: coppices where the wild pigs scratched: and deep woods, where the wolves ran. Plenty of good food.

However, the forests could be dangerous – even for a dragon. They harboured giants and gryphons, witches and wodwos. So she preferred to hunt in the open fields around the villages, where men fattened their sheep.

Inferna’s favourite village was called Great Toft. She regarded it as entirely her own territory, and fought off any dragons that came near. Next year, when her babes were fully grown, they would have to find new territories of their own.

However, five miles to the east lay another village, Little Toft. There had been no dragon there since old Belliger had died, years ago. Her little ones could practise hunting there, she decided. There were plenty of cows and sheep, and the villagers were soft as butter. It would keep her fledglings out of her way, and the strongest of them could eventually take the village over.

She hoped it would be Ferox. He was her favourite.

*

Brand the Blacksmith of Little Toft was hard at work. He glistened with sweat as he bent over his anvil, hammering. His son Walter watched him, half-hypnotised by the heat and the steady clang of his father’s hammer.

Straightening up, Brand dunked the red-hot iron into a bucket of water which sizzled and steamed.

“Take those spears to Weaver’s house, while I get on with Merchant’s. Much good they’ll be – Merchant won’t know what to do with a spear. Still, who am I to argue?” He wiped his face and neck on a cloth. “And George Farmer’s got some daft idea about an iron fence. How is that going to keep a dragon out, I ask you?”

“At least these dragons are good for business,” volunteered Walter timidly. He was somewhat scared of his father and of the raging heat of the forge.

“I’d rather have no business and no dragons. We’ve had no dragons at Little Toft these ten years, and we don’t want them now.”

“But we’ve often seen dragons flying around,” said Walter rather wistfully.

“That’s different. They weren’t staying. We don’t want dragons moving in.”

Walter did not argue. He hefted the spears and went out of the forge into the cool, clean sunshine.

Weaver was not at home. He was probably at the market, but Walter decided against trying to find him in the heaving crowds of the market square. However, he could not just leave the spears, so he sat down by the front door to wait.

Closing his eyes, he let the sunlight shine red through his eyelids. In his imagination he saw the line of four dragons sweeping across the sky, just as he’d seen them last week: straight and swift as arrows shooting overhead. They had been wonderful.

The hubbub of the market turned to sudden cries of alarm. Walter opened his eyes, and beheld the dragons of his dreams.

His heart leapt as they streaked out of the clouds, blazing red, dazzling orange and iridescent emerald green. But the last one was a strange grey colour; he wondered if there was something wrong with it.

The dragons circled high over the market square and screamed. Down below the villagers screamed too, and yelled and shook their fists and anything they could lay their hands on: brooms and rakes and crutches. They threw stones and pots and potatoes up at the dragons – pointlessly, since these hurt nobody but the unfortunate people they came down on.

“Why all the fuss?” asked Walter. “They’ve hurt no-one except a couple of sheep.”

“It starts with sheep,” answered an old woman nearby, busy banging on a kettle with a wooden spoon. “They’re only young.”

Like me, thought Walter, as he dodged a flying potato. “But they’re so magnificent,” he said.

“You won’t remember.” She stopped banging for a moment. “You’ve never seen what a dragon can really do. To horses, cows – and people. We want to get rid of these dragons before they get any bigger.”

By banging on a kettle? wondered Walter.

She pointed up triumphantly. “Look! They’re leaving.” The dragons were circling higher now. She shook her fist at them. “Go on, then, you vermin! And don’t come back!”

The villagers cheered as the dragons soared upwards, shrinking.

The higher they rose, the lower Walter’s spirits sank. He was bitterly disappointed to see the dragons go.

Then the biggest one – the red one – seemed to change its mind. Folding its wings, it dived out of the sky like an angry falcon, making the air sing. As it fell, it unfurled its talons, curved and cruel. It banked above the schoolhouse and raked its claws across the roof.

All the villagers ducked instinctively, apart from Walter. He was the only one to see the dragon draw in its breath and open its jaws wide to scream.

But instead of the expected scream, a long funnel of flame came out. It was hotter than his father’s forge. It hit the door of Weaver’s house, which smoked, turned black and went up in a roaring mass of flames.

Walter was the only one to see the expression on the dragon’s face as it turned and wheeled back upwards. He thought it looked almost as surprised as he was.

Ferox had just discovered how to breathe fire.

*

“We’ll never get rid of them now,” said Walter’s father gloomily, tossing pebbles into the duck-pond. “Not now that the orange one and the green one have learnt to breathe fire too. There’ll be no stopping them.”

“The fourth one can’t fire-breathe yet,” said Walter. “The grey one.”

“What does that matter? Three are bad enough.  Cornfields, haystacks, sheds, roofs, barns – nothing will be safe. Look at them,” said Brand grimly.

Two dragons spiralled high: one emerald green, one grey, almost lost against the clouds. The green one swooped at a patch of woodland nearby, breathing a funnel of fire. The treetops burst into flame, causing half a dozen terrified deer to bound out from their cover.

The dragon dived and plucked a faltering deer from the ground. Then it took off across the fields, leaving a blackened trail across the wheat.

“It’s nothing to them,” said Brand. “Just wait until harvest. Every sheaf, every bale. We may as well not bother.”

Now it was the grey dragon’s turn. It plunged down – not at the trees, but straight at them. Walter heard the hiss of wind through its wings, before his father grabbed him and pulled him flat on the ground. There was a high-pitched shriek, a tremendous splash, and a great quacking of panicky ducks.

Cautiously he raised his head. The grey dragon was gliding away, a large fish squirming in its jaws.

“At least it can’t set the duck-pond on fire,” said Walter.

“I’ve seen a dragon fry fish in a pond before now,” answered Brand.

Walter got up and walked to the water’s edge. There were no ripples. The pond had an odd sheen. Then he saw the indignant ducks skidding across its surface.

“It’s frozen!”

Brand poked it with a stick. Cracks spread across the pond, drawing a glittering maze.

“Well,” said Brand, and did not seem to know what to say next.

“It breathed ice,” said Walter. “Ice!” He picked up a piece of pond and held it, staring after the dragon, until his dripping fingers burned with cold.

*

However, one dragon that breathed ice did not compensate for three that breathed fire.

It was a novelty, certainly. The villagers now had ice at hand whenever the grey dragon went fishing: it was useful for keeping the butter cold and the milk fresh.

“But what good is that,” said Brand, “when the others keep eating our cattle?  We’ll have no butter nor milk soon.”

At harvest, Walter saw his father’s worst fears confirmed. The dragons turned the hayricks into blazes that fired up spectacularly for a few hours and then kept smouldering for days. The air was permanently fogged with smoke, so that people went round with red-rimmed eyes, and coughing.

“But then we don’t need the hay,” observed Brand bitterly, “since we’ve lost the animals to feed it to.”

House after house was abandoned as the roofs went up in flames; there was no straw to re-thatch them. Several families camped inside the school house, which was tiled.

Miller’s waterwheel, damp though it was, became warped by the dragons’ heat. It groaned and stopped.

“What’s the difference? There’s little enough corn to grind in any case,” Brand muttered.

Summer wilted into autumn. The villagers guarded their few remaining livestock like their children, bought expensive grain from neighbouring towns, and worried about the winter. But as the weather grew colder, the dragons visited the village less often.

“What’s happened to them?” asked Walter, peering out of the forge. The sky was full of orange and scarlet, leaves flying on the wind: but no dragons. It had been a full week now since one had last appeared.

“They sleep through the winter, so it’s said,” Brand told him. “Nobody knows where.”

“Oh… Then we’ll be all right now,” said Walter, trying to sound cheerful as he knew he ought.

But Brand did not sound cheerful. “They’ll be back, come the spring,” he answered gloomily. “We can survive one winter. But how many more summers can we last?”

*

Deep in the rainy mountains to the west, a great cavern lay hidden underground. It was here that the dragons slept.

As the rain turned to sleet and the sleet to snow and hail, more of them gathered from far and wide. They lay in slumbering heaps, claws entangled, tails entwined, old enmities forgotten for the sake of winter warmth. The air inside the cavern steamed and smoked and reeked of sulphur.

Amongst all the sleepers, though, one dragon was restless. Nivalis shifted and rolled over, unable to sleep.

She was too warm. She’d been pushed to the edge of the cavern by dragons complaining of her chilliness; but even by the wall she was too warm. The smoky heat of her fellows was stifling her. It was hotter than the summer sun had been – and in the summer, she’d at least been able to cool herself by plunging into ponds and lakes.

The memory of that cool water made the cavern’s heat too much for her to bear. Nivalis began to creep slowly and carefully away from the sleeping dragons. She felt her way along dark passages of stone, following the cold call of the winter air.

She emerged on a ledge high up on the mountainside. The sky was a heavy grey and snow was softly falling. Nivalis breathed in deeply. The icy air filled her lungs and rushed through her blood.

She unfurled her wings and stretched them wide, letting the cold snow caress them.

Then she opened her mouth and cried in sheer pleasure at the cold: a long thin cry like the wind that echoed round and round the icy mountains.

No answering dragon cried back. Nivalis was alone. And she was suddenly very hungry.

*

Trudging home heavily from school, Walter glanced up to see a dragon burst from the clouds in a swirl of snow. It swept across the fields like a great grey blizzard, leaving behind it a trail of dead grass encrusted and brittle with frost.

Walter raised both his arms and yelled with delight; and the dragon wailed back.

The villagers of Little Toft, of course, were less than delighted. They did not know what to make of the dragon’s return. At least this one posed no danger of fire, and little risk to the remaining livestock – for the dragon preferred fish from the duck-pond or the nearby lake.

All the same, a dragon was a dragon, and they were wary. Very soon their dark mutterings were justified. For it became clear where the danger of Nivalis lay: not in fire, but in ice.

She could do the work of a dozen hard winters rolled into a minute. Though she could not burn thatch, tiles shattered under her freezing breath.

She breathed down chimneys and put fires out.  She froze the log-piles solid. Snow began to fall softly whenever she flew overhead. The villagers shivered by day and by night.

The baker could not keep his ovens hot, so there was no bread. Water froze in pails, and milk in churns.

And at the blacksmith’s forge, the furnace was extinguished and could not be relit.

“We’ve got to do something!” said Walter.

“But what?” said Brand listlessly. The fire in him had gone out along with his furnace. He looked small and grey and weary. Walter had never seen him like this.

“Don’t worry!” he told Brand. “I’ll go and talk to this dragon.”

“Talk to a dragon!” Brand was jolted out of his apathy. “You can’t just go and have a little chat with a dragon!”

Walter didn’t see why not. “Well, it can’t burn me up,” he said, “and I doubt if it’ll eat me, since I’m not a fish.”

“It could freeze you to death!”

“I’ll wrap up well.”

Brand struggled to his feet. “I forbid it,” he said hoarsely. “You’re my only son, and you are not to talk to dragons. Do you hear me, Walter?”

“I hear you,” Walter said.

*

Walter wrapped up well. Since his father thought he was going to school, he had to smuggle the extra clothes out of the house in a bulging school-bag. Once he was well away from the house, he headed to the lake.

Here, he stopped to put on two more pairs of trousers, two pairs of socks, an extra tunic, a woolly waistcoat and two overcloaks.  By then he was so bundled up, he could hardly move.

He wrapped a scarf around his head and waddled down to the lakeside. The marshy ground was as hard as stone, with clumps of reed poking sadly through the frozen mud.

A few snowflakes were blown around in the bitter wind. Even inside all his layers, Walter began to shiver. He stamped his feet and squinted at the sky, wondering how long he would have to wait.

Not long. Out of the clouds it fell without warning. It must have been up there all along, perfectly camouflaged.

Wings folded, it dived straight at the lake. It crashed deafeningly through the splintering ice and disappeared underwater. Walter gaped at the swirling waves for a long minute until the surface exploded and the dragon re-emerged with a large pike thrashing in its jaws. As the waves settled, long fingers of ice were already groping across the water’s surface to lock it up again.

The dragon landed on the shore close by and shook itself. Walter was sprayed with hail. As the dragon began to tear at the fish, he approached it cautiously.

“Dragon?”

It glanced up.

“Human,” it said without interest, in a thin, distant voice.

“I’m Walter. I’d like to talk to you.”

The dragon gulped down the head of the pike.

“So talk,” it said.

“It’s about my village.”

“My village,” corrected the dragon.

“But it’s no use to you! You only eat fish. Why can’t you leave us alone?”

“You’re my village, for now at least,” repeated the dragon in its chilly voice. “A dragon has to have a village. My mother told me. You’re my territory. Do you think I like the place? Ovens everywhere, and horrible warm smoke coming up the chimneys.”

“Is that why you keep putting all our fires out?”

“Of course it is!” the dragon said. “I hope I’m causing plenty of terror and hardship? Because that’s what I’m supposed to do.”

Walter opened his mouth and closed it again.

“Well, actually,” he said slowly, “actually, we’re quite enjoying it.”

The dragon dropped its fish and fixed him with an incredulous glare from its icy grey eyes.

“Enjoying it?”

“Well, we like skating,” said Walter. “And we like, er, making snowmen. And we can have ice-cream every day. And the butcher’s ice-house is already full for the summer.” This last fact was true, at least. “Oh, yes, we like the cold.”

“You like it!” hissed the dragon. A blast of freezing air nearly bowled Walter over. He blinked as ice-crystals formed on his lashes.

“It’s wonderful!” He tried to sound convincing. Although his mouth was so numb he could barely speak, he went on: “It’s such a change from the usual sort of dragon.”

The dragon drooped its head.

“And I thought you were all wretched and terrified,” it sighed. “I’m no good at this. What use is it having a village if I can’t terrorise it?”

Walter stayed diplomatically silent.

The dragon sniffed. “If nobody’s afraid of me, I may as well go,” it said tragically.

Even though this was what he’d aimed for, Walter felt sorry for it.

“Where will you go to?”

“I shall have to find another village.” It sniffed again. “And you’ll get another dragon.”

“Will we?”

“Oh, yes. A village has to have a dragon, just like a dragon has to have a village. One of us will take you over. My mother said.”

“What?”

“I know she wanted my brother Ferox to have you.  The strongest and most fearsome, she told us. I rather hoped it would be me.” Its wings wilted. “Ah, well. Maybe it will be Ferox after all. Though Atrox is definitely more fearsome.”

“Atrox? Which one is that?”

“The orange one. He’s got a temper. Still, that’s not my problem.” The dragon began to flap its wings, preparing to take off.

“Stop! Wait!” cried Walter. “Just a minute! If you won the village, would Atrox stay away?”

“They all would,” it whispered. “They’d all have to find somewhere else.”

Walter chewed his lip. “But how do you prove that you’re the most fearsome dragon? I mean, apart from eating everybody up?”

“Erch! Eat humans?” spat the dragon. “No, thank you. Though I’m sure Atrox would gobble you up if he got the chance.”

“Then he mustn’t get the chance!” said Walter urgently. “How else? How do you decide?”

The dragon pondered long and hard. “Poems,” it said at last.

“Poems?”

“So my mother told us. The most dreadful dragons have long poems written about them. Epics to enthral kings, and appal children on dark nights. That is how the fame of dragons spreads.”

“I see,” said Walter. “Yes. Thank you. Don’t go away, will you? I’ll be back.”

*

Walter went back home and told his father, and Brand, once he had closed his astonished mouth, called a meeting of the villagers in the schoolhouse. There it was decided that a winter dragon was far preferable to a summer one, and that they should try to keep Nivalis.

Then all those who could read and write (mainly school-children) put their heads together to compose the dragon’s poem.

It began like this.

Hark! For I shall tell you now

Of fearful monsters and of how

There came to us a more dread beast

Than any yet that from the east

Or north or west or south has come

To make this wretched place its home

and nine hundred and twenty lines later, it finished like this:

And so this dragon holds us all

In its accursed and frozen thrall.

Proclaim its terror everywhere!

Beware! Beware! Beware! Beware!

Even though it had been written in a hurry, the school-children were very proud of it. It harped on a great deal about the ferocity of the dragon and the misery of the villagers. When Walter read it aloud to the grey dragon the next day, it took him the best part of an hour.

Nivalis was delighted. “You make me sound quite horrible!”

“Good. We’re going to send copies to all the other villages,” Walter told it. “Do you think that will do the trick?”

“If it doesn’t, I don’t know what will. It says such flattering things about me!” The dragon twirled her tail. “Do I really give all the children nightmares?”

“Dreadful ones,” Walter assured her, and went so far as to clap her on the shoulder. This was a mistake: his hand froze onto the dragon’s scales, and bled when he eventually managed to pull it away.

*

Spring came, despite the dragon, and the lake gradually thawed out with a great cracking of ice. Ferox, Atrox and Dura awoke and came flying out of the mountains, trailing smoke, each intent on laying claim to Little Toft.

When they learnt of the epic poem, they were furious. They spat sparks and fizzed fire: but the poem was now famous throughout the land, and Nivalis was notorious as the Scourge of Little Toft.

“I don’t care,” grunted Dura. “It’s only a common little village anyway.  I can do better than that. I fancy a castle.”

“I’m going to look for a proper town,” said Ferox. “Somewhere with a few knights, a bit of excitement.”

Atrox hissed in anger and thrashed his tail; but there was nothing he could do about it. So when the others departed, he had to follow them.

Inferna was very proud of her daughter, though puzzled as to just how she had gained such a fearsome reputation.

For with the coming of spring, the power of Nivalis waned. She could not compete with the sun. The frozen ground thawed out, the trees broke into leaf, and Brand the blacksmith lit his forge again.

By May, Nivalis had had enough. She was too hot, and she was tired.

So she flew to the high mountains in the west, and crept into the cavern, which was now silent, cold and empty. She lay down in the dark with a deep sigh of contentment, and closed her eyes.

In Little Toft, life returned to normal. The villagers re-thatched their roofs, counted their sheep and stored bushels of grain. There was much singing and merriment at harvest-time that year.

But Walter watched the leaves, waiting for the first rusty tinges to appear: waiting for the wind to change to its northern wolfish howl: waiting for a grey cloud full of snow to sweep across the chilly sky and turn into a dragon.

The Drinker of Time

Matilda clattered down to the kitchen, her comb in her mouth, trying to pull her hair back into its scrunchie as she leapt down the stairs two at a time. Monday mornings were always one long rush.

As she reached the bottom stair, Matilda realised that she had left her school bag upstairs under the bed. She groaned, letting the comb fall to the floor.

“Toast!” she yelled to Dad, bursting through the kitchen door –

– and into Sunday night, with her last-minute homework spread out all over the breakfast bar. Matilda recognised the graph she had struggled so hard with: there were shreds of rubber all over it. Outside the window, it was dark and Dad stood at the stove cooking pikelets for supper.

He turned a faintly bewildered face to her.

“Not toast,” he said. “We have pikelets on a Sunday night. It is Sunday, isn’t it?”

Matilda frowned and checked the clock. Half past seven,

– no, a quarter to ten and her mother was in front of her, ready to go to church for the morning service.

Matilda watched her mother pick up her handbag and inspect it with a puzzled expression.

“Haven’t I been to church already?” she asked.

Her father threw down the Sunday paper.

“I’ve read this page!” he exclaimed.

Matilda realised she was holding her swimming costume. It was dry, although last time she’d seen it, it had been draped soggily across the radiator.

She dropped it as if it had just turned into a snake. “I went swimming yesterday,” she declared. “Why is it Sunday again now?”

As Dad opened his mouth to answer, all the lights went out.

Matilda found herself lying in bed. She was sure she hadn’t woken up: rather, she had just arrived here. A breeze ruffled the curtains. She rolled over to peer at the luminous hands of her clock. It was ten past four.

She could hear faint snores coming from her parents’ room. She switched on her bedside light and checked her phone to see if it was still Sunday. It was, though that was no great help.

Matilda thought for a while and then said to the empty room, “I can’t be doing with this, you know. I’m losing great chunks of my life, backwards.”

She worked it out. The first chunk she had lost had been almost thirteen hours: the second had been less than ten hours.

The third gap was only five and a half hours. Maybe the effect, whatever its cause, was running down. Wearing itself out.

She glanced at the clock again. It was twenty five past two.

“Good,” said Matilda. “At this rate I might get some sleep before yesterday evening.”

And she switched off the light and wriggled down under the quilt.

*

She woke up, sure enough, on Sunday morning. The day progressed exactly as it should have, apart from the fact it that it was for the second time.  Although Dad grumbled about how predictable his weekends were these days, nobody but Matilda seemed to have noticed anything seriously wrong.

When she went back to school on Monday, she tried to raise the subject with her friends. All she got were blank looks, so she kept quiet.

Then, at two o’clock on Wednesday afternoon, time started disappearing again.

Matilda turned a page of her history book to find herself in the middle of Tuesday’s French lesson.  After a few minutes of passive verbs she was back in that morning’s assembly. Then it was backwards in diminishing skips and jumps all the way to six o’clock on Friday.

Dawn was breaking, and Matilda was in her pyjamas.

She leapt out of bed, extremely angry.

“I am not having Friday again!” she announced. “I got a C minus for maths and I fell off the apparatus in gym. Everyone laughed at me. I’m not going through that again.”

She glared at the clock. “Just you dare,” she told it. “I want to know who’s responsible for this!”

There were three bangs on the bedroom wall.

“Shut up, Matilda,” came her mother’s muffled voice. “It’s too early.”

Matilda shut up, and brooded.

She brooded for the next two days, during which she had to fall off the apparatus, bruising her hip and her pride, and suffer the teacher’s scathing remarks about her algebra. On Saturday she went swimming and had a familiar argument with her friend Elaine, and got just as annoyed as she had the first time round.

By the time she got to her third attempt at Sunday, Matilda was seething with frustration. She’d tried to change her actions, but it was almost impossible. It was as if the day was laid down in predetermined tracks. She couldn’t stop herself from arguing with Elaine.

If she did manage to alter her words or her behaviour, even slightly, it suddenly felt as if she was wading through treacle;  like when she tried to run in her dreams, only to find her feet glued to the pavement.

So, once again she had to fail at the new computer game, forget to charge her phone, spill gravy all down herself at tea, finish her homework late – getting the graph  wrong for the third time – and rush to be ready for school on Monday morning.

Monday progressed the same as last time until dinner, when the school pizza and salad on her plate

– was abruptly porridge. In the kitchen. That meant last Thursday.

Matilda checked the newspaper to make sure, and stood up, bowling her chair over.

“I am not doing it all again!” she bawled at the top of her voice.

“Doing what?” asked Mum.

“Everything!” yelled Matilda.

And although it wasn’t easy, she picked up her bowl – which suddenly seemed to weigh a ton – and tipped the porridge in a slithery lump into the sink.

Then, although it was still harder, she walked out of the house in the opposite direction to school. It took all her strength. By the time she reached the river, she was so tired she had to stop and drape herself across the rough stone of the bridge. At the same time, the bright morning sky

became a dark, misty night. Street lamps glimmered hazily through fine drizzle. That was Wednesday. She was being thrown further back in time than ever. This had to stop.

So Matilda then did something she had occasionally contemplated. The bridge was not high, and the river below was deep and slow, and in summer at least, was probably quite swimmable.

She had to break the pattern somehow. So with a gigantic effort she struggled onward to the middle of the bridge

– by which time the night had changed to a watery, unclear daylight; but she hardly noticed. Ungluing her feet, she climbed up painfully to the parapet and jumped

into the jaws of the dragon.

It was surprised. It coughed and spat her out. Matilda did a backwards roll and knelt up on the sand, nursing a grazed elbow.

The dragon’s head was as big as a bus. Behind the head, its body humped and trailed away like a scaly hill, as yellow as dull brass. Two stumps on the hill must be its wings, Matilda decided. They were very rudimentary. It could hardly fly with those.

She seemed to be alone with the dragon in the middle of a greyish desert. In the distance, shimmering sand melted into a hazy orange sky.

“What were you doing?” cried the dragon. It had a whistling, squeaky voice, and it sounded horrified.

Matilda stood up and brushed herself down carefully. She was so angry she could hardly breathe. “I might ask you the same question.”

“You jumped right off that bridge!”

“Oh, you noticed,” said Matilda.

“But you could have died, and that would be absolutely terrible!”

“Would it?” said Matilda.

“Yes! It would have ruined all my plans!”

Matilda sat down with a thump. All of a sudden she felt very tired.

“Really,” she said.

“Oh yes. I couldn’t have gone on. I’m not supposed to actually alter things, you see.”

The dragon heaved itself onto huge, splayed feet and took a few lumbering paces. It moved in slow motion. At each footfall, the ground trembled and the air shivered. That must have been how dinosaurs moved, thought Matilda tiredly, although the dragon was at least ten times bigger than the hugest dinosaur.

The dragon rumbled down to the river. This was not the same river she had tried to jump into. It was made of light. It emerged from the sand and flowed across it like a rainbow until it sank and disappeared again.

“It’s going too fast!” the dragon wailed.

Bending its giant head it drank deep, gulping at the rainbow. As it raised its head to swallow, the river ebbed and eddied, flowing backwards to fill in the gap.

The dragon dipped its head and drank again; paused, and drank a third time. Each time it swallowed less than the last.

It lowered its head for a fourth attempt, but instead, with a moan, slumped down on the riverbank.

“I can’t drink any more,” it said in its whistling voice. “I’m just too full. And I’ve only managed a week.” It blinked an eye as big as a table and a giant tear rolled out like a glistening football, to hiss and steam as it sank into the sand.

“A week!” said Matilda. “That’s my life you’re swallowing.”

The dragon raised its fearful face.

“Oh, no,” it assured her. “It’s only time. You don’t lose anything. You just get to live it all again.”

“I don’t want to live it all again!”

“Don’t you? I thought you’d be happy to relive your life. I’d love to go back – wouldn’t you?”

“No,” said Matilda. “Once is quite enough. Why do you want to drink time?”

Another huge tear hissed into the sand.

“I’ve lost the other dragons. I don’t know where they are, and I’m so lonely.”

“But how is swallowing time going to help?”

“They must be somewhere in the past, you see,” explained the dragon. “If I can only go back far enough, I’ll find them. Do you know where they are?” it asked with sudden hope. “Do you know anything about the other dragons?”

“Dragons are mythical,” snapped Matilda, and then wished she hadn’t, because the beast looked so unhappy.

“They must be a very long way back indeed, then,” it said dolefully. “I’ll just have to keep drinking.”

Lowering its head ponderously, it took another series of noisy gulps from the rainbow river.

“Dragon?”

It ignored her, drinking ravenously.

“Dragon!”

“Aaah,” it sighed at last. “Two weeks that time. But I’m very full.”

“Dragon, you’ll never find them that way.”

“But I’ve got to!” it wailed. “I want them so much. I’ve got to get them back.”

“You can’t make time go backwards,” said Matilda. She pointed to the eddying river. “Look, it’s already catching up again. You’ll just end up where you started.”

“Then what am I to do?”

“Sit down. Have a rest. And stop crying, for goodness sake.”

The dragon lay down with a long whump. A fountain of sand flew up from either side of its belly. It gazed at Matilda with imploring, mournful eyes. “Tell me what to do, please!”

“Well, could you fly away and find them?” She eyed its stubby wings doubtfully.

“I’m only young,” said the dragon reproachfully. “They haven’t grown yet.”

“You mean you’ll get bigger?”

“Only my wings,” said the dragon. “Please tell me how to find the others.”

She shook her head. “I can’t. Dragons don’t exist in my world, you see.”

“What!” it squeaked. “But they must! Otherwise how did you know I was one?”

“Stories,” said Matilda. “There are no dragon fossils. No traces. You’re just stories, inside people’s heads.”

“Indeed,” it said huffily.

But Matilda was thinking aloud. “Drinking time is no use. Dragons have nothing to do with time. You won’t find them that way. You need to look somewhere else.”

“Humph! I suppose I need to look inside your head!”

“Inside the stories,” she corrected firmly, in case it got the wrong idea.

“I don’t know any dragon stories,” it said petulantly. “I only know about me.”

“You must have heard of Saint George!”

“Was he a dragon?”

Matilda hesitated. “Not exactly. Listen.”

She sat down cross-legged by the dragon’s ear, and started to tell it the story of Saint George. Since the idea of the dragon getting killed made more enormous tears plop down into the sand, she quickly changed the ending, so that Saint George had a ferocious battle with the dragon and then knighted it for bravery.

“More! More!” cried the dragon.

So she told it about the dragon that fought the Iron Man, and won.

“More! More!”

She told it about Smaug and the Midgard Serpent and the dragon that guarded the Golden Fleece. She told it about the Reluctant Dragon and Custard the Dragon.  Most of these stories were transformed in the telling. Jason, for instance, did not get his Golden Fleece: he got horribly devoured.

Every time she halted, the dragon cried, “More! More!” Coming from a well-armed mouth the size of a bulldozer, this did not seem to be a request she could refuse.

So she told it about Welsh dragons and Chinese dragons and Arabian dragons. When her memory failed her, she just made it up.

Meanwhile the dragon listened intently, sprawled on the ground, for story after story, hour after hour. Matilda had never in her life had anyone listen to her so attentively.

All of a sudden, in the middle of the tale of Jack the Giant-Killing Dragon and his golden eggs (for Matilda was free-wheeling by now) the dragon stirred its massive head.

“What’s that?” it squeaked. “Look! Over there!”

Matilda squinted at the haze.

“It’s them! It’s them!” The dragon surged to its feet, knocking her over backwards.

She sat up and squinted harder. Perhaps there was a glint of golden in the haze; no, several glints.

“You found them! You made them come for me! You did it!” cried the dragon. It lashed its tail excitedly, setting up a sandstorm. Matilda had to close her eyes.

When she reopened them, the dragon was lurching across the swirling river.

“I’m off!” it squealed, as it lumbered away towards the horizon, its tiny wings waggling for all they were worth.

Matilda watched until the orange cloud of dust behind the dragon gradually hid it from view.

At last the ground stopped shaking. She was left alone with the unchanging sand and sky, by the side of the rainbow river.

She sat there for a while, watching the river flow, and sprinkling sand between her fingers.

“This is all very well,” she said at last. “But I can’t stay nowhere. Things have to change. They’d better change. But they won’t unless I go back.” She sighed, contemplating algebra and gym.

They wouldn’t last for ever. Nothing would, unless she stayed here. So there was only one solution. Matilda got to her feet and stood at the edge of the river.

“I suppose I can always make up stories for myself,” she murmured.

She took a deep breath, savouring it as if it were her last, and then swung her arms and jumped

and arrived to toast for breakfast, on the dawn of a new day.

Rabbithead

Everybody knows what a dragon looks like.  A dragon is cold, bold and magnificent. Its scaly armour gleams like bronze.  Its cruel eyes glow like embers.

It may have leathery wings and steely claws.  It is permitted to have horns.

What a dragon should certainly not have is a pair of long, soft, floppy ears with a tendency to fall over its eyes.

Rabbithead had been made aware of this for as long as he could remember. All his life he’d had these ears, and all his life he’d suffered the taunts of his brothers and sisters. They called him Rabbithead right from the start.

It wasn’t just his brothers and sisters. When Rabbithead grew old enough to frighten humans, they refused to be frightened. The first time he swooped, shrieking, across the fields, the farmers dropped their spades, gazed up in alarm – and burst into hysterical laughter.

Rabbithead was utterly humiliated.

He gave up trying to terrify people. It simply wasn’t possible with two long, floppy ears bouncing against his cheeks.  The other dragons jeered and sneered relentlessly.

Eventually Rabbithead grew so wretched that he could bear it no longer. He had to do something about his ears. He needed help.

First he sought out the most famous wizards in the land.  After one look at the ears, they sniggered and sent him packing.

Next he visited the most renowned witches, who weren’t much better. The nicest of them offered him a cup of toad soup – but even she could not restrain a smile.

“Just learn to live with them, dearie,” she advised. “At least you’ll give everyone a good laugh.”

“I don’t want to give anyone a good laugh!” wailed Rabbithead. He stalked out to find another witch.

But by now, he had asked them all. There was no-one left.

As he flew despondently home over the forest, he spotted a small cabin in a clearing in the trees.

Rabbithead flew lower. There was a sign by the door:

CLEMENTINA NIGHTSHADE

APPRENTICE WITCH

He eyed the cabin with suspicion. It wasn’t the usual witch’s hovel. No bats hung from its eaves: no crows perched on the chimneys. It was very neat and new, with check curtains in the windows and a big tub of pink geraniums by the door.

Rabbithead knocked doubtfully. The door was opened by a girl with plaited hair and freckles. She was wearing a frilly apron.

“Yes?” she said briskly.

“Are you the witch?” he asked, even more doubtfully.

“Clementina Nightshade. That’s me.”

“You don’t look much like a witch.”

“You don’t look much like a dragon. What do you want?”

“I want people to think I’m fierce and horrible,” said Rabbithead desolately. “I am, really, but they just look at the ears and laugh.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Clementina Nightshade. “You’d better come in.”

“I won’t fit.”

“Just put your head in. That’s the important bit.”

Rabbithead lay down and eased his head through the door. His ears flopped onto the rug.

It was unnaturally clean, for a witch’s house. No dangling cobwebs, no shadowy corners, no dusty shelves where unspeakable bits of things lurked in jars. The cauldron in the corner held a mop and an umbrella.

“Aren’t you rather young for a witch?” he asked.

“I’m an apprentice. I’ve only just started.”

“Then I don’t suppose you’ll be any help.”

“We’ll see.” She stroked his ears carefully. “Aren’t they lovely? So soft and silky.”

“I don’t want lovely ears! I’m a dragon!” howled Rabbithead. “Make them disappear!”

“If I do that, you won’t be able to hear. But I could swap them for something smaller. Wait there while I fetch my book of spells.”

The sight of Clementina’s book of spells reassured Rabbithead greatly. It was heavy and mildewed, with crackling pages. The ink was brown with age.

She blew the dust off it. “This book’s in a terrible state,” she said severely. “I bought it off a retiring wizard. Quite disgusting. And the spells are most unhygienic. Eye of newt and tongue of frog. Imagine!”

“Don’t you need those to make the spells work?”

“I like frogs,” she said indignantly. Rabbithead hoped that the spell he needed would not require any pieces of frog.

“Here we are!” said Clementina. “How about having a mouse’s ears? They’d be small enough not to show.”

Rabbithead agreed, and waited excitedly while she recited the spell.

He felt a tingling in his scalp. When he shook his head, he could no longer glimpse his flopping ears.

“Has it worked?” he asked eagerly.

Clementina was staring at him. “Well, sort of,” she said uncertainly. “They seem to have been made for a rather large mouse.”

Rabbithead began to twist around. “Where’s a mirror? I want to see!”

“No, no! I don’t think that’s a good idea…” Hastily Clementina flipped through the pages. “What about a bat’s ears instead? At least they’ll be black and not pink.”

Again his scalp tingled as she recited the spell; then her voice suddenly changed. It sounded as deep as thunder.

“What’s happened?” he cried, his voice booming out unnaturally. He could hear every scrape of his scales on the floor magnified a hundred times. The ticking of the clock was like a volley of firecrackers.

“My ears hurt!” he roared, deafening himself.

“Bats have very sensitive hearing,” rumbled Clementina.

The dragon clapped his claws to his head in agony.

“Change them! Change them into anything – now!”

“All right, all right!”

As she gabbled another spell, the dragon felt a great weight on his head.

“What have you done?” he cried.

Clementina began to giggle. “It was the first spell that came to hand. Elephant ears. Now they really suit you!”

Rabbithead rolled his eyes back and glimpsed two enormous, grey, wrinkled flags waving over his head.

At this, he became very angry. He was a dragon, and not to be made fun of.

“Take them away!” he snarled. “Or I’ll sizzle you up like a forgotten sausage!”

“I’m doing my best here,” protested Clementina.

“Give me back my ears!”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

Immediately Rabbithead felt his old familiar ears flop over his head.

“Thank you for nothing,” he snapped, and began to back out of the door. “Goodbye and good riddance!”

But Clementina was leafing through her book. “We need to try a different approach,” she said.

He paused in the doorway. “What do you mean?”

“It’s not the ears that are the problem. They’re very fine ears. It’s people’s attitudes that we need to change. People are so prejudiced.”

“What?”

“Keep still,” commanded Clementina, and she launched into a long and complicated spell.

When she had finished, Rabbithead shook his head experimentally. His ears were still there, flapping against his cheeks.

“What did you do?” he asked suspiciously.

“Here’s a clue. The other dragons hate you because you’re different to them. Can you guess yet? No? Go home and see.”

So Rabbithead flew off homeward, and very soon he saw. It became obvious with the first dragon he set eyes on.

This dragon was a stranger. It perched in a tree, hunched and miserable. It had two long, soft ears like a lop-eared rabbit’s, and glanced up at Rabbithead without surprise.

“You too?” it said mournfully.

Rabbithead sped on without answering. Near home he saw a crowd of dragons reeling through the sky, long, floppy ears trailing in the wind. They were hissing like a swarm of angry bees.

“We look like idiots!” they snarled. “We’ve been cursed! Just wait till we catch the joker who did this…”

One of them turned and saw Rabbithead. It was his sister.

“There he is!” she screeched. “He’s got to be the one behind this! He’s trying to make fools of us all. Get him!”

The dragons banked in a seething, smoking squadron and swooped on Rabbithead.

He turned and fled. A dozen irate dragons pursued him. Their flames scorched his tail and singed his wings. He had never flown so fast in his life.

As he reached Clementina’s clearing, he crashed through the trees and landed in a crumpled heap next to her cabin.

“Change them back!” he panted to the startled witch. “Change them back!”

The dragons roared. Treetops burst into flame. Clementina took one look at them and started shouting a frantic spell at the sky.

The furious screams of the dragons suddenly faded into surprised grunts. Rabbithead peered up cautiously and saw a line of dragons, now earless, gliding away over the charred trees.

He laid his head upon his paws and closed his eyes, exhausted.

“Well, it was worth a try,” said Clementina.

“No, it wasn’t. They wanted to kill me. You should have thought of that.”

“I can’t think of everything!”

Rabbithead raised his head. “Why not?” he roared. “You’re a witch, aren’t you? Why can’t you get it right?”

“I will, next time.”

“There won’t be a next time!”

“But I’ve had another idea! And this time it’s foolproof.  Well, interesting, anyway.”

Rabbithead glared at her. “Interesting?”

“Foolproof,” amended Clementina. “If this spell doesn’t work, I’ll eat my hat.”

“If it doesn’t work,” growled Rabbithead, “I’ll eat you.”

*

Clementina refused to say what the new spell would do.

“It’s all to do with changing people’s attitudes,” she said.

“I thought you’d just tried that?”

“Not this way. This way will work. Don’t look so worried!”

However, as Rabbithead took flight, he felt sick at heart. He had no faith in Clementina. And after their last meeting, he couldn’t face other dragons right now.

So he flew to a lonely perch in the hills, where only eagles circled and he could be sorry for himself in peace. There he brooded on the unfairness of fate and the unreliability of witches.

Nearby, an eagle dived to make its kill. Rabbithead watched it moodily as it plummeted down, talons unfolding to grab its prey.

There was a flash of fur, a puff of smoke, a scream – and then the eagle was beating its way back into the sky as fast as it could, leaving several feathers behind.

“What’s the matter?” called Rabbithead. Although he could barely hear the distant eagle’s answer, it sounded oddly like:

“Rabbit!”

Rabbithead pondered this, and then flew down to investigate. As he landed on the grass, a brown, furry head popped out of a hole and wiggled its nose. Seconds later, rabbits popped out of holes everywhere and began to lollop towards him.

Then, launching themselves at Rabbithead, they sank tiny, vicious teeth into his legs. Some scrambled onto his back and bit his shoulders: others snapped ferociously at his wings.

“Get off!” cried Rabbithead.  Their teeth could not pierce his hide in many places, but where it did, it was very painful. Little puffs of smoke and flame came from their noses. He tried to run from them, and took flight with a couple of determined rabbits still clinging to his tail.

He shook them off and flew over the fields. Abruptly, he braked in mid-air.

Down below, humans were harvesting. At least, they were flailing with scythes and sickles; but they weren’t cutting wheat.

They were fighting off hordes of rabbits that leapt at them with tiny teeth bared. Miniature puffs of flame shot out of the rabbits’ mouths and singed the farmers’ trousers.

“Interesting,” said Rabbithead. He flew on to the village.

Rabbits were running riot in the streets. The villagers were fighting them off, but there were more rabbits than they could cope with, clawing at their hands, ripping their clothes and scorching their boots.

The dragon landed on the village green in the middle of a fluffy sea of wild, rampaging rabbits. At once they turned all their attention to him.

“Who are you?” they squealed viciously in a thousand puny voices. “What’s your game?”

“Game?”

“What do you think you look like? Call yourself a rabbit, with scales like that?” sneered the rabbits.

“Actually,” said Rabbithead, “I call myself a dragon.”

And he took a deep and careful breath and blasted the entire village green, and its furry contents, with a sheet of fire.

“Roast rabbit for your tea,” said Rabbithead to the open-mouthed villagers. For once, nobody was laughing. They all shivered in a very satisfying way.

He took off again and left them to their feast of rabbit. He had a score to settle.

When he arrived at the clearing in the woods he saw Clementina outside her cabin with a paintbrush in her hand.  She was repainting her sign.

Rabbithead landed in front of her with a snap and a snarl.

“Foolproof, eh? I’ve come to eat you up!”

“Oh, please don’t,” begged Clementina. “I’ve already eaten my hat.  And, I’ve given up being a witch: it’s far too dangerous. I nearly got scalped by a dozen darling little bunnies.”

“Good!”

“I’ve just magicked them all back to normal, but that’s the last spell I shall ever do. I’ve decided on a change of career.”

She pointed at the sign.

CLEMENTINA  SAWBONES

APPRENTICE  SURGEON

Rabbithead shuddered. “Remind me not to get ill. What will happen to your ancient spell book?”

“I’m about to throw it out,” she said. “But you can have it, if you promise not to eat me.”

He considered this, and nodded. “It’s a deal. What did the hat taste like?”

Clementina wiped her paintbrush carefully. “Delicious, thanks. I turned it into a treacle pudding first.”

*

Rabbithead took the ancient spell book home and studied it carefully. That was how he became the first dragon wizard.

Since he was not at all squeamish about frogs or newts, he found the book more useful than Clementina ever had, and soon acquired a good range of spells which he tried out on his family until they promised to be more polite.

As his fame grew, dragons came from far and wide to consult him. He was called Rabbithead no longer, but was respectfully addressed as O Master.

Those meeting him for the first time assumed his unusual appearance was simply a sign of the Master’s special powers. If they dared to comment on his ears, they were likely to find themselves immediately transformed into a halibut.

And needless to say, no-one ever laughed at Rabbithead again.

Magpies

It was the Year of the Magpie.

Everyone was heartily relieved that the old year had ended at last. The Year of the Rat had been most unpleasant, what with the swarms of rodents scurrying around the garden, creeping out of drains, and even pilfering from the kitchen if you didn’t watch out.

Before that, it had been the Year of the Rooster, an extremely wearing year. It hadn’t been too bad in winter; but come the summer, being awoken by flocks of loudly braying birds at sunrise had been no fun at all.

A year from now it would be the Year of the Snake. Most people preferred not to even think about that one.

All in all, the arrival of the Year of the Magpie was seen as a welcome breathing space. It was true that magpies could be noisy at times; but at least they didn’t breed in the sewers, bite your ankle or scream “cock a doodle doo” at four o’clock in the morning.

So the town had a very relaxing three months until April, when the magpies started to nest.

“My Mum’s lost her engagement ring,” said Lewis to his friends as they were swinging on the gate.

“Mag-pie! Mag-pie!” chanted Tom.

“That was careless of your Mum,” Fiona said. “Hasn’t she read the notices?” She quoted from them in their headmistress’s voice. “On no account should small, shiny items of value be left unattended this year. Remember the traditional habits of magpies! Guard your smaller valuables!”

Tom giggled, but Lewis didn’t feel like laughing. His Mum had been too upset.

“She forgot,” he said. “She only put the ring on the window-sill for a minute, while she washed up. And the window was open. And when she turned round, there it was, gone.”

Fiona tut-tutted.

Tom remarked, “My sister lost an ear-ring last week, I think. She didn’t tell anyone, but I overheard her swearing.”

“Silly girl,” Fiona said. “She’s old enough to remember the last Year of the Magpie.”

“Hardly!” Tom protested. “It was twelve years ago. She was only three back then.”

“I can’t wait till the Year of the Bear,” said Lewis wistfully.

Fiona shrieked. “No, thank you! We’re going to move away and live in Dextra that year. Dad said so.”

“Bor-ing,” said Tom. “In Dextra, all the years are the same. They only have numbers. Animals are much more interesting.”

Lewis said nothing. He liked the idea of animals, but the reality could be disappointing. The roosters had got on his nerves, and his attempts to tame the rats had failed humiliatingly. Although the monkeys three years ago had been fun, even they just got to be a nuisance in the end.

And now the magpies had upset his Mum.

He sighed.

“I suppose I’d better climb up and check their nests,” he said.

*

There were several magpie nests in the tall pine tree in the back garden. Lewis borrowed his Dad’s ladders (which was strictly forbidden) and lugged them from the garage to the tree, gouging deep troughs in the lawn on the way.

The ladders got him up as far as the bottom two nests. After that, he had to climb the tree (which was even more strictly forbidden), trying not to look down. The magpies flapping and cackling from the branches did not help.

When he finally reached the topmost nests, his limbs were trembling with the strain. And there was nothing there.

“Just eggs,” he reported afterwards to Tom. “A couple of bits of broken glass. A penny. Nothing else. It must be another magpie coming into our garden. I’ll have to track it down.”

“How are you going to do that?” asked Tom.

Lewis thought for a moment.

“Bait,” he said.

Next morning he got up while everyone else was still asleep. Dressing silently, he crept out into the dusky garden to scatter his bait carefully. Then he retreated into the house to watch from behind the blinds.

He waited. Imperceptibly the garden turned from mysterious grey-blue to everyday green. A blackbird sang from the hedge, and sparrows hopped on the grass: but there were no magpies. Although Lewis waited for an hour, by the time Dad came lumbering down for breakfast the bait still lay untouched on the lawn.

“You’re up early,” said Dad, yawning. “What for?”

“Looking for magpies.”

Dad peered short-sightedly out of the window. He had left his glasses upstairs. “Can’t see any,” he commented. “What’s all that stuff on the grass?”

“Bottle tops and silver foil, to lure them down,” muttered Lewis, feeling rather foolish.

“Well, it isn’t working. You go and pick that lot up. We don’t want rubbish all over our garden.”

“I will, after breakfast,” said Lewis. He fetched a bowl of cereal and ate gloomily.

When he went to rinse his bowl, he glanced out of the window. The bowl fell with a clatter into the sink.

“The bait – it’s gone!”

“Lucky you. That’s saved you a job.”

“But where are the magpies?” cried Lewis.

He rushed outside. Every bottletop and scrap of foil had disappeared. A single magpie sat bobbing its tail in the pine tree: but how could one magpie account for all that lot?

At school, Lewis was distracted. He spent the lessons staring into space, and the breaks fishing sweet-wrappers out of the classroom bins. After a few attempts at conversation, Tom and Fiona shrugged and left him to it.

By four o’clock, the glittering sweet-wrappers were spread about the lawn. Lewis watched and waited. Occasionally a magpie flew across the garden, but none alighted. The bait remained untouched until teatime.

Lewis’s mother refused to let him eat his tea while standing by the window. Considering it was her ring that he was hunting for, it was really most unreasonable of her, he thought as he bolted his spaghetti.

And when he was allowed up from the table, his annoyance was complete. While he had been eating, the lawn had been swept clean as if by a giant vacuum cleaner. Not a single sweet-wrapper remained.

“Into thin air!” muttered Lewis as he scanned the sky for magpies, unsuccessfully.

Once again he dragged the ladders across the grass to check the nests in the pine tree. Once again he made the vertiginous climb to the higher branches.

All for nothing. The nests were nearly empty.

Lewis slid down the ladder in a temper. He was going to find those magpies, somehow.

What he needed was more bait….

“Lewis,” said his mother, later that evening, “Have you been in the fridge? Someone’s taken the lids off all the yoghurt pots.”

“Lewis,” said his Dad, “what happened to that box of clout nails?”

“Lewis!” wailed his little brother Sidney. “I can’t find my marbles!”

“It’s in a good cause,” explained Lewis from his lookout at the window. “They’re only in the porch. I’ve left the door open. I’m trying to get the magpies to come really close.”

“But I need those clout nails,” complained his Dad.

“That yoghurt’ll go off,” his mother warned.

“I want my marbles!” Sidney howled.

“Oh, all right then.”

However, when Lewis stepped out to the porch to collect them, he was too late.

*

In the following days, more things went missing. Paper-clips. Thumb-tacks. Key-rings. Badges. More seriously, his mother’s silver bracelet. His father’s tie-pin. And Lewis’s own watch.

“But I didn’t take them,” protested Lewis for the umpteenth time. “Well, only the paper-clips. I didn’t take any of the others.”

Mum was angry. “So you mean to tell me those magpies flew into the house without any of us seeing them, and pulled the thumb-tacks out of the pinboard by themselves? And my bracelet was in a drawer!”

“I need my pirate badge,” whined Sidney. “It’s my best badge. Give it back to me, Lewis.”

“But I haven’t got it! I didn’t take any of them!”

“Except the paper-clips,” said Mum drily. “Well, you’re the one who lured the magpies right up to the porch. So if they’ve decided to come inside the house, you’d better either catch them or find out where they’re nesting. Soon.”

Lewis did his best. He climbed tree after tree, and gained nothing except torn trousers. He borrowed Fiona’s binoculars and scanned the skies: to no avail.

Meanwhile his mother’s temper was growing shorter. Small change kept disappearing from her purse, and she did not know who – or what – to blame. All her pins had vanished, and her thimble.

Then the nail scissors went, followed by the teaspoons. Mum took to wearing her house keys on a string around her neck, which was just as well because the spare ones vanished two days later.

So did a necklace, a small glass horse, a pair of compasses and Dad’s steel tape measure.

“And that’s heavy!” Lewis told Tom. “For a magpie, anyway.”

Tom studied him doubtfully. “It’s not really you, is it?”

“Of course it’s not! I wouldn’t take all that stuff. I’m in enough trouble as it is. Hasn’t anything gone missing in your house?”

“I don’t think so,” said Tom. “Though Mum did say we were a knife short. And something about the salt-cellar.” He fell silent, wondering.

But soon reports from other houses began to multiply. At first, people shrugged them off.

“Those magpies are up to their old tricks again,” they said. “Remember the last time, twelve years ago?”

There seemed to be no other explanation, until households started reporting tin-openers lost, and the tins to go with them, and beer bottles, and cut-glass vases, and pinking shears, and light bulbs.

“This is not the work of magpies,” said Lewis’s Dad finally. “This is the work of some sneak thief.”

“Why would a sneak thief want your nail-clippers?” Lewis asked.

“Well, who else could it be?” His father ran his hands through his thinning hair, exasperated. “We’ll be losing the saucepans next.”

The saucepans went exactly a week later, closely followed by the kettle. They had to cook the meals in two old brown casserole dishes, and gave up drinking tea. The steel teapot had gone too.

Sidney’s trumpet and xylophone disappeared.

“That’s no loss,” said Lewis. But he was furious when his roller-blades went missing, along with the borrowed binoculars.

So Lewis set a trap.

He cut a crown out of golden card and put it in his bedroom drawer. Then, without asking, he borrowed his father’s vice and set it up on his desk.

Next – again without asking – he took the expensive new camcorder, and with the help of sticky tape, plasticine and string, rigged it up so that the camera should start to run as soon as the drawer was opened.

He left the window wide open, hid behind the wardrobe and stared hard at the drawer for ten minutes. Nothing happened.

Lewis scattered a layer of talcum powder on the window sill. Then he went out of the room and sat on the floor outside his bedroom door. Still nothing happened, except that Sidney came along whining.

“I’ve lost my dumper truck! My best one, the big yellow one!”

“I haven’t got it,” said Lewis.

“You have!” yelled Sidney. He knelt down and began to thump Lewis on the chest with his fists. “You have! You have!” And he started to cry.

“Cut it out, Sid,” said Lewis, but Sidney went on thumping and crying. All at once there was a loud clatter and a bang from the bedroom. Sidney stopped hitting Lewis, stuck his thumb in his mouth and ran away.

Lewis scrambled to his feet and flung open the door.

His drawer was on the floor, upside down. Lewis picked it up, leaving a pile of socks on the carpet. The cardboard crown had vanished. He hurried to the window, where the talc lay undisturbed.

Lewis spun round. So how had they managed to get the crown?

And, he realised with a sick feeling, the vice…

And the brand new camcorder.

*

After that, Lewis set no more traps. He lay very low and kept his head down. Luckily his father never asked him if he knew anything about the camcorder, instead complaining at great length to the police over the phone.

So Lewis kept his mouth shut.  Even when the hedge-clippers and lawn-mower went, he had nothing to say.

However, he was thinking hard. Whoever was taking all this stuff had to be keeping it somewhere. Surely a huge collection of lawn-mowers and camcorders and roller-blades couldn’t be that difficult to find?

The next day, he went down to the Building Society and drew out all his savings.

Then he went to an electrical shop in the precinct, where he’d often stopped to gape through the window at the TVs on display.

Today the windows were nearly empty.

“Can I help you?” said the shop-keeper. “No, I don’t suppose I can, unless you want a keyboard. They’re all still here, for some reason. Not a great deal else is, as you can see.”

“Have you got a metal detector?” enquired Lewis.

“I think they’ve all gone… Not sold, just gone. Hang on. I’ll check the storeroom, if you like.”

He returned a minute later carrying a long box. “Last one. You were just in time. I don’t suppose it’ll be there next week.”

“Great! I’ll have it.” Lewis dug in his pockets. He didn’t have quite enough money, but the shopkeeper didn’t mind.

“I’ll just take the notes,” he said. “You keep the change. It won’t stay in the till.”

“Thanks!” Lewis grabbed the box in both arms and hurried away to the playground, where he could sit and read the instructions in peace. On the way, he noticed that the slide had disappeared.

Having read the leaflet twice, and tried out the metal detector on the roundabout – which it detected quite easily – Lewis began his search.

Since he had no idea where to begin, the playground seemed as good a place as any. He checked the sandpit and the flowerbeds and under the hedges; anywhere that things could have been buried.

He found nothing at all – not even the old tin cans he’d been expecting. Disgruntled, he set off across the car park, and was brought up short by the metal detector’s ear-splitting wail.

Lewis was bewildered. There was nothing here. The cars were all parked at the other end, by the shops. The empty tarmac looked exactly the same as it always had.

He scratched his head. “Drains,” he said uncertainly. “Or cables. Or something.”

He dismissed it until the same thing happened as he walked past the newsagent’s. The detector suddenly went haywire.

He raised and lowered it. It went quiet at ground level, and shrieked loudly as he lifted it, warning of something in mid-air that Lewis could neither see nor feel.

In short, it was detecting something that wasn’t there.

Lewis stopped waving it above his head and gave an embarrassed grin to the small audience that had gathered. Before they could ask any awkward questions, he set off home.

Half way up the empty drive the metal detector wailed at him again.

“Stupid thing,” growled Lewis, and he threw it in the space where the dustbins used to be. When he went to look for it next day, repenting, it had vanished.

*

As summer ripened into autumn, the disappearances slowed down. Lewis’s father went to Dextra to buy another lawn-mower, and this time it stayed put. Shops began to stock needles and scissors again. The jeweller’s, which had closed down in despair three months earlier, re-opened.

Mum bought new saucepans, and tinned food came back on the menu. Sidney ate nothing but baked beans for a week. He had been suffering from baked bean deprivation.

With the approach of Christmas, Lewis forgot about the disappearances. The presents in their shiny paper, the baubles and tinsel, the fairy lights all stayed where they were supposed to. Nothing vanished at all, although very soon everyone wished that Sidney’s new trumpet would.

Christmas passed, to Lewis’s regret. New Year’s Eve held no excitement for him, since it seemed to have been invented for adults. There were not even any snakes to look forward to, as they were not expected to put in an appearance until spring.

So he lay in his bed trying to sleep through the bursts of laughter and song that came from the New Year party next door. Sometimes he recognised Mum’s or Dad’s voice; they were taking it in turns to join the celebrations.

Lewis tossed and turned and checked his watch. Two minutes to twelve. He decided he might as well get up and look out of the window in case anyone nearby set off fireworks at midnight. Next door, the snatches of unsteady singing suddenly coalesced into a chanted count-down:

“Five! Four! Three! Two! One! HAPPY NEW YEAR!”

Outside, there was a long and deafening crash.

Lewis stared at the driveway. A few seconds ago it had been empty. Now it was full of a bumpy, glittery, metallic mountain. Bits of it were still rolling around as if they had fallen through an invisible trapdoor.

“Out of thin air,” he breathed.

The mountain was made of televisions and kettles. It was made of irons, hacksaws, light bulbs and tricycles. Every so often a bit of it would slide down to the bottom of the pile with a clang or a tinkle.

Then all the party-goers came crowding out of next door’s house to see, so Lewis went back to bed.

There were a good many arguments over the next week. As well as the shiny heap in the drive, there was another, larger mountain in the playground car-park, a pile just outside the newsagent’s, and six or seven more scattered around the town.

It took days to sort out what belonged to who. At the end of the week Lewis’s family were left with a lingering pile of junk in their front garden: things like old oilcans and broken buckets that nobody wanted. Lewis never got back his roller-blades – somebody else claimed them first – but he did manage to retrieve his family’s camcorder. He knew it was theirs as soon as he played the recording.

His trap had not worked after all. The camera failed to record the thief opening the drawer. But the thief must have fiddled with the camcorder, pressing buttons at random, so that there was ten minutes worth of jerky, disconnected footage.

Most of it was skewed shots of a junkpile made of washing machines and toasters that for some reason seemed to be inside a cave. Lewis had an impression of slimy rock-walls and a glimpse of stalactites hanging from the roof.

It was only in the very last few seconds that the thief had turned the camera round so that it was pointing at himself. The thief was too close to be properly in focus, but it was clear at once that he was not human.

He was scaly. He had long, serrated teeth, and cavernous nostrils, which steamed up the lens. A glistening red eye stared unblinkingly at Lewis. The camera moved, and filmed a claw as long as the tin tray that the scaly foot was resting on.

The camera moved again. And there were wings.

The screen went blank. Lewis switched the camcorder off and put it in a shoebox on top of his wardrobe, right at the back.

He studied the calendar that hung on the wardrobe door. It was last year’s.

Lewis took a pencil and crossed out “Year of the Magpie.” He began to write something in its place, then stopped.

How could it have been the Year of the Dragon? There were no such things. And the magpies had been plentiful, sure enough, although they had had no chance to steal anything.

If the calendar hadn’t got it wrong, the dragons must have. They’d got the wrong town, the wrong planet. Or maybe the wrong dimension…

Next time, Lewis would have to let the dragons know. At least he had twelve years to work out how to do it.

That was if the dragons waited for that long. What was the Year of the Snake famous for?

He recalled the stories. Scaly slitherings underneath the floorboards; disappearing pets, and sharp teeth in dark places…

Well, Lewis would be ready.

What he would need was bait….

Wordhoard

Outside the Great Hall, the wind howled angrily as it reeled through the dark.

Inside, the villagers huddled together around the central fire. They had glowing red faces and chilly backs. Shadows shook wildly in the corners, as if tossed around by the wind that wriggled under the door.

The villagers were tired. Their cows were milked, their horses stabled, their pigs were fed, and so were their children, sitting at their parents’ knees.

Now all faces turned expectantly towards old Harold. He cleared his throat. Children hushed their parents into silence. They were waiting for the story.

“Harumph,” said Harold. “Is everybody ready? Now then. Once upon a time, on a dark and windy night just like this–”

He paused, rubbing his chin.

“Once upon a dark night there were three goats. No, that’s not it. Three – brothers... No, just a minute. Let me try again.”

The crowd sighed and shuffled a little, very politely.

“Once upon a time in a tall castle lived a….”

The old man’s voice tailed away. “A something,” he said. “Sorry; it’s gone. You try, Alfred.”

The even older man sitting next to him cleared his throat.

“One fine day, whilst walking through the forest, a little girl met a–”

He stopped with his mouth open.

“Lost it,” he mumbled. “Anyone here remember?”

The crowd sighed again, like the mournful wind in the trees, and shook their heads.

“You have a go, Hilda,” Alfred urged. “You knew thousands of stories once.”

The oldest woman of all screwed up her eyes and mouth in intense concentration.

“Let me see. Let me see. Wait – I think I’ve got it.”

The audience held its breath.

“A little girl in a red coat,” announced Hilda. “Or was it a hat? Anyway. She was walking through the forest with her axe one day when all of a sudden she came across a great… big…”

“Yes?” breathed the audience.

“Frog,” said Hilda doubtfully. “Perhaps.”

A soft moan of disappointment wafted around the hall.

“Never mind,” old Harold said unhappily. “Another night, we’ll try again.”

The people slowly got up, one by one, and trailed out of the hall and back to their dark houses. They were moping and miserable.

It was months now since they’d had a proper story.

For the tales had simply vanished. Not all at once, but bit by bit, they’d gradually slipped away. Nobody knew where they had gone, or how to bring them back. And if not even Hilda could remember stories any more, what hope was there for anyone else?

Most miserable of all was Edgar; for he had the most need of the stories.

Edgar was twelve. He lived in the smallest, darkest house in the village, with a neighbour he had to call Uncle, because his parents had been eaten by wolves. Edgar was made to work harder than anyone in the village, because Uncle was lazy; and he received no reward for his labours, since Uncle pretended to be poor, though he was not.

So Edgar used to lie in bed at night and tell himself stories until the hardships of the day seemed distant and unreal.

But now he had nothing to tell. The stories had faded like dreams, leaving only a few half-remembered images behind.

That night, as Edgar shivered in his narrow, lumpy bed, he tried yet again to catch a thread of story and reel it in. Something about a man on a horse – but as soon as he tried to grasp at it, it slipped away again.

Edgar groaned. With no story to distract him, all he could think about was the cold. The icy wind squeezed through the cracked window and slid under his thin blanket like a frozen knife.

Edgar rolled and turned, and at last sat up and said aloud:

“Why does nobody do anything about it? I can’t sleep anyway. I’m going to look for those stories.”

Jumping out of bed, he dressed, shivering, in his ragged clothes. Then he tiptoed past the room where his bogus aunt and uncle lay snoring, and slipped out of the house.

The street was soaked in moonlight and patched with black moonshadows that lounged against each building. Turning to face the moon, Edgar followed it out of the village and across the fields.

He crunched across the stubble fields and plunged into the pasture. The long grass soaked his legs with dew. At the far side, he looked back at the trail he had left, grey and glimmering in the moonlight.

Next there was a deep, swirling river to cross. It was treacherous enough by day. But the moon shimmered on the water, speckling it with silver; so he waded up to his armpits and pushed against the heavy swell.

Breathless, he pulled himself up onto the far bank. By now, he badly wanted to lie down, but knew he must keep moving to stay warm.

So he dived into the wood, where the moon winked down beneath the branches. His feet made a great stir in the carpet of dead leaves. Small rustlings answered them like tiny echoes. Boughs creaked far above him.

At last he came out of the wood and found himself beneath a cliff. At that point, Edgar’s heart nearly failed him.

But the moon shone down and pointed out the footholds. So up he clambered to a rocky ledge where he stopped, panting, until he realised that the breathing he could hear was not his own.

The rock face was dark with more than shadow. He stood at the mouth of a cave, too deep for the moon to reach. Leaning in, and listened.

Something in there was snoring like a thousand Uncles. It rasped and growled and whistled; and it sounded very big.

But underneath the snores, Edgar heard a faint, sad, hopeless sound: a whimpering murmur. So he clenched his courage in his fists and walked into the cave.

He felt his way along the damp wall, testing each careful footstep. The cave went far, far back into the dark heart of the mountain.

Something glimmered red, deep in the blackness. At first he thought it was a trick of his eyes; but it grew stronger, turning from a glimmer to a glow.

Rounding a corner in the rock, Edgar blinked, bewildered.

It was the strangest thing he’d ever seen. Not a snake, though it was scaly: not a lizard, for it had wings like a bat; but it was certainly not a bat either. In any case, it was far too big to be any of these, and it glowed as red as a hot coal.

Simon considered all the dangerous animals that he knew. Bull or bear, wolf or wildcat: it was none of these. In any case, it was asleep.

Around its flanks crawled feeble little creatures, murmuring. They were like nothing that he knew of either, with their many wobbly legs and bulging eyes. Kneeling, Edgar bent his head to catch their whispers.

“… and with a wave of the magic pipe and a one two three! the golden chains fell from her feet…..”

“… then the donkey opened its wide mouth and began to sing…”

“… but hiding in his barrel, the cabin boy trembled to hear the captain’s cruel words…”

“and so she let down her long chestnut hair to the fox waiting eagerly below….”

Edgar grinned. Here were the stories he’d been searching for, in a rustling, quivering pile, ready for the taking.

Edgar pulled off his shirt, still wet from the river, and quickly knotted the sleeves together around the collar to make a sack. He scooped up handfuls of wriggling, whispering stories and tipped them in.

Then, sidling past the huge scaly creature – which still snored unperturbed – he made his way back along the rock wall out of the cave.

The journey home seemed much longer than the way there. To climb back down the cliff, Edgar had to grip his shirt between his teeth. The cloth snagged on a stone and a story tumbled out.

Immediately, clinging to an outcrop beyond his reach, it began to mutter about the giant troll disguised inside a cliff-face, ready to lure unwary travellers into his gaping mouth.

Edgar scrambled down in a great hurry to reach the shelter of the wood. More stories escaped from his torn shirt, rolling away to hide in the dead leaves.

From there, unseen, their soft voices told him of the trees that made cages of their branches to catch their dinner in: of bad-tempered goblins who lived in rotting trunks, and wolves visible only by the light of the full moon. Glancing at the milky moonlight, Edgar hurried on as fast as he could.

As he waded across a river, another story fell out of his shirt. He heard float downstream, sighing over the river god who fell in love with the land and flooded it for a year and a day.

On the far bank, when he halted to retie the knots, out slid yet more stories, fleeing from his fingers with soft mumblings about unicorns and lions.

Even so, there were still plenty left when he set off across the pasture. He listened to their whispers as he walked.

They told him how the moon was a lantern lit by a goddess; and the ghost of a dead star that had lost its way: and a white boat towed by butterflies: and a cheese kicked up into the sky by an angry cow.

They told him how the field he crossed had been won by a farmer in a game of riddles with a giant.  They even told him how the trail through the wet grass had been made by goblins on their way to midnight market.

By the time Edgar reached the village, his head was spinning. He set the tattered shirt down in the road, untied the sleeves and watched the stories hop and roll and creep away towards the silent houses.

Then he trudged back to Uncle’s house and threw himself, exhausted, on his bed.

One story must have lingered in his pocket. As he dozed, it whispered softly.

It told him of the ragged orphan boy who found a terrible dragon that lived inside the mountain, guarding its stolen treasure of hope and joy.  Armed with his new-found wealth, the boy left his cruel master (who begged him on his knees to stay) and set out into the world to seek adventure.

As the tale unfurled in Edgar’s head, he forgot his tiredness, cold and hunger.

Deep inside the mountain, the dragon smiled in its sleep.

The End

Table of Contents

Two and a Half Knights and a Dragon

The Earthwyrm

The Nestingbox

The Winter Dragon

The Drinker of Time

Rabbithead

Magpies

Wordhoard

Two and a Half Knights