He has heard of this kind of thing happening. Well, not this exactly. He has heard of whales swallowing men who yet lived. One at least. This he has heard in church. The young priest whom everybody loved (whom some loved less than others and some more, in ways that made them weep at night for the wanting of it) said: This happened. I promise you it happened. And it was written down in Latin.
Is Latin God’s mother tongue? The man is not sure. At any rate he is sure that Jonah who returned alive from the whale did not speak Latin, but that God knows all tongues. And God made the whale after all. Did God make the dragon too? He hopes so, and in hoping prays.
It is hot in here, as one might expect. It is a dry heat. He thinks he would have been just as hot in the desert, if he had gone to fight for the king as he had signed up to do. Instead he allowed himself a day’s trip from his village—just one!—to buy new boots, and ran into this thing, and before he could run, was snapped up and eaten. Tumbled and fell into the chamber where he now lives: yes, hot, the walls of the stomach as scaled inside as out.
A curious place. As neat as he can make it. His clothes folded in a corner; a marching column of charcoal tally marks antlike on the wall. Ninety-one days. With his knife he trims his hair and nails. He tosses his leavings into the white-hot chasm at the back of his new house. Sometimes the dragon rises, flaps, runs, and then he holds on for dear life to the scales into which he has carved handles, so he will not fall into the chasm.
He knows when it is hunting; sometimes he can even smell the night air blowing in through its parted jaws, so far above. Where are they? He cannot tell by nose. All is numbed by sulphur. The young priest would say: The dragon is the serpent—is the Devil. An infernal thing. Wily and cunning, and that is why saints kill them. A saint! The man would give all he has for a saint to come and set him free. He doesn’t have much, it’s true. He would accept less. Half a saint. One knight. A man who said something kind once to an ugly child.
There is nothing to do. There is too much to do. The dragon’s forays are indiscriminate, and whole sections of fencing, mud huts, sheep, chickens, earth, and stones are consumed. As if the great toothed maw is a shovel. He remembers only one glimpse of the maw: closing on him. The teeth strange, so white they seemed almost blue.
The man snatches at whatever’s small enough to grab with one hand as it flies past. He makes little fires. He suspects the dragon won’t mind. If it did it would have coughed him up by now. It’s ventilated well in here anyway, despite the heat. Many times the cool air blowing in has smelled pleasant but also exotic. A smell of broken twigs, rising sap, flowers and fruits not from home. He imagines they are in the places spoken of in myth. He does not know all the names but they are music to him when he speaks them aloud in the deep green echoing place. Has the dragon gone to hunt in Ionia? Sparta? Mycenae? Ithaca? Does the dragon (the man wonders) personally know Scylla or Charybdis?
Do all monsters know all other monsters? With men it is often the case. He thinks of the lords his father knew. He thinks of their little hobbies and games.
He roasts mutton on the smashed remains of fences and he declares each bite seasoned with splendid herbs from far-off meadows. He keeps the long bones and tendons with some dim idea of making a ladder one day. He recites half-remembered poetry and gives himself a new name, easier to rhyme, so he can write ballads of his tragedy. He thinks this is much better than being inside a whale.
He sleeps in the hot stuffy air and he thinks of his friends who have died from wet shoes or wet hair or wet chests. It’s healthier in here. Better than a desert even, because you would be constantly rubbing your feet raw on the sand inside your boots.
He thinks if the dragon invaded a city like Troy he could leap out unexpectedly and be the great hero of the day. He does not think he would stay and fight the dragon though. Too much to fight. And no need. Is he not a lord now? His room is as big as a castle for all it jostles about and burns his feet sometimes and knocks his head against the scales and cuts his fingers. It is warm and dry. It is entirely his.
He is not sure that he misses being the youngest of six sons of such a little lord. He wonders how his brothers are doing: where they are fighting and who. They have fought all their lives. Him, each other, the villagers, relatives, weather, soil, fate. How they hated to pick up a pen or a pitchfork! Anything but a weapon they hated to touch.
The man thinks about this and thinks about Troy again. If he climbs up to the throat, he can leap out just before the dragon flames and (he has rehearsed this) tumble to the ground, roll, and stand upright. Like magic. He does not think he has taken all his hopes and dreams with him into the dragon but if not he is not sure where they live.
He makes his ladder as canny as he can make it, he is no carpenter’s son, but he is proud of it in a quiet way; he thinks he could safely climb it to at least the roof of the church. It’s not long enough. He waits for more sheep. Now supposing you were in a whale, he says to himself. You’d never do this with fish bones. And then imagine the constant damp and the stench.
He has stopped smelling the sulphur. He no longer thinks the dragon is the Devil. He no longer thinks the dragon is infernal. He does not even think it is magic, particularly. It is less magic than the curses the village witches put on your milk, because those sometimes work. How could it be magic when it eats up stones and trees along with its meat? He thinks it is an animal and it is not to blame for what has happened to him.
He begins to listen for its heartbeat, a slow sonorous drum, and when he finds where it is loudest he begins to sleep there, on his threadbare woollen blankets. To the heart alone he recites his poetry. He confesses to the dragon that he has given himself a new name. He never liked the old one. After five sons the old lord didn’t care anymore.
He builds the ladder higher and draws on it with charcoal from the fire. He will make it his own if he can. He catches a strange thing one day as it goes past: not a goat, not a sheep, not a deer, something that is all of those things, black and tan and startled-looking with its broken neck. Sand is between its toes. He eats it and saves the horns, because they are beautiful.
He watches the green walls of his home flare orange-yellow-blue-white when the dragon flames. He counts the seconds between colours and writes them down and puts them in a poem which he thinks could be set to music one day, though not by him. He carves divots into two scales to hold the feet of his bone ladder. He holds the scale shavings in his hand and watches them glitter like the wings of dragonflies or the backs of beetles, now green, now violet, now red. He puts them in his bag.
He sings one last song. He smells the wet air and ropes himself about with supplies and he climbs as quick as any squirrel—up, up, up. The dragon does not lie down, its head is always up, a league above him; he follows the smell of newness, the smell that cuts through the sulphur and the fug. The bones creak, his hands slip, he climbs, he sings his songs. It has been one hundred and eighty-four days. Maybe later, they will declare this a mystic number; maybe they will say it is the number of a saint.
He scuttles across the thick dry tongue, his arms out, then dives beneath it for protection when the flame comes, and he counts. He sees lights in the distance, lanterns or windows glowing on a dark hillside, and when the teeth part he jumps, wearing his oryx horn crown, and he tucks just as he practised, and he screams, because of course it was not a village-studded slope but a night sky filled with stars, and he is falling.
He is free but he is falling and when he runs out of air he breathes in and screams again. He is facing the wrong way. The water is at his back. Something else too: a clawed paw as big as a town, catching him with a thud.
He stares up, clutching the hot skin, at the face of the dragon: a lizard’s visage dark against the stars, mildly surprised in the moonlight, each eye like a stained glass window. The wings might cover a country. The man is not sure of anything anymore. He does not know how big the beast is. He does not know how big he is.
He is sure that it chuckles, like any human, and it says You’re welcome, and lifts its forelimb to place the man gently upon its head as they fly. The man holds onto the horns there easily, though he weeps. The world is too large and the stars reflecting from the ocean are impossibly bright, they are too sharp and beautiful to bear, and no one has died at his hand. He is flying. He is free. He is not alone. The dragon says, Come, my friend. Let’s go find something to eat.
