Chapter 15. Family Visit

[ BEGINNING OF THE BOOK OF BOOKWORM CAN BE FOUND HERE: http://stihi.ru/avtor/yanastihiru&book=4#4 ]

Three days later  the travelers were climbing up a deer path that wound its way along the forested slope leading to the dragon lair. Here and there they glimpsed the grisly spoor of old battles: the rusted blade of a halberd, still embedded in the trunk of a great oak tree, a horse skull with a bronze bit between the grinning teeth, a dented helmet, a charred saddle. “Must have done a fair amount of fighting a while back,” Bookworm observed.  “But nothing looks fresh. That’s a good sign. I hope it is past its prime fighting age. Still, I do not think you should go any further. Let’s set up camp here, by the stream. I will get ready to go meet the dragon.”

Magda set up camp. Bookworm selected the largest sacks of gold coins, weighed them in his paws and nodded with satisfaction. “This should be a nice introduction. Now, Magda, if there are any large flame jets or if you see the strange dragon in the sky, you hide out over there,” he pointed to a pit under the roots of a large fallen tree, “and wait ‘til nightfall. Then start going back the way we came. Travel only by night. Head to our old camp site. If I do not meet you there, do not wait. Strike out east on your own. Take all the remaining gold with you. As soon as you get to a big city outside of this cursed duke's domain, hire someone to help you get back to Seven Hills.” Magda turned pale. She was tempted to beg Bookworm to not go to the dragon lair, to simply forget the whole thing about the Salt Spring. But, having gotten this far, it was the wrong time to lose heart. She bit her tongue and ordered herself to be silent. Picking up the coin sacks, Bookworm took off.

A few minutes later, there was a great rumble, then another. Magda did not so much hear them with her ears, as feel them through her whole body; they were transmitted to her as an earthquake, through the ground. She jumped up scanning the sky, but it was empty, save for white wisps of clouds.  After a few more rumbles, Magda realized that this may be the sound of dragon voices conversing with each other in their own language. She paced back and forth past the horses, who stood huddled next to each other, rolling their eyes and flattening their ears, as if scared of a thunderstorm. Magda did not know the dragon language, but what she was hearing sounded more like a conversation than a fight. There were long, loud remarks interspersed with shorter, more hesitant ones. There was no noise of battle, no winged shapes or jets of fire on the horizon. But now and then the blue of the sky was marred by small puffs of the black acrid smoke that Magda recognized as signs of dragon anger. Each time she saw one of these black clouds, Magda's stomach lurched with fear.

Then all had gone quiet. Soon, Bookworm soared into view. He landed in the clearing with a thud and exhaled a great cloud of sparks and ashes with a loud "Phooo!"

The girl rushed to the dragon: "Bookworm! Are you hurt?" Bookworm shook his head, then said hoarsely: "Do you remember any of the poems by Anacreon? The ones in praise of wine?" Magda nodded. "Write out a couple for me, will you? I need a good stiff drink."

Magda glanced at her companion doubtfully. Ever since the incident at the Bird Spring, she was careful not to get Bookworm any books about wine. But his goggle-eyed expression was so odd that she decided not to argue. Getting a few pieces of parchment, the quill and the inkbottle, she set to work. Magda was fluent in reading ancient Greek, but not as proficient in writing it. After some struggle, she was able to reproduce from memory three of Anacreon's light-hearted poems, although she was sure that she had made a number of errors. Bookworm did not care. He knocked back the poems, oblivious to their sparkling flavor or to the imperfections of Magda's transcriptions. Then he sighed and sat down heavily on his haunches.

Seeing him regain his composure, the girl finally ventured to ask: "So, how did it go with that dragon? Did he accept the gold? Is the passage there, in the cave? Will he let us go in?"
"She" Bookworm replied wearily.
"She?"
"The dragon is a she. In fact, she is my own mother."
"Your mother?!" Magda repeated in amazement. "Bookworm, that's wond….Umm, so how did it go?"
"She liked the gold. The passage is there. She will let us use it."

Magda could tell that there was a lot more to tell. She waited patiently. Eventually, the dragon got the whole story off his chest.

His visit had started well. He approached the lair with his offering and, stopping at a respectful distance, called out the resident dragon to parley. Of course, Bookworm introduced himself by his dragon name, Scorchfire. A she-dragon poked her head out of the grotto, then slowly heaved out her enormous bulk. "Scorchfire? What are you doing here?" her voice sounded oddly familiar. Bookworm had to dig down to the deepest layer of his memory.
"Mother?" he asked, astonished.
"That's right. Let me see, let me see… That snout sure has grown a lot since I saw it poking out of that eggshell. Hmm, what do you have in that bag there? Ahh, I smell gold, local vintage."
"It's for you."
"Good thinking," she nodded approvingly and scooped up the present. "Good thinking. I see that you may have inherited some of my dragon sense, unlike that sister of yours." At this point, Rendtalon launched into a long tirade about her daughter, Stormwing. At first, Bookworm was rather confused by the story told in rambling segments punctuated by exclamations of disgust and puffs of black smoke. But gradually he caught on.

Apparently, Rendtalon had recently found out that Stormwing chose an unusual and, in Rendtalon's view, shockingly unbecoming source of nourishment. Namely, music. How that had happened was a total mystery to Rendtalon.

Early on, Stormwing went about getting herself supplied with music in a dragon-like fashion. She captured traveling minstrels and troubadours and made them stay with her in her cave for a year or two playing their instruments and singing, until she tired of their repertoire. Then she would let the old ones go and catch herself some new ones. With time, she accumulated a tremendous store of knowledge about music and became a discerning and demanding listener. She was now something of a celebrity in musical circles. It was considered a great honor to be abducted by her and spend a year or two under her tutelage. Any musician who could claim to have had this training was assured a good position at a royal court or in some other rich and status-conscious household. 

"What does she think she is, a dragon or a robin?!" bellowed Rendtalon, walloping her tail against the heap of gold and jewels that served as her lair padding. "And what is she going to provide for her offspring when she gets ready to lay an egg? Build a nest out of harps and cymbals?! Disgraceful! Absolutely disgraceful! And to think that I lugged all that gold, and that excellent ruby crown, and three dozen pearl necklaces to build a starter hoard for the ungrateful brat!"

The son listened to his mother’s ranting with a bland expression. In his mind, however, he was begging that fate would not let her find out that he now went by the name of Bookworm, or hear the story of his recent nocturnal concert near Bird Spring.

Eventually, having vented her anger at her eccentric daughter, Rendtalon turned her attention back to her son, who was sitting in front of her, surreptitiously mopping beads of soot that kept breaking out on his scaly forehead. "So," she asked, eyeing him appraisingly, "are you a gold hoarder?"
"I get gold whenever I need to," Bookworm replied evasively. Rendtalon glanced at the hefty leather bags, which were coming apart at the seams with the weight of the gold. She nodded approvingly.  "Good. Take my advice: don't waste your time on anything else. Gold, with some pearls and gems mixed in, is the most durable and healthy food for a dragon. Just make sure to chase livestock and have a few skirmishes with knights every month to provide you with a bit of exercise. You do kill cattle, don't you?"
"Umm, no, not really. I do not like meat," mumbled Bookworm.
"And what about killing knights?"
"Umm, I have had a few skirmishes now and then," Bookworm answered, hoping that she would not press for details.

He had his share of encounters with the knight errant types who came seeking his head for the purposes of turning it into a decoration for their feast halls. He managed all of them quite successfully. However, he had a hunch that his mother would not approve his untraditional methods of fighting. He did not go for the classic “roar, breathe flames, charge” frontal attack. No, he preferred to practice more subtle strategies and tactics, many of them adaptations of what he had read in the classical texts on human warfare. His favorite trick was to fly up quietly from behind, lasso his opponent with a stout rope and throw him off the horse, leaving the heavily armored knight to lie in ignominious helplessness. And Bookworm did not aim to kill his opponent, although there had been accidental casualties. But if all went well, the dragon would set the vanquished knight back on his horse and let him go as soon as the poor chap, fed up with lying like a beetle turned on its back, was willing to sue for peace.

Luckily, his mother did not ask him for any blow by blow accounts. Rendtalon simply assumed that if the dragon were alive, the knight who encountered him must be dead. However, she was not entirely satisfied with his answers.  "Now-and-then is not the right way to exercise," the she-dragon  remarked severely. "You have to make sure to include cattle-chasing and knight-killing in your regular regimen.  I do not care for meat either, but when I was your age, I forced myself to have a few livestock runs each month when knights were out of season. It’s OK for an old one like me to retire from all this chase and fight stuff. But a young dragon needs to exercise. Besides, you have to keep the populace properly terrified. You don't want them to take you for granted. And speaking of being a young dragon, what are you doing here, so far from home? You are not supposed to leave your territory until your first flight to the Inferno Cauldron."

Now Bookworm was stumped. Up to this point, he had been able to get by with half-truths. However, he was quite sure that if he told his mother something even remotely resembling the truth about the purpose of his journey, she would not be any happier about his doings than she was about Stormwing's. Not only would she not permit him to use her territory to search for the Salt Spring, she might fly into a paroxysm of anger and incinerate himself, Magda and all the forest for twenty miles around her lair. The time had come to lie, and to lie creatively.  He mopped his forehead again. "I… I also abduct maidens. And… and the maidens in Seven Hills are boring. All they do is darn socks and talk about the price of fish.  I've heard there is some really good maiden hunting down here, so I came to fetch a few for myself, just for variety. I've got one already."

Rendtalon harrumphed. Sure, she said, abducting maidens was a perfectly traditional thing for a dragon to do. But all the same, she considered it to be an unwise and dangerous way to make one's living. She thought it was especially foolhardy to be picky about one's maidens and go out of one's way to get what she called “the flashy type" – the beautiful, virtuous and gifted ones who may be especially beloved by their families and communities. "It is one thing to fight with the kind of fool who goes around, waving a banner and looking for glory. Even now, when they've got themselves encased in those metal buckets they call armor, the odds are in favor of the dragon. But you steal a maiden, and you are asking for trouble. There are just too many complications.  There are wily maidens, determined parents, loyal brothers, faithful servants, love-crazed sweethearts. Sooner or later you face a posse of archers with a bunch of arrows dipped into a bucket of tears that the girl's mother and all her sisters sobbed up. Let me tell you about your grandfather, Deathfang, and your uncle, Flashflame. Maidens, maidens, maidens. That's all they could think of. And what's the result? Both cut down in their prime, did not even make it to their five hundredth year!" She carried on and on. Bookworm learned a lot about his family on both his mother's and his father’s side, most of it uncomplimentary.

After a long while, Rendtalon ran out of fuel for gossip. "So," she asked after a silence, "what brings you to this lair? Surely you were not looking for maidens right here: you knew that whoever lived in this lair was a gold hoarder." Her tirade had given Bookworm time to think of an answer to this one. "I am looking for an entrance to a tunnel that leads to a magic spring. I believe that the entrance is in your grotto or somewhere close to it. I need to get to that spring. I have a touch of scale rot and I've heard that water from that spring can cure it."
"Scale rot? At your age?" roared Rendtalon. "I am six hundred ten years old, and I do not have a single scale loose. And why? Because I live as a dragon is supposed to live: healthy diet, exercise, and no fancy ideas. Improper diet and lack of exercise — that's what leads to scale rot." She launched into another lecture about the foolishness of the younger generation. Finally, she switched from indignation to maternal advice. "You need minerals in your diet, especially rubies and jade. Concentrate on gold-hoarding and you will reliably get all the minerals; treasures always have a bit of gems mixed in with the metal. And don’t forget those knights."
"Thank you. I will make sure to do so," lied Bookworm. "Now, may I have your permission to look around for the entrance to the tunnel?"

It turned out that Rendtalon knew exactly where the entrance to the tunnel was — at the back of her grotto. She had even explored the tunnel herself a couple of times when she first moved in. Indeed, she had found a spring at the end of it. She had toyed with the idea of using the tunnel as a secret back door to her lair. Eventually she had abandoned this plan. For one thing, the tunnel was long; it took a few days to traverse its full length. Even more off-putting was the fact that the length of the journey varied from occasion to occasion and that the tunnel had the strange property of leading to the same spring, but somehow in different places. Eventually, she simply plugged the entrance to the bothersome tunnel with some boulders and ignored it from then on.

Rendtalon considered Bookworm's claim that the spring could cure scale rot to be one of the "lizard-brained, newfangled ideas that young dragons get nowadays." But she agreed to allow him and his captured maiden to use the tunnel. She hoped it would teach him a valuable lesson and convince him that only long-term dedication to proper dragon diet and way of life can really keep one's scales in tip-top condition.

By the time Bookworm finished recounting to Magda his visit with his mother, the first stars peeked out over the trees. Magda fetched the pot in which she had been soaking dried peas, and Bookworm provided the fire to cook her evening porridge. She fed the horses and led them to the brook to drink. She did all this in silence. Bookworm's story was simply too astonishing for her to be able to take in all at once. For one thing, she never thought of Bookworm as having an age; she knew he had been in Seven Hills for generations and generations. To have him referred to as "young" was disorienting. Even more jarring was the thought that among his own kind he might be considered eccentric and even disreputable because he did not imprison maidens and did not terrify the local populace as a form of exercise. She had to admit to herself that Ludwig the Archer, while wrong in Bookworm’s specific case, had been justified in his suspicion towards dragons in general.

Later, she was sitting next to the dragon and eating her porridge, while he consumed a few pages from a small book, glancing furtively in the direction of the dragon lair. Magda ventured to ask a question that has been vexing her for the past hour. "Bookworm, you told me that dragons do not go visiting their relatives, right?"
"Right. And I can now see why," grumbled Bookworm.
"Then how did your mother know what your sister was up to, or what happened to your other relatives, like Deathtooth?"
"The name is Deathfang. I would guess that my sister is now of age and goes to the Inferno Cauldron. My mother must have seen her there, and Stormwing must have been stupid enough to let this stuff about musicians slip out. Well, I am certainly forewarned now and will keep my mouth shut.”
“What is the Inferno Cauldron?”
 “It is our mating island."
"Mating island?"
"Yes. All the dragons who are of age — older than two-hundred ten years, go there every seventh spring for the fire dance. The ones who don’t yet have a mate, fight. Kind of like the jousting tournaments some humans have at their courts, only not just for the boys. Males fight with males, females with females. Then the top male fighter gets to be the mate of the top female fighter, the second male fighter goes to the second female fighter and so on. Then we have the fire dance and afterwards all the dragons go back to their lairs. The fighting takes a long while. While the young ones fight, the old ones who already have their mates, have time to talk: gossip, brag, exchange news. Also, if an adult dragon dies, his or her mate knows when it happens, no matter how far apart their lairs are. So, after my grandfather and uncle died Rendtalon must have heard about it from their mates at the next fire dance.”

Magda was amazed. “How do you know all this about being a dragon? Did your mother tell you just now?”
“No, I just know. When the mother dragon transfers some of her fire to the hatchling, she also transfers some of her knowledge about dragon ways. I suppose in the case of me and my sister, Rendtalon just did not breathe out properly, ” he concluded glumly.

Magda mulled all this over for a long time. Although Bookworm mentioned his mother when they were getting ready for the journey and referred to the existence of other dragons, she never really imagined how they might interact with each other. “Bookworm!” she whispered anxiously. The dragon, who was already drifting off to sleep, snapped his eyelids open.
“What? What is it?”
“Will you have to go to that Cauldron place? Will you have to fight? Will you be all right?”
“Not for another ten years. Then yes, I will have to go. I think the strength of a dragon has a lot to do with the strength of the source of the power he feeds on and with how well his food suits him. My mother is right, gold-hoarders are often stronger than others. I don’t think there has been another book-eating dragon before, so I do not know how well books will stack up against all the other stuff dragons live on. But they have served me well so far, they really agree with me. Maybe drinking from that Salt Spring will give me a power to create books.” He sounded wistful. “I imagine it is a potent power, to write great poetry, maybe the most potent there is.”

There were a few more minutes of silence. Then Magda whispered again: “Bookworm, do you really have scale rot? Is it dangerous?”
“Nah,” the dragon answered.  “Never had any problem with it; I get enough minerals from the pigments that color the pictures in the books.”

The next morning Magda and Bookworm got ready for the passage through the tunnel. They decided that it was safe to leave the horses in a grassy glen near the brook where they had their camp. Judging from her words, Rendtalon was not keen on gobbling up domestic animals for food and had let her exercise regimen lapse. At the same time, the vicinity of a dragon lair would be free of other large predators.

Based on Rendtalon’s description of the tunnel, the travelers decided to prepare for a long journey. They filled the water skins and cooked bannocks for Magda and packed two large book bags for Bookworm. They wrapped these supplies in the trusty tarp and strapped the bundles to Bookworm’s back. Bookworm advised Magda to leave her golden dragon-maiden bracelet behind, with the horses. Rendtalon had a keen nose for gold and it was best not to tempt her. “And one more thing,” he added, sounding embarrassed. “Act like you are scared of me – you know, like you are a captured maiden.” Magda nodded, and they set off for the lair.

Approaching the lair they heard the even, deep rattle of a dragon snoring. Bookworm said that it was best not to wake up a snoozing dragon. They waited. After about an hour, the snoring thinned out and stopped. The jowly face of the old dragon poked out of the grotto and surveyed the visitors. The pupils of the great copper-colored eyes narrowed and the she-dragon rumbled some remark. Magda could not understand it, but suspected that it was yet another criticism. Indeed, it was. What Rendtalon said was: “Scorchfire, you don’t have an ounce of sense under your head crest. First, you go all this way just for the maidens. And then, what do you get for all your troubles? She looks exactly like the kind of girls they have in that city I picked out for you!” The old dragon was right. Magda’s sturdy figure, straw-colored hair and brown-eyed, freckled face were quite typical of Seven Hills’ folk. Bookworm made some reply in a peaceable tone. Rendtalon snorted derisively, put her head down again and watched the young dragon and the girl sidle past her into the grotto. 

As they entered the dim, hot grotto, Magda did not have any trouble making herself appear scared. She was terrified of Rendtalon. The old she-dragon resting upon a glittering pile of treasures was enormous: she was much longer than Bookworm and exceeded him even more in girth.  Like Bookworm, she was black (although she seemed blood-colored in the red-tinged dimness) and had a golden crest along her back all the way from the top of her head to the tip of her tail. She must have been in many pitched battles – quite a few of the triangular plates that made up the crest were notched or chipped, a couple had been broken off altogether. There were several great scars on her scaly sides and two of the toes on her hind paw were missing. Now Magda comprehended how Rendtalon could refer to Bookworm as “young.” Compared to her, he looked fresh and untried, almost dainty.

Even more terrifying than the old dragon’s bulk or her battle-scarred appearance was the baleful expression of the slit-pupil eyes that tracked the visitors. 

Magda and Bookworm tiptoed past the end of the heavy, spiked tail to the back of the grotto. There, trying to make as little disturbance as possible, Bookworm rolled away the three huge boulders that blocked the entrance to the tunnel.  He entered the dark hole and Magda followed close behind him.

THE BOOK OF BOOKWORM WILL BE CONTINUED IN THE NEXT CHAPTER