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‘Well,’ she said, watching him closely. ‘Don’t ever do that again. Now – what’ll you have?’
He picked up the menu and started to read it and stopped suddenly.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked his wife.
He turned his head and shut his eyes for a moment.
‘Listen.’
She listened.
‘I don’t hear anything,’ she said.
‘Don’t you?’
‘No. What is it?’
‘Just the tide,’ he said, after a while, sitting there, his eyes still shut. ‘Just the tide, coming in.’
The Dragon
THE night blew in the short grass on the moor; there was no other motion. It had been years since a single bird had flown by in the great blind shell of sky. Long ago a few small stones had simulated life when they crumbled and fell into dust. Now only the night moved in the souls of the two men bent by their lonely fire in the wilderness; darkness pumped quietly in their veins and ticked silently in their temples and their wrists.
Firelight fled up and down their wild faces and welled in their eyes in orange tatters. They listened to each other’s faint, cool breathing and the lizard blink of their eyelids. At last, one man poked the fire with his sword.
‘Don’t, idiot; you’ll give us away!’
‘No matter,’ said the second man. ‘The dragon can smell us miles off, anyway. God’s breath, it’s cold. I wish I was back at the castle.’
‘It’s death, not sleep, we’re after’
‘Why? Why? The dragon never sets foot in the town!’
‘Quiet, fool! He eats men travelling alone from our town to the next!’
‘Let them be eaten and let us get home!’
‘Wait now; listen!’
The two men froze.
They waited a long time, but there was only the shake of their horses’ nervous skin like black velvet tambourines jingling the silver stirrup buckles, softly, softly.
‘Ah.’ The second man sighed. ‘What a land of nightmares. Everything happens here. Someone blows out the sun; it’s night. And then, and then, oh, God, listen! This dragon, they say his eyes are fire. His breath a white gas; you can see him burn across the dark lands. He runs with sulphur and thunder and kindles the grass. Sheep panic and die insane. Women deliver forth monsters. The dragon’s fury is such that tower walls shake back to dust. His victims, at sunrise, are strewn hither and thither on the hills. How many knights, I ask, have gone for this monster and failed, even as we shall fail?’
‘Enough of that!’
‘More than enough! Out here in this desolation I cannot tell what year this is!’
‘Nine hundred years since the Nativity.’
‘No, no,’ whispered the second man, eyes shut. ‘On this moor is no Time, is only Forever. I feel if I ran back on the road the town would be gone, the people yet unborn, things changed, the castles unquarried from the rocks, the timbers still uncut from the forests; don’t ask how I know, the moor knows, and tells me. And here we sit alone in the land of the fire dragon, God save us!’
‘Be you afraid, then gird on your armour!’
‘What use? The dragon runs from nowhere; we cannot guess its home. It vanishes in fog, we know not where it goes. Aye, on with our armour, we’ll die well-dressed.’
Half into his silver corselet, the second man stopped again and turned his head.
