The Dragon's Daughter

In the beginning the silhouette was little more than a dot in the darkening blue. But as its outline began to appear, the woman intently watching it could begin to see the graceful curve of long wings lifted and still, the creature soaring straight and true like an eagle riding atop the high winds. As it started its descent, it began to undulate like a snake swimming atop water and it seemed to the watcher that the motion of its serpentine body was as important to its flight as its wings.

But while it was still a great distance away, the skies began to make the mystic passage from twilight blue to midnight black. With her hand raised over her eyes, the woman continued watching long after the lovely creature disappeared into the night, her eyes still fixed on the horizon. The full moon rising like a lonely beacon, she felt that the flight of the last frost dragon the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

Not even the cacophony of the approaching mob could break the watcher’s concentration, tears slipping from her eyes as she replayed in her thoughts the dragon’s powerful wing strokes. “Rasulka comes,” she whispered to herself. But she did not turn from the dark skies till the approaching men had drawn close enough that she could hear the guttering of their torches. “Well,” she sighed at last, “it will all be over soon.”

Fourteen years had passed since she first stumbled upon the dragon’s glade and saw its mighty head slip below the branches of the ancient yew. The old wood of a serpent’s fig encircled the trunk of the dragon’s roost, its bright foliage draping the tree’s leafless branches with the deceptive appearance of vitality. But save for the waxy green of the vine’s leaves, nothing else living grew, creeped or hopped atop the yew’s heavy branches. No bird sang from its limbs, no caterpillar chewed the parasitic vegetation, no squirrel nested in the tree’s lofty heights. Foreboding clung as tightly to the tree as the thriving fig.

But the yew was already long dead before the fig’s first shoot breached the earth at the tree’s broad base. Its slayer slept, indistinguishable from the serpentine vine wrapped tightly around the tree, its heavy plated hide as brown and ragged as the yew’s bark.

Save for the sound of the nearby river current tumbling over submerged stones, the surrounding woodland was eerily silent. Bees, heavily laden with pollen, visited the little blue speedwells in a small, sunlit glade enclosed by scraggly elder bushes and thickly tangled wait-a-bits on one side and a marshy riverbank on the other. Although lush with green grasses, the broad antlered Fallow and Red deer never visited it and the brown hare had not nibbled at the tender speedwells in a hundred years. Even the field mice and hedgehogs ranged far afield of the dead yew. No man had set foot in the deep wood where the old yew stood in several hundred years.

The day she first held the gaze of the dragon a pair of highway men had stumbled into the sheltered glade after bulling and cursing their way through the protective undergrowth, their leggings and tunics ripped by thorns and covered in burs. Failing to notice the deathly stillness in the surrounding wood, they built a fire directly beneath the tree to roast the meat they had carried with them. But the air in the tree’s shade seemed unnaturally cool, the man turning a makeshift skewer frequently looking up at the sky to see if the sun had taken cover behind a cloud.

“It’s unnatural, this cold.”

“I told you, these woods is accursed,” groused the other.

“Rubbish.”

“My grandsire tole tales of frost drakes freezin’ men as hard as winter ice.” He spat. “Bah … this meat’s hardly e’en warm.” He continued with a jab of his forefinger, “Mark you, Heifers were staked as sacrifice jus’ like this un, every Lenten moon, for a thousan’ yeers.”

“And men like us ate them, you ignorant sot. I’m doubtin’ yer grandsire ever spied a dragon.”

“No, thank thee gods. You only spy ‘em if they want to be spied. Pity the hapless fellar that spies a dragon.”

“More rubbish.”

Curled above them around the yew’s towering thick upper branches, Rasulka slept fitfully. The men anxiously watching the meat on the spit could not begin to imagine the terror stirring in the tree above them. An experienced huntsman would have noted the absence of animal activity. If he had entered the glade at all, he would have done so with an arrow nocked in his bow.

The smoke of their fire slowly eddying into the yew above them, Rasulka opened her eyes with a start of fear. “Fire!” she whispered with a spasm of terror. But looking below and seeing only a pair of raggedy men squatting near the flames, she sniffed with disgust. “How foul they smell. Are such things tasty, we wonder?” But the doe she had swallowed the week before still left a noticeable bulge in her mid-section. “Come back when we are hungry,” she thought and closed her eyes with a snort, the freezing exhale of her breath putting the fire out.

Both men looked up into the tree with surprise. “Did ya feel that?” said the first, his teeth chattering with terror and cold.

“Aye. I’m tellin’ thee, this place is accursed.”

“I’m not leaving meat I killed for.”

The other shrugged, “Then take it somewhere else.” A stick snapping, he frowned. “Someone’s comin’,” he whispered.

The first pulled a knife from his belt. “Who goes there,” he demanded, the bushes at the glade’s edge beginning to tremble and shake. But when a small, naked child stumbled out with her arms outstretched for balance, he lowered the blade and stood upright with a scowl. “Romany brat.” He spat.

Rasulka opened an eye and stared at the naked thing walking clumsily across the meadow. The little girl paused to stare at the men, her body lightly swaying before losing her balance and landing on her bottom with a thump. Gazing at the man with the knife, her black eyes burned with curiosity. Self-consciously, he tried to pass it to his partner. “You kill it,” he hissed.

“Ye can kill it,” he whispered back, each of them realizing simultaneously that the blood of the girl’s father was still on its blade. “He was milkin’ it for her.”

“Killin’ ‘im twas a kindness. Would not survive the winter, that one, nor the brat.”

The dragon began to slip silently down the tree without fully realizing what she was doing. Although the child seemed hideous to her eyes, she could not make herself turn her gaze away. Curiosity drove her unconsciously toward a confrontation she had avoided for centuries. But as her head slipped beneath the oak’s lowest branches, the child turned and stared at her, Rasulka freezing in a panic.

The child, who a moment before was a flurry of restless motion, paused and gaped with open mouthed awe, it’s unblinking gaze holding the dragon’s returning stare. As Rasulka slowly retreated into the cover of the vine’s foliage, the little one’s eyes followed her movement before giggling and clapping her little hands. Unless a frost dragon wants you to see her, the only sign of her presence is the unnatural cold of the air where she rests. But the girl stared as innocently at her as if the dragon was a gentle doe grazing in the glade.

“Little man’s whelp,” Rasulka thought in terror, “how canst thou see us?”

Following the child’s gaze, the men’s eyes pierced the ancient yew half expecting to see Romany bowmen hidden in the branches, but they could not see the dragon or recognize that the heavy limb hanging conspicuously from the tree had not been there only moments before. Hardening his resolve, the first walked toward the girl brandishing the knife. But as he bent to the deed, she blurted “Da Da,” provoking his partner to laugh out loud.

The man’s shock at the little girl’s unexpected response caused him to pull the knife back as Rasulka slid bodily from tree and knocked him so hard with a driving blow from her snout that he tumbled head over heels into the river. Unlike his partner, the other had a few moments to apprehend what was happening before the dragon turned to do the same to him. Even though his body quivered with terror, he managed to sprint past her and followed his partner into the water, the current carrying both swiftly downstream.

When Rasulka turned to the little girl in the glade, the remembered roar and fury of the flames that had orphaned the dragon returned her to memories. With a helpless shiver she heard her mother’s whispered warning – “Lie still little one, men are coming.” She saw again the memorial tears in her mother’s golden eyes as she climbed high into the tree without her and launched gracefully into the smokey sky as if even centuries were too short to ever forget or forgive what followed.

When the highway men were pulled from the river, the first was dead, his body as broken and battered as if crushed by a great falling rock. Dragging the one who survived to the pub, the rescuers plied from him his tale with meat and beer. Once his shaking had subsided and he had the benefits of a pint, he told them about the sudden attack of the dragon, but left out the Romany child, the murder of her father and the butchering of the heifer. In a corner seat, a huntsman listened to the tale with silent interest before whispering something in a companion’s ear. The companion left the pub shortly after while the huntsman quaffed his beer and called for another.

But the huntsman was more interested in earning coin for killing thieves and bandits than in the man’s wild dragon tale. When his companion returned from following the surviving highway man, he gathered all the men in the village who could handle a bow or a huntsman’s axe and visited their hideout in the night when their quarry was least prepared to resist them. Since the huntsman's men were seasoned killers and the village volunteers were eager for a fight, they killed all the men in the camp and hung them on gibbets at the forest’s edge.

Not one to spurn an opportunity, after the others returned to the village, the huntsman spent a few days following the river deep into the wood until he found the serpent fig and the yew. But he did not find the dragon and returned to the village assuming it had flown away in the night. He was not greatly disappointed at the outcome, however. He knew something with a certainty that no one else did. At least one dragon remained in the wild. “She will return one day,” he thought to himself with satisfaction. “Dragons always return. And when she does, I will be waiting for her.”

The initial days caring for the man’s whelp did not go well. She tried all the sorts of foods a young dragon likes best: fresh trout and pike from the river as well as plump quail snagged near her new hide. She even tried regurgitating bits of the partially digested doe. But the child only had an inferior pair of teeth in her little mouth and spit everything out, even meat carefully chewed to a soft mash.

The child really wanted to suckle, but Rasulka’s shriveled breasts were long past the childbearing age. When the little one’s patience wore out, she began to squall in hunger and frustration. After several hours of her maddening shrieking, in desperation the dragon pressed the child’s mouth to one of her teats in hope that dry suckling would at least silence her cries for a little while. But when the little one furiously sucked the nipple into her mouth something impossible followed. The ancient dragon’s breast began to lactate, the little girl greedily drinking the milk as Rasulka’s trembled with feelings outside of her experience. An hour later the little girl slept in the dragon’s scaley arms as contented as if held by her own Romany mother.

But unlike a young dragon, the child was noisy, messy and frail, Rasulka soon learning that she could not keep her in the tree without ceaseless supervision and care. This made serious hunting extremely difficult and sleeping all but impossible. She needed a partner in a woodland occupied only by her prey. Since every animal in the woodland both feared and hated her, she did not have any idea of what to do.

The whisper of her name made every heart in the woodland grow cold. Once the sun set, when Rasulka hungered she would slip her mighty girth sinuously to the ground before diving into the river. She would swim downstream to one of her ambush sites where she waited silent and still for the unwary to slake their thirst at its banks. Any animal who bent incautiously to drink where Rasulka moored herself would experience the same, unspeakable cold of her breath as thousands of others before it and then slip helplessly below the surface and into her waiting jaws.

But the woodland was abuzz with curiosity about the little man’s whelp. Word spread quickly that Rasulka did not have time to hunt, and many animals shifted their feeding grounds closer to the dragon’s tree out of a combination of curiosity and spite. Aquila, the golden eagle, the boldest of any animal save for Rasulka, landed in the tree above the pair. He watched the dragon make several attempts to feed girl something solid one morning, cocking his head sometimes in one direction and then in the other. Unlike most other birds, Aquila is not particularly talkative. After careful consideration of the problem, he whistled softly and the frantic dragon glanced upward while keeping half an eye on the child.

“You need help,” he said in the common woodland tongue, a statement rather than a question. As a rule, eagles consider questioning deeply offensive.

Since Aquila is an unusually large bird, even for an eagle, Rasulka eyed him suspiciously, pulling the girl protectively to her breast. “Yes,” she answered with an unhappy sigh, “We need thy help.”

Inclining his head toward the infant, Aquila continued – “Can’t eat meat. Wrong teeth. Make pact with Soween.”

The largest wild boar in the woodland, Soween headed her family through a combination of size, sharp tusks and a very short temper. Naturally, she was the last animal that Rasulka would have picked to establish a pact. Soween had lost dozens of squeakers to Rasulka over the years. Although a full-grown boar would feed Rasulka for a month, she greatly preferred the tender little ones to the tough and stringy adults.

After Aquila flew off to find Soween, Rasulka shook her head in frustration. But looking tenderly at the little girl, she remembered how she had pointed and smiled at the moon the night before as she rested in Rasulka’s arms. Smiling at the memory, the dragon spoke tenderly, “Luna we name thee, precious one. When thou hast grown and left poor Rasulka and returned to men, remember the moon thy namesake.

Luna had begun to fuss hours before Rasulka finally heard Soween snuffling and grunting as she slowly made her way to the proposed meeting. Wild boar are noisy folk and don’t care who know it. Even the patient Aquila began to whistle in frustration as he tried to hurry the sow along. Unless her little ones were in danger, Soween never hurried. Every few steps she would pause to snuffle and press her nose into the earth. If she smelled a pleasing root or truffle she would ply her snout like a spade into the earth to dig it up.

When she finally arrived, she made a point of stopping a fair distance away from the dragon and kept the squeakers behind her, her back bristling with greater than her usual bad temper. Truthfully, she was both frightened and surprised that she had agreed to meet with the most dangerous predator in the woodland.

“Spose yer wantin’ help with the man’s brat,” she began offensively.

“With our daughter Luna,” the dragon corrected.

“Not very dragon-like, yer daughter.” A pair of curious squeakers peeked around Soween’s flank and although she was determined not to think about it, Rasulka’s mouth began to water just the same. But when the dragon failed to reply to the second barb, Soween continued – “Wat’s the pact?”

“We won’t hunt thee or thine till our daughter knows the woodland ways and can fend for herself.”

Soween snorted loudly, the wild boar version of laughing. “No boar huntin’, now or ever again.” Three squeakers had moved to the other side of their mother and were trying to get at her teats. Rasulka’s stomach growled when Soween flopped heavily on her side and the six squeakers tumbled over one another to get their share of her milk. Unnoticed by Rasulka, who had temporarily closed her eyes to reduce temptation, Luna was crawling rapidly toward Soween. She had hungrily noticed the sow’s engorged teats and soon had shoved one of the squeakers aside to suckle with the others.

When the dragon opened her eyes again, she saw that Luna had already sealed the pact, Soween looking at the little one with surprise and affection. Luna soon charmed every animal that she encountered in the woodland. It was not long before Soween loved her almost as deeply as Rasulka. She taught her what roots and mushrooms were good to eat as well as where they might be found. Although Soween relied heavily on her superior sense of smell, she also could identify visual clues as well, and Luna learned quickly. What she did not learn from the sow, others taught her.

Ursoo, the brown bear, taught her how to find the best berries, nuts and acorns, and Arvi, the water vole, taught her how to dig up wild onions and beets, and the tastiest parts of the dandelion and chickweed. By the time Rasulka had weened her, Luna could perfectly imitate every animal call or cry she had encountered in three summers in the woodland. She could grunt like Ursoo, whistle like Aquila or sing as sweetly as Luscinia the nightingale. She counted every animal in the woodland a friend and learned the common woodland tongue as well as formal greetings in a dozen different animal dialects.

After seven summers, she was as tall as a child of twelve, the souls of her feet harder than the soles of any shoes, and she was still as naked as the day she was born. The dragon’s milk had given her a winter belly like Rasulka’s and though she had not yet learned the secret of drawing the breath from her stomach instead of her lungs, even the coldest days had little effect on her.

Like Rasulka, the heat made her sluggish and irritable. On hot days she would dive into the river and swim as swiftly as a trout or simply cool herself by floating lazily on her back like Lustra the otter. Lean, Lithe and strong, she could run and leap with an athleticism that no child born of woman had ever possessed before or ever will again.

In her eighth summer the Romany returned to the woodland in a long caravan of brightly painted wagons. Rasulka had slept for the previous week after killing a heifer that had escaped from the villagers who tried to stake her out for the dragon in any event. Luna, who had the run of the woodland heard laughter and a high-pitched tune very like a nightingale except louder and went to investigate.

Climbing silently into an oak in over watch above the encampment, she watched women with thick, black hair and skin almost as brown as her own dancing as a man made his violin sing as sweetly as Luscinia. But since she had never known clothing save for her brief and unremembered babyhood, she did not understand the brightly colored skins that whirled around the women or the dark furry hair on the men’s faces.

Once a curious child spied her in the tree and pointed her out to her mother, the music stopping as the dancers held their hands above their eyes and stared at the wild girl crouching in the tree above them. Luna, who had never known a moment of fear in her life, was not afraid now. When they waved for her to join them she slipped out of the tree with an ease that surprised them all. An older woman shooed the gawking men and children away and took the girl to the back of one of wagons.

What Luna could not know was that her mother was raised in this caravan and several of the women remarked on the resemblance. Her mother’s own sister took her hands with moist eyes. She asked Luna if her mother lived, but of course Luna could not understand her words or gestures. She tried speaking in the common woodland tongue, but hearing the animal grunts and squeaks come from the young girl’s lips only frightened the women and made her mother’s sister weep aloud.

The older woman took Luna aside and bade her to sit. When she took a stick and drew a wolf in the dirt Luna bayed like a pack on a blood trail. When the old woman drew a bear, she grunted like Ursoo. When the old woman handed her the stick, Luna drew a huge dragon when compared to the bear and wolf scratched into dirt beside it. Sucking in her breath the old woman rubbed the drawings out with her foot and motioned to the knot of women standing off to the side.

“What is it?” one of the women asked. The old woman had grown deathly pale. “Tell the others to pack, we must leave while there’s still light.”

Luna’s aunt, her eyes still red from weeping, asked “why must we leave?”

“Have you not felt the cold? Its all around the girl.”

“It’s only a breeze.”

“Don’t be a fool, Drina, there’s no breeze and the sky is cloudless. There’s killin’ frost in that girl’s belly.”

“She’s Esmeralda’s daughter, look at her. If we leave, she’s comin’ with us.”

“That girl is stronger than any man among us. She has wintered these past years naked as the day she was born. She might have been Romany once, but now she is dragon in all but flesh.”

“The least we can do is feed her,” Drina pleaded.

“I wash my hands of the lot of you,” the old woman replied and walked away.

Drina led the girl to her wagon and offered a handful of plump raisins that Luna ate greedily. Then she offered her a spiced tea with goat’s milk. But after drinking it Luna was very sleepy and Drina offered the cushions in the wagon to lay upon on and Luna fell into a deep sleep.

When Rasulka awoke three weeks later, she slid down from her tree to slake her thirst in the river. Then looking skyward, she spotted Aquila as he soared high above the woodland, his sharp eyes watching for movement. When he noticed that Rasulka had finally awakened, he dipped a wing and wheeled in a wide circle, dropping lower and lower till he alighted in a nearby tree.

“Where is the woodland’s daughter?” Rasulka asked.

“Gone,” Aquila answered in a stifled whistle. “Gone from new moon to full.”

“Gone!” Rasulka shrieked. “My precious daughter, gone?” she quailed. Stumbling noisily through the woodland, she asked any animal that did not run away if they had seen her, but the answer was always the same.

“Rasulka had always known that eventually Luna would leave her to enter the world of men, but she had not expected it this soon and was riven with grief. After a week of stamping about and begging the other animals to help her find her daughter, Ursoo suggested searching on the wing like a true dragon. But Rasulka’s wings had remained furled at her side for centuries. She feared their strength might never return. “Hunt, eat, fly,” Aquila whistled.

For the first time since her parents left her in the yew as an infant, she opened and tested her wings. The resulting pain seemed even worse than she imagined, but love compelled her. She ate even when not hungry and worked her wings even when the pain brought tears to her ancient eyes. The regimen continued new moon to full and new moon again as the seasons slowly passed. But even after a year of rebuilding her strength the wings still could not raise her off the ground. During the following year she killed more frequently but never ate enough to sleep more than a few hours during the day. Every waking thought was of her little Luna.

At the end of the second year, she flew for the first time on a moonless night. Returning to the ground a few minutes later, she was utterly exhausted but ecstatic. She knew that it was only a matter of time before she could begin her search. The following spring after the first heavy kill in over a year and a full week of rest, she flew high in the sky till she rode for the first time on the back of the wind. Her silhouette briefly appearing on across the face of the Lenten moon before disappearing into the night.

Four years passed in the woodland without Rasulka. For most of the animals four years is a lifetime. Cubs, kits, fawns and squeakers were born that never knew the terrible fear of her name and save for Ursoo and Aquila, the woodland forgot both Luna and Rasulka.

At the end of the fourth year a single Romany wagon entered the woodland carrying only Luna. She had left the Romany caravan three years before after a group of toughs had raped a Romany girl and Luna, who had finally learned to harness her winter breath, had killed them. Hounded and attacked in every village they visited over the next few years, Luna final left the Romany. But she knew as soon as she entered the woodland that Rasulka was gone.

When Aquila found her, he told her of Rasulka’s travails and final triumph and Luna wept for the suffering and grief her mother had endured. After asking Aquila the direction Rasulka had taken at her departure he took her to cliff several miles from the woodland that overlooked the sea and there Luna watched and waited. Much changed, she now wore the colorful dress of the Romany, her once wild tresses combed and washed. Full of life and striking in her beauty, she broke men’s hearts in every village visited. But branded as a witch, even as she stood in silent watch across the sea, Luna knew that before long men would come with torches and weapons and then what would she do?

When the night finally came that she spied Rasulka on the wing at such a great distance that she was barely a speck in the sky, the huntsman had finally found the quarry he thought worthy of him. He knew what Luna was. Although the price on her head was high, he hoped that by trapping her, he could lure an even greater prize.

When the huntsmen and his men surrounded Luna, she turned to face them, the animal shine in her eyes causing a collective intake of breath.

Stepping forward, the huntsman asked her if she would join him peacefully. “I’m not looking for a fight.”

“Neither am I.”

“So you’ll come with me?”

“No,” she answered simply.

“You can’t beat us, we are too many for you.”

“I know.”

“Why fight if you can’t win?”

“I’m not afraid to die. Are you?”

“You think you can kill me.”

“I can kill a lot more of you than you realize.”

“I have a dozen bowmen with arrows nocked but only a single target.”

“Can they see in the dark?” With a heavily exhaled breath, every torch went out and the terrifying battle cry of the last frost dragon echoed across the cliffs. The arrows flew but none hit the expected mark. And of the men who followed the huntsman to the cliff, none returned home to tell the tale of the battle with the last frost dragon and her daughter.

The next day those who visited the cliff found the dragon's carcass feathered with arrows, the grass surrounding the body still covered in a heavy frost even though the sun rode high in the sky and warmed both air and earth. But the dragon's daughter they did not find. The news traveled swiftly that the last frost dragon was slain, and villages far and wide held celebrations and gave thanks to God and Saint George.

But of the final, whispered words that passed Rasulka's lips only Luna knows, and she tells no tales. She wept upon her mother's neck long after her life left her. And then Luna disappeared as if she had never existed at all. Some say she returned to the woodland and lives there still. Others think that she tired of the world of men and surrendered to the winter within her belly and became as scaly and fearsome as her mother.