forever, and beyond those was what seemed like half the world: plains, valleys, hills, lakes and rivers, reaching to the horizon.
Jack stared, feeling the vastness of the world, feeling his freedom. He lifted his arms into the airy boundlessness of the blue sky around and above him.
“If you flew, could you bear me on your back?”
So the boy padded the dragon’s spines with his woollen tunic, and straddled them in a kneeling position, cleaving hard to the spines in front of him. And the dragon launched herself from the peak.
For one moment, it was terrifying.
And then, once the boy found his balance, and they soared higher and higher until they were impossibly high, untouchably high, gloriously limitlessly inestimably high, the orphan boy threw back his head, flung his fists to the air and whooped from the depths of his being.
And something that had been rising in the dragon’s heart with every beat of her wings now exploded, and she too threw back her head and hurled a long, bugling trumpet-cry into space, and it was glorious, glorious, wonderful and unbearable and glorious.
“THIS,” roared the boy to the dragon, “THIS IS LIVING!”
“I know!” shouted the dragon, “I see!”
And both yelled together, “I’M ALIVE!”
–––––––
For more than a year the boy and the dragon wandered together, lingering where food and water were plentiful and moving on from where they were insufficient. After a few weeks the dragon finally understood the meaning of the stroke, and her heart beat more deeply at the feel of Jack’s hand.
One night, in a cave halfway down the side of a valley, the dragon and Jack watched a thunderstorm rage. The sky was black with cloud, the lightning vivid and bright, and wind blasted the valley. As the dragon regarded the river at the bottom of the valley, swollen and turbulent from the heavy pelting rain, she thought with dread of what could happen if Jack were swept away in that roiling stream and the dragon unable to rescue him.
“What if I were ever to lose you?” she asked aloud, sadly.
The boy came and took the dragon’s face in his hands.
“You would survive,” he said calmly.
“But what would be the point of it,” said the dragon softly.
There was a long moment of quiet from the wind; and the sound of the rain and the rushing river filled the cave.
“You are a dragon,” the boy said at last. “Just by being a dragon you gift something to the world that no other creature can bring. … You are lovely, necessary, unique. You are special.”
“I wish we could bind ourselves to each other, become part of each other so that we need never be alone,” said the dragon.
Silhouetted dimly in the entrance to the cave – the boy straight and almost as tall as the dragon, with her large, spiky outline, whose head he held in his hands – Jack bent his smooth-skinned forehead to the dragon’s hard ridged one.
“I know what you mean,” he said.
–––––––
A short time later, the dragon was lying down on the floor of the dark cave, and Jack was sitting with his back against her right side. The dragon curved her neck around to look at Jack.
The dragon asked, “Would you ever leave me?”
The boy reached up his left hand to hold the dragon’s head, so that he was gazing straight into her large, yellow eye. In the dim light, the dragon’s pupil was round and black. In the lightning flashes, the dragon could see that Jack’s own eyes were as blue and intense as the lightning’s fire. The boy moved his other arm, which had been resting draped along the dragon’s side, and clasped the left side of the dragon’s jaw with both hands, keeping her head turned to look at him.
The boy kissed the dragon on the cheek.
“No,” he said. “I would never leave you.”
And the dragon opened her long, fanged jaws and closed them round the boy’s left shoulder and chest, whereby she could pierce his breast in an instant if she chose; and Jack, knowing this, relaxed, and, resting his hands lightly on the dragon’s jaw, caressed the smooth scales with his thumb. The dragon closed her eyes, feeling the boy’s heartbeat against the teeth of her lower jaw. After a few moments she put her head in the boy’s lap, and, with Jack leaning into the crook of her neck and stroking her, in the utmost expression of trust, she abandoned all defences in sleep.
–––––––
Another year passed. That Winter, before the first snowfall, the dragon and the boy lay sleeping within a thicket in a wood, tangled close together for warmth, the dragon’s tail curled tightly around the boy. Above the pair the sky was heavy, low and pale grey. The trees were bare.
There was a soft noise of crushing leaf litter. The boy’s eyelids cracked open. He blinked awake. Through a gap in the bare branches that surrounded him and the dragon, he could see human clothing. There was a man, a man standing ten paces away in the trees, facing him!
Jack held his breath. Had he and the dragon been detected?
The man advanced one slow, stalking pace, and Jack had his answer.
With a violent yell of warning Jack struggled out of the dragon’s embrace and leapt to his feet. There were running footsteps through the leaf litter, and the sound of crashing branches came from all directions. “Dragon, fly!” screamed Jack. The man that he could see was running toward him. Jack glanced behind at the dragon. She was on her feet, rearing, wings spread, smashing the twigs around her. All around Jack and the dragon, men were closing in, ragged, bearded men with ropes and nets in their hands. The first man whom Jack had seen grabbed him. Jack struggled, twisted, elbowed and kicked. With a blasting, reverberating roar at the man, the dragon towered over him; but the man held Jack in front of him, facing the dragon, like a human shield. The dragon turned on the others and breathed fire in a sweeping semicircle, causing the men to cry out and back away, and the branches of the thicket to crack and blacken instantly. Jack and the man holding him gasped. Jack arched and thrashed again, desperate to get away. A rope sailed through the trees from Jack’s left and its noose snared the dragon’s crest. The dragon shook it off and snapped at the thrower, dropping to all fours as she lunged. Then she was rearing again with a flap of her wings, scattering fragments of charred twigs, and roared her threat at the man who held Jack. The men behind her were closing in again, their ropes and nets at the ready. “Dragon, there’re too many! Fly!” Jack beseeched her.
Again the dragon whirled, and hissed blazing gold flame at them, but this time they dodged. Jack cried, “Dragon, if you love me, fly! Fly!”
The dragon threw a last glance at him, and with a scream of misery and fury, beat into the air, circling above the thicket. An arrow zipped up at her, puncturing and passing through her wing membrane, and she rolled sideways in the air in belated evasion; then, as more arrows began to pepper the air, she climbed higher and flew out of Jack’s sight.
Within moments the dragon returned, flying above the thicket whereat Jack had been captured. But the men, and the boy Jack, were nowhere to be seen. The dragon landed with caution, suspecting an ambush, but the area was empty of humans. The dragon searched for footprints, for a scent trail; but she found nothing. All day the dragon searched, listening, sniffing, circling the area. Into the cold black night she searched. But the men had disappeared, and had taken Jack with them.
The dragon howled, Jack’s last words echoing in her ears.