The Red Red Dragon Page 2

  The teacher gave a little sigh of relief. “We don’t have proper words for many of these ugly, indecent feelings,” she said, “because we hardly ever have them. And when we do have them, something bad happens.”

  “Like what?” asked Basher, forgetting to raise his tail-point.

  “Our smoke, our beautiful white dragon smoke, turns black. And,” the teacher continued solemnly, “we try never to blow any of—”

  Red interrupted. “My granddag said it was black smoke that covered the blue-top and ruined the whole world. He said uprights made black smoke and black smoke brought life-over.”

  “How does your granddag know that?” asked Basher.

  “Every dragon should know it,” explained Berserk. “Dragon smoke – the white kind – is for showing how different we are from those terrible creatures we banished in” – her eyes darted from one mumbo to the next – “in what?”

  “THE GREAT RIDDING!” the whole class shouted.

  “Correct. Our smoke is harmless – unless it’s black. We must try never to blow that kind in case the badness in it gets out – the same way it did in the Old Time when uprights ruined the world with it—”

  Red interrupted again. “My granddag said that ages ago, when the world was going bad, dragons gave uprights a chance to make griffilin—”

  “Oooh! Red said the impossible word!” cried Merciless.

  The other mumbos just looked puzzled.

  “What’s griffilin?” one of them asked.

  “Don’t waste your think-spaces on it. It can’t happen. That’s why we don’t say it,” warned Berserk.

  “Why can’t it?” asked Red.

  The teacher gave him a stern look. “Because it would need uprights to listen. And listening’s not what uprights do.”

  Fire was a topic that often came up in lessons, and was very important to dragons.

  “Eat up your twigs and branches before meals,” their teacher often stressed. “Without them, you won’t have fire in your chests. And without that, well, I won’t even go into that because it’s much too…” She cleared her throat. “Anyway, very soon you’ll be able to chew and swallow coal.”

  The whole class shivered with excited anticipation.

  “This will put fire in your chests,” the teacher went on, “and one light you’ll feel the urge all dragons feel, and you’ll open your jaws and a stream of beautiful fire will flow from you. Then, and only then, will you stop being mumbos and become—”

  “Full-grown dragons!” shouted Basher, thumping on the floor with his strong hind paws. “FULL-GROWN! FULL-GROWN! FULL-GROWN!”

  The other mumbos, stirred by their classmate’s words, joined in, chanting and thumping on the floor until the sound rang through the built-thing like thunder.

  Later that light, Red – ever curious – caught up with his teacher in the school playground and asked, “Where does the coal we eat come from?”

  The teacher gave him a very curious look. “I thought your dag was head coaler. I’m surprised he hasn’t told you that.”

  “Coal stacks?” Red guessed. Berserk nodded. “Does it grow there?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. The teacher shifted slightly on her haunches. “It’s there because” – she gave a little cough – “because it’s … er … always been there.” She began to edge away, but Red followed.

  “But if all full-growns eat it, won’t it eventually get used up?”

  A faint trickle of darkish smoke drifted from the teacher’s nostrils. “You ask too many questions, Ferocity. Try not to. It’s unhealthy.”

  Red felt a stab of shame. “Sorry, I was just trying—”

  “Try less. Listen more. Now repeat after me,” said his teacher, staring at him earnestly. “We eat coal to fuel our fires. Coal makes us whole and much better flyers.”

  Red repeated her words. But his think-space was alight with even more nagging, unanswered questions.

  The mumbos only took one term of Geography (mostly because they never went very far), and it was mainly about the Endless Water. They were warned never to fly over it – even though they’d probably never see it – because dragons can’t swim. Known fact. The Geography teacher, Gruesome, made them recite a reminder:

  “Over the valleys and hills you can fly‚ but not over water; that way—”

  “LIFE-OVER!” the class all shouted.

  Once every few lights, they practised blowing smoke signals, which is how dragons communicate across distances, even short ones. And they learned tail-signalling, a skill left over from Before Speak. Tail-signalling was a sort of forgotten language and most of the mumbos found it pointless – this was a joke because of their tail-points. But Red liked it. His dag had forgotten it completely from his school-lights, so Red and his friends could use it to talk in secret.

  “You lot are really getting on my tail-point!” Rampant would complain whenever Red had his friends round to cave and they sent messages to one another in this way. “I can’t understand a smoking word you’re signalling. And that’s rude.”

  No one liked being called rude, so they quickly stopped. Until the next time. One dark, Red saw his dag blow a trace of black – no, no, not black but greyish – smoke. He’d never once seen him do that, not even the time he went hunting horn-trotters and bashed his head on a branch mid-chase. So that was the end of tail-signalling, at least in cave. One thing was certain: no one wanted to see what happened when Rampant’s grey smoke turned black.

  Red’s favourite subject was Dragonstory, also called the Trail of Smoke. It was passed down from full-growns to mumbos and went right back to when dragons weren’t at all as they are today.

  “There have been so many advances in dragonkind within the think-hold of our oldest dragons that it’s no wonder we have changed and become far better in every way,” another of his teachers, Bellicose, explained.

  And like all good pupils, Red and the rest of his class believed everything they were told.

  Red loved school, but he always seemed to have more questions than his friends. When he sensed he wasn’t going to get all the answers from his teachers, he would save them for when his mag and dag next went out, and his granddag and grandmag stayed in to mumbo-sit. They loved telling him about Dragonstory.

  “For most of the Trail of Smoke,” his grandmag said one dark, “we had mortal enemies.”

  “What does mortal mean?” asked Red, crunching a fur-hopper bone.

  There was a slight pause.

  “Well, go on,” urged his granddag. “Tell him.”

  “It means deadly and cruel—”

  “And violent!” added his granddag, and, despite himself, uttered a little growl.

  “Granddag!” protested Red, shocked. “You said the vi word!”

  His granddag muttered something.

  “Pardon?” said Red.

  His granddag, ignoring the pain in his old wobbly haunches, rose to his full height, spilling shadows against the cave walls that made him look twice the size. Now his words were very loud and very clear.

  “I said: VIOLENT!” He cleared his throat and lowered his voice. “These words you hear at school – the ones they say are indecent – describe what dragons once were and could still be.”

  “Still?” Red just about managed to say it.

  “YES! STILL!” His granddag gave a little rasping cough. “Deadly and cruel and violent should never have been left behind. They’re words that we should always keep in our think-spaces.”

  “But why, Granddag? We don’t need any of those awful things now!”

  “In case,” the old dragon hissed.

  “In case what?”

  “They ever come back.”

  Red shivered down his back-fins, he didn’t know why.

  Granddag bent his neck so that his snout was very close to Red’s; close enough so the mumbo got a whiff of his granddag’s acrid smoke-breath.

  “If it’s cruel to protect your family,” the old dragon continued, “if it’s violent to stand up for your kind; if goodness and decency come under threat; if every bit of your body goes tight with the agony of watching your own beautiful world disappear, then tell me – is it not right to use the old ways?”

  Red opened his mouth to answer. But couldn’t. There was another long silence, eventually broken by his grandmag suddenly nudging her pair and saying in a croaky voice, “Enough! That’s enough now!”

  One thing was clear to Red, and that was that the mere mention of that Old Time made his grandparents – all full-growns, in fact – very uncomfortable. This period of Dragonstory was very unpleasant and only taught to half-growns who were so nearly full-grown that they could breathe fire. But thanks to his granddag, Red found out about uprights earlier than most. “Those REPULSIVE clawless, fireless, wingless creatures!” he called them, who, despite being scaleless and puny, had once ruled the world, as dragons did today.

  They were all gone now, most dragons believed. Thanks to the Great Ridding.

  Neither Red’s grandparents nor his parents – indeed, not even any teacher – could explain exactly how this had happened, because dragons now prided themselves on being civilized, and the thought of uprights and the Old Time stirred something so black in their think-spaces that they felt strange, forbidden thinks stirring inside them, making them hot behind their eyes, and sending shivers through their limbs right down to the tips of their very sharp claws.

  Which is why it came as a shock when Red’s granddag showed him his teeth one dark by the light of the fire.

  “Here,” the old dragon grunted, “take a good look at these. See how sharp they are?”

  Red peered at them. Sure, they were a little worn down, but the mumbo still marvelled at their immense size and sharpness.

>   “You don’t think dragons need these crunchers just for eating – even the few who are still meat-feeders?”

  “Are they for crunching pieces of coal?” Red asked innocently.

  The old dragon growled and shook his head. “Course not. We used them to drive out those stinking uprights.”

  “Drive them out, Granddag?”

  There was a pause.

  “Yes, son, yes. WE RIP-BURN-KILLED ’EM!”

  There was an unfamiliar sound in the old dragon’s voice – could it be pleasure?

  Red gasped. Rip-burn-kill was the worst – the very worst – swearing he’d ever heard. And it left him talkless.

  His granddag sensed the mumbo’s shock. “We had to get rid of them somehow,” he insisted. “Or what? As sure as fire burns bright, they’d have got rid of us. They nearly did!”

  Red cleared his throat. There was something hot and bad and bitter-tasting in there, like rotten meat. Still, he mustered a question. “What about the ones we didn’t” – Red gulped – “do that to?”

  “The unlucky ones who survived, you mean?” His granddag gave a chortling snort. “They fled as fast as their puny little legs could carry them.”

  “You sound like you’ve seen one, Granddag!”

  “Who, me? Don’t be ridiculous!” the old dragon snarled. “This was all long, long before my time! Just as well, because I’m certain eating one would’ve made all my teeth fall out!”

  Nothing he’d heard so far shocked Red quite like this.

  “EAT them? You mean dragons ate uprights?”

  His granddag gave a grunt. “Well, it’s all just stories – ages old. Who can really know for sure? No one, that’s who…” With that he turned and hobbled off. “All I know is I’m no green-feeder, not me,” he muttered as he vanished into the shadows, “but I don’t suppose I could’ve stomached eating the likes of them.”

  Red called after him. “Where did they go, Granddag? The uprights, I mean. The ones who got away?”

  His granddag’s gnarled old face reappeared suddenly, eyes gleaming in the firelight.

  “Go?” A faint trail of black smoke spurted from his nostrils. Then he said quite simply, “Wherever they went, they’d better FLAMING WELL STAY THERE!”

  A little later, when Red asked his grandmag the same question, she fluttered her old wrinkled wings, ducked her head, and insisted there never really were any uprights. But Red knew that couldn’t be right – it couldn’t be – because dragons can’t make things up. Their think-spaces just aren’t made that way.

  Later, when his dag came back to cave and stuck his head in to say good dragon-dark, Red put the same question to him. After huffing a little – to hold his smoke back, Red presumed – Rampant told him of the rumours that the upright survivors of the terrible pre-Ridding battles, if indeed there were any, were thought to be scattered on small live-places called land-lumps somewhere out in the Endless Water.

  “That’s a very, very long way away, where they can’t harm anyone or anything,” he assured his mumbo.

  “How’d they get there, Dag?” asked Red sleepily.

  “You mean if they got there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Nobody knows.” Rampant leaned down and nuzzled his son’s ear. “Now go to sleep, and don’t waste your think-space on uprights. They’re nothing but dust and shadows.”

  Reassured, Red gave a contented sigh, closed his eyes, and slipped away, deep into the vastness of his think-space.

  Next time the subject of uprights came up at school, Red’s class teacher backed up Rampant’s words. She had no reason not to.

  “We don’t have to worry about marauding uprights any more, forever hunting us and taking over our live-spaces and then ruining them. If uprights did anything good, it was to show us, by their awful example, how not to live.” Berserk looked severely at the class. “We dragons are very practical and concentrate on our needs and on just being polite and sensible. In a word…?”

  “DECENT!” the mumbos replied. And then, as if on cue, they recited, “We never quarrel or argue, it’s true – kindness and decency’s what dragons do.”

  The teacher nodded. “When disagreements or problems arise, what do we do?” She scanned the mumbos hopefully until one, at the back of the class, raised her tail-point.

  “Yes, Militant?”

  “We solve them by talking-not-quarrelling.”

  “Talking-not-quarrelling. That’s right. We crouch around a fire, and we have a – anyone…?”

  This time the class answered in chorus, tail-signalling for emphasis: “HEADS-TOGETHER!”

  “That’s correct. We have a heads-together till we agree on what to do next. Who knows what we call that?”

  “DRAGONSENSE!”

  “It’s polite to raise your tail-point before you answer, Ferocity. But yes. We never really need to quarrel. There’s plenty of live-space, lots of fruit and other green-feed, and small prey for the few of us who, regrettably” – her eyes darted to Basher – “are still meat-feeders. So we’re not short of food.”

  Red’s tail-point shot up. “So what are we short of?”

  “Why d’you ask that, Ferocity?”

  “Well, the way you said food sounded as if we were short of something.”

  Their teacher gave an irritable little cough. “Let’s move on, please…”

  Talk of food reminded Red of a subject that sometimes caused not quarrels but discussions in cave. His dag had recently given up meat-feeding, calling it uncivilized because it involved life-ending.

  “Nasty business,” Rampant had said. “I like to think of dragonkind as having moved beyond that. I hope when you’re older, son, you’ll follow my example.” He’d thrown a meaningful glance at his pair. She, on the other paw, was an extremely skilled hunter who refused to deny her son the “fire-stoking pleasures” of a meat diet.

  “You want to be a green-feeder, go right ahead, dear,” she’d said. “Me? I end what I eat.”

  Ferocity hadn’t known which parent to side with. What he did know was that he absolutely loved the taste of ground-flapper.

  Suddenly his teacher’s voice snapped him out of his back-thinks.

  “Another example of talking-not-quarrelling,” she said solemnly, “is deciding how to share out the coal for our chest-fires – yes, all right, Merciless, no need to show us your smoke rings.”

  Red needed to listen very carefully to coal-talk. His dag, as head coaler, crouched on the Council and had to attend heads-togethers. Red had overheard his parents talking about this recently after fire-out. He wondered with a sharp realization if coal was the answer the teacher had avoided giving before – could that be what they were short of?

  “One last thing,” the teacher added. “Listen very carefully, because this may very well be the difference between life and life-over for us dragons.” The class fell silent. “You must – must – keep your chest-fires lit at all times. No exceptions. Does anyone here know why?”

  Silence.

  “Because if your chest-fire goes out, you stop being” – she lowered her voice to a whisper – “a full-dragon.”

  There was a gasp, followed by excited murmurs. Berserk raised her tail-point for silence.

  “Not being a full-dragon means you can’t breathe fire, and if you can’t do that, you can’t fly!”

  Another uneasy murmur from the class.

  “We have a signal for that, mumbos.” And she showed them by curving her tail to point to her chest. She cleared her throat uneasily. “That is the most terrible signal you can ever make. I only hope that none of you ever have to.” Then she uncurved her tail and said pleasantly, “Good dragon-light, everyone.”

  For more lights and darks than he could remember, Red had been waiting for one thing, and he wasn’t alone. From a very young age, every mumbo learned that the Special Place was by far the most important thing in the whole of their live-space. Roughneck, teacher of Dragonstory, had waited patiently for the moment when the Council would give their permission for the school to visit it.

  That light had finally come.

  The Special Place was a built-thing on the edge of Red’s live-space that had somehow not fallen down. He and his mag sometimes passed it when they went to visit his dag at work, but then the doors were always hard shut.