Tad Williams - The Dragons of Ordinary Farm

“But you’re a businessman!”

“I take back what I said earlier-you don’t remind me of myself at all. I don’t think I was ever that naive, even when I was in elementary school.”

Jude Modesto came forward, his face beaded with sweat that gleamed in the light spilling from the helicopter’s interior. “Sir, you never said anything about this. This is… this is kidnapping.”

“Only if our friend here wants to file charges. But I’m betting that one way or another, he won’t. Either he’ll like the deal I’m going to offer him-and it’s a good deal, one where he’ll get to keep at least that half a million-or something will happen to him and no one will ever find out where he went. Make sense?” He nodded to the man behind Colin. “Let’s go.”

The briefcase was taken gently from his hand, then Colin Needle was shoved, stumbling, toward the open door of the helicopter.

I t might have been an interesting sight in another place and time-the rolling hills at the edge of Standard Valley laid out in blanket folds, glowing gray in the moonlight and rushing away beneath her like the current of a river. As it was, though, she was dangling upside-down, held only by the ankle on the shredded restraint straps of a dragon, and whipped by the speed of their passage like a spider in a gale, so Lucinda was too busy screaming to appreciate the view.

“Go down! Go down! Meseret, put me down! ”

But all that came back from the dragon was a jumble of heated, dark thoughts, storm clouds full of lightning-anger and fear and something deeper Lucinda could not put a name to, especially not when she was spinning and swinging two hundred feet above certain death.

The dragon banked down, clearing a stand of trees by so little that Lucinda felt the topmost branches whip past her head, then leveled out, following the curve of the land as she headed toward the far side of Standard Valley. If it was Colin she was after-if he actually had Meseret’s egg-then the boy was as good as dead. Many thousands of pounds of dragon were going to drop on him like an eagle on a field mouse, if Meseret didn’t just burn him to ashes first.

Now that they were flying more steadily, Lucinda finally stopped swinging like a yo-yo. She grabbed the strap around her ankle and tried to pull herself up, but at first she could not even get her head up to the height of her own knee. All those horrible exercises in gym class, knotted ropes and obstacle courses-why hadn’t she worked at them harder? All those times she’d run to the wall, clambered up a few feet, then slid down to the ground and walked away, ignoring her gym teacher shouting that she knew Lucinda could do better if she only tried.

But this time she was going to die if she didn’t make it. Her foot was going to come loose and she’d fall, or she’d get her head smashed into a tree, or, perhaps worst of all, get dragged a hundred yards across rocks and brambles when the dragon finally landed. And then what? Colin incinerated. Not that he was blameless, but still… Tyler and Steven stuck in the mirror, wherever that might lead, and the Carrillo girls helplessly waiting. Their mother, receiving a phone call from someone-probably Mrs. Needle: “So sorry to tell you this, but your children aren’t coming back home…”

“No!” She couldn’t even hear herself shout against the whistle of wind in her ears, but she felt a tiny twinge of recognition from Meseret, as if despite the fury that filled the she-dragon like a hive of bees, she dimly heard Lucinda’s voice. But it wasn’t enough to make her slow down or stop.

Lucinda grabbed at her ankle again and began to pull herself upright. It was hard, hard going, and once, terrifyingly, the knot on the strap gave a little and she lost her grip and fell away, banging her back and head against the dragon’s rough, leathery hide, but the tangle tightened again and held. Laboriously she pulled herself back up until at last she was able to get her other hand onto the knot of canvas above her ankle. She clung to it, the wind bumping her rapidly against Meseret’s side, until she had caught her breath and didn’t feel quite so strong a need to scream. Already, though, her muscles were exhausted and burning. But what choice did she have?

“Meseret! Can you hear me-can you understand me? Put me down! I’ll get killed if you don’t put me down!”

But the dragon didn’t seem to be listening either to Lucinda’s words or her thoughts. Meseret kept flying steadily south, following the slope of the land through every change so that every beat of the batlike wings seemed to carry them higher or lower. Lucinda clenched her teeth until her ears rang and began to pull herself up.

Her gym teacher would never have recognized her. First one hand, then the other on top of it, pull up a few inches, then change hands. Her fingers felt like bony hooks, cramped and agonizing from holding her weight as the wind kept trying to pull her off, to throw her into space, but she knew she didn’t have the strength to start over again if she lost her grip. She tasted salt in her mouth: she had bitten her lip until it bled. She couldn’t even see because the wind and her own pain had made her eyes fill with blurring tears.

One hand. The other hand. Pull up. Change hands. One hand. The other. Pull.

The wind was full on the back of her head now, her hair whipping the sides of her face and trailing behind her so that at first she could not tell the difference between it and the dragon’s long tail, switching from side to side as she banked through the sky.

I’m up! She was all the way above the knot on her ankle, and with one last tug she was able to lift herself upright, clinging tightly to Meseret’s broad flank. She was standing in the knot as though it was a stirrup, facing backward toward the dragon’s tail end. Lucinda put her free foot on top of the knot and rested there for a long moment, but she knew she wasn’t safe yet-as if there was any position that could be called “safe” when she was riding on top of a five-ton dragon gone insane with anger. Nevertheless, she mustered what seemed like the very last of her strength and pulled herself up, using both feet now to keep the restraint rope taut, until she was finally up onto the relative safety of Meseret’s broad, scaly back. Lucinda left the knot around her ankle just in case, then clung to the hummock where the top of the dragon’s massive hip joint met her pelvis, where the wind was a little less fierce.

Meseret abruptly stooped. Lucinda’s heart leaped in fright. Had the creature seen Colin? Was she going to shred him while Lucinda watched helplessly-eat him, maybe? What did the stupid boy want the egg for, anyway? Had he really stolen it, or was it all some kind of misunderstanding between him and Haneb? Did it even matter? Despite the species difference, Lucinda knew that Meseret felt perfectly certain of the boy’s guilt and that she would destroy him in an instant to get to her egg.

But that egg isn’t even alive! Why was the dragon so angry? Why was she so crazy to protect a failed egg? Lucinda could feel it clearly, though, that mysterious emotion that throbbed behind all the others like a bass note in a complicated song, hard to hear unless you found the trick of separating it out from the other, brighter, showier notes.

Lucinda clung to the dragon’s back, hurtling through the air, trying desperately to make sense out of the swirl of alien emotions.

Alien. Maybe that was the problem-she’d been trying to make the dragon’s thoughts into human thoughts-but maybe the only way was to think more like a dragon. But how?

She buried her face against the rough hide and spread her arms and legs wide so that she was touching as much of Meseret as possible. She could feel the massive shoulder muscles pulling back and forth even from several feet behind them. What must it be like to be so strong, to be able to fly, to be able to lift that vast bulk into the air and break through the misty clouds? To dive like a bird and to glide silently? To feel fire in your belly and your throat and know that you could spit it out of your mouth, destroying all before you?