Chapter 15
We marched in the morning.
March, march, march.
It felt embarrassing, corny, even. Because is there anything more brainless than this? Is there anything more embarrassing
than picking up a shiny stick and thinking you can use it to hack the world into whatever shape you think it ought to be in?
Of course the soldiers formed a line. Of course Commander Smear gave a rousing, inaudible speech. Of course the horde cheered
and stomped their feet, ejaculating blanks into the empty air, mouths still full of mutton right off the bone. The dragon
could arrive any second, the dragon could arrive any hour, day, week; who cares when we can just play pretend and get the
same result: a surge of adrenaline, animal yips, muscles flexing under fat.
I led the horde from our smallholding through the forest, everyone galloping and whooping at first, but slowing down as the reality of the narrow trails set in.
All the horses and equipment struggled to condense.
Plants and offshoot trees were flattened and the catapult got stuck multiple times.
It took all day for everyone to make it through the forest and their awe at the crater’s grandeur was tempered by the reality of needing to set up camp again, light the fires, feed the masses.
War and conquest were an exhausting logistics game.
At sundown, I left the crater and went looking for firewood and spent the whole time sitting on a log alone.
I thought of nothing. I tried to empty my mind, be the peasant I was always meant to be.
Something licked my hand. I was back in the forest. Echoes of laughter and shouts from the soldiers weaseled their way through
the trees. I heard the whiz bang of a firework—I didn’t know fireworks had been invented already. Flashes of green and red
lit up the sky, lost in the black teeth of towering trees. Then something licked my hand again.
I looked to my side and flinched.
It was a wolf. Its blue eyes locked with mine, cautious as it licked a faint crust of dried blood and ash from my hand. Its
fur was mangy and gray, its ears tawny and alert. The wolf finished with my left hand and I presented it with my right, but
it shrank and ran away when it saw Simon coming toward us, stepping through the thicket. The wolf disappeared like a ghost,
like a dragon, and only the slobber on my hand convinced me it had been real.
“What are you doing out here?” Brambles cracked as Simon pushed through them.
“They’ve slaughtered another sheep. They took all our animals out here.
They’ll be eaten by morning. You didn’t want them to burn down our house, but you’re fine with that?
You don’t want to fight the dragon, but you still led them here. Now you’re hiding?”
“I’m looking for firewood.” I stood up. Simon grabbed me.
“What’s happened, George, what’s going on?” He put his arm around my waist, he put his head close to mine and closed his eyes
as if to listen to what was going on inside. I pulled away.
“What do you mean ‘what’s going on’? Your angel didn’t tell you about this part? It told you all about me but neglected to
mention the dragon and the thousand soldiers?” The sourness of my own words stung me and I stopped myself. “Sorry. I just
think—” My head pounded with all the things I couldn’t say, or couldn’t decide—I couldn’t do this but I wanted—I didn’t want
but I needed . . . “I think we just need to let the dragon do its thing. If we try and fight it, it’s going to kill everyone
here. More people will come, and more people will die, and it’s just going to keep happening over and over.” We needed to
go but we needed to stay. I needed to stay. I closed my eyes and felt the purposelessness of the past, the dragon’s denigration of it and how the myth
of the future was just a pale imitation of the present. The date had tasted so derogatory on my tongue—he had called them
entropy. The entropic zone. We were random chaos, viruses colliding. Simon reached for me, hands pulled for me again, pushed
through the purposelessness I knew he also had to feel lapping at his ankles.
“Do you love me?”
I didn’t ask it. I was stunned to hear it because it didn’t come from my mouth. It sounded modern enough like I should have
said it, but I didn’t.
“Do you love me?” Simon asked again. “George. I need to know.”
Tears pulsed down my cheeks. I felt an immense pain in my throat, a stifled cough I clung to, tasting ash and barrenness.
I nodded my head, knocking more tears from my eyes like a child.
I said, “Yes.” Meager and weak.
“Yes,” I said again, into Simon’s chest, closing my eyes, muffling my cries, “Yes” in this foreign tongue, “Yes,” but I didn’t
know what love meant anymore.
The ring of encampments circled the lava field. We sat and ate dinner and watched soldiers run drills across the crater’s
darkened plain, horses riding back and forth in different alignments. Echoes swirled around the massive space like an open
drain, their torches like fading embers. The catapult was set up and tested. Someone slipped and fell through a lava tube.
Another sheep was roasted, two lambs were left to go—they stared at me like strangers with their oblong pupils. It was indeed
another moonless night, but only because we had blocked the sky with our campfires, this traveling tailgate.
I wondered who everyone was. No one wore a uniform, carried a wallet, no ID. All of these men and they could only proclaim
their selves to each other, scooped up into groups. I thought: it’s a miracle nobody just lies. Or maybe everyone did and
I was finally getting the idea. You can just say what you want, you can just say who you are, and be it.
A child soldier ate bread and stew across a campfire from Simon and me.
The startling fact was that there were six-year-olds running around places like this—because who else will carve rocks for the catapult, light signal fires, scavenge the bodies of the dead?
The boy watched me through the flames, fixated while he chewed.
I could hear nervous words whirling in his mind.
Simon noticed it too and smiled. Finally the boy lifted his bowl to slurp the last of his meal, then asked, loud and in a rush, “What does the dragon look like is it as tall as a tree or even bigger?”
I chuckled. “It’s very big,” I said. “Bigger than a house.”
“Bigger than a castle?”
“Probably. I’d say it’s bigger than the Tower of London.”
“I’ve never been to London what’s London like?”
“It’s nice,” I said. “It’s very noisy. There’s lots of people.”
“I’m from York.”
“I like York.” All I could do was answer his fruitive little questions while a dirge of sadness moaned in my heart. The boy
was barefoot and dirty. His cheeks were chapped and glazed. He carefully poked the last of the beans in his stew with a rusty
dagger.
Simon had a better manner about him with children and took charge. He said, “The dragon’s big but he’s not very scary. He’s
got big, flappy wings and skinny legs like a chicken.”
“I’m not scared,” said the boy.
“That’s good,” said Simon. “Make sure you stay up here on the ridge when he appears, don’t run down with the soldiers. The
ground will be too hot, you’ll burn your feet. Stay up here and keep any fire from spreading to the forest. You can make sure
our house stays safe.”
“Is that your brother?” The boy pointed at me.
“No.” Simon smiled. “He’s my boyfriend.”
My spirit sailed as high as the banners of war strung above our camp, and my spine, caught unaware, shuddered and winced and tried to pull it back down.
I smiled but I’m sure I grimaced. I didn’t want to think what I was thinking.
I didn’t want to decide what I feared I had already decided.
I didn’t know how to be honest with myself and say definitively what I wanted so I thought of only the things that I knew I didn’t want, namely, child soldiers, babies abandoned in forests, heads on pikes, brutality, and ruthlessness—never mind the fact that these are timeless injustices available at any time period—but it was easier for my mind to play dress-up in this blatant outrage, a child soldier just a convenient excuse.
I forced myself to think plainly like this and avoid the real question—no, actually skip over the real question entirely and jump straight to a masking follow-up question instead: Maybe Simon would be able to come with me?
A dog somewhere barked. A bone was thrown for it. Somewhere else, a soldier got out a lute and started strumming. Then silently
and suddenly, a cruise missile shot across the sky.
It happened in an instant. A fiery line, followed by an explosion. A flash of white. Silently.
Sound was delayed. For two seconds there was the vision before us of the earth erupting, accompanied only by the sweet crackles
of campfire and music, the final slurps of soup. Shadows lengthened. Faces twitched. Then when the sound hit: a roar unlike
any other.
It was like a chunk of the sun itself. Don’t stare into an open flame. I closed my eyes and I could still see it through my
eyelids. Wings unfolding. A neck extending. Talons, horns, and a thorny tail. A mouth opening with a smile from hell. It was
like the dragon had simply come home, kicked off his shoes, taken off his coat, slammed the door, and let out a scream.
The soldiers tripped over themselves and onto their horses, gathered their arms. Everyone scrambled for swords and arrows like you would rummage through a cutlery drawer for a sudden uninvited dinner guest. The most inspiring speech Commander Smear could muster now was “Divine,” his face alight with pure white. “This is divine.”
I didn’t grab Simon. Surprising myself, I grabbed the little boy who had been eating with us. But of course he broke free
from my grasp, held up his rusty dagger, and charged along with everyone else. I watched him disappear into a tornado of fire,
his skeleton visible through his skin.