The Dragon's Treasure
An ex-knight, getting on in years, makes a dangerous annual pilgrimage.
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“Oh,” Mariela said softly when she rolled over in bed, and saw Gerta on her feet. Standing in the centre of their small bedroom, Gerta had already pulled her chain on over her head, and was now in the process of fastening the studded plate of her jerkin around her waist, pulling the belt taut to settle it properly on her body. “Is it that time of the year already?” “The daffodils are in bloom,” Gerta said, picking up her bracers and beginning to fasten them onto her arms. In her youth, in service to the city, she had worn this armour every day, as a guard, and as a knight protector, but she was long-retired from such business now. Her limbs were too tired and too old to stand the daily march about the castles’ walls, let alone anything else. But today — Today, she would wear her armour, as she did every spring. “You needn’t go yourself,” Mariela said in a quiet voice, and Gerta turned to look at her wife where she curled comfortably beneath the sheets, looking up at Gerta with her beautiful eyes half-lidded still with sleep. Mariela had never cared for early mornings, and Gerta stepped forward on silent feet, gently cupping Mariela’s cheek, and Mariela leaned into the warmth of Gerta’s palm, made rough with decades of holding a sword, and stained by a decade longer of brewing potions and making poultices. “What good are our apprentices, if you would not trust them with this?” “What good is an old woman,” replied Gerta, “if she would have a youth of nineteen undertake a risk she would not?” “You aren’t so old,” Mariela mumbled, her eyes falling closed, no matter that she tried her best to keep her head. It was scarce even light outside. “You have much to live for.” “I am holding everything that matters in my hand,” Gerta agreed, still cupping Mariela’s cheek as she slowly fell back upon the pillow. “I shall return tomorrow morning.” “You’d better,” Mariela mumbled, and Gerta pulled away. It would be a fine day when the sun rose fully above the horizon, and she wanted to be well out of the city by that point. Taking up her belt and putting it about her waist, making sure her dagger was in its scabbard, she made her way into the other room, picking up her satchel and putting the kettle on the fire, that Mariela would have warm stew awaiting her when she rose for breakfast. “It’s spring again, Montebello,” she told their horse as she came out into the yard, already saddled as he was, and Montebello looked at her for a moment, pensive, before he bent his knees slightly and allowed her to climb atop his back. Taking up the reins, she looked at the house she and Mariela had built together, all those years ago. She looked at Mariela’s beautifully-kept herb garden, at the crystals hanging from their windows, and thought about her wife still asleep in their bed. She always did this, before she set off for this annual pilgrimage: she took in their home together, and committed its every detail to memory. She prayed it would not be the last time she would do so, and set off. Riding so early as she was in the morning, there was no one in the streets to see her as she passed by, which was how she preferred it. She had some ride ahead of her over the plains known as the Sweetlands, before she made it to the mountain, and she spent the day in pensive silence, passing no one on the roads. She stopped twice along the way, once to collect some nasturtiums growing by the side of the Pink River, for the sake of their petals and their roots, and once to fill her water skein and eat some bread and butter. Gerta saw, on a path further down the plain, a hunting party moving out, no doubt performing the vital culls of some species in the nearby Faerie Woods. The deer, particularly, had been breeding over much this year, and she knew that the Crown had been encouraging the people to add more venison to their diets, to cull their populations down before they destroyed every tree in the woods. The mountain loomed over her and Montebello. It was late afternoon by now, and rising in thick, grey furls from the mountain’s top, she could see swathes of smoke. Some people in the Sweetlands thought the Sweet Mountain was a volcano. Gerta knew better. As she and Montebello began to ascend the mountain, she checked her dagger in its holster, and felt the weight of her armour on her shoulders. Even just riding like so, it felt so very heavy — had there really been a time, all those years ago, when it had felt like naught more than a second skin, made up of barely any weight at all? Could there really have been a time, long ago, when she was young? She was still graceful in her armour, for now, but Mariela had been right — this pilgrimage would not be one she was up to pursuing forever, and perhaps not for many more years at all. Already, her reflexes were slower, and while she still walked very silently, it would take only one unfortunate clink of chain upon chain, one creak of leather pleat against leather pleat, for her life to be over. Absolute silence was crucial. Gerta had found the entrance to the cave system in the Sweet Mountain when she’d still been just a little girl. Stumbling through the corridors, having run away from home over some argument with her sisters, she’d thought of living in the mountains forever. The dragon was even bigger, now, than it had been then. She still remembered vividly how it had felt, stepping into that great, cavernous room, her feet making soft noise on the sandy floor, and looking with awe upon the pile of gold in the centre of the room, higher than her house had been at the time. It had glittered a bright, shiny yellow from the vents in the cavern’s ceiling, and she had seen a thousand different types of gold coin, plates and platters, pieces of jewellery, busts, shields… When she had heard the rumble of noise down the great corridor, twenty times the size of the one she had come through, she had thrown herself back into the narrow little hall she’d walked down — a corridor that now, as a woman, she would have to crawl through on her hands and knees. She had seen the dragon, a great beast with dark maroon scales come into the room and curl itself around its pile of treasure, seeming to bask in its reflected light as a cat in a sunbeam. It had never occurred to her, even then, that she would steal any of the dragon’s gold — it as not what occurred to her now. Forty years ago, now, after a dragon had been killed on the Hourglass Continent, somewhere in the vicinity of Nez, the healers there had discovered that the dragon’s scales, owing to certain properties in their make-up, and how magically rich they were, were excellent as reagents for all manner of healing potions and remedies. They allowed for the stabilisation of very risky combinations of ingredients, particularly those best for an emergency — blood replenishment potions, certain antidotes, and other mixtures that were vital in assisting a very ill or badly injured patient. They were vital, but rare. Creeping slowly down one of the corridors, she hugged closely to one of the walls, and smelled the strange, metallic scent of gold on the air as she came closer to the great cavern. The dragon was asleep. She could see its huge side, see its scales which were the colour of undiluted wine, a thick, red-purple, a strange maroon. Where it rested, she could see its huge chest rising and falling, wrapped tightly around its treasure — that pile of treasure which grew larger every year. She had thought, as a child, that dragons ate gold. It seemed clear to her now that they did not. Gerta took her dagger from her belt, and slipped slowly into the great cavern, her boots as silent as possible on the sand. She synchronised her movements with the dragons deafening, growled snores, and found the first great pile of shed scales. Dragons had a decorative ruff on their chests of hard, horny scales that stuck out — they would slip free if they received a blow against their torsos, at times, but every spring, she had come to know, dragons — or at least, thisdragon — shed the scales from the chest and grew a new ruff. The pattern changed every year, she thought. Perhaps it was done consciously. Cutting away the excess thin, filmy layer of skin that stuck between the hardened scales themselves, each of them a little bit larger than her palm in size, she began to carefully pack them into her satchel, pressed tightly against one another so that when she stood again, they wouldn’t rattle. She moved quickly, gracefully, and although her dagger moved swift and sharp through the shed skin and leathery, heavy scales, her body barely moved at all, to keep from her armour making any unnecessary sound. Gerta remembered the morning, decades upon decades years ago, that she had thought to take from the dragon’s cavern one of its shed talons or teeth, something to impress Mariela. How foolhardy she’d been, how madly unhinged: when she had returned with a satchel of smooth, dry skin wrapped around the heavy scales, she’d scarcely known what it was she had. Mariela had kissed her so passionately, had all but wept with delight and joy, and the curesshe had made… Satchel full, Gerta rose to her feet — And froze as one of her greaves creaked. In front of her, she could see the dragon’s huge head, large enough that it could swallow five of her without even chewing, where on every exhale between snores, smoke rose up from its huge nostrils. Its eyes opened. She had never looked into the eyes of a dragon before — very few people alive had. The people at the Draconic Church said that dragons had golden eyes, but she had never before now thought to consider what that meant. The dragon’s eyes shone. Each as large across as a cart wheel, unconscionably massive, they glittered as gold did, and the colour in them was not like the colour in a human’s eyes, where the iris was scattered with pigment, but seemed, in some way, liquid and alive. Her dagger would not be able to pierce the dragon’s thick hide. Her only hope, if the dragon grabbed for her with its teeth, each of which were as large as the blade she carried herself, was that her armour would save her from the bulk of injury, that she could crawl to safety in one of the narrow corridors, and that in some days, Mariela would send someone for her. Gerta barely dared even to breathe. The dragon did not move an inch. For what felt like hours, and yet couldn’t have been longer than two minutes, Gerta stayed frozen in place, half to her feet, and the dragon remained quite still, its chin laid upon the back of its folded caws, its gaze fixed on her. With every exhalation, more smoke rose slowly from its nose, and she could smell the smoke — more like the result of burning sulphur than woodsmoke. She could glean no expression in its face, although it was preached that dragons were intelligent, and carried in them more wisdom than the Gods: it just stared at her, staying so very still she could almost believe it was still asleep, but with its eyes open, like a fish. Hesitantly, keeping the satchel tightly gripped against her side, she took a step back. The dragon didn’t move. She took another. Impassively, it watched her as she made her way back to the wall, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her throat, and when she fell back into the corridor, she stumbled, but then sprinted as fast as her old legs could carry her back out to the mountainside. Every part of her body, in that aftermath, ached. She stumbled, clumsy, down to where Montebello was waiting for her, slinging the satchel onto his back, and apparently sensing that she was struggling, he knelt to allow her to climb into the saddle. She didn’t even need to lead him forward: she fell forward in the saddle, pressed her face against the hair of his mane, and let him choose their path back down the mountainside. Eventually, her breathing evened out, and her heart slowed in its fast, fast beat: the cold sweat remained on her body, clammy under her armour, and she tried her best not to shiver as she rode onward. Gerta did not stop for rest or water, and Montebello allowed it: as he tucked into the feast Mariela had left out for him, not expecting her wife or their horse home until the dawn, Mariela rushed into the house, where Mariela was sitting beside the fire, separating the petals from the stems of flowers for medicine. “Gerta,” she said when Gerta came inside, her mouth falling open. “You’re back so early, are you — ” Gerta grabbed her, held Mariela tight to her, and buried her face in Mariela’s hair. Mariela softened, hushing her as she wrapped her arms around Gerta’s waist, and leaned back to press their noses together. She touched Gerta’s cheeks, her hair, her chin, kissed her so softly. “Oh, my love,” Mariela said quietly. “You are home now: I have you.” Mariela, with gentle hands, divulged her wife of her armour. It was the last time she would ever do so. * * * The next spring, Helvetta Turbin, who had been apprenticed to the town’s two healers for some years, rode north in borrowed armour, thinking she would creep through the cavernous halls of the Sweet Mountain to steal into the dragon’s cavern, and take its shed scales. In the end, she did not need to. The corridor Gerta had marked for her to enter through had been blocked off some fifteen feet down the passage by stacked stones. Helvetta would have thought it was a natural collapse, if not for the shed dragon scales piled there, waiting for a healer to take them.
“Oh,” Mariela said softly when she rolled over in bed, and saw Gerta on her feet. Standing in the centre of their small bedroom, Gerta had already pulled her chain on over her head, and was now in the process of fastening the studded plate of her jerkin around her waist, pulling the belt taut to settle it properly on her body. “Is it that time of the year already?” “The daffodils are in bloom,” Gerta said, picking up her bracers and beginning to fasten them onto her arms. In her youth, in service to the city, she had worn this armour every day, as a guard, and as a knight protector, but she was long-retired from such business now. Her limbs were too tired and too old to stand the daily march about the castles’ walls, let alone anything else. But today — Today, she would wear her armour, as she did every spring. “You needn’t go yourself,” Mariela said in a quiet voice, and Gerta turned to look at her wife where she curled comfortably beneath the sheets, looking up at Gerta with her beautiful eyes half-lidded still with sleep. Mariela had never cared for early mornings, and Gerta stepped forward on silent feet, gently cupping Mariela’s cheek, and Mariela leaned into the warmth of Gerta’s palm, made rough with decades of holding a sword, and stained by a decade longer of brewing potions and making poultices. “What good are our apprentices, if you would not trust them with this?” “What good is an old woman,” replied Gerta, “if she would have a youth of nineteen undertake a risk she would not?” “You aren’t so old,” Mariela mumbled, her eyes falling closed, no matter that she tried her best to keep her head. It was scarce even light outside. “You have much to live for.” “I am holding everything that matters in my hand,” Gerta agreed, still cupping Mariela’s cheek as she slowly fell back upon the pillow. “I shall return tomorrow morning.” “You’d better,” Mariela mumbled, and Gerta pulled away. It would be a fine day when the sun rose fully above the horizon, and she wanted to be well out of the city by that point. Taking up her belt and putting it about her waist, making sure her dagger was in its scabbard, she made her way into the other room, picking up her satchel and putting the kettle on the fire, that Mariela would have warm stew awaiting her when she rose for breakfast. “It’s spring again, Montebello,” she told their horse as she came out into the yard, already saddled as he was, and Montebello looked at her for a moment, pensive, before he bent his knees slightly and allowed her to climb atop his back. Taking up the reins, she looked at the house she and Mariela had built together, all those years ago. She looked at Mariela’s beautifully-kept herb garden, at the crystals hanging from their windows, and thought about her wife still asleep in their bed. She always did this, before she set off for this annual pilgrimage: she took in their home together, and committed its every detail to memory. She prayed it would not be the last time she would do so, and set off. Riding so early as she was in the morning, there was no one in the streets to see her as she passed by, which was how she preferred it. She had some ride ahead of her over the plains known as the Sweetlands, before she made it to the mountain, and she spent the day in pensive silence, passing no one on the roads. She stopped twice along the way, once to collect some nasturtiums growing by the side of the Pink River, for the sake of their petals and their roots, and once to fill her water skein and eat some bread and butter. Gerta saw, on a path further down the plain, a hunting party moving out, no doubt performing the vital culls of some species in the nearby Faerie Woods. The deer, particularly, had been breeding over much this year, and she knew that the Crown had been encouraging the people to add more venison to their diets, to cull their populations down before they destroyed every tree in the woods. The mountain loomed over her and Montebello. It was late afternoon by now, and rising in thick, grey furls from the mountain’s top, she could see swathes of smoke. Some people in the Sweetlands thought the Sweet Mountain was a volcano. Gerta knew better. As she and Montebello began to ascend the mountain, she checked her dagger in its holster, and felt the weight of her armour on her shoulders. Even just riding like so, it felt so very heavy — had there really been a time, all those years ago, when it had felt like naught more than a second skin, made up of barely any weight at all? Could there really have been a time, long ago, when she was young? She was still graceful in her armour, for now, but Mariela had been right — this pilgrimage would not be one she was up to pursuing forever, and perhaps not for many more years at all. Already, her reflexes were slower, and while she still walked very silently, it would take only one unfortunate clink of chain upon chain, one creak of leather pleat against leather pleat, for her life to be over. Absolute silence was crucial. Gerta had found the entrance to the cave system in the Sweet Mountain when she’d still been just a little girl. Stumbling through the corridors, having run away from home over some argument with her sisters, she’d thought of living in the mountains forever. The dragon was even bigger, now, than it had been then. She still remembered vividly how it had felt, stepping into that great, cavernous room, her feet making soft noise on the sandy floor, and looking with awe upon the pile of gold in the centre of the room, higher than her house had been at the time. It had glittered a bright, shiny yellow from the vents in the cavern’s ceiling, and she had seen a thousand different types of gold coin, plates and platters, pieces of jewellery, busts, shields… When she had heard the rumble of noise down the great corridor, twenty times the size of the one she had come through, she had thrown herself back into the narrow little hall she’d walked down — a corridor that now, as a woman, she would have to crawl through on her hands and knees. She had seen the dragon, a great beast with dark maroon scales come into the room and curl itself around its pile of treasure, seeming to bask in its reflected light as a cat in a sunbeam. It had never occurred to her, even then, that she would steal any of the dragon’s gold — it as not what occurred to her now. Forty years ago, now, after a dragon had been killed on the Hourglass Continent, somewhere in the vicinity of Nez, the healers there had discovered that the dragon’s scales, owing to certain properties in their make-up, and how magically rich they were, were excellent as reagents for all manner of healing potions and remedies. They allowed for the stabilisation of very risky combinations of ingredients, particularly those best for an emergency — blood replenishment potions, certain antidotes, and other mixtures that were vital in assisting a very ill or badly injured patient. They were vital, but rare. Creeping slowly down one of the corridors, she hugged closely to one of the walls, and smelled the strange, metallic scent of gold on the air as she came closer to the great cavern. The dragon was asleep. She could see its huge side, see its scales which were the colour of undiluted wine, a thick, red-purple, a strange maroon. Where it rested, she could see its huge chest rising and falling, wrapped tightly around its treasure — that pile of treasure which grew larger every year. She had thought, as a child, that dragons ate gold. It seemed clear to her now that they did not. Gerta took her dagger from her belt, and slipped slowly into the great cavern, her boots as silent as possible on the sand. She synchronised her movements with the dragons deafening, growled snores, and found the first great pile of shed scales. Dragons had a decorative ruff on their chests of hard, horny scales that stuck out — they would slip free if they received a blow against their torsos, at times, but every spring, she had come to know, dragons — or at least, thisdragon — shed the scales from the chest and grew a new ruff. The pattern changed every year, she thought. Perhaps it was done consciously. Cutting away the excess thin, filmy layer of skin that stuck between the hardened scales themselves, each of them a little bit larger than her palm in size, she began to carefully pack them into her satchel, pressed tightly against one another so that when she stood again, they wouldn’t rattle. She moved quickly, gracefully, and although her dagger moved swift and sharp through the shed skin and leathery, heavy scales, her body barely moved at all, to keep from her armour making any unnecessary sound. Gerta remembered the morning, decades upon decades years ago, that she had thought to take from the dragon’s cavern one of its shed talons or teeth, something to impress Mariela. How foolhardy she’d been, how madly unhinged: when she had returned with a satchel of smooth, dry skin wrapped around the heavy scales, she’d scarcely known what it was she had. Mariela had kissed her so passionately, had all but wept with delight and joy, and the curesshe had made… Satchel full, Gerta rose to her feet — And froze as one of her greaves creaked. In front of her, she could see the dragon’s huge head, large enough that it could swallow five of her without even chewing, where on every exhale between snores, smoke rose up from its huge nostrils. Its eyes opened. She had never looked into the eyes of a dragon before — very few people alive had. The people at the Draconic Church said that dragons had golden eyes, but she had never before now thought to consider what that meant. The dragon’s eyes shone. Each as large across as a cart wheel, unconscionably massive, they glittered as gold did, and the colour in them was not like the colour in a human’s eyes, where the iris was scattered with pigment, but seemed, in some way, liquid and alive. Her dagger would not be able to pierce the dragon’s thick hide. Her only hope, if the dragon grabbed for her with its teeth, each of which were as large as the blade she carried herself, was that her armour would save her from the bulk of injury, that she could crawl to safety in one of the narrow corridors, and that in some days, Mariela would send someone for her. Gerta barely dared even to breathe. The dragon did not move an inch. For what felt like hours, and yet couldn’t have been longer than two minutes, Gerta stayed frozen in place, half to her feet, and the dragon remained quite still, its chin laid upon the back of its folded caws, its gaze fixed on her. With every exhalation, more smoke rose slowly from its nose, and she could smell the smoke — more like the result of burning sulphur than woodsmoke. She could glean no expression in its face, although it was preached that dragons were intelligent, and carried in them more wisdom than the Gods: it just stared at her, staying so very still she could almost believe it was still asleep, but with its eyes open, like a fish. Hesitantly, keeping the satchel tightly gripped against her side, she took a step back. The dragon didn’t move. She took another. Impassively, it watched her as she made her way back to the wall, her heart beating so hard she could feel it in her throat, and when she fell back into the corridor, she stumbled, but then sprinted as fast as her old legs could carry her back out to the mountainside. Every part of her body, in that aftermath, ached. She stumbled, clumsy, down to where Montebello was waiting for her, slinging the satchel onto his back, and apparently sensing that she was struggling, he knelt to allow her to climb into the saddle. She didn’t even need to lead him forward: she fell forward in the saddle, pressed her face against the hair of his mane, and let him choose their path back down the mountainside. Eventually, her breathing evened out, and her heart slowed in its fast, fast beat: the cold sweat remained on her body, clammy under her armour, and she tried her best not to shiver as she rode onward. Gerta did not stop for rest or water, and Montebello allowed it: as he tucked into the feast Mariela had left out for him, not expecting her wife or their horse home until the dawn, Mariela rushed into the house, where Mariela was sitting beside the fire, separating the petals from the stems of flowers for medicine. “Gerta,” she said when Gerta came inside, her mouth falling open. “You’re back so early, are you — ” Gerta grabbed her, held Mariela tight to her, and buried her face in Mariela’s hair. Mariela softened, hushing her as she wrapped her arms around Gerta’s waist, and leaned back to press their noses together. She touched Gerta’s cheeks, her hair, her chin, kissed her so softly. “Oh, my love,” Mariela said quietly. “You are home now: I have you.” Mariela, with gentle hands, divulged her wife of her armour. It was the last time she would ever do so. * * * The next spring, Helvetta Turbin, who had been apprenticed to the town’s two healers for some years, rode north in borrowed armour, thinking she would creep through the cavernous halls of the Sweet Mountain to steal into the dragon’s cavern, and take its shed scales. In the end, she did not need to. The corridor Gerta had marked for her to enter through had been blocked off some fifteen feet down the passage by stacked stones. Helvetta would have thought it was a natural collapse, if not for the shed dragon scales piled there, waiting for a healer to take them.
Content Tags
Rated T for Teen Audiences. Published September 3rd 2020. Approximately 2800 words.
Setting: The Sweetlands, on the Dragonplanet.
Characters: Two wives married many years. One is an ex-knight, now healer, the other a healer and apothecary.
Genre & Tone: Fantasy. Hopeful, kind.
Themes: Sacrifice and Risk.
Content: Dragons.
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