Entry 212 in the Fenmule grazing ledger, dated the ninth of Dustmonth, reads in full: "Brass wyrm on Ledgegoat Ridge talked to Pike's two nanny goats from the fourth hour past noon until dark. Goats unharmed. Pike unharmed. Pike now owes the wyrm an opinion." The clerk never explains the last sentence, and nobody at Fenmule has been asked to.
I climb to the ridge on the evening of the twelfth. Fenmule is a dry basin named for a marsh that vanished before anyone's grandmother was born, and Ledgegoat is the cracked sandstone shelf above it where the goats go for shade. The wyrm is already there, laid out in a long S along the rock. Its scales are the yellow of an old doorknob, dull at the elbows from leaning on them, bright along the spine. Its ears are broad ribbed fans like beaten tin, with a dent in the left one, and they swing toward me before its head does. It begins to speak when I am still forty paces off. The subject is the river crossing downstream, its true width, and the error of everyone who has ever guessed at it.
I take the measurement the only way the situation allows. At sunset I stand a ten-foot surveyor's pole upright beside the rock and mark on the sandstone where the shadows of its nose and tail end. Three pole-lengths, so thirty feet. The wyrm notices the pole. For the first time in an hour it stops, asks what I am doing, and when I tell it, corrects my pole. I have set it slightly crooked, and it is right. Then it rears onto its hind legs against the orange sky, jaw hinged wide, one foreleg raised, and lectures on the river for another forty minutes while sand sifts off its belly in a thin steady stream. Between sentences it eats: a strip of dried fish from a flat rock, then a mouthful of the ridge itself, swallowed without chewing.
Bram Oakes, who grazes forty goats at the foot of Ledgegoat, says the wyrm is harmless and the only trouble is that it remembers who yawned. His late brother was the yawner, and the wyrm still will not look at the left side of Oakes's face. Darkness ends the lecture. It stops mid-clause, folds down onto the rock, and says "as I was saying" to nothing at all before it sleeps. Herders give one instruction to anyone going up: leave a strip of dried fish on the flat rock, sit down when it starts talking, and do not stand again until it says it is finished.
- Classification
- Metallic dragon, desert-dwelling
- Habitat
- Sandstone ridges and dry basins
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 30 ft nose to tail
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- The dry country
- Binomial
- Draco aurichalcus
- Diet
- Dried fish, cured goat, sand
- Temperament
- Chatty, sociable, easily slighted