Jacinto Reis, who grazes forty goats below Serra Vedra, says the dragon is a lazy animal that has found a good rock and means to keep it. His neighbor across the gully, a wool dyer named Marta, says it is a thief with a grudge. Both have watched it for years, and my notes from late summer through the thaw give each of them something.
In late summer the dragon, forty feet from nose to tail, leaves its scree hollow only when the light turns amber. Its first chore comes before that, in the cool of the morning, and it is dull work. It walks the gravel flats and swallows stones, a dozen or so, one after another, the way a hen takes grit. Then it climbs a smooth boulder above the village of Azinhal and rests its wide, flat chin on it. The hide is charcoal, the belly a banked red. The wings are oversized and torn, and the left one has a single notch missing from its edge. Around the left foreleg hangs the scorched fringe of a red wool blanket, snagged on a claw. Marta swears the blanket came off her drying line. Jacinto says it caught the fringe on a thornbush and cannot be bothered to shake it off. In Azinhal no one hangs red wool outdoors anymore. It dries in the loft, and children are told why.
At the first frost the sulking stops and the feeding starts. The dragon drops to the flats and takes goats, oxen, and now and then a stray sheep, and then it goes back up the ridge to digest. It leaves glassy black drips on the scree, each the size of a thumb, where its throat has run hot over the gravel. Shepherds in Azinhal read these like tracks. Warm glass means it fed within the day, and the herds stay off the flats until the glass goes cold. Strangers make a different error. A sleeping dragon at dusk, sooty and domed, looks exactly like a charcoal burner's clamp, a mound of slag left smoldering. The difference is that a clamp does not breathe, and a hand held near the belly feels the ember glow rise and fall.
Through deep winter the animal barely moves. It lies on gravel it has warmed and fused, the glow in its throat gone to a dull orange, its amber eyes half shut. In the thaw it is back on the boulder and easily startled. A dropped pail in the village below sends it rearing, the ragged wings snapping half open, the fringe swinging from its claw, and then it settles again with an offended look. Marta calls that proof of guilt. Jacinto calls it proof of nerves. The dragon has carried a scrap of one woman's blanket through three winters and has never shaken it loose from a claw that could split an ox. Nobody in Azinhal can say whether it keeps the fringe on purpose.
- Classification
- Winged fire-breathing reptile
- Habitat
- Scree ridges and gravel flats
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 40 ft nose to tail
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Cinder Fells highlands
- Binomial
- Pyrosaurus cinerarius
- Diet
- Goats, oxen, occasional stray sheep
- Temperament
- Territorial, sulky, rarely aggressive