How to Slay a Dragon

BY THE FIRST LIGHT OF DAWN, Steven was up with his bedroll packed and his staff in his hand. Jasper arose sleepily and slowly.

“Do we have to leave already?” he said plaintively. “It’s hardly morning.”

“You don’t have to leave, my friend,” said Steven, “but I want to be on the road and searching for the dragon.”

“Can you wait while I get ready?” Jasper asked. Reluctantly, Steven agreed, but couldn’t help pacing back and forth in impatience. 103,320. 103,321. Steven had added three hundred thirty-three steps before Jasper picked up a small parcel and slung it over his shoulder.

“Is that all?” Steven asked, in disbelief.

“I don’t have much,” said Jasper. “I’ve never really needed anything that people didn’t just give me.”

Steven shrugged and the two headed out of Lastford on the main road. The skies were gray and there was a hint of moisture in the air. Steven was glad for the warm wool of his walking shirt as he picked up his pace to the comfortable one hundred steps per minute that meant he was on a smooth and secure path.

Jasper lagged behind and then jogged to catch up. He talked to Steven at a rapid pace for several minutes and then gradually fell behind again. Jogging to catch up again, he asked breathlessly, “Why do you walk so fast? I can hardly keep up. Can’t you slow down a little?”

To Steven, the pace was not anything like the one hundred twenty steps per minute that he considered a hard walk. Nonetheless, he tried to moderate his pace to match Jasper, but kept gradually drawing ahead and Jasper would jog to catch up and complain that Steven was walking too fast.

Jasper spent most of the time talking as fast as they were walking, asking questions but seldom waiting for an answer. But one question he asked set Steven thinking, and lost in thought he was a great deal ahead of Jasper when the boy ran to catch up again.

“How are you going to kill the dragon?” Jasper had asked.

Now that was a good question. In fact, it was a question he had asked himself and others many times. The hunter had taught him to set traps and to shoot the bow and arrow when he was still a youngster. Since then he had assumed that he would have to make a bow and arrow of his own and that he would shoot the dragon in one of the two vital spots the hunter had described for most animals: the neck just behind the back of the skull, or the heart. Now the neck of a dragon could be armored. In that case he would have to shoot for the heart. Steven was not precisely certain where the heart was, not being at all certain what a dragon looked like. So, he had asked many people over the years how they thought he would kill the dragon.

“Mother, mother,” he had pestered her when he was still tagging along at her heels. “How will I kill the dragon?”

“Well,” she had said, “you will be clever and surprise it.”

“But how will I kill it?”

“Well, perhaps you will stab it?” The young Steven considered this for a moment. To stab the creature, he would need to have a knife, and those were strictly forbidden.

“But I’m too little to have a knife. You said,” he complained. “How can I kill it without a knife?”

“Well, you aren’t too little to hit it with a stone,” she had replied. Steven thought some more.

“But what if it is really, really big?” His exasperated mother was at her wits’ end trying to answer the question.

“Steven, I don’t know how you will kill the dragon,” she had said in irritation. “I don’t even know what a dragon looks like. Perhaps you are a kind of poisonous animal and when the dragon eats you, he will die of a stomachache. Or perhaps you will simply talk it to death!”

That had served to silence Steven as he considered for the first time that slaying the dragon might not mean that he would return home victorious. His mission in life might, in fact, cost him his life.

Now and then, when a gust of wind blew up, Steven could hear the bone in his hatband make a whistling noise. It was not unpleasant. As he walked with or in front of Jasper, tuning out the boy’s chatter and complaining, he focused on counting his steps and thinking about how to kill the dragon. 109,682. 109,683.

He had studied herbology with the wise woman. He had studied ritual magic with the shaman. He had studied tracking with the hunter. He had even studied storytelling with the teacher and politics with the elder. He had many skills, but still had no real understanding of what a dragon was and how it should be speedily dispatched. He imagined it to be a winged serpent that breathed fire. His first encounter with a winged serpent, however, had been a snake and a duck locked in mortal combat.

What part of a snake would be considered its neck? he wondered. How could I get close enough to poison the dragon without being eaten? What magic ritual might I invent to immobilize the dragon as I slay it? How can I ever fulfill my destiny and return to my little village a hero?

There was a sudden crack of thunder that broke Steven’s reverie and caused Jasper to scream. In an instant, the rain had begun in earnest. Steven pulled the flap of his oilskin pack over his head and continued to trudge onward, now slowed to less than his most stately eighty steps per minute. But even at this pace, Jasper—wet and bedraggled—had difficulty keeping up. He was tired and wet, and soon the inevitable happened. Like the child he was inside, he broke down in the middle of the road and wept.