Here there be dragons Read online

  The king laughed and slapped his leg. "Yes, yes!" he cried out. "Bring it on, William! Bring it on! Medium-sized, and with colored lights, mind you!"

  "Yes, your highness," said William, taking a tiny package from beneath the table and placing it before him. It is in here."

  "It seems a pretty small package," said the king.

  "Yes," said the first adviser.

  "Yes indeed," said the second.

  "Much too small," said the third.

  The king opened the package. Bell jumped out and stood upon the table.

  The three advisers laughed. The knights laughed. They laughed and laughed until the tears came into their eyes.

  "That is supposed to be a medium-sized dragon, with colored lights?" they asked. "Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!"

  And they laughed and laughed and laughed some more, until Bell stood up on his tiny hind legs and turned to William and asked, "Now?"

  "Now," he said.

  Then something happened. Bell had been the color of the oakwood table, but now he was dark, red-green in color and seemed slightly larger than he had been. He opened his mouth, and a tiny spark came out of it.

  Then he was bigger than the package he had come out of. He was twice as big as he had been only a moment before. He opened his mouth again, and the king drew back away from the flame that emerged.

  Then Bell was as big as a man, and the platters rattled as they fell upon the floor, pushed away from him while he grew.

  And he kept growing. He grew and he grew, until the table broke in half beneath him. He grew until he filled half the great banquet hall.

  He opened his mouth and roared with a sound like thunder. Flames shot forth from the windows of the palace and lighted up the courtyard outside. Tapestries were scorched. Women screamed and backed against the wall. Seven knights fainted, and the captain of the King's Guard ran and hid himself behind the throne.

  William felt something crawling across his foot, and he looked down under what was left of the table. The first three advisers were crouched there, shivering.

  "Well?" he asked them. "Yes, it is a very good dragon," answered the first.

  "Only it is not a medium-sized one," said the second.

  "No, it is a large, economy-sized dragon," said the third.

  "He was the best I could manage on such short notice," said William, smiling.

  The king pushed the princess behind his back and stood facing the dragon.

  "My, you're a big one," he said. "Please do be careful with those flames. There are expensive tapestries and people and things like that about."

  The dragon laughed. No one else did.

  "I am Belkis," he roared, "king of the dragons! You are only a human king, so do not give me orders!"

  "But I am sovereign majesty of a mighty kingdom," said the king, "and my word is law. I order. I really do order. And I am always obeyed. So please do not go about burning tapestries and people and things like that."

  Belkis laughed again, and the flames danced about the rafters.

  "No one orders Belkis to do or not to do anything. I am only here for one reason. I want to meet your Royal Cartographer, Mister Gibberling. Produce him!"

  Chapter 6

  AND THE KING BACKED AWAY.

  "That is Mister Gibberling down at the end of the table you just broke," he said. "The man with the white beard. The one still holding a glass in his hand."

  "Aha! Mister Gibberling! So we meet at last!" snarled Belkis. Mister Gibberling, who was indeed an old man, rose slowly to his feet.

  "Uh I don't quite understand ..." he began.

  "You are the one who is giving dragons a bad name," said Belkis.

  "Wh-what do you mean?" asked Mister Gibberling.

  "Your maps! Your stupid, nasty little maps!" said Belkis, burning the edges of Mister Gibberling's beard as he spoke.

  "'Here There Be Dragons'! That is absurd! That is cheating! It is the refuge of a small mind!"

  "Yes ! Yes !" agreed Mister Gibberling, putting out his beard by emptying his wine-cup over it. "You are right! I have always felt mine to be quite small!"

  "I want you to know that over the past several thousand years we dragons have taken great pains to stay out of the way of humans," said Belkis. "We have even taken to assuming other forms such as that of the little lizard Bell, which you saw a bit earlier. We do not want people to know that we are still about or they will be forever pestering us. Take any foolish young knight out to make a name for himself: What is the first thing he does?"

  "I don't know," said Mister Gibberling.

  "I will tell you," said Belkis. "He looks for a dragon to kill. If he can't locate any, though, he finds something else to do. Perhaps even something constructive. But you with your dragon-filled maps! - you are keeping the old legend alive when we want it to die. We want people to forget, to leave us alone.

  Every time some young squire gets hold of one of your maps, he has visions of heading for the mountains around here in order to make some rank, to get to be a knight by killing dragons. This leaves dragons with the choice of eating them all or trying to ignore them. There are too many and most of them pretty tasteless, not to mention hard to clean. So we attempt to ignore them. This is often very difficult, and it is your fault. You have been responsible for maintaining a thing better forgotten.

  Also," he stated, "you are a very poor geographer."

  "My father was Royal Cartographer, and his father before him," said Mister Gibberling.

  "What does that have to do with you?" asked Belkis. "You are a poor geographer."

  "What do you mean?"

  "What lies over those mountains?" asked Belkis, gesturing with a scaly wing.

  "Drag Oh! I mean more mountains, sir," said Mister Gibberling.

  "Admit it! You do not know!" said Belkis.

  "All right! I don't know!" cried Mister Gibberling.

  "Good," said Belkis. "That's something, anyway. Have you quills and ink and parchment handy?"

  "No," said Mister Gibberling.

  "Then go get them!" roared Belkis. "And be quick about it!"

  "Yes, sir!" said Mister Gibberling, stumbling over his cloak as he dashed from the hall.

  ". . . Be very quick about it!" said Belkis, flaming. "Or I will take this place apart, stone by stone, and drag you out by your whiskers like a rat from a brick heap!"

  Mister Gibberling was back in record time. While he was gone, though, Belkis ate three roasted pigs and a dozen chickens with dumplings. Then he roared again and scorched the ceiling and charred the throne.

  "You have them now?" he asked.

  "Yes, yes! Right here! See?" "Very good. You are coming with me now."

  And with that, he seized Mister Gibberling's cloak in his talons and flew out through the great double-door at the end of the hall, through which the Honor Guard sometimes entered on horseback. He took him high into the sky and they both vanished from sight.

  "I wonder where he is taking him?" asked the third adviser.

  "It is probably better not to think about it," said the first.

  "We'd better get to work cleaning up this mess," said William.

  Chapter 7

  AND THEY FLEW far beyond the kingdom, and Belkis pointed out to Mister Gibberling that there were other kingdoms, and that there were rivers and lakes and other mountains, and valleys and plateaus and deserts, and ports and pastures and farms and granaries, and ships on the ocean and armies in the fields.

  Every now and then he would say, "Are you getting that all down on paper?" and Mister Gibberling would answer, "Yes! Yes!" and he would scratch away with his quill and record all of the places which really existed in those spots where he had always been accustomed to write HERE THERE BE DRAGONS.

  Much later, they returned. Belkis set Mister Gibberling down in the courtyard, perching himself upon the wall like some great, red-green bird.

  "Have you learned your lesson?" he asked.

  "Yes. Yes, sir, great Belkis, sir," s
aid Mister Gibberling, clutching his maps close to him, as if for protection.

  "Then I will leave you now," said Belkis, "and I expect you to make good maps from now on. And remember this," he added, "I want you to forget about dragons."

  "Yes, I promise," said Mister Gibberling. "I will forget all about dragons."

  "See that you do," said Belkis, "or I will hear of it and I will return. You would not like that."

  "No, no I wouldn't!"

  "Then good-bye." And Belkis spread his great wings and rose into the sky. No one in the kingdom ever saw him again.

  After that, though, the king came to listen to William more than he did to his other advisers, and soon William became his first adviser and his old first adviser became his new fourth adviser.

  And Mister Gibberling went on to draw beautiful maps, showing all of the things he had seen other kingdoms and rivers and lakes and other mountains, valleys and plateaus and deserts, ports and pastures, farms and granaries. His maps were quite good, and after a time people were no longer afraid of dragons and they began to go over the mountains and to trade with people in other kingdoms, and to learn of them, and to have other people come to visit them.

  After a time, the king came to realize that his kingdom was not so large as he had once thought it to be, and he encouraged commerce, to make his kingdom prosper and grow.

  One day, though, while he was studying one of the new maps, the king said, "My, but there are so many seas in the world!"

  "Yes, sire," said William. "That appears to be true."

  "I wonder what lies beyond them?" asked the king.

  "Perhaps they go on forever and ever," said William, "or perhaps there are other lands beyond them."

  The king nodded. "I believe I will ask the Royal Cartographer," he said, "since he has recently had a postgraduate course in cartography."

  So he went to the chambers of Mister Gibberling and asked him, "What lies beyond all those seas which your maps show as bordering the lands?"

  Mister Gibberling stroked his beard (which had grown back in again) and he studied a map for a long while. Then he picked up his quill, and with a great flourish of the feather he wrote (in fancy letters) in that place at the farthest edge of all the waters:

  -HERE THERE BE SEA SERPENTS-

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