Beasts and Monsters Read online

  His father was a high-ranking officer in the Roman army and for a time George followed in his footsteps, serving as a soldier under the Emperor Diocletian. He was brought up by Christian parents and he travelled the world, spreading the gospel and doing good.

  His encounter with the dragon happened at a small town called Silene. And this is where the story begins.

  The people of Silene had lived in fear of the dragon for many years. It lived in a cave on the edge of a stagnant lagoon, a few miles from the town. Now the vapours from this lagoon would often be carried by the wind into the town and the people came to believe that the dragon was responsible for the rotten smell that seeped through their streets. So they began to feed the dragon two sheep every day in the hope that it would go away. This was, of course, a particularly stupid idea and had exactly the opposite effect. Because once the dragon got used to the idea that it was going to receive a free meal at twelve o’clock regularly, it decided that the townspeople must be genuinely fond of it and actually wanted it to stay. Certainly it had no idea that they were afraid.

  This went on for a number of years until, not surprisingly, the townspeople began to run out of sheep. So a council was called at which all the local politicians, along with the king himself, met to decide what to do.

  The minister for external affairs was the first to speak. ‘My honourable friends,’ he began. ‘This is a serious situation. Indeed, I am tempted to say that this is a crisis. We have no chops. We have no shepherd’s pie. We have a shortage of wool. And why? Because we have given away all our sheep! And still this dragon refuses to go away.’

  ‘Hear! hear!’ all the other councillors cried, although in fact the minister hadn’t said anything that they didn’t already know.

  The leader of the opposition got to his feet. ‘I would like to remind the council,’ he said, ‘that I was always opposed to the policy of giving sheep to the dragon. If we had given it chickens, as I suggested, we would not now be facing this crisis. This is another example of government incompetence. The government’s behaviour can only be described as . . . sheepish!’

  His friends all laughed at this rather feeble joke. But now the minister for internal affairs leaped up. ‘The council’s policy of giving sheep to the dragon has been a great success,’ he said. ‘Even though it is true that the dragon has not gone away yet, all the signs are that it will go away quite soon. We just need to feed it a bit more.’

  There was a general outbreak of booing and shouting. Papers were waved, torn up and scattered until the Speaker, who was in charge of the council, had to call for order.

  The minister for ministerial affairs stepped forward. ‘If, as my honourable friend suggests, we are running out of sheep,’ he suggested, ‘we could try giving it something else.’

  This produced a sudden hush as the other councillors considered the alternatives.

  Then the king spoke, and his face was grim. ‘It is well known,’ he said, ‘that dragons like the taste of children. It seems to me, therefore, that there is no alternative. We must give him our children. Once a week we will feed the dragon with our sons and daughters.’

  For a moment, nobody spoke. The entire council was alarmed, but nobody wanted to argue with the king. After all, they had their careers to think about.

  ‘I’m not sure this will go down well with the voters,’ someone muttered.

  ‘How will we choose the children?’ someone else asked.

  ‘We will have a lottery,’ the king replied. ‘Every child in the town will be given a number. Once a week a number will be drawn out of a hat. The child that has that number will be given to the dragon in order to save the town.’ He rose to his feet. ‘That is my law,’ he concluded. ‘There are to be no exceptions.’

  Three months passed, during which time no fewer than a dozen children were seized by the royal guard, torn away from their weeping parents and then tied up and left outside the dragon’s cave. Seven boys and five girls met this terrible end, the flesh picked so cleanly from their bones that the little skeletons gleamed pure white in the morning sunlight. As for the dragon, it noticed the change in its feeding. It was even a trifle puzzled. But the king had been quite right to say that it would like the taste. In fact it had been getting bored with sheep and found the children a welcome change. Needless to say, if it had been thinking about moving on, it now decided to stay exactly where it was and even considered inviting a few friends to join it.

  By the time George arrived, an atmosphere had descended on Silene more poisonous than any mist that had been blown in from the lagoon. Every Tuesday, the day of the lottery, the streets were so silent that if the town had become a cemetery nobody would have noticed the difference. Few people left their homes, and those that did went about their business with pale faces, their mouths stretched in a grimace of fear, each avoiding the others’ eyes. Then at midday a bell would ring. Soldiers would knock on the door of a house somewhere in the town. A terrible cry of pain and depair would break the silence. And everywhere parents would hug their children and thank the gods that their number had not been drawn.

  George came on a Tuesday afternoon, a few hours after one of the lotteries had ended. It didn’t take him long to find out what was happening in Silene and when he did find out he shook his head, half in astonishment, half in despair. Straight away he went to the palace to find the king, and as he walked into the throne room he heard the following conversation.

  ‘You can’t!’ the king was saying. ‘I forbid it!’

  ‘But you told us to,’ one minister replied.

  ‘You made the law,’ a second said.

  ‘And you said no exceptions,’ a third added.

  ‘But she is a princess . . . my daughter.’ Tears ran down the king’s cheeks. ‘She didn’t even tell me that she had been given a number. When I find the idiot who gave her a number, I’ll have him executed. I’ll have him flayed alive!’

  ‘It was the minister of the interior,’ the minister of the exterior exclaimed.

  ‘No it wasn’t, Your Majesty!’ the minister of the interior cried. ‘As a matter of fact, I was the one who said that the royal family and all politicians should be exempt, that none of us should have to draw numbers. But she took one anyway. She said she wanted to be like all the other children.’

  This was in fact true. The princess, although she was only fourteen years old, had been horrified by the turn of events in Silene. She was an intelligent and educated girl and, some might say, well ahead of her time. For example, she had argued passionately that criminals shouldn’t be put to death before they’d even been tried and that perhaps it was a bad idea to wage war at the drop of a hat without thinking about the consequences. And she had been one of the first to speak out against this evil lottery. When the king had refused to listen to her, she had decided to take a stand. She had insisted on being given a number herself and, when it had been drawn, she had presented herself to the soldiers without any argument. Perhaps, when she was killed, her father would change his mind about this foolish law. That, at least, was what she hoped.

  The king had changed his mind. But it seemed it was too late.

  ‘She’s already gone to the cave,’ the minister for the interior explained. ‘In fact, I’m afraid she’ll already have been devoured.’

  ‘My only child!’ the king wept. And for the first time he understood some of the suffering of his people. ‘My princess . . . !’

  George realized that there was no time to waste. He left the palace without even introducing himself, leaped on to his horse and rode out of the town in the direction of the lagoon. It wasn’t difficult to find. The stench from the stagnant water was so strong that he could literally follow his nose.

  The sound of weeping told him that he had found the cave and that, contrary to what the minister had said, he was not too late. The dragon had overslept that day and the princess was still alive, sitting on the ground with her hands tied behind her back. George got off his horse and wa
lked over to her, but he hadn’t taken more than a few steps when there was a sudden rumble from inside the cave and the dragon appeared.

  It was actually much smaller than George had expected – not a lot larger than his horse. It was bright green in colour, with a peculiar, misshapen body. Its wings, for example, were far too small to allow it to fly. On one wing there was a pink ring and on the other a red one. It had two rather squat legs and claws and a long, serpentlike neck. But the only really menacing thing about it was its teeth, which were white and very sharp.1

  When the princess saw the dragon, she closed her eyes and waited for the end. But George wasn’t afraid. ‘Oh dragon!’ he exclaimed. ‘I see you have dined well over the years. But maybe so many free meals have clouded your judgement. Do you really mean to eat this young girl?’

  The dragon growled uncertainly. The girl opened her eyes.

  ‘God did not create people to be served up for the pleasure of wild animals,’ George continued. ‘And as a creature of God, you should be ashamed of yourself. It’s only because you were created by Him that I don’t take out my sword and cut off your head right now. But even animals should be given a chance to repent.’

  Smoke trickled out of the dragon’s nostrils and formed a question mark over its head.

  ‘Enough of this foolishness!’ George untied the girl and helped her to her feet. Then he took a ribbon from her dress and tied it round the dragon’s neck. ‘Let us go back to Silene and talk this over.’ He bowed to the princess. ‘It seems to me, my lady,’ he continued, ‘that you will make a much wiser and kinder ruler than your father. Your actions have shown that much already.’

  There was a tremendous uproar in Silene when George returned. First of all, the people saw the princess walking next to him. Everyone had assumed she was dead. Her obituary had already appeared in several celebrity magazines. But even more astonishing was the sight of the dragon itself, waddling timidly behind at the end of a ribbon. Was this what they had been afraid of for so many years? How could they have listened to the king and the councillors who had in some ways been as bad as the dragon itself, feeding so easily on their fears?

  From that day on, nothing in Silene was the same. Indeed, by the end of the week, the entire town had converted to Christianity.

  And so, in fact, had the dragon.

  Shortly after that, the king retired from the throne and his daughter became queen. All the ministers and councillors were sacked and, although a couple of them stayed behind to write their autobiographies and a couple more were invited to join the board of the local bank, the rest of them left town. None of them were missed.

  The princess married a local prince and the two of them ruled well and wisely for many years. As for the dragon, it ended its days in the palace gardens, a friend and playmate of the queen’s children. It also became a confirmed vegetarian.

  In the hours before a battle, a great peace descends upon the men who may be about to die. Those who live will remember it long afterwards. Of course they are afraid. As the sun sinks in the sky, a certain darkness creeps not just across the hillside, but into their very souls. They see the blades of imaginary swords biting into their flesh.They feel the pain of their limbs being severed, the bone being cut in two, and wonder what it will be like to lie there in the long grass, watching their lifeblood spread all around them. Or perhaps it will be an arrow, striking them down without warning – in the throat, in the chest. How much will it hurt? How long will they suffer before they are released into the comfort of death? They know that many of the men they see around them, friends they have travelled with for years, may never see the sun set again. Here they are, drinking wine, scowling, warming themselves by the fire. They are human. They are alive. Tomorrow they may be nothing. Even the thoughts they are thinking may become nothing, just blackness, in a few hours’ time.

  So it was on the evening before the Battle of Gabhra. Gabhra today is known as Garristown in north-west County Dublin, but this was almost two thousand years ago, when Ireland was young and strange creatures, witches and demons still walked among men. Many of the fianna had no idea why this battle was about to take place. Nor did they care. They were here and nobody could stop what was about to happen. That was all that mattered.

  The fianna was a warrior band. Some called them mercenaries – others had names that were worse than that. True, there were robbers and bandits who rode with them, but there were also aristocrats: young noblemen still waiting to inherit their fathers’ estates. Like the ancient samurai in Japan or Robin Hood’s merry men in medieval England, they would fight for their country when they were needed. And they liked to think of themselves as poets. In order to join the fianna, you actually had to learn twelve books of poetry off by heart! Wasn’t that proof enough?

  There were other, more physical tests. A would-be fénnid, as the recruits were called, would have to prove that he could walk over dead branches and leaves without making a sound. He would have to pull a vicious thorn out of his own foot while he was running – without stopping or even slowing down. But the most dangerous ordeal involved a pit dug in the ground. The recruit would climb down so that he stood waist-deep and would be given a shield and a hazel stick. Nine men with spears would surround the pit and, at a given signal, the test would begin. A fight . . . sometimes to the death. The fénnid would weave and dive between the spear thrusts. If he was wounded even once, he would be considered to have failed.

  In fact, at sunrise the fianna would be fighting against the forces of the High King of Ireland, a man called Cairbre Lifechair. The king’s daughter had recently got married and it was the custom at the time to pay a tribute to the fianna on the day of the wedding. The High King had refused. In return, the fianna had killed one of the king’s servants. How easily a simple argument had turned into a full-scale war! Lifechair had summoned up his army and both sides had assembled at the damp, foggy swampland around Gabhra. At dawn they would settle their differences once and for all.

  The men had eaten their supper. Soon they would sleep. But now they were talking. Whatever they might be thinking, there wasn’t a single one of them who wasn’t glad to be there. For they were in the company of one of the great heroes of the fianna, a man known all over Ireland. His name was Oscar, and although he was still in his twenties there were already epic poems and songs that had been inspired by his exploits. His father was Oisín, another legendary fighter, and he was also there although, unlike his son, Oisín liked to keep himself out of sight.

  It was often said that when Oscar was young, in his early teens, he had been so clumsy and unreliable that none of the older warriors had wanted to ride with him. But by the time he was twenty, all that had changed. He was Oscar the Brave, Oscar the Victorious, Oscar who had never lost in battle or hand-to-hand combat. He still looked younger than his true age, with long fair hair tumbling over his shoulders, a thin, chiselled face and very bright blue eyes. He was famous for his laughter and his carefree attitude to the dangers that lay ahead.

  And yet tonight he was unusually quiet. It was as if he was lost in thought, and when someone proposed a song, Oscar shook his head slowly and crept away to sit in the darkness. Some of the men were disturbed by this, but another warrior, a man called Dáire, scowled at them. ‘He’s just preserving his strength for tomorrow. And if you had any sense, you’d do the same. We need to sleep. Unless you want to fall asleep, perhaps permanently, on the field.’

  But secretly Dáire was concerned. From the moment Oscar had arrived that day, he hadn’t been quite himself. Dáire was ten years older than his friend, dark and battle-scarred. He liked to think of himself as Oscar’s older brother. The two of them had been through many adventures together. He knew when something was wrong.

  So, when he was sure nobody was looking, he went over to Oscar and sat down beside him. For a while, neither of them spoke. Dáire took out a wineskin and drank. He offered it to his friend. Once again, Oscar shook his head.

  ‘What’
s the matter?’ Dáire asked.

  There was no answer. Dáire was about to ask the question a second time when Oscar spoke. He was gazing straight ahead of him as if trying to find something in the darkness of the night. ‘I was thinking of some of the monsters I have encountered in my life,’ he said. His voice was soft. He had the ability to sing even when he was talking. It was a great talent. Dáire had often listened in wonderment as Oscar recited his father’s verse. ‘I was just wondering which of them was the worst.’

  ‘Do you mean the ugliest or the most dangerous?’

  ‘I don’t know what I mean.’

  ‘Then why are you even thinking such things? There’ll be time enough for monsters after the battle is done. Now – Cairbre Lifechair . . . there’s a monster for you. Calls himself a king, but puts us to all this bother and throws away the life of his men just because he’s too mean to pay for a wedding!’

  ‘I will tell you what happened to me today, Dáire. But only you. Promise me you won’t speak to anyone else.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Oscar?’ Dáire raised the skin to his lips and drank heavily. Whatever happened tomorrow, he wasn’t going to leave behind any of his wine.

  ‘I’m talking about the washer at the ford,’ Oscar said.

  He paused. And then he began his tale.

  ‘As I was riding here, I had to cross a ford. I’d been following the river for some distance and the water was deep and fast-flowing. It was the only way to the other side. Well, there was a woman sitting there. She was washing some clothes.’