A Dragon's HungerMadalena Daleziou
4000 words the brother What can I tell you about my sister? I was barely eight when it all started. She wasn’t much older, but she’d wash us and put us to bed and her hands were more tender than our mother’s. We called her Lena. She had a longer name once. But bombs take; limbs; lives; even time itself. They clip names. We were a large family, and Mother had to yell all our names as the world around us dissolved to ashes. Our island—a rock in the Aegean—was supposed to keep us safe. Hardly anything grew there but tomatoes in the fields and cotton factories downtown. The bombs found us all the same. The dust had started to settle for the day when I emerged from the basement with her and our younger brother. The island was licking its wounds. We knelt on the window seat. We stretched, our bodies half-hanging outside, counting fragments of our world. A child’s shoe. A dropped doll. Shattered glass from the neighbour’s window. Then we saw him. A man on a white horse, its mane shining against the bombed cobblestone. The rider’s curls were brown like our neighbor’s last chestnuts before the war, his cloak spotless, undisturbed by the dust and smoke. His armour caught the last bleeding sunrays. His spear cried red. Our little brother Yorgos ran down to fetch our mother wide-eyed. “A knight!” he exclaimed. By the time she climbed up from the shelter, the rider was already gone. Mother’s chuckle was dry like the sound of a lighter. “This is no time for fairytales.” “Really, mama, it was a rider on a white horse.” “Not another word.” Her skirts rustled as little Yorgos bolted past her. “Listen. He was there, we saw him. He looked like…like him!” Proudly, he grabbed the icon of St. George, his namesake, from the fireplace and shoved him in front of Mother’s face. “Yes,” I chimed in, “like him. He was carrying a spear, too.” I paused. What had the rider killed? Soldiers, dragons, did it matter? Soldiers were real, the thunder of their boots a threat we’d learnt to flee from. Dragons hadn’t existed for many, many years, but this knight looked fresh from battle. “The blood drops are still on the steps, mama.” This, from Lena. For her, the rider was no surprise. She told me everything that night before tucking me in bed. Not a month ago, she’d climbed Ano Syros, all the way to the church of St. George. Kneeling until her knees bled, she’d prayed and prayed. Please saint, we’re losing the war. People drop on the streets, that’s how hungry they are. We’re trying, but it’s not enough. Help us. And if you can’t… If you can’t, could you make peace with the dragon, just this once, and send him to our aid? She bit her lower lip when she told me that. It occurred to her that a dragon wouldn’t be able to tell between us and the soldiers. She’d reconsidered. Let me be a warrior instead, a warrior, like you. Let me end this. Was our sighting of St. George an answer to her prayers? I don’t know. I never made up my mind. Seeing her so serious, Mother went and looked. She bent down and saw a single red drop: a little poppy blooming in the stone steps. She made the sign of the cross and ran to fetch her friend Sister Leonie from next door. The nun rushed from her hideout with her veil ajar. She ran her fingers on the stone. “They’re children. Pure souls.” She cupped Lena’s face with her hand, while I stood there waiting for an acknowledgment that never came. “You must believe them,” she said. Our mother believed, though there was little to believe in, those days. People forgot. When their low-ceilinged houses got bombed again and again, they retreated to caves, the homes of scorpions. Later, they forgot that too, and they resolved to do to each other what their enemies did to them and worse. There was no time for saints. *** The war ended but a new one had already started. When Lena turned ten, Mother sent her to the textile factory just outside of town. At night she would tell me about the machines’ screeching, how the threads tickled her nose when stakeholders visited, and all workers younger than sixteen, would crouch and hide under the materials. She didn’t tell me about Mother’s chapped, chilblained hand, taking her meagre wages. But I saw it and knew it would be my fate too. Before Lena’s second year in the factory, the Civil War had fully broken out. One of our cousins in the mainland got snatched by one army, our eldest brother joined the other. It was around that time the dragon showed up. Forced into the capital, I suppose, like thousands of refugees when the war spread into the mountains, turning their homes into battlefields. There was no more room for mythical beings of begone times to hide unknowable for centuries. We didn’t see it arrive on the island, but the newspapers said plenty. My siblings and I took turns reading headlines. The Skies Are Torn, we read. Smoke and Sulphur Suffocate the Outskirts of the Capital. The Time of Judgement Is Nigh—we weren’t sure if we should believe these headlines. A real dragon, after all this time? But we enjoyed scaring each other, reading out loud in exaggerated voices. Sister Leonie knocked a few days later, with our parish priest at her heels and told our mother they had to speak to us all. Lena, Yorgos, and I were brought before them. Lena scrubbed dirt off my face with spit on a cloth before leading me into the narrow sitting room. “They saw the beast north of Athens,” Father Petros said. “It feeds on animals from the forest. No one dares get too close, and bullets might be useless on such thick skin. How long before the beast demands children? But these three, the Saint blessed them. Give us one to train. With St George’s blessing, they can slay a dragon. Only such a soul can save us.” Is it selfish that I prayed they wouldn’t pick me? St. George wasn’t my namesake, nor was I the one who had prayed for his aid. And yet, what Mother did next took me by surprise. Pressing her hand against Lena’s back, she gave her a little push forward. “Take her.” The nun and the priest exchanged uneasy glances. In families like ours, there was no greater honour than having a priest son. And here she was, refusing something greater: a saint son. Even now, I can’t tell why she favoured us, even though we were too young to bring money in just yet. All I know is that her love was coarse like her work-worn hands, and some of us got more of it. Sister Leonie fixed her veil before Father Petros could speak. “Fine. I’ll take her to Athens with me.” I still remember how Lena would pick up spiders in yellowed newspaper pages to get them out to safety. One Easter, before the German Occupation, I saw her cry when our grandfather sliced a lamb’s throat. How did they expect her to kill a whole dragon? Don’t take my sister away, I wanted to yell. But I could make no sound. I’m ashamed to say it, but I breathed more easily, knowing I was off the hook. *** Only later, the nun put a dagger in my sister’s hand. A dagger Lena would hold close every night like the doll she never had. Much later, I heard they also gave her a rifle, anointed in holy water. St. George had rescued a princess with his spear, but the world was changing. Surely, no one believed that God would begrudge them efficiency. Lena took the nun’s hand. She accepted the knife and the rifle, too. We were children forged by bombs and famines; war had stolen too much. When they offered us something, anything, we didn’t know how to refuse. I hardly saw my sister after that. When I finished primary school, I moved in with our eldest brother in Piraeus to learn a craft, though being close to Lena had something to do with it. The headlines about the dragon hadn’t stopped, nor had my guilt. I was younger, there was little I could have done, and yet I couldn’t stop feeling guilty for my relief when the nun took my sister’s hand and not mine. Even though I lived as close to her as I could, I only heard half-truths of what happened next. *** the nun On Sunday afternoons, after Mass, I’d take the girl aside to the pine trees and try to give her a fighting chance. I taught her how to hold a knife. Tightly, with four fingers around the belly of the handle and her thumb touching her forefinger, making it hard to snatch away. She was a fast learner. The rifle didn’t even surprise her. When I showed her how to pull the trigger, she didn’t flinch, nor did she step backward. I’d thought I would have to send her packing to the island by the end of the first month. But she was a fighter. I soon believed that perhaps she could make it. “What good is a knife?” she asked me once. “The dragon has fire.” I pretended not to hear. Truth be told, the church loves a little martyr. But you don’t tell that to the girl who saw St. George in the flesh, else she might leave her knife and rifle and beg our land’s old pagan gods to turn her into a deer rather than drink that bitter cup of dragon slaying. Another time, she asked me how I learnt to fight. I pretended not to hear that either, though it wasn’t as romantic as she imagined. A childhood in the mountains. A hunter father, no brothers. In another time, another life, I might have stayed in the mountains with the rebels, and this story of girls and dragons would have been someone else’s business. Those days, though, a woman had to survive in any way she knew, and this veil is how I made it through years of blood and ashes. It’s why I didn’t protest when Lena’s mother gave her away like cattle. She wasn’t a bad woman, her mother. But the years had hardened her. She knew she couldn’t feed them all. Deciding which of the little ones could fend for themselves was a cruel choice—I helped her make it, anyway. I was selfishly amenable to the idea of raising a daughter. A couple of years went by sleepily. The dragon’s shadow darkened the convent from time to time. We heard of angry graziers who’d lost their herds, of bloody animal carcases in Parnitha. Some singed hair and burns, too, for those humans foolish enough to approach the beast, but as long as he stayed away from the city, I delayed the inevitable and kept the girl by my side. At fifteen, she told me she wasn’t going to become a nun. She blurted it out during a training session, her knife’s blade singing against my own. We both paused for a moment, panting, fingers curled tightly around the handles. “Fine,” I shrugged. “I didn’t want to be a nun either, not at first. Slay the dragon, then you’re free to go.” She blinked before turning away. She hadn’t expected it to be that easy, and, before her footsteps in the corridor died down, I wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake. Does any of this explain what happened next, or was it all the girl’s doing? I can only guess. Her mother and I first became friends when I was stationed in the island. I was their guest some Easter before the war, and I saw how she cared for her little siblings—and not just them. I still remember her face when she saw her grandfather slice a lamb’s throat. It doesn’t hurt, he’d said. It only lasts a moment. The words hadn’t consoled her. Is it a surprise then that the thought of killing a dragon hung heavy in her? Sometimes, I’d see her kneel by the icon of St. George in the chapel. I wonder what she prayed for. That she may summon sacrificial love for her fellow humans who lived under a dragon’s shadow, enough for her to seek the beast out and be done with it? Only once did she speak a prayer out loud: “Let me be a saint like you. Show me what I have to do.” Ah, she was no saint, but nor was she ungrateful as the other nuns claim. She never complained, like some of the novices, when weeks passed with no meat on the table. Bread filled her up just fine. But those rare times when there was fresh milk, or butter, or juicy meat, her eyes would water, hardly believing she’d survived long enough to taste something like it again. She had known a dragon’s hunger. You don’t forget such a void, not even when your belly is filled. Perhaps that’s why she couldn’t bring herself to begrudge a dragon for eating a herd or two. *** the mother That child was always a featherbrain if you ask me. When my second son Nikos moved in with his big brother in Athens, they asked her to stay with them and leave it all behind. There was an easy way out if she wanted it. Instead, when I visited the convent, I found her in her dorm room, sulking as if someone had died. “I didn’t expect you,” she said coldly. Truth be told, I hadn’t planned to visit her that day, but Nikos was troubled last time he saw her. He told me she was restless, couldn’t wait to leave the convent and go—where did she even want to go, if she wouldn’t stay with her brothers? “If you aren’t going to be a nun, you’d better marry,” I told her. Athens is nothing like the island. It gets wilder by the day. She knew nothing of the capital outside of the monastery, she wouldn’t last a day on her own. She didn’t acknowledge my words. Was she so determined to get out all alone into this jungle of a city, or was she still angry at me because I gave her away? And what could I have done? I couldn’t feed them all, she hated working at the factory, and I knew Leonie would care for her. Besides, I never expected that dragon slaying business to amount to much. As a child, she wasn’t especially good at anything. Who would have thought she’d get good with a rifle? What reason she had to sulk for, I don’t understand. She was better fed than she ever could have been at home. She had a fine coat too, a bit discoloured at the elbows, slightly long for her, but warm enough. Her siblings didn’t have anything like that. I told her this and she got angry. She slipped it off her shoulders and threw it on the bed. “Give it to your other children then,” she said and ran off before I could say anything. Don’t look at me like that. How could I have known what she’d do afterwards? I wasn’t even in the city anymore when it happened. I tried to stay with my sons for a while, but the endless smoke and the sound of cars became too much. They wouldn’t come home with me no matter how I pleaded. They were happy in Piraeus. I took the ferry home less than a month later. We only heard second-hand accounts on the island. Who knows how much of it was real? Although, truth be told, I wasn’t entirely surprised. She’d always had her head on the clouds. *** the dragon It’d been years since birds told me about the children on the island who saw their saint, armed to the bone, with the blood of my kin dripping from his spear. The rest I eavesdropped unseen. She would already talk to me, the way she’d scold a cat who didn’t use its litter box. On overcast days I would sometimes watch her, concealed by the clouds. “Why are you here?” she’d shout at me while she threw knives at the pine trees Sunday after Sunday. “Why did the Saint appear to me if he won’t give me the heart to end you?” Year after year, her anger grew. It became too much. She flung her knives with the iron will of someone too good at surviving, so much so that she might turn into a blood-boiling ghost without realizing. I never wanted this for her. It wasn’t my fault one of her saints appeared to her. Nor was it my fault that their human wars came to my home in the mountains, forcing me closer to the capital. So one day, around two or three years after she arrived in the convent, I tried something different. I flew from the safety of the clouds and engulfed her in my shadow. Her hand was quick to grasp her knife, a muscle memory she couldn’t unlearn, like blinking, breathing, swallowing. But when she traded the knife for the rifle, she thought twice, running her thumb over the trigger. “Finally here to eat me?” she yelled. “Then be done with it.” A dry laugh, resembling the chuckle of a lighter. The girl only knew the saint who slayed my kind. How could she know that, while their wars raged on, I long put to rest my war against humans? My eons run slow, like a cold honey stream. So much bloodshed, so much hate in less than half a century—I pitied them, thought their own wars more than sufficed without my adding to them. The girl might have caught the understanding in my eyes if she had been clearheaded enough to pay attention. But she was sixteen and she thought the fire in her had never been felt by anyone else since the beginning of time. She believed her mother hated her, and that not a single soul in the world could understand. Quite a state to be in—so I didn’t begrudge her for what she did next. The knife flew like a spear, the blade buried itself in my shoulder, barely missing my sinew. Blinded by pain, a flame escaped my mouth–a small burst, but big enough to give her still-raised fist a scorch she’d nurse for days. Why did I hold my fire after that? Don’t ask. Age has mellowed my rage. Or perhaps it was the ever-present hunger since their wars forced me from the mountains, the gnawing emptiness that no herd can fill. I didn’t have it in me to incinerate a child who has known a dragon’s hunger. With a sharp movement, I pulled out the blade. It didn’t do much damage. I have thick skin. I could have kept the knife and flown away. Instead, I left it at the girl’s feet, scraping her shoe. She picked it up and looked at me a full moment before running away. Right then I came up with this plan that could have been the end of me, if I’d misjudged her. What could I have done? I befriended humans before, back when the world had room for wonder. Some have more kinship with dragons than with fellow humans and, no matter what they’d made her, this girl was one of them. *** I’d half-forgotten the last time I stretched my wings to their full length to fly in the open, warm wind on my skin, sun reflecting on my scales. From high up, humans were reduced to ants. I soared until they were less than that. I passed by the monastery first, for the sake of old times, not bothering to hide in the clouds. This time the veiled woman, the one who taught the girl to fight, stood at the bell tower, biting her lip bloodless. Her eyes narrowed into daggers when she saw me. She didn’t hesitate to pick up the rifle, but she didn’t shoot either. “I chose my fate long ago,” she told me. “You can still choose yours.” I didn’t trust her to keep the rifle down, so I flew away faster, higher, lest she change her mind. At the sight of me they ran. Panicked ants whose nest was kicked by a cruel child. Doors banged shut. When I flew lower, my tail brushed their windows and they flinched as far from them as they could, backs against walls. Radios screamed evacuation mandates. And back in the convent, in the outskirts of the city, a girl was given saints’ relics to wear and a holy-water-anointed rifle to end me with. They’d tried shooting me before, but not from close enough, and not with a saintly finger pulling the trigger. They prayed it would work. Here and there, I caught stray cries: flee the capital. The dragon is going to the Acropolis. I found the girl waiting for me on top of the hill, next to the Parthenon. By then she wasn’t angry anymore, that’s what she later told me. She tried to convince herself she was beyond fear, too. Years ago, sheltering from the bombs, she’d hoped to live long enough to come to the capital and see her people’s most sacred monument. This too meant nothing to her right then. Those marbles had been watered in blood too many times. She couldn’t meet her ancestors and tell them it was still all blood and ashes. Not yet. She faced me, unflinching. I saw my eyes reflected in her own, bright yellow against her honey brown. She caressed her rifle with her thumb: a warning. I knew then that if this were to unfold the way they’d planned for us, it would end that day. In her death or in mine. But we’d had the chance to kill each other once before and didn’t take it. But I believed here was a third choice; we could both choose our fate. My nostrils burned. Two cords of smoke came out, but I held my fire. Eyes watering, the girl covered her nose with her shirt collar, but she didn’t blink. When I approached the hill, she took a step back, allowing me room to land. I lowered myself, stomach against the sun-baked ground, resting my head on a rock. Finally, we were level. She could climb on my back if she wished. It wasn’t easy to hold back my fire, not when the midday sun made her weapons impossibly bright to look at. Her finger still toyed with the trigger. But I could tell the difference between a raging she-wolf and a girl wearing a wolf’s fang, trying to look brave. “I don’t want to kill you,” she said, “and I don’t want to die. Enough is enough.” She’d known two wars—and many more if she counted her grandmother’s stories. Her hand was still bandaged from the burn I gave her. It was clear: she might not survive killing me. And if she did, then what? Slaying a dragon wouldn’t save the world, wouldn’t save her people from one another. At the edge of that ancient hill, the girl decided to save both of us. She laid the rifle at her feet. She let go of her dagger. The nuns had taught her many prayers, but she did not speak them. When she climbed on my back, her tongue unleashed a new prayer, one entirely her own. Let me be a dragon. |
|
Madalena Daleziou
Madalena Daleziou writes speculative fiction inspired by Greek folklore and intergenerational trauma. Her work has been shortlisted for the Rhysling Award and for Brave New Weird. Madalena's short fiction and poetry has also appeared or is forthcoming in The Deadlands, Inner Worlds, and The Triangulation Anthology. She is currently working on her short story collection and her novel, which both feature many ghosts.
|
|
Baubles From Bones © 2025
|