"Kushner,.Donn.-.A.Book.DragonUC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dragon Stories)

A Book Dragon
Donn Kushner
Copyright 1987 by Donn Kushner

CHAPTER I

DRAGON AND HIS
GRANDMOTHER

WE SELDOM HEAR OF DRAGONS NOWADAYS. IT IS EASY
to believe that they never existed at all. But many
years ago people knew that there were dragons,
just as they knew there were angels and devils,
witches and gnomes, and, on occasion, banshees
and leprechauns. Even if they saw no dragons in
their own neighborhoods, they were sure that some
could be found in far, unknown, fearful places. So
that, in old maps of unexplored lands we can still
see blank areas with the warning words, "Here
there bee dragons."

The maps are all filled in now; the empty spaces
bear names like Caracas, and Vladivostok, and
Chicago. Dragons aren't mentioned at all. But there
are dragons alive today, at least one of them. This
is his story.

NONESUCH WAS - AND STILL IS. FOR THAT MATTER-THE
last of a family of dragons that lived over
five hundred years ago in a limestone hill,
honeycombed with caverns, above the vil-
lage of Serpent Grimsby near the south coast
of England. The dark mouth of the family's
cavern opened towards an ugly tangled
scrub forest that ended, at the lap of the
hill, in an evil bog: land which few men
entered by choice and still fewer left. From
the cavern, the dragons could see the tip of
the village church spire over the crest of the
next hill and, past this, the square towers
and crenellated walls of the Earl's castle.

The castle had been built in the time of
Nonesuch's great-grandfather. While lurking
in the forest above the building site, he had
become so interested in watching the walls
of the donjon rise that when he came down
for a snack of fat cattle, he found the circle
almost completed. The drovers were able to
herd the cattle inside and drop a crude gate,