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

eager to be off. His uncles, he recalled, had claimed that by
flying through clouds they could cut them into small pieces.
"We can fly through the cloud-capped mountain peaks," he
said proudly. "Nothing can stand in our way."

The other animals considered his words. "I can fly in the
mist too," the butterfly said,' 'but it makes my wings heavy.''

The turtle, who had been listening with his head sub-
merged to his ears, now lifted it out of water. "I suppose
you're going to tell us you can fly through stone," he said
suspiciously.

"Of course not," Nonesuch replied. "We wouldn't want
to." Though he spoke haughtily, as was always proper for a
dragon, he recalled that his father and his uncles, in the zest

16

and gtory of their flights, had sometimes crashed into moun-
tain peaks; perhaps they had imagined that the rocks would
give way before them, but they never had.

The turtle's reply was even more haughty.' 'I should think
not! All rocks are derived from the shell of the Greatest Turtle
of All. Nothing can be more solid and massive!"

Before the dragon could ask him to explain this statement,
the butterfly piped up again. "We don't strike against rocks,
either, though we may rest on them. But the first butterfly
never rested: she was a beam of light, infinitely swift. At last
she grew weary of glancing off beautiful objects or passing
by them, so she broke up into many butterflies. Like our an-
cestor, we must always keep moving."

"One certainly must avoid striking rocks," the turtle
remarked ponderously.

"But we avoid nothing else!" Nonesuch asserted, not at
all pleased with the way the conversation kept getting away
from him. "My uncle and his cousin, Blackhearth, fought a
mighty battle with the wild, uncouth, fringed dragons from
the Scottish Highlands. The noise of their trumpeting shook the
hills; its echoes rolled so that people couldn't sleep for a month
after the battle itself. When the dragon judges declared our
side the winner, the battleground had been so plowed up that
nothing grew again." His audience looked at him without
speaking.' 'At least, not tffl the next year,'' Nonesuch conceded.

The others were silent at first. Then the toad croaked