by Em Harriett
in Issue 137, June 2023
Matt was shearing the sheep when the earthquake struck.
He planted his feet on the ground and grabbed the sheep in front of him by the remainder of its fleece, holding on to its terrified little body as the field trembled and the stone cairn atop the hill tumbled over. The rest of the flock bleated and ran in panic-stricken circles, stumbling over their own hooves to escape the rumbling earth. Pebbles cascaded. Grass quivered.
And just as quickly as it had started, the quake passed.
Preternatural stillness fell upon the earth. Matt stroked the sheep in front of him and murmured soothing rhymes until it calmed down.
“Matthew?” called his mother, Deirdre, from the slate-roofed house at the base of the hill. “You alright?”
“Fine, Mum,” Matt replied.
“Nothing’s broken in the house, but I’m going to check on the neighbors.”
Matt waved a hand in response and watched Deirdre shuffle back inside their small home, then onto the long country road that followed Vaalbara’s rugged coastline, her walking stick adding a third leg to her silhouette. The nearest neighbors, the Areys, lived three miles away. By the sun’s height, Matt figured he had five hours to high tide.
That’s it, he thought, brow furrowed as the briny sea wind caught his long hair in its talons. Mum doesn’t approve of my training with Master Feyr the swordsman. But these quakes have gone on long enough. I know what’s causing them, even if Mum thinks it’s just a legend.
I’m going to fix everything.
Matt finished shearing the flock and bundled their fleece into the spinning shed so Deirdre could wash and comb the wool just as her father and grandmother before her. Shepherding was the way of life on Vaalbara—a job that left Matt with more and more restlessness in his bones every year.
Matt clipped his felted shawl around his shoulders and took the sword Master Feyr had lent him from its resting place beside the window. He strode onto the dirt road and stared at a distant outcrop on the island’s farthest tip like a claw emerging from the ocean spray.
Matt headed straight for it.
He had a dragon to kill.
The island of Vaalbara was a beast of stone, hemmed by the ocean and dotted with grass and sheep. Salt seasoned the air and coated everything in a briny crust. Matt counted eider ducks on his long walk down to the rocky shore known as Stonemeadow—a curled inlet of water-smoothed pebbles enclosed by high mudstone cliffs. Picked-apart shells and carapaces marked the terns’ hunting ground, the shellfish husks cracking under Matt’s boots like plover eggs.
He followed the brackish-colored cliffs, looking for a darker hole near the base that sank into the sea.
That’s where I’ll find its lair, he thought.
“It’s just a legend, Matthew,” Deirdre had said over dinner.
Several months ago, when the quakes had started, winter had its white fleece over the island, making every disruption look like a claw had raked through the ground. Everyone from Vaalbara Peak to its rough stone beaches sheltered in their homes, but that didn’t stop gossip any more than it stopped birds from flying.
Matt had set his spoon down over his bowl of rabbit stew and sighed. “Mum, what if it’s true?”
“It isn’t. Legends are made-up tales to get youngsters—or those like you who act just as rashly sometimes—to mind their manners and respect the world around them. A dragon under Vaalbara is about as far-fetched as a sheep with wings.”
Matt spooned hot stew in his mouth and chewed sullenly. As the legend went, according to the first settlers of Vaalbara, a dragon lived in a deep tidal cave under the island accessible only through an entrance along the Stonemeadow cliffs. Time your descent wrong and the water would swallow you long before the beast did. But, if legend was to be believed, that dragon was the island: its wings the mountain peak, its breath the fog, its scales the stones littering the roads and fields.
Deirdre watched Matt from across the driftwood table and set her spoon down sternly.
“Don’t go chasing folklore, Matthew,” she warned. “That tale only serves to give our island mystique. You’re better off returning that sword to Master Feyr and picking up a shepherd’s crook for good.”
Matt had assured her that he wouldn’t chase legends, but the idea of an unruly dragon breaking apart Vaalbara hung on his back like a broadsword. Well into the spring he followed rumors, asked the widespread neighbors who made up their town of Gorsepeak if they’d heard anything about a supposed dragon, and—when he felt like he had enough to go on—waited for the right moment when Deirdre wouldn’t be around to dissuade him.
And here I am, he thought, wading into the water. He held an oil lantern aloft to keep the water from wetting its wick and braced himself against the ocean’s cold, picking his way over submerged rocks like a newborn lamb.
Matt found the cave tucked beside a cluster of mussels growing against the rocks. Fishing nets and bits of rope clung to their smalt-blue shells, blocking nutrient-rich water from the filter feeders.
Matt ignored them and waded into the cave’s entrance.
He crouched on a sloped hump of smoothed stone and lit his lantern with a dry match tucked behind his ear. Cool air drifted from the depths of the cave system. He gripped the pommel of his sword with his free hand.
Taking one last look at the slate-gray sky behind him, Matt descended, foot by foot, into the earth.
The tidal cave was dark, cold, and damp, its wetness seeping into Matt’s skin, worming beneath his woolen clothes to get at his core. Water cast every stone surface in shining relief in the lanternlight. Shimmering mica bands in the metamorphosed phyllites appeared like waves etched in stone.
The cave tunnels lengthened, the ceiling sloped upward, and, finally, emptied into an ovular cavern with a floor that slanted into darkness. Water shone in a thin layer over the floor, fed by the ocean in an unending stream that lapped at the feet of a gargantuan stone dragon.
Matt almost forgot to breathe. The beast was real, and it was massive. Its scales were the color of greywacke and stormclouds, its eyes like quartz that shimmered in the light of Matt’s lantern. Its neck was arced back regally, its angular head tilted down and snarling.
I will save our island from you, beast, Matt thought.
He set the lantern on a flat shelf of phyllite and drew his sword.
Animosity surged in the dragon’s eyes. It hissed, jaw wide, neck already arced back to strike.
At the sound, Matt leapt aside into a roll and swung his sword like Master Feyr had taught him, but the blade sliced through air.
The dragon hadn’t moved. It warbled like a cat with a thorn in its paw and scraped the cave floor with its stone claws, but its head was immobile, its neck seemingly frozen at the apex of its arc.
Matt’s heartbeat gradually calmed. He was out of range of the dragon’s claws and teeth, but had no intention of following its great stony bulk to its wings and thick ridged tail. He slowly circled the dragon’s front, holding his lantern aloft to pierce the darkness. Matt could trace the island’s contours in the shape of the dragon’s wings, the peaks and long ravines, the natural trails that rainwater flowed through to the ocean. Even the cairns appeared as raised bumps in the dragon’s hide.
But a dark line like the chinstrap on a bridle held the dragon’s head aloft and inert.
“…Are you trapped?” Matt asked.
The cavern caught his voice before it could echo, but the dragon’s stone lips curled up in a snarl. It whacked its tail against the back of the cavern like a sheep kicking a hoof to show its temper. Far above, like thunder in the distance, Vaalbara Peak shuddered in response.
Matt gulped and groped for the slick cave wall, hauling himself onto a wide ledge to try and get a better angle on the dragon. Sheathing his sword, he climbed even higher, finally landing on a narrow shelf of stone at the dragon’s eye level. This close, its teeth were veritable stone daggers, its breath the briniest ocean air.
When Matt lifted his lantern, the light caught the fibrous texture of a thick fisherman’s net, flotsam brought in by the tide and lodged in a crevasse near the ceiling. It hugged the dragon’s chin and forced it into an unnatural position.
Matt shivered. The cave floor rippled; to Matt’s dawning horror the water level seemed to be slowly rising.
“…You can’t reach it,” he said to the dragon. “And every time you thrash about, the island feels the earthquake.”
The dragon let out a low rumble that almost sounded resigned.
Matt frowned, looking from it to the rising water and back again.
I don’t have much time, he realized. Either I risk my own life trying to free this creature or I bail and get out before I drown. But if I don’t do something about the dragon, Vaalbara will keep breaking apart every time it flails.
I could just kill it. That’s why I brought a sword.
He set the lantern at his feet and drew the blade. The dragon’s quartz eyes fixed on it with loathing.
A gush of water slapped against the dragon’s forepaw. This high up the cave, Matt didn’t need to fear its claws, but the water level was nearing its knuckles—Matt’s upper thigh if he ran for it now.
The dragon was caught fast. It wasn’t a sheep—far from it—but Matt saw something in its eyes, a stubborn independence that needed a human’s intervention from time to time.
Matt lifted his gaze to the gray stone ceiling. Nine hells, this is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.
He raised the sword.
The dragon snarled.
Matt angled the blade between the net’s tangled bulk and the dragon’s rocky hide the way he clipped fleece off a sheep. Carefully, without nicking the scales, he sawed at the thick salt-crusted cord until the rope gave way.
The dragon tugged its head down, nearly grazing Matt’s hands with its ridged stone horns. Before Matt could sheathe his sword it reared back up and snapped its massive jaws over the weapon. With a savage yank, the dragon tore it from Matt’s grip and warped the metal in a single bite.
The force of its tug threw Matt off-balance, off the ledge, off into the yawning darkness until he hit the water with a resounding smack. He coughed, standing—the water was up to his collarbone now—and glanced at the dragon. The stone beast had curled its tail around its legs and settled its head down like a sleeping sheep, the ghost of a smile on its angular face.
Matt didn’t stay to admire it.
The tide surged. Matt stumbled for the exit, abandoning his lantern, and ducked into the tunnel he’d followed down to begin with. The cave was a channel of shadows darker than the night sky. Matt fought the current, clawing his way blindly in the dark, skinning his palms on the stone and wincing as saltwater stung the open cuts, striding and pushing and swimming when the water went over his head until suddenly–
His head burst from the water, long hair drifting like seaweed around his shoulders, coughing and gasping in the briny sea air.
The ocean was a ripple of gray. Waves threatened to push Matt’s head underwater, but he bumped against the mudstone cliff above the tidal cave and clung to it to keep him afloat. He followed its contour, hauling himself through the water and onto the pebbly beach, crawled until he was out of the tide’s oncoming range, and with a massive sigh worthy of the stone dragon below collapsed and rolled onto his back.
He was soaked. His shawl stank of wet sheep. He’d lost his sword. But Matt had never felt so relieved in his life.
“Oh, hells,” he said once he’d caught his breath, “I’ll have to reimburse Master Feyr for that blade…”
He watched a pair of terns fly down from the cliffs. The sun had yet to set, but the overcast sky was dark, like someone had draped a thick woolen shawl over the sun. The dragon had calmed. Vaalbara was inert, quiet save for the ocean waves, the distant bleating of sheep, and the whistling calls of shepherds.
Matt sighed, a smile playing at the corner of his lips. He patted the empty belt on his hip where Master Feyr’s sword had hung.
“I hope he likes fleece.”
© June 2023, Em Harriett
Em Harriett is a queer nonbinary author with work forthcoming in All Worlds Wayfarer and the 2023 Kaleidoscope anthology from Cloaked Press. This is their first appearance in Swords & Sorcery.