Every night Khalil played the lute for his king, and feared what the growing gray void behind the king’s wet eyes meant. When the chamber guard in their useless red finery appeared at his door, Khalil knew the king had finally slipped into that deep slumber that came with such an illness.
The grim-faced men forced Khalil to hold out his hands so they could bind them with rough ropes, and they laughed when he winced as they pulled the knots so tight he no longer felt his fingers.
They kicked him down the long stone walls, past the portraits of the king’s unamused ancestors in their furs, or fine gowns, or riding down foxes with their baying hounds.
“You filthy creature,” the chamber guard men spat as they dragged Khalil down the dark, dank passages where the shadows shrank back from their orange flecked torches.
“You’ll finally get what you deserve.”
Khalil numbly let them yank him this way and that, and he marveled that the same worn steps that he’d found so welcoming in year’s past now felt like like foreboding slabs that hinted at his doom.
He laughed at himself. A taste of misfortune, a lick of Death’s fangs, and he had turned into a moody poet.
“Lord,” Khalil said when he staggered before the General Sebastian Graves. “Lord, what have I done.”
“Shut up!” Khalil dropped to his knees and grabbed at the side of his head. He wanted to turn around and fight the guard who hit him, Khalil was a man, was he not?
General Graves squinted at Khalil from beside the king’s bed. At some point in the night he’d had a wooden chair dragged in for himself, and a desk, from which several stacks of letters threatened to spill off onto the floor.
“Shut up!” said the king’s raven from the window sill. “Shut up. Sing a song, Khalil. Sing me a pretty song.”
General Graves glared at the inky black bird. “Someone. Needs. To. Catch. It.”
Black feathers scattered about the room, a few still flitting this way and that, spoke to the success of previous attempts to capture Siegfried, the Raven.
Khalil gave the bird his best bow, as he’d been taught as a child to always respect God’s creatures, and it returned the gesture.
“A half-crown to the first person to bring me its head,” General Graves snapped, and then turned his attention back to Khalil. “And you…”
Khalil weathered the suspicious hatred focused on him without flinching. He stood firm in his calm pride, though he felt like he was standing naked in the middle of a storm of prejudice.
“The land is dying,” General Graves said, voice thick with weariness. “Five Lords of the Province report that fruit rots on the vine, the three brothers will not stand in the fields, their seed is deformed, so their stalks grow deformed. A farmer in the Midlands said his cow was born with three heads. Dark clouds loom over rivers. And strangers walk the land.”
“I am no stranger,” Khalil protested.
“To. The. Land.” General Graves sniffed. “The regent lies on his deathbed. Your days of whispering poisons into his ears are over.”
One of his pike-men threw the mangled remains of Khalil’s lute at his feet. The shattered pieces of varnished spruce clattered against the moldy stones, and the strings sprung this way and that, like Khalil’s raggedy hair. He’d no time to prepare himself for the day.
Though what fashion would one choose for a day like this?
He’d worked so hard to learn to play on the shorter-necked lute. Just different enough from a barbud that he’d struggled to adapt in his first months in court.
“They’ll take you to the coast. You will take a trade ship south. You will never touch this land again,” the general announced.
“I left the sunlands when I was just a child,” Khalil protested. A prodigy, they’d called him. But his father had woken him every morning in the deepest dark before dawn. To play is to know God, his father said. And to share God is the highest calling. And his God had led him farther across the world than anyone could have dreamed. Praise him. “I will be a stranger to them.”
General Graves squinted. “Or you can go with the King’s Lancers to face the dragon Moloch.”
Khalil looked around at the courtiers, who looked away from him and up at the fine tapestries woven to commemorate the king’s great victories. The dragons slain, the wars won, the women he’d taken as wives, the stories hung, permanent windows into other times and stories. The chamber guards held only hate in their eyes.
They thought him a spy. The man who sang to the king every night, who played his favorite songs, and whispered soft manipulations into the king’s ear as he lay in slumber.
One of the guards caught the raven, finally, with a net, and wrung its neck right then and there. Khalil stared at the dead, black body limp on the gray stone for a moment. He saw his own dark skin, clammy with death, lying on a stone pier of a harbor. A half day’s ride to the harbor, or four day’s north to where rumors said the dragon had been penned into a cave by a small army?
“I’ll face the dragon,” Khalil said loudly. “Just give me a sword, as you have destroyed the only instrument I’ve ever wielded.”
The general had not expected that. He laughed, and the courtiers and guards did not know how to respond, other than to laugh. Fake laughs that never reached the eyes that now regarded him with suspicion and fear.
***
“That,” said the lancer, a knight of the land, his armor polished so finely it gleamed like a full moon in the sun of the day. “That is a nice sword.”
Khalil regarded the steel on his lap, the jewels set into the hilt.
The lancer nudged his horse closer to peer at Khalil where he sat in the back of a cart. The lancer’s horse, also clad in armor that rattled so loudly that startled birds flew out of the nearby trees, snorted and complained a bit, as if it joined the conversation. Khalil felt for the horse, it had tried to buck its armor earlier in the day, and two men had clubbed it until it surrendered.
“It is a fine sword,” Khalil agreed. General Graves had pulled it from the king’s scabbard and thrown it at him.
“Bring back the dragon’s tongue so we can boil it and feed it to the king, so that he can regain his strength and heal the land,” General Graves shouted. “If he tries to run, kill him. And send him in after Moloch first, before any other.”
Thus had Khalil’s death sentence been passed.
He felt numb, which surprised him. There’d been so much fear kindled in him when he’d been dragged to the king’s chambers. Fear that his greatest champion would be dead. That his detractors would slit his through right there. The tiny slice of hope that he’d felt when he’d claimed his own destiny by not taking the path the general had set out for him.
But this was just a different death, wasn’t it? He’d tricked a few more days of live away from fate.
Well, not many get to choose their death. Not many got to see it coming so plainly, he thought.
And hadn’t he lived through storms, lashed to the railing of ships that could founder at any moment? Hadn’t he walked across killing deserts on pilgrimage? Or tasted the food prepared for royalty, knowing it could have been poisoned? Survived the third plague, sweating in his room and seeing his mother in visions, her voice cracking with disappointment that he’d never returned to take care of her in her resting years?
In some ways, he’d always known death would come some day. You couldn’t always count on those arrows to miss you on the battlefield. Eventually you became one of those pitiful corpses dragged off to the side of the battle of life.
“My sword was fashioned by the greatest smith for a week’s ride in any cardinal direction,” the lancer said. “I’ve ridden for the king my whole life, my father pledged me to him the day I first could raise a sword over my head. Before I could even walk!”
Khalil wondered how long it took to become an expert swordsman.
Longer than three days.
“It’s not my first dragon,” the lancer said. “The entire land knows Sir Anson. I have tracked, harried, and struck the killing blow three times. Felt the heat and been singed by their demonic breath. The fires of hell burn in them, the very fires of hell.”
Their scales he melted down into his armor. Their organ meats, he cut out to sell for medicines. The skin, boiled and soaked, became hide. Their eyes, baubles to set into the walls of his castle.
“And their jaws, I mount on the doors to my keep, for guests to walk under and know that I, Anson the Dragonhunter, can slay anything.” He lowered his voice, to whisper as if to a lover. “But their hoards. Little man with the fine sword that I’m ordered to send in first: it is the gold that we knights desire the most. Because I am almost as powerful as any king, now.”
Up to this point, Khalil had listened only with curiosity. Maybe he would hear some trick, or advice, about fighting a dragon. But so far it seemed that wasn’t coming, so he asked, “if you have so much gold, why are you on this expedition?”
Khalil swept his bound hands around them to indicate all the lancers with their steel-tipped spears, a forest of sharp weapons that surrounded the cart he sat in, which was filled with provisions, extra weapons, and him.
Anson the Dragonhunter looked at Khalil, amazed at the question. “Because someday I will rule.”
And Anson smiled, much like Khalil imagined a dragon would.
Khalil almost said, “I imagine General Graves has an opinion about that.” But he bit down on that thought, cracked it between his teeth, and swallowed it back.
All these shining men, lusting after gold, trooping wearily north. Who was worse? The dragon and its avarice, or the men around him? Certainly, as the army marched, it stripped the towns it passed of more sheep and virgins than a dragon could.
“I can almost taste the bullion on my tongue,” Anson shouted, pulling his reins and the horse away from the cart. “But I tell you this, if you kill that dragon before me, I will kill you!”
***
They cut Khalil’s bonds at the mouth of the cavern. Their hushed voices echoed back from inside the mouth of darkness, and echoed about some as well. A fine drizzle misted the air, and the lancers waved their long spears about in the air as they moved around the grass and heather and boulders.
A few miles away, a church bell rang, rang, and rang, warning everyone to seek shelter where they could.
Khalil shivered. He was always shivering in this gray land. He loved the vibrant green of the plants everywhere, it was like a carpet that covered everything. But the cold, it seeped into everything, and it drilled so deep into him sometimes his bones ached.
“Go on, singer, go tell the great worm a lullaby, maybe it will fall asleep so you can strike it!” one of the lancers shouted.
They shoved the king’s sword in one hand, and a torch in the other. The lancers lowered their spears, and jabbed Khalil forward. They laughed, flushed faces filled with fear, loathing, and the same expression Khalil saw on little children’s faces when they plucked at an insect’s limbs.
He turned away from their tortuous glee and followed the wobbling orange sphere of light he cast into the dark.
“Your gods aren’t here in this land to save you!” they shouted as he descended.
“There is only one God…” Khalil whispered.
Step by cautious step, Khalil moved deeper into the ground until some faint change in the air raised all the hair on his arm. Something in him told him that a predator looked at him. Khalil felt like someone on the savannah realizing that a great cat stalked them.
Three days extra of life. Spent in a crudely build cart, his back hurting because he’d been slammed about with every major hole in the decaying road they’d hit. His wrists burned from the ropes they’d never untied until just now.
He wished he could say he’d treasured the extra moments. That the meat he’d eaten tasted better, the wine sweeter. But the meat had been off and left him shitting off the side of the cart all day, and the wine had been so watered down he could barely taste it. And the rain had soaked him, the cold numbed him, and Khalil spent the trip miserable.
Khalil raised his sword and threw it off into the dark ahead.
“I am no swordsman, no lancer, nor am I a fighter,” he said to the dark. “And I am certainly no killer. I am just a simple musician, condemned to death. Take my sword as a gift, Ancient One. There are a hundred lancers out there, waiting to kill you and restore order to the land. Now that you know this, I just ask that you make my death quick, and as painless as any death can be so that I can go to my ancestors peacefully.”
The dragon—Khalil couldn’t see it, but he could feel the weight of the creature somehow—laughed. Flame flared in the dark maw at the far end of the cavern.
Khalil shivered. It was not from cold, as the air around him crackled with warmth.
***
“Lancers,” said the dragon in the darkness. “The first time I saw metal on tree sticks I told my cousins: these things are dangerous. They said we could not worry, these are the creatures that scurry to hide in caves when our wings blot the sun out. And now here I am, the one in the cave hiding.”
Rocks tumbled as shadows shifted, and for all his bravery and travels, for all that he’d seen so much of the world’s strangest sights in his journeys, Khalil’s knees failed him. The cavern started to spin around him as he panted in raw, honest fear that could not be hidden from.
Darkness fell over the sword, and it scraped as it was dragged over the stone away into the back of the cavern.
“If we steal all their shiny rock metals,” Moloch growled, “then surely they can’t stab at us anymore with them. That’s what my cousins said. But no matter how much we steal, you still dig into the rock and burn it to make metal that you kill us with.”
Khalil waited, and waited for the burning death.
Instead, the glittering, jeweled eyes of the dragon appeared in the dark as it looked down at him. The dragon sighed.
“I remember so much. I remember when the gods whispered the world into creation, and how we flew the world to do their bidding. I remember when your kind all spoke a single tongue, when you called us angels. Now you call us Great Worms.”
Khalil dropped to his knees. He winced as shins struck rock.
“Ancient One,” he bowed his head and lifted his hands. He had learned this so long ago. Kings demanded supplication, and adoration, and respect.
“You came with my murderers, but you bow before me? You carry their killing weapons, but you gift it to me?”
“I give you my life,” Khalil said.
Khalil felt hot breath tear at his tunic. He imagined such great teeth, gleaming just above the nape of his neck, but dared not turn his head.
“What do I need you for?” the dragon asked. “Can you help me fight those men? Will you spirit me off to safety?”
It retreated to the far back of the cavern and angrily spat flame at a wall. Ancient painted figures, skeletal and ethereal, danced in the dragon fire’s light as Khalil strained to look from the corner of his vision while he kept his head bowed. Coils of scaled flesh flickered in the shadows.
“I am no fighter,” Khalil said.
“Then what are you?”
“A musician.”
A long moment passed, and the dragon asked, “A good musician?”
“The greatest.” Pride kindled inside Khalil. He rose to his feet and faced the shadows. “I played for the king himself. I lived at the court, and people gathered from all over the land to hear my instrument.”
“And where is your instrument? Play me a song, musician.”
“I don’t have it,” Khalil had to admit.
“Why not?” The shadows sounded curious.
“It’s shattered. The general broke it, when he sent me here.”
A sigh. “When he sent you here to kill me.”
“Yes,” Khalil said.
“And now then, answer me this: why did he send you, and all those men with their little pointy sticks, to kill me?”
“The king is dying. Wounded when he fought…” Khalil trailed off, worried about what he’d almost said next.
“Fought what?” The words dripped from somewhere up in the rock ceiling.
“A dragon,” Khalil finished hastily, as if hopping past the words could get him clear of raging danger that came with them.
“So it is revenge, even though I never laid a talon on him.” The dragon sounded mournful, maybe even slightly self-pitying. Khalil could recognize it in the timbre of the words, as he had felt that same way as he lay in the cart at night, staring up at the stars and marveling at his fate.
“No, Ancient One,” Khalil said. “Not revenge. If they kill you, they can revive the king. And if they revive the king, the crops will grow again, and the livestock survive. The land will heal.”
The dragon snorted a quick puff of flame. “It is not the death of kings that grieves the land. It’s the death of dragons and greed.”
Khalil saw the long nose and sword-like teeth appear as it turned to look out into the cavern’s mouth. It stepped forward and the ground trembled. Claw struck rock, and Khalil bowed as deeply as he could.
This was it.
A death. But by dragon.
By God, he’d spoken to a dragon! Who could say this?
The dragon’s maw paused, just above the ground, by Khalil’s right ear. “A gift, for a gift, musician.”
Khalil trembled at the heat, his ear blistered from the words.
“There’s an old barbud I took from a dhow that blew too far out at sea, much to their surprise. Take it, and sing of me after this last battle. Or maybe you will sing to me, when we meet again. There’s a small gap, a way out in the back. Just small enough for someone like you to wiggle out.”
“Ancient One,” Khalil gasped.
“That is not my name,” the dragon said. It spoke its true name, revealing itself to Khalil.
The dragon swept, and swept, and swept past Khalil, leaving only scorched air behind.
And then the screams began.
***
In his elder years, Khalil only played once a moon or thereabouts. His fingers hurt, he said. He landed on the wrong notes here and there, and sometimes forget the song halfway through.
Yet, on his best days, with cousins slapping the ground with their feet to his rhythm, Khalil felt like he’d spun the world to travel back in time.
And if the mood turned just so, and old man Khalil had a little too much wine, he would say, “Now I will sing to you of my thirty-year-long pilgrimage, and all the lands and faces I played too, and I’ll even tell you about the time I spoke to a dragon, and it revealed it’s one true name to me.”
No one really believed him, after, but during the song, *all* believed him. Utterly and completely.
“And this is why our land is so lush, and the land so abundant,” Khalil would tell them. “We welcome dragons for their wisdom and their control of nature. We never hunt our dragons.”
Some say that once a week Khalil takes a goat all the way out to the edge of the bush, near the hot springs that appeared the year after he returned home. He leaves the animal outside a small cave that leads underground, and he sits and talks to the shadows inside. He tells the shadows of the king killed by an old, jealous General, and how the country fell to war and famine, and how many years it took to find his way home, even after spending all the gold he’d scooped up into his pockets when he ran.
The hot springs are well worth a visit for many restore health, and put a jaunty step back in an old person’s wobbly. But no one goes alone, or after dark, and all are quietly respectful.
Khalil’s story may be an old man’s tale, but who would disturb a dragon and bring bad luck anyway? There might be a hoard there, but Khalil’s people were well fed and took care of each other right where they were.