Then, as he watched, eyes wide, the change happened—a ripple ran through the shrubs and grasses over there, and then a stronger one. He could feel no wind to account for it, or for the next, even heftier, ripple. Then the whole hillside lifted up and looked at him.

  For it was the dragon himself, stretched out and likely asleep, that he had been watching all this while, the tough green scales and hairy interweaves of the great now clearly discernible, the huge head (he had thought it a distant tree) now reared halfway up the sky turned round to gaze at the knight, who felt awe and fear, states of feeling he had been trained to turn into thinking. He thought, calmly and quickly, taking and holding and releasing his breaths in the rhythm he had been taught by a monk when he was still in the hands of his master.

  The dragon’s head swung nearer, balancing gently halfway across the gorge. The eyes of this dragon, which was in fact the first of any kind that the knight had seen with his own eyes, these eyes that looked at him were many colored. They did not glitter like the eyes of a snake or glisten like those of a frog. They were more catlike, he thought, in that they seemed to go very deep into themselves and open up in there onto some other space. The hall in an ancient castle they all are coming from, he thought.

  Smoke drifted out of the dragon’s nostrils. Watching the smoke curl away into emptiness made him feel strange, so he concentrated on his breathing, and on letting his eyes do their work with the eyes of the animal.

  Though it didn’t much look like an animal.

  “Can you with all your seeing see who I am?” asked the dragon. The voice was smaller than you’d imagine, deep enough, but seeming to come from nowhere. In fact, the knight looked around to see if someone else had spoken.

  “No,” said the dragon, “it is I who spoke. Do you feel fit to answer my question? Can you see who I am?”

  “Truth to tell, I can’t. I have been looking, maybe even staring, forgive me, I know that isn’t polite, but somehow I imagined an animal would not mind being stared at. I mean, animals—cats, for instance, or deer, or owls—are always staring.”

  “That is logical, Sir Parsival. But animals do mind being stared at as if they were not worth any other mode of discourse. Seeing can be very distancing. The object you look at so intently can be rendered into a mere thing by your beholding. Instead, you should try to use all of your senses, mental senses at least, to observe.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  “I know all the names, Sir Parsival. And I know which name belongs to whom, and what everybody’s real name is.”

  But Parsival doubted suddenly. In his mind’s eye he could see the leper hobbling through the aspen grove, hurrying along a shortcut to the dragon’s lair, and whispering to the dragon the name of his soon-to-be assailant. And once the knight started thinking that way, he soon imagined that the leper had deliberately lured him, for no decent reason, into this encounter with the dragon. The leper was some sort of agent or tool of the dragon. No wonder he stank and had scaly skin. The knight didn’t blurt out all that, of course, but only said, suspiciously enough: “I think the leper came secretly to you and told you my name.”

  And even as he said so, he realized that he had not told the leper his name.

  “Not so, Sir Parsival, I would not need a priest to tell me what I can read from your heart.”

  “How did you know the leper was a priest? He wears no sign of his former glory.”

  “I know what everyis, and everywas, and some part of what everywill be—but not all,” explained the dragon, “so do not ask much about what is to come. What is to come is written in what has been. You think I am a monster (you haven’t said so, but I can tell), whereas I think I myself am nothing but the logic of the world.”

  The dragon paused, more as if to reflect than to give the knight a chance to speak, then went on: “And the logic of the world is frightening enough, God knows.”

  “You dare to speak of God!”

  “Everytalks about God. Be closer!”

  At that command, abruptly spoken, Parsival drew back, and his hand began to coax his sword out of its scabbard. Yet suddenly he was closer, much closer, right in front of the dragon’s face, but he had not moved. The great head had swung further toward him. He could feel the warmth of the dragon’s breath on his face. He had been holding his breath, for fear of the evil smell of that breath, and perhaps a righteous fear of inhaling evil itself into his innocent body. But he had to breathe, and snatched a quick inhalation. To his surprise, the smell was far from unpleasant. It reminded him of many things—the skin beside his mother’s earlobe when he had kissed her goodbye, a birchbark box he had once opened and found full of old rose petals, most of their color gone but still a rosy scent left for him.

  “See,” said the dragon, “you are beginning to stare with other senses now.”

  Bravely, the knight inhaled deeply. And now he found other fragrances mingling too, more enigmatic—sun on hot slate, a cucumber stung by a wasp and turned a little brown around the bite, a door slammed by the wind and the dust on the threshold whirled up by its motion, tickle in the nostrils, could moonlight have a smell? And wasn’t that the smell of the place in the woods where he’d seen a stag rubbing itself against a beech tree? He sneezed.

  Instantly the huge membranous wings of the dragon whirled and came to rest a few feet above the knight’s head.

  “Why? What?” gasped the knight.

  “I am shielding you from the noontime; the sun is greedy for the part of a man’s soul that flies out when he sneezes and looks around and soon comes back unless it’s snatched by some power. I shield you from that power.”

  “Thank you,” said the knight, still a little breathless from his big sneeze.

  “That is the first word or sign of courtesy you have shown me, Sir Parsival. Thank you for it, though someday you’ll grasp that it does you more good than it does me. Now tell me, why have you come to slay me?”

  “Not easy to explain, now that you ask me. At this moment, I don’t feel very much like killing you. Or anything else.”

  “Those words are good to hear. (Even better that you speak them.) But before this very moment on the porches of my house, in pleasant sunlight, and no birds shouting, why did you think to come slay me?”

  “I suppose I didn’t ‘think to’ slay you. I really didn’t think at all. I have been raised in a tradition that tells me that virtue lies in smiting or slaying the enemy. The same tradition recognizes enemies of all kinds—wolves and bears, snakes and spiders, foreigners and bandits, demons, bad neighbors, dragons, monsters, devils, and the Devil himself. All of them are against us, and we must be quick to flee them or slay them, whichever is in our power. And many of the great older brethren in my company have distinguished themselves by slaying dragons. Or so it is said. I have never seen it done. To be truthful, you are the first dragon I have ever seen.”

  The dragon’s head drew even closer, and turned slowly from side to side as if to give the knight a chance to see him whole. Poised now a foot or two above, the dragon spoke.

  “Do I seem to you to belong to the class of enemies you have listed? Is it enough just for me to be a dragon to make you slay me, or must I first be guilty of bad behavior? And if so, what wrong have I done you?”

  The knight edged back a little to get some distance from that all-tooobservant face, the broad nostrils carved in the shapely muzzle, the all-color eyes resting, always resting, calmly on him.

  “No wrong, Sir Dragon. But the leper told me of your depredations on the farmlands and houses outside the woods, and the maidens you have carried off. It seemed from what he said that you were behaving exactly as dragons are said to behave. Therefore it fell to me to remedy the evil—the one who learns about it must do something about it, that is the rule.”

  “A good rule,” said the dragon. “But what it means to ‘do something,’ ah, that’s another matter. We should one day have a talk about that.”

  “Do you deny that you have raided and ravened in the plains round about?”

  “Come into my house deeper, sir, and you will find no plunder. There are no maidens here.”

  “Did the leper lie?”

  “Perhaps the priest in him made him do it. They are creatures of books and ceremonies, priests. He, like you, has learned how dragons make nuisances of themselves, and, like you, assumes that since I am a dragon, I have done what the dragons in his books are said to do.”

  “So I should not be afraid of you?”

  “You have done very well so far in hiding your fear, or perhaps distracting us both from it. But on the contrary, you should be very afraid of me. I told you that I am logical. Now I tell you that I am wise. The two flanks of the mind are deployed, and there is no room for stupidity or hatred or indifference. And not much room for love—just enough to keep the world at work.”

  “But how can I slay wisdom?”

  The dragon looked very sad a moment, unless the knight deceived himself by interpreting a certain wetness of the eye.

  “Slay wisdom? The priests do it all day long, and what they leave still breathing the schoolmasters and the merchants soon make away with. Wisdom, being eternal, is the easiest thing to slay.”

  “That’s too deep for me,” said the knight. And he stood up, tugging the sword loose at last from the sheath. The dragon did not move.

  “O little one, o little knight, my little son! Don’t you know you have already slain me? Don’t you know that you’ll come back tomorrow morning and there will be no dragon here, just an empty gorge, with a trickle of reddish water in it, rusty from the iron sills in this old rock. No dragon, no hoard, no maiden. But your mind will be different. You will listen to me in your head again. You will realize that, just like the cowardly creature your traditions claim I am, I have rushed into hiding. You will slowly realize that I have hidden myself in the snuggest cavern of all, deep inside your mind, and that you will never altogether silence me. Because once you have slain someone or something, you take into yourself everything they are and know and do.”

  Parsival did not raise his sword, but let it fall. He began to cry. Wisdom is so cruel, so tender, what can he do but cry? He is young, after all, not yet seventeen, and his mother is dead.

  He blinks tears out of his eyes and says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I meant no harm.”

  “And none was done,” said the voice of the dragon.

  “What shall I do?”

  “Do what you have done. Be quick to listen, slow to lift the sword. Learn from everything you see and everyone you meet. Even lepers. Even priests. Even me.”

  Then there was no dragon. The air was just the same, the gorge was as it had been before; perhaps the far slope was a little more barren, perhaps not. Memory is not reliable.

  The knight stowed away his sword, untethered his horse, mounted, and went back down the way he had come. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve. Perhaps he should seek out the leper and disabuse him of his false ideas about the dragon. And yet, he thought, it was those wrong ideas that had brought him to this meeting. The meeting seemed important, very important, but Sir Parsival could not exactly say how or why. He left it to work itself out in his mind, the way things do. No need to bother the poor leper, let him think as he pleased.

  Then Parsival attended to his path, the calm demeanor of his horse. Strange, now he thought about it, that his horse had not shied from the dragon, had not even whinnied or shifted. All through the conversation, the horse had gone on browsing. He began to think about the horse, what it must have felt. What an animal must know.

  THE LONG, COLD GOODBYE

  HOLLY PHILLIPS

  Berd was late and she knew Sele would not wait for her, not even if it weren’t cold enough to freeze a standing man’s feet in his shoes. She hurried anyway, head down, as if she hauled a sled heavy with anxiety. She did not look up from the icy pavement until she arrived at the esplanade, and was just in time to see the diver balanced atop the railing. Sele! she thought, her voice frozen in her throat. The diver was no more than a silhouette, faceless, anonymous in winter clothes. Stop, she thought. Don’t, she thought, still unable to speak. He spread his arms. He was an ink sketch, an albatross, a flying cross. Below him, the ice on the bay shone with the apricot-gold of the sunset, a gorgeous summer nectar of a color that lied in the face of the ferocious cold. The light erased the boundary between frozen sea and icy sky; from where Berd stood across the boulevard, there was no horizon but the black line of the railing, sky above and below, the cliff an edge on eternity. And the absence the diver made when he had flown was as bright as all the rest within the blazing death of the sun.

  Berd crossed the boulevard, huddled deep within the man’s overcoat she wore over all her winter clothes. Brightness brought tears to her eyes and the tears froze on her lashes. She was alone on the esplanade now. It was so quiet she could hear the groan of tide-locked ice floes, the tick and ping of the iron railing threatening to shatter in the cold. She looked over, careful not to touch the metal even with her sleeve, and saw the shape the suicide made against the ice. No longer a cross: an asterisk bent to angles on the frozen waves and ice-sheeted rocks. He was not alone there. There was a whole uneven line of corpses lying along the foot of the cliff, like a line of unreadable type, the final sentence in a historical tome, unburied until the next storm swept in with its erasure of snow. Berd’s diver steamed, giving up the last ghost of warmth to the blue shadow of the land. He was still faceless. He might have been anyone, dead. The shadow grew. The sun spread itself into a spindle, a line; dwindled to a green spark and was gone. It was all shadow now, luminous dusk the color of longing, a blue to break your heart, ice’s consolation for the blazing death of the sky. Berd’s breath steamed like the broken man, dusting her scarf with frost. She turned and picked her way across the boulevard, its pavement broken by frost heaves, her eyes still dazzled by the last of the day. It was spring, the 30th of April, May Day Eve. The end.

  Sele. That was not, could never have been him, Berd decided. Suicide had become a commonplace this spring, this non-spring, but Sele would never think of it. He was too curious, perhaps too fatalistic, certainly too engaged in the new scramble for survival and bliss. (But if he did, if he did, he would call on Berd to witness it. There was no one left but her.) No. She shook her head to herself in the collar of her coat. Not Sele. She was late. He had come and gone. The diver had come and gone. Finally she felt the shock of it, witness to a man’s sudden death, and flinched to a stop in the empty street. Gaslights stood unlit in the blue dusk, and the windows of the buildings flanking the street were mostly dark, so that the few cracks of light struck a note of loneliness. Lonely Berd, witness to too much, standing with her feet freezing inside her shoes. She leaned forward, her sled of woe a little heavier now, and started walking. She would not go that way, not that way, she would not. She would find Sele, who had simply declined to wait for her in the cold, and get what he had promised her, and then she would be free.

  But where, in all the dying city, would he be?

  Sele had never held one address for long. Even when they were children Berd could never be sure of finding him in the same park or alley or briefly favored dock for more than a week or two. Then she would have to hunt him down, her search spirals widening as he grew older and dared to roam further afield. Sometimes she grew disheartened or angry that he never sought her out, that she was always the one who had to look for him, and then she refused. Abstained, as she came to think of it in more recent years. She had her own friends, her own curiosities, her own pursuits. But she found that even when she was pursuing them she would run across Sele following the same trail. Were they so much alike? It came of growing up together, she supposed. Each had come too much under the other’s influence. She had not seen him for more than a year when they found each other again at the lecture on ancient ways.

  “Oh, hello,” he said, as if it had been a week.

  “Hello.” She bumped shoulders with him, standing at the back of the crowded room—crowded, it must be said, only because the room was so small. And she had felt the currents of amusement, impatience, offense, disdain, running through him, as if together they had closed a circuit, because she felt the same things herself, listening to the distinguished professor talk about the “first inhabitants,” the “lost people,” as if there were not two of them standing in the very room.

  “We lost all right,” Sele had said, more rueful than bitter, and Berd had laughed. So that was where it had begun, with a shrug and a laugh—if it had not begun in their childhood, growing up poor and invisible in the city built on their native ground—if it had not begun long before they were born.

  Berd trudged on, worried now about the impending darkness. The spring dusk would linger for a long while, but there were no lamplighters out to spark the lamps. In this cold, if men didn’t lose fingers to the iron posts, the brass fittings shattered like rotten ice. So there would be no light but the stars already piercing the blue. Find Sele, find Sele. It was like spiraling back into childhood, spiraling through the city in search of him. Every spiral had a beginning point. Hers would be his apartment, a long way from the old neighborhood, not so far from the esplanade. He won’t be there, she warned herself, and as if she were tending a child, she turned her mind from the sight of the dead man lying with the others on the ice.

  Dear Berd,

  I cannot tell you how happy your news has made me. You are coming! You are coming at last! It seems as though I have been waiting for a lifetime, and now that I know I’ll only have to wait a few short weeks more they stretch out before me like an eternity. Your letters are all my consolation, and the memory I hold so vividly in my mind is better than any photograph: your sweet face and your eyes that smile when you look sad and yet hold such a melancholy when you smile. My heart knows you so well, and you are still mysterious to me, as if every thought, every emotion you share (and you are so open you shame me for my reserve) casts a shadow that keeps the inner Berd safely hidden from prying eyes. Oh, I won’t pry! But come soon, as soon as you can, because one lifetime of waiting is long enough for any man . . .