Experimenting with The Farming Dragon

“It’s daft.”

We stood on the thin grass verge next to the muddy field. Coxcomb thrust her snout into every badger hole in the hedgerow, snorting and occasionally flaming as she shot dirt from her nostrils.

I had to admit I was nervous.  I’d finally trained her to hold a bit in her mouth, but gave up after she melted each one. The blinders, I’d given up on them too, because they confused her so. With them on all she could do was stand stock-still and pant heavily – and you don’t want dragons panting heavily when all your roofs are made of thatch.

And I’d never tried her with the weight of the plow behind her.

“When do we need to plant?”

“Weeks ago,” my father said, and spat.

“And why haven’t we planted?”

“Soil’s too wet. All this blasted rain.”

“So we’ve got to try.”

“It’s still daft.”

I nodded. It was daft. But we’d never know if it would work if we didn’t try.

I patted Coxcomb on her head, between her ears and spines. “Let’s go to work, shall we girl?” She looked at me with one rotating eye; the other stared still down the last badger hole she’d explored with her nose.

I pulled her halter from my bag and quickly strapped it onto her head. She snaked out her tongue and tried to grab the leather, my hands, whatever she could get, but the hide I used for the halter was thick and my gloves were even thicker. She shook her head as I buckled the halter down.

I played the straps out to the waiting plow. Shaking his head, papa fastened the straps to the plow and stood on the plowboard.

“You’ll run her like an ox,” I said. “I’ll run the flame.”

“We’ll have it all on fire, the house, the barn, the neighbors too,” he said, wiping the rain-slicked hair out of his eyes.

“But we’ll have the seeds in the ground,” I said.

“Maybe.”

He shook the reins and clicked his tongue, and Coxcomb lurched forward. With my strap, I pulled her snout gently toward the ground, then jiggled the strap. She snorted, then belched a burst of flame at the ground, which sizzled.

“Slowly,” I said to papa. “Until we get the hang of it.”

He nodded and twitched the reins.

Coxcomb walked slowly forward, firing gentle bursts at the muddy ground. She left footprints in the soil – but that was it. As the plow hit it, it was soil – not mud.

With his stick, papa poked holes in the earth and dropped in seeds.

Coxcomb lumbered forward, whispering flames and shaking her head as I jiggled the strap attached to her jaw.

We took a break after the first row. I removed her halter and straps and let her go back to the badger holes.

Papa stood by the side of the field, staring at the planted row.

“Seeds went in nice, did they?”

“That they did,” he said. “But got a lot more planting to do. And a lot more mud to pass.”

“But it’s working, right?”

We watched the rain patter onto the plowed soil. The rain would quickly saturate the soil again, but we could dig ditches to help the draining. And Coxcomb could come out into the field again if things got too wet.

“When the field is planted and the seeds are sprouted and not drowning, then I’ll say it works,” papa said.

“Then let’s finish.”

“Aye,” he said. And for the first time patted Coxcomb on her rump. Coxcomb hiccupped flame into a badger hole, then pulled her muddy snout out to look at us.

“Let’s get to work, girl.”

More from "The Farming Dragon"

NOTE: Not yet sure where this one is going. But it keeps coming back to my pointy little head, so that means something, right?

Not far from the village lay a ruin. It might have been a keep or castle of some sort, but most who saw it mistook it for a pile of rocks and rubble. Not even the monsignor at the church in Asheville could tell anyone what the ruin once was.

But from the ruin, from time to time, passersby could see columns of smoke, sometimes thick and black, and other times willowy white. A few of the more foolish boys dared each other to approach the ruins at night, when the vapors were accompanied by strange lights, blue one moment, green-red the next. Those who got close said the rocks were swarmed with frogs who lived in the marsh near the pile. Their eerie croaking filled the night, filled their ears, and they, in turn, filled the ears of the more cowardly with stories of a wizard changing those foolish enough to intrude on his solitude into the croaking beasts.

There was indeed a man living in the ruins. Abbingdon himself had seen him. He seemed strange, yes, hermetic, closed in, unwilling to communicate. But he occasionally came to the farm to buy fresh eggs, betimes with coils of sausage and strings of onion over his other arm. Wizard or not, becharmer of frogs or not, he was mortal enough to be hungry.

“Good morning to you, Richard,” Abbingdon said as the wizard approached the farm gate.

“It’s still raining,” the wizard said.

“Hadn’t noticed,” Abbingdon said, rain dripping off the end of his nose. “Eggs?”

“Yes. Several dozen, if you have them.”

Abbingdon’s eyebrows arched. “That many? You have guests, or a sudden urge for omelettes?”

Richard laughed. “Guests you might say, who like an omelette.”

“I’ll go poke the hens. I have some eggs, perhaps they have more.”

He and Richard walked to the henhouse. They gathered about a dozen eggs, adding them to the basket of five dozen Abbingdon had collected earlier that morning.

“I’ll have some disappointed customers,” Abbingdon said as Richard hoisted the full basket. “But the price is right.” He jingled a heavy handful of coins.

Isaac heard the jingling, from a hideout in the stables. He peered through a thin bit of thatch and saw his father talking to the wizard, who squelched off with his basket of eggs.

He could not steal from his father. He knew the money he jingled would go to buy food for the family and for the animals that fed them when there was no purse to jingle. Stealing from his father would be stealing from himself, taking food from his mouth and clothes off his back. “I have developed ethics, father, despite what you think of me,” he said, grinning.

But the wizard. If the wizard had that kind of money to spend on eggs, he must have more.

Much more. For wizards could turn lead into gold, he knew. Wizards earned fortunes for casting spells, for potions. That they lived in pokey huts or in the ruins of ancient buildings belied their wealth – of that Isaac was sure.

“The best time to go is now, while the fool is preoccupied with his eggs in the daylight, not expecting to be followed,” Isaac said to himself as he slid out of the thatch and into the muddy farmyard.

Though the rain muffled his steps, and though he was quick to stay out of sight, Isaac found following the wizard taxing. The wizard was suspicious, turning suddenly about, muttering, talking to himself, tripping over roots and lurching from side to side as he struggled around the mud and puddles. Once, dismayed at the mire the path had become, he looked quickly about and, spotting no one, snapped his fingers. Instantly he levitated about a foot in the air and, walking as if on invisible stilts, traversed the muck without further staining the bottom of his green robe.

Isaac was forced to run to keep pace. He felt the sting of nettles and thorns as he pushed through the brush and bloodied his nose when an errant branch snapped back and hit him in the face.

“This wizard had better have something worth stealing,” he muttered, blotting at the blood mixing with rainwater on his upper lip and chin.

Isaac sensed he would have to be cautious. Stealing from a wizard – even one as bumbling as this one appeared to be – probably came with risk. Not the ordinary risk of pitchforks or the empty threat of a noose. He had vauge ideas in his head of wizards turning people to stone.

Risk.

That, right there, is why Isaac had become a thief because, truth be told, there was little the money and trinkets he lifted could buy him. Asheville, full of traders and craftsmen and even a great stone church, was after all only a small village, swelled to a few hundred residents because the dwellers of the miserable villages and farms thereabouts had to have somewhere to go to buy new shoes and to be warned of hellfire.

The things sold in Asheville were too common to entice Isaac to part with his stolen money. He had bigger plans. Once his maggot was large enough, off to Sloughburg he’d go. Or Favisham for a boat, then on to the colonies – the colonies where his stolen bits of gold and silver could purchase land – and land was real. Land kept you, his father always said.

But Isaac had enough for servants. For workers. He would keep the land, he thought to himself.

So caution.

First, to sit and watch. Always to sit and watch. Smash and grab had its place, he knew. But the real secret to robbery was not to slink and mutter and hide in the shadows but to become so common, so ubiquitous, so ordinarily seen where the goods were to be found no one noticed you. Until it was too late and you’d managed to ditch the six-inch stilts and the fake beard and nose you wore while becoming common as wattle and daub in some back alley someplace, shortly after the money was missed and the shouting began.

The wizard was alone.

Alone with eggs. He could see at the hearth a small frying pan crusted with egg, and over the banked fire a pot boiled in a gentle roll, a pot filled with eggs and water. But on the makeshift settee, the tables, the floors and benches and nooks in the rocks, wrapped in gunny and linens and other oddmetns of cloth, were eggs. Rather largish eggs. Some nearly round, glistening of mother-of-pearl, others elongated, shiny, like leather loaves of bread.

The room, despite the banked fire, was stiflingly hot. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw in other corners the glow of embers. The reek of coal met his nostrils. As the wizard dozed in a snumbling rumble, smoke and heat, invisible in the twilight except for the waves of distortion they put out, seeped from nearly every crack in the rocks. Yet the wizard was wrapped tightly in robe and blanket, from which seeped hints of a cool blue glow. Enchantment, perhaps.

Quietly, Isaac thrust an arm through the crack. The heat within enveloped his arm as a clap of thunder. Beastly, worse than any summer mugginess, and wet as a sow’s mouth.

It had to be enchantment that kept the wizard cool. Inside the ruin, an oven.

Isaac crept around the dwelling, probing here and there, until he found a slab of rock, cleverly mounted on a pivot, which swung outward as he pulled on it. He quickly darted inside and shut the door, then cowered in the darkness behind a pile of baskets and sacks.

“Who’s there?”

The wizard.

Isaac was right to think the opening and closing of the door would be noted – those who enjoyed baking in such heat felt every draft of cool air.

The cool blue glow from beneath the wizard’s robe was brighter. The wizard walked, flapping folds of the rope so strobes of blue flashed amid the prickly heat.

Behind the baskets, Isaac began to sweat. He gulped silently at the stifling air and sweat coruscated off his brow. The wizard would have to settle quickly, or he’d have to leave, the heat was so oppressive.

“Chickadees,” the wizard muttered.

Instantly the dull red of the fire and the scattered coals burst forth new light – but, mercifully, no extra heat. The wizard, far from resembling the bedraggled soul who bought eggs off his father, looked menacing, probing the darker corners of the rubble pile with the end of his evil-looking walking-stick. He struck the pile of baskets with his stick, and the pile began to whirl and dance, buffeting Isaac with hot blasts of searching air. But because he was a skinny lad, able to clamber into a cleft in the rocks, and because the wizard was still dozy and the baskets whirling in his vision, he went unseen.

“Must be the chinking,” the wizard muttered as the baskets settled once again into their disorderly pile. “Or the damn squirrels sneaking in again. Nothing frightens the brainless things!”

As Isaac’s heart skipped a beat or two, the wizard, mollified, went back to his chair, wrapped his robe more tightly around him, sighed, and settled back to sleep.

Isaac remained in the crack where he hid, listening.

The wizard’s dwelling was quietly noisy, noisy enough for careful sneaking, he decided. He identified the sounds, one by one:

Crackling of the fire.

Boiling of the egg-filled water.

The quiet, easy breathing of the wizard.

Here and there, a gust of wind from outside which, mysteriously, never seemed to work in through the cracks, no matter what the wizard said about chinking.

And something else.

A few something elses.

Teacups rattling on the shelf as if a heavy cart pulled by a pair of oxen were trundling outside.

The sqirmy flap of soggy leather.

And beyond the bubbling at the hearth, another, deeper bubbling, as of a dog slumbering soundly underwater, its breath passing through a vast cauldron of hot, hot water.

He noted different timbres, as his ears got more attuned to the sounds. Many squirmings. Many rattlings.

One squirming close at hand.

Nestled in a basket, wrapped in rough sacking, an egg. But what an egg – an egg the size of a hen. A bald, leathery hen.

As he watched it, the egg squirmed.

Isaac was repulsed. The egg resembled not an egg, but a weevil, a weevil like the ones he discovered once in his oatmeal when he complained to his mother that the currants she put in were putrid.

“No currants to put in, love,” he recalled her saying. “Just oatmeal and a bit of milk.”

The wizard shifted in his seat, snorted.

Isaac saw the basket had handles on it.

He grasped them.

“No use getting caught looking for treasures,” he thought to himself as he backed towards the slab-door. “I’ll come back for a better poke-about when the wizard’s not here, and find his treasure. In the meantime, I’ll see what we’ve got here.” He pulled the slab open, darted out, and swiftly shut it. As he darted into the cover of the brambles alongside the road, he fancied, over his shoulder, he felt a blue glow diffuse the white of the stars above.

Isaac had to keep shifting the basket from one hand to the other, as the heat of the wizard’s dwelling seemed to have accompanied the baggage he carried.

Alone with Eggs

Bluish smoke sorted from the wizard’s chimney.

The thought of being turned into a toad gave Isaac momentary hesitation. But he’d robbed vicars and constables and merchants who slept lightly and had itchy trigger fingers. He may have come close a few times to being caught, but it was his experience that even the most vigilant clinger to earth’s possessions relaxed a bit when the sun set and the hearth was warm and everyone was quietly nodding off.

He’d wait a bit longer. Dusk would shortly come. The wizard would eat his omelette, then doze the late evening naps of the elderly.

The wizard was alone.

Alone with eggs. He could see at the hearth a small frying pan crusted with egg, and over the banked fire a pot boiled in a gentle roll, a pot filled with eggs and water. But on the makeshift settee, the tables, the floors and benches and nooks in the rocks, wrapped in gunny and linens and other oddemtns of cloth, were eggs. Rather largish eggs. Some nearly round, glistening of mother-of-pearl, others elongated, shiny, like leather loaves of bread.

The room, despite the banked fire, was stiflingly hot. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw in other corners the glow of embers. The reek of coal met his nostrils. As the wizard dozed in a snumbling rumble, smoke and heat, invisible in the twilight except for the waves of distortion they put out, seeped from nearly every crack in the rocks. Yet the wizard was wrapped tightly in robe and blanket, from which seeped hints of a cool blue glow. Enchantment, perhaps.

Quietly, Isaac thrust an arm through the crack. The heat within enveloped his arm as a clap of thunder. Beastly, worse than any summer mugginess, and wet as a sow’s mouth.

It had to be enchantment that kept the wizard cool. Inside the ruin, an oven.

Isaac crept around the dwelling, probing here and there, until he found a slab of rock, cleverly mounted on a pivot, which swung outward as he pulled on it. He quickly darted inside and shut the door, then cowered in the darkness behind a pile of baskets and sacks.

“Who’s there?”

The wizard.

Isaac was right to think the opening and closing of the door would be noted – those who enjoyed baking in such heat felt every draft of cool air.

The cool blue glow from beneath the wizard’s robe was brighter. The wizard walked, flapping folds of the rope so strobes of blue flashed amid the prickly heat.

Behind the baskets, Isaac began to sweat. He gulped silently at the stifling air and sweat coruscated off his brow. The wizard would have to settle quickly, or he’d have to leave, the heat was so oppressive.

“Chickadees,” the wizard muttered.

Instantly the dull red of the fire and the scattered coals burst forth new light – but, mercifully, no extra heat. The wizard, far from resembling the bedraggled soul who bought eggs off his father, looked menacing, probing the darker corners of the rubble pile with the end of his evil-looking walking-stick. He struck the pile of baskets with his stick, and the pile began to whirl and dance, buffeting Isaac with hot blasts of searching air. But because he was a skinny lad, able to clamber into a cleft in the rocks, and because the wizard was still dozy and the baskets whirling in his vision, he went unseen.

“Must be the chinking,” the wizard muttered as the baskets settled once again into their disorderly pile. “Or the damn squirrels sneaking in again. Nothing frightens the brainless things!”

As Isaac’s heart skipped a beat or two, the wizard, mollified, went back to his chair, wrapped his robe more tightly around him, sighed, and settled back to sleep.

Isaac remained in the crack where he hid, listening.

The wizard’s dwelling was quietly noisy, noisy enough for careful sneaking, he decided. He identified the sounds, one by one:

Crackling of the fire.

Boiling of the egg-filled water.

The quiet, easy breathing of the wizard.

Here and there, a gust of wind from outside which, mysteriously, never seemed to work in through the cracks, no matter what the wizard said about chinking.

And something else.

A few something elses.

Teacups rattling on the shelf as if a heavy cart pulled by a pair of oxen were trundling outside.

The sqirmy flap of soggy leather.

And beyond the bubbling at the hearth, another, deeper bubbling, as of a dog slumbering soundly underwater, its breath passing through a vast cauldron of hot, hot water.

He noted different timbres, as his ears got more attuned to the sounds. Many squirmings. Many rattlings.

One squirming close at hand.

Nestled in a basket, wrapped in rough sacking, an egg. But what an egg – an egg the size of a hen. A bald, leathery hen.

As he watched it, the egg squirmed.

Isaac was repulsed. The egg resembled not an egg, but a weevil, a weevil like the ones he discovered once in his oatmeal when he complained to his mother that the currants she put in were putrid.

“No currants to put in, love,” he recalled her saying. “Just oatmeal and a bit of milk.”

The wizard shifted in his seat, snorted.

Isaac saw the basket had handles on it.

He grasped them.

“No use getting caught looking for treasures,” he thought to himself as he backed towards the slab-door. “I’ll come back for a better poke-about when the wizard’s not here, and find his treasure. In the meantime, I’ll see what we’ve got here.” He pulled the slab open, darted out, and swiftly shut it. As he darted into the cover of the brambles alongside the road, he fancied, over his shoulder, he felt a blue glow diffuse the white of the stars above.

Isaac had to keep shifting the basket from one hand to the other, as the heat of the wizard’s dwelling seemed to have accompanied the baggage he carried.

The Wizard

Not far from the village lay a ruin. It might have been a keep or castle of some sort, but most who saw it mistook it for a pile of rocks and rubble. Not even the monsignor at the church in Asheville could tell anyone what the ruin once was.

But from the ruin, from time to time, passersby could see columns of smoke, sometimes thick and black, and other times willowy white. A few of the more foolish boys dared each other to approach the ruins at night, when the vapors were accompanied by strange lights, blue one moment, green-red the next. Those who got close said the rocks were swarmed with frogs who lived in the marsh near the pile. Their eerie croaking filled the night, filled their ears, and they, in turn, filled the ears of the more cowardly with stories of a wizard changing those foolish enough to intrude on his solitude into the croaking beasts.

There was indeed a man living in the ruins. Abbingdon himself had seen him. He seemed strange, yes, hermetic, closed in, unwilling to communicate. But he occasionally came to the farm to buy fresh eggs, betimes with coils of sausage and strings of onion over his other arm. Wizard or not, becharmer of frogs or not, he was mortal enough to be hungry.

“Good morning to you, Richard,” Abbingdon said as the wizard approached the farm gate.

“It’s still raining,” the wizard said.

“Hadn’t noticed,” Abbingdon said, rain dripping off the end of his nose. “Eggs?”

“Yes. Several dozen, if you have them.”

Abbingdon’s eyebrows arched. “That many? You have guests, or a sudden urge for omelettes?”

Richard laughed. “Guests you might say, who like an omelette.”

“I’ll go poke the hens. I have some eggs, perhaps they have more.”

He and Richard walked to the henhouse. They gathered about a dozen eggs, adding them to the basket of five dozen Abbingdon had collected earlier that morning.

“I’ll have some disappointed customers,” Abbingdon said as Richard hoisted the full basket. “But the price is right.” He jingled a heavy handful of coins.

Isaac heard the jingling, from a hideout in the stables. He peered through a thin bit of thatch and saw his father talking to the wizard, who squelched off with his basket of eggs.

He could not steal from his father. He knew the money he jingled would go to buy food for the family and for the animals that fed them when there was no purse to jingle. Stealing from his father would be stealing from himself, taking food from his mouth and clothes off his back. “I have developed ethics, father, despite what you think of me,” he said, grinning.

But the wizard. If the wizard had that kind of money to spend on eggs, he must have more.

Much more. For wizards could turn lead into gold, he knew. Wizards earned fortunes for casting spells, for potions. That they lived in pokey huts or in the ruins of ancient buildings belied their wealth – of that Isaac was sure.

“The best time to go is now, while the fool is preoccupied with his eggs in the daylight, not expecting to be followed,” Isaac said to himself as he slid out of the thatch and into the muddy farmyard.

Though the rain muffled his steps, and though he was quick to stay out of sight, Isaac found following the wizard taxing. The wizard was suspicious, turning suddenly about, muttering, talking to himself, tripping over roots and lurching from side to side as he struggled around the mud and puddles. Once, dismayed at the mire the path had become, he looked quickly about and, spotting no one, snapped his fingers. Instantly he levitated about a foot in the air and, walking as if on invisible stilts, traversed the muck without further staining the bottom of his green robe.

Isaac was forced to run to keep pace. He felt the sting of nettles and thorns as he pushed through the brush and bloodied his nose when an errant branch snapped back and hit him in the face.

“This wizard had better have something worth stealing,” he muttered, blotting at the blood mixing with rainwater on his upper lip and chin.

The Farming Dragon, Another Part

Isaac liked the rain. Though he had to be cautious about footprints and certainly about tracking mud, the friendly rain also obscured tracks after a time and made his footprints across the meadows nearly indistinguishable from that of the cattle.

He liked the fog even better, because not only did the fog conceal, it also distorted sound and warped distance and made those searching for him stumble.

Fog and rain were friendly.

“Not so, Father, not so,” he said.

Isaac sat on a pile of firewood. His father leaned on his axe.

“You’re smiling so, Isaac,” Abbingdon said. “You must be lying!”

“Oh, Father, can a boy not smile at his father upon seeing him of a morning?”

“Not when the boy is prone to smiling whenever he’s caught in a lie. You must take back the Widow Provost’s ladder.”

“But I told you, Father, I do not have it.” Isaac smiled.

Abbingdon gave a small sigh. “Don’t play me with technicalities, boy. I see you do not have it. So I will rephrase my request: Go to where you’ve hidden the Widow Provost’s ladder, then return it to her.”

Isaac’s smile widened. “I have not hidden her ladder, Father. Nor do I have it.”

The games were wearying. He had to credit the boy with inventiveness, and took a stubborn pride in his son’s natural intelligence, though the pride never strayed into justifying his thievery. If only there were a school nearby, a good school, where this boy could learn, Abbingdon thought many a time. He could put that mind to good use. But the monastery school wouldn’t take him because of his past, and there was nowhere else to go. He chafed at life on the farm. He stole from the businesses where  he could apprentice.

Abbingdon gave another sigh, leaned the axe against a fence, and gently grabbed Isaac by the ear.

Isaac protested. “I’m not a child, father. Do not punish me like one.”

“To punish you as an adult would be to turn you over to the undersheriff, next time he comes,” Abbingdon said. He marched Isaac behind the stable where a ladder unfamiliar to Abbingdon lay propped against the wall. He released Isaac’s ear and nodded toward the ladder. “Pick it up,” he said.

Isaac scowled, but did as he was told. “What does she need the ladder for,” he mumbled to himself almost as he shouldered the ladder and started to walk toward the Widow Provost’s hut. “She’s too old and fat to climb it.”

“No matter, that,” Abbingdon said. “What matters is that it is hers, not yours, to do with as she pleases.”

Thunder rumbled as they both crossed the meadow and entered the wood, following the meandering path that le to the village outliers. Ordinarily, Abbingdon liked the thunder. It made him feel dozy, as it reminded him of late afternoons resting between chores. But this was morning thunder, not to be trifled with, meaning heavier rain was on the way and likely to cause more rot in the haystacks.

They walked in silence, slipping on piles of wet fallen leaves and splashing through puddles on the path. More thunder rolled as birds an squirrels scampered around or flew through the gathering mist, trying to find a morsel of breakfast before the storm of the day set in.

“What do you need the ladder for,” Abbingdon asked as they walked.

“There are two-story houses now in Asheville,” Isaac said. “I cannot reach the upper windows.”

“Brazen you are,” Abbingdon said.

“Bored I am,” Isaac said. He then shut his ears to his father and concentrated on walking. So he had to return the ladder. Hers was not the only ladder he could lay a finger on. Hers had just been the first, and likely easiest to seize. There would be others.

God in heaven, Abbingdon said to himself as they walked, the rain now coming down heavier, soaking the gunny he used as a cloak. God in heaven, how can I make my son see he walks on the path of error? He’ll end up on the gallows in Asheville, though he himself does not see it. He’ll hang if he continues down that path. I told him that once, when we stood at the foot of the gallows. He laughed and ran up the gallows stairs and swung on the rope hanging there, the rope that bobs and weaves in the night as the ghosts of those hung by it fly through. He jumped up and down on the trap door, pulled in vain at the locked release lever.

“Immortal, Father,” he said. “Immortal. I will never die. Never!”

He continued to steal. He continued to lie. He continued to sullenly return what was stolen which, for the time being, mollified the residents of their village, who knew him, who knew his father, who knew if anything was missing it was best to find Isaac and shake him until the missing item fell out of his cloak.

But they did not know him at Asheville. To them, he would be another fresh-faced thief, ready for the rope.

The Farming Dragon

NOTE: Here's a new story working its way out.

“Naught to do now but wait,” he said, rain dripping from his hair and nose. He stood in mud and rivulets and puddles of water.

The ox moaned.

With swift strokes he cut the leather thongs and ropes that tied the ox to the plow, mired in the muddy field. With another low moan, the ox stumbled off, slipping in the mud, towards the nearby trees where perhaps it might find shelter from its misery. He’d tried for an hour to unknot the leather, but his weary fingers couldn’t ferret the knots from the wet harnesses.

Abbington knew rain. He lived with it. He slept with it. He drank it and from it made his tea and his soup. But never had he seen such rain, and for so long. The runnels swelled to rivers. The rivers boiled with brown muck flecked with bits of log and fence and house and drowned dog. The roads were impassible with mud and the tracks through field and glen sucked boots from the feet.

He sneezed into rain-shriveled hands.

“Even the fish,” he muttered as the rain pelted his already-soaked hat. “Even the fish are tired of the rain.”

“Carn’t plant the portaters, they keep’m floadin’ away,” said Crump. He and other soggy farmers lined the bar at the mud-caked pub. “Nawt the barley, neither. And them carrot seed, why’m they swole up to the size o’radishes, they did.”

The others nodded.

Ain’t seen rain like this since Noah build t’ark,” Stark said.

For more than a month, indeed, nothing but rain. Grey clouds rolled in day after day, like wool from the shearers.

“Ev’rone’s got the rot,” Malcolm said. “Me poor Bessie, her hooves just rotted out from ‘neath her. Had to have the knackers come, she suffered so. Curse this rain and the God that brings it!”

Jeremy was worried. No new beer deliveries to his pub for two weeks, and the cellar was nearly empty, except for the seepage. Seemed the longer the rain lasted, the longer the farmers’ thirst held for beer. And if he ran out, why, these folks were ugly enough drunk; he couldn’t imagine them sober, dripping, clamoring for a pint he couldn’t give them.

“Eh, Abbingdon,” Malcolm said. “Solved that problem of your’n, have ye?” He chuckled.

Abbingdon’s smile faded slightly. Malcom, even in the best weather on the best days, made him weary, but with the weeks of rain he’d grown wearisome with his pecking at everyone’s difficulty.

“No,” Abbingdon said. “But the solution will come. I’m sure of it.”

“Sure’n it will,” Malcom snarled. “Soon as the rain dries up.” He grabbed his tumbler of whisky and swallowed it.

Abbindon stared out the window, through the pub’s wavy glass. The solution will come, he was sure of it. Likely his son Salomon would steal a solution and bring it home to hide in the chicken coop, as he had with the silver form the church, the barrels of whisky from the pub – he was lucky they let him through the doors now, after that episode – and the good tack and plow from the abominable Malcolm, who spat at Salomon every time he saw him.

He sighed. Such troubles, and with the rain making everything wetter than a duck’s bottom,  Abbingdon didn’t need any more troubles.

*             *

"The copse yonder of Woolley Farm is burning," Mikal said.

Abbingdon's eyes rose from the barrow he was pushing through the muck. He was quite pleased with it. He'd removed the wheel and built the front of it on a hinged sledge, so it still bore the weight of the load but slid over the mud rather than sinking into it up to the axle, as the wheeled barrow had done. Now if only he could do the same with his knees.

It was not a smudge of smoke, but a curling billow boiling up into the low-hanging clouds. He frowned. He had often seen smokes and vapors rising from the earth. He was familiar with the clammy vagaries of fog and the biting concealment of blizzards.

"That be Dragon-smoke," he said to the stunned Mikal. Naught else could get this wet world to burn but a Dragon."

"What do we do?" Mikal gulped.

Abbingdon rested his hands on the barrow handles.

"We watch," he said. "And if I'm familiar with the worm, we lose a few sheep, a few cattle, before the men of the village are united and frightened enough to try to chase beasts off. Some few will be burned, returning to their homes in blackened, smoking clothing and dazed expressions. Some few will disappear - some run off, some eaten. Less so if we can hire a knight, or a Hero comes a-wandering through."

"That's all? We're powerless?"

Abbingdon nodded. "Seen it all before, ha'n't I? Grew up in the Wild Wood, where the Worms came to feed. Don't know anyone from the Wild Wood who has his or her eyebrows-" he waggled his bald brow "- or isn't missing a few fingers or a few relatives cause of the Worms."

Mikal looked like a water-wheel jammed by a boulder tossed down in the spring floods. He cast his eyes toward the billow, back towards Abbingdon, next to the village.

Abbingdon laughed. "Young Mikal," he chortled, "calm yourself. I'm filling yew full of stories. Again. Yonder is a billow from the Colby mine, which sends up a stack ever so often on the days when the rain is lighter and the wind just right. It will be gone, yon cloud, by nightfall, and you may sleep tight, no Worms descending to nibble yer toes."

Mikal smiled. "One if these days, I'logically see you're talking through your hat." He glanced up at the clouds, blackening on the horizon. "Think it'll rain?"

It was Abbingdon's turn to smile. "If it don't, I'm a lizard."