The Reluctant Dragon Slayer

On the piss-poor star of Vega, a young prince who never wanted to be king sets out to meet his destiny.

            Griselda was on her second mulled wine when Prince Harold shambled in.

            "I almost gave you up for dead!" She gave him her cheek to kiss, then made a face. "Are you trying to grow a beard again?"

            He touched the stubble of his cheek, "Don't you think it makes me look rakish?"

            "You're funny."

            Prince Harold signaled the bartender, "Make it a double, Tommy."

            "Rough day?"

            The Prince merely sighed. He downed his drink in one quick slug. "Another," he gasped.

            "What's happened?" Griselda and the bartender exchanged a worried glance. Harold was not one to drink like this.

            "Dragon."

            The word went through the room in a trice. All around them, the crowd suddenly fell silent. Dragons make people nervous.

            "Oh Harry! What are you going to do?"

            "I'm going to slay him," said the heir to the throne, "it's up to me to slay the dragon."

            And then everyone in the place started to laugh.

            Harold would have frozen them with his best regal glare, but even he had to appreciate the irony of the moment. No one ever would have ever expected, him least of all, that one day it would come to this. He remembered his father, that cantankerous old bastard, yelling after him about duty and honor, and all that dreck. They were dragon slayers, that’s what they were supposed to do. The son knew he'd never please the King. It was useless. He'd never be as good as those three elder brothers, each who had been fine, hale, and hearty lads. One by one, each had perished. They were all killed while trying to slay the dragon.

            And now it was Harold's turn.

           

            The King wasn't such a terrible man, in his reckoning, at least. He just wanted a peaceful kingdom, enough bread for his people, and no one to be eaten by mythical fire breathing beasts. He also wished his surviving son would have any of the qualities his brothers had possessed, those beautiful Princes who fate cruelly cut in the green wood of youth. He tried not to be bitter, but Harold could be willfully exasperating. As a young boy, he showed no interest in jousting or tilting, he never went to hunt nor enjoyed the manly sports. Despite a number of eligible Princesses from around the galaxy, he was not the lusty example of virility his brothers had been.

            "Why, my son?" he'd asked him once, "why do you ignore the lasses I bring around? Such beautiful young women, the loveliest daughters from Vega."

            "I suppose I don’t much care for Vegans," the Prince sad with a rueful laugh.

            Nothing displeased the king more than being laughed at.

            He hired the best coaches, but the Prince showed no aptitude for swordsmanship. He could barely hold a lance. An ogre from Arcturis tried to teach him to wrestle, but that had been an embarrassing episode. When the lad had taken to poetry and writing sonnets, the King had the tutor beheaded. What father would do less? Nothing worked. The boy remained obstinate, stubborn. He would never be the man his father had wished he’d be. Now, at the ripe age of sixteen, he showed no signs of changing.

            There was a brief moment of hope, when the father heard that Harold had gone to the stables each night for a week. "Perhaps he shall overcome his fear of horseflesh," the King had said with growing pride to the Man of the Royal Household, "remember you not how well his brothers sat in saddle?"

            The Man was compelled to answer. " It's not the horses that attract him, my Lord."

            The handsome groom was shot the next day, the stable boys were sent to the stocks to keep their silence, and the Man of the Royal Household was banished to the outer star of Sirius. But it didn't make a difference.

            "Why are you so difficult, my son?"

            Harold just shrugged. He had taken to being sullen and morose. It must be admitted that the golden blond boy was beautiful in his velveteen doublet and matching jerkin. With his lip just now down-turned in defiance, and the strong cheekbone and high forehead, he was so like his mother. Those eyes that looked with scorn, they were her eyes, too. The King suppressed a welling emotion as he remembered how the astrologer had prophesied that the child born in the third decan of Pisces would be blessed beyond measure. What hijinx the fates can play, for look at them now! The Queen died in childbirth, leaving behind this mewling, puny, pink-fleshed alien creature to plague his later years. Add to this, those three marvelous sons, those brave brash boy Princes, who were taken away too. What a fine prank.

            The astrologer had been summarily drawn and quartered.

            When the Lady Griselda came upon the scene, there was a renewed glimmer of expectation as Prince Harold seemed to enjoy her company to the exclusion of almost all others. The gloomy boy was even seen to be laughing! Could this be the lady of his heart? She was buxom and lively. For a while, the fripperies and rhyming couplets seemed to be forgotten. But Griselda’s influence was not quite wholesome. She drank, and gambled, she swore like a Lord. She dabbled in occult arts better left to wizards. The sober Vegan court was astonished at the frivolities of the heir and his favorite. Daily reports of their carousing and general silliness only made the sire’s heart sink lower. The King’s dynastic dreams were dashed yet again, for there would be no wooing, and no bedding.

            “How are you to ever be King?” the father was furious.

            “I don’t want to be King. I’ve never wanted to be King!’

            “It’s your destiny, my boy, and we none of us has any control over what the gods have chosen to give.”

            “But Daddy-“

            The King bristled.

            “But Father-“

            “There is nothing gained in more talk, nothing more need be said.” And the child was dismissed. There was in truth nothing more to be said. For better or worse, Harold was born to a royal life, he would be King. There was no getting around it.

            And now, the dragon.

            At the pub, Prince Harold stared into his empty glass.

            “Cheer up, Harry,” the Lady Griselda soothed.

            It was late, just the two friends and the faithful giant Tommy were left, after everyone else had scurried home to be behind double locked doors and windows.

            “How am I to kill a dragon? Me? I can’t do it. I can’t.”

            “You’re a gentle soul, a sensitive spirit. It’s just one of the many reasons why we love and adore you, Harry.”

            “I’ve never even stepped on a bug.”

            That much was true.

            “I’m afraid, Grizzy. I don’t want to go. Honor and duty be damned. I’m no dragon slayer!”

            Tommy poured them each another dram, and as they touched tankards in toast, a thought seemed to seize the Lady.
            “Wait!” she said.

            The men looked upon her, she was known to have fanciful, outlandish ideas. They watched her face change expressions as an odd glint flickered in her large violet eyes.

She jumped up with a start: “We’re going with you!”

            “What?!”

            “We’ll go with you! The three of us! We’ll make an adventure of it! We’ll give that beast a bloody fight!”

            "You can't be serious."

            "I am. It's a marvelous plan!"

            “I couldn’t ask you to endanger your lives for me,” the Prince said.

            Tommy spoke up, “the Prince is right!”

            “Thomas! Are you a yellow coward? Would you abandon our noble Hal in his moment of need?”

            “But my Lady, we’ll meet with certain doom.”

            Griselda leveled him with a look. “Sirrah, you’ll join us, or I’ll hex your peter so that it falls off.”

            “Right then. So, when do we leave?”

            “We don’t” said Harold. “I can’t let you. Tommy, you’ve been a loyal servant. I can’t ask you to do this.”

            Tommy exhaled deeply, clearly relived, and drained the dregs of his drink.

            “And, as for you Griselda, you can’t even be thinking in such a way, you’re a woman.”

            She slapped the Prince’s face so hard that he spat blood.

            “A pox on you!”

            And so, it was decided.

            In the early dawn hours of the next morning, the three friends set out on their journey. Worse for the hard drink of the night before, and little sleep, they made a motley appearance as they left the empty courtyard. By the king’s order, no one was to see them off. He Himself chose to watch from a lone window, behind a heavy drape. Whatever thoughts he had at seeing his son perhaps for the last time, the old man kept to himself. If he suffered any pangs, if any regrets disturbed him, they did not show on his wizened face, but he gripped the curtain tightly until they were out of sight.

            The trip itself was the usual tedium, relieved by the drinking songs Tommy sang from a seemingly inexhaustible list, and Griselda’s running commentary on the scenery, which was mostly dust and rocks and the occasional withered, stunted tree. Harold said little. He tried to laugh at the banter, but in truth he was deep in thought, and afraid. The horses clopped along, kicking up dry clots of red dirt. The good Prince tried to sit high in his saddle like his brothers had done, but it was a sham parody. By the time they got to the thick wooded forest, it was full noon, though the dense leaf cover in the tall looming trees made the place feel like midnight.

            “It’s so dark,” Harold said, trying not to let his voice betray him.

            An owl from a high branch shrieked in response, making his skin tingle with fear.

            “Don’t be afraid, bonnie Hal,” Griselda tried to sound cheerful, but truth be told she was just as worried. There was something about the scene that made her blood chill. She tightened her fur-lined mantle about her throat.

            “Here, my Lord, have a drink, “Tommy handed over a silver flask.

In spite of the warm liquor, they all shivered as they neared the dragon’s cave. It seemed too soon. No one felt ready for this.

            “Bloody Hell!” Griselda said.

            “My Lord,” Tommy said, his words breaking, “we can still turn back.”

            Harold said nothing.

            They dismounted.

            Gingerly, they made their way, stepping over the many skulls and scattered bones that littered the ground. It was a place of carnage and death, a burial ground of lost souls.  The smell of burnt wood and rotting flesh made them cough, their eyes stung with tears. Carrion birds circled overhead, they swooped endlessly, cawing and screaming to one another. Harold could taste the bitterness of dread at the back of his throat as his mouth went dry. His insides felt a cold finger of nettling anxiety, there was nothing in his stomach but grog and bile.

           

            In the stony hillside, the entrance to the dragon’s den was like an open maw.

            During the too short journey to this moment, Harold had been contemplating his lot, and that of his two friends. In the whole of his life, nothing had prepared him for anything like this. Motherless, brotherless, practically fatherless, all he had in the world really was the love and the faith of Griselda, and the ever-loyal Tom. Though the sight of the dark, echoing cavern filled him with horror, the growing awareness that they were behind him gave him a kind of strength he had never before known. He turned to them, and they saw something in his eyes, a flash of something that made them both pause.

            “I’m going in,” the Prince said.

            Griselda started to remonstrate. “Harry! You must be mad!” But instinctively she understood. She stayed herself, and fell silent.

            “I don’t want to be King,” he said. “I never wanted to be King.”

            “Who can argue with that, Harry? Who would want to rule some piss poor planetoid like Vega? Vegetables don’t even grow in the dirt. I never saw anything like a flower here, ever. Nothing beautiful exists there. And the subjects? Slack-jawed unattractive plebes with no intelligence.”

            “Beg pardon, your Ladyship,”

            “Oh Tom! I didn’t mean you of course.”

            The barkeep merely smiled.

            “But honesty, dear Prince, what would we be going back for? Thomas had the right idea. Let’s turn around now. Let’s leave this place and start life somewhere, anywhere else. Let’s go. Let’s leave this blasted, blighted kingdom forever! What’s keeping us here?”

            Harold listened, and was still some minutes.

            He shook his head.

            “Tom. Hand me the sword.”

            “My Lord,” the giant unsheathed the gleaming blade. With a grace of movement unexpected for a man of his proportions, he knelt on one knee before his Master, and he bowed.

            “Dear Tom," Harold gently touched the top of his friend’s head, before taking the weapon. Its heaviness surprised him. The solid heft of it, the purpose of it, the metal forged from fire that gave it power, all this he felt at once.  An energy surged through him, an electric current of white heat.

            “Harry, don’t.”

            He smiled. “If I return, my most beloved friend, we’ll do as you say. We’ll go wherever you like, we’ll start a new life."

            "Yes."

            "If I don’t come back, tell my father I did my honor and duty.”

            “Harry-"         

            But he would not be swayed, she knew as much, and in her buxom breast her heart swelled for the gentle, sweet boy she'd come to know.

            "Oh Thomas!" she cried.

            They stood together, silently, and watched as he turned away.

            The Vegan Prince who never wanted to be King held his sword up. With squared shoulders and steady gaze, he entered the dragon's domain. If his father had seen him then, even he might have been proud of the young man who walked alone into the darkness to encounter his fate.