Stories for Another Day
One day Rustum was flying over a new and mysterious city that he had never visited before, when he smelled something familiar and nasty. How he came to be flying over the city was this: the king had granted him the use of his flying carpet for exactly one hour once a month – why exactly is a story for another day which I hope you will be able to read one day. Of course Rustum made good use of this hour to do as many interesting things as he could think of.
He flew down and landed the carpet beside a high wall of solid, grey stone that surrounded a great house made of the same grey stone. A few short sniffs were enough to tell him that the smell was something very unpleasant: dead rat.
He climbed over the wall – you or I might have gotten onto the flying carpet and sped as far away from the nasty smell as possible, but Rustum was made of sterner stuff. Besides, he thought he could smell a very faint whiff of something even nastier, and he meant to find out if he was right.
On the other side of the wall was a beautiful garden, full of fruit trees and flower beds, clinging vines and sitting walls. And in the corner just in front of him, there was a dog burying a dead rat.
Rustum went up closer. It was not a dog at all, but a sort of lizard the size of an armadillo, with furry patches and a snout like a warthog, a sort of wart-lizard. “What are you doing?” Rustum asked.
The wart-lizard jumped and tried to bark in a rasping, squeaking voice that didn’t fool Rustum for a second. It ran at him with its long, sharp fangs bared, but Rustum aimed a solid kick at it and it staggered back against the wall. While it was still shaking its head and counting to see if any teeth were missing, Rustum walked quickly up to the great house.
He rang a bell large enough to call a whole playground full of children into school. A tall man with dark hair and long, tapering fingers, wearing a black suit and a white shirt with lace cuffs, opened the door.
“Are you the owner of this house?” Rustum asked.
“I am Sir Norgard, and this house and all you see are mine,” the tall man said with a bow. He put on a pair of fine, gold spectacles, the better to see Rustum with.
“Then I have to tell you, sir, that there is a dragon in your garden, burying dead rats,” Rustum said.
“No! Is there really?” said Sir Norgard. “One of those large, scaly, fire-breathing creatures?”
“Dragons come in many shapes and sizes, Sir Norgard,” Rustum said.
Sir Norgard peered out the window. “I don’t see anything, only my dog,” he said.
“Your dog,” Rustum said firmly, “is a dragon, very badly disguised. The best thing to do is dispatch it, before it starts killing larger things than rats.”
“Dispatch?” said Sir Norgard. “You mean, kill it? But he is a sweet little pet, and an excellent guard dog.”
“Dispatch it,” Rustum repeated, very firmly, “without delay. Now.”
Sir Norgard took off his glasses and waved them around. He hummed and hawed, and then he said, “I might as well tell you. I know he is a dragon and not an unusual puppy. The fact is, I am an eminent dragonologist, and I am conducting an experiment with the help of that little dragon. In the interests of science, I beg you not to harm him.”
Rustum said, “In the interests of the people of this city, not to mention their cats and dogs, and their sheep and even their horses, that dragon must be destroyed. If you won’t do it, I will.”
Sir Norgard looked quite upset, but he said, “Oh, very well then, you do it. But don’t sneak up on him and kill him in an underhand way. Face him like a man.”
Rustum went back down to the garden, where the wart-lizard dragon was waiting for him. He picked up a shovel which was lying about conveniently and prepared to kill the creature with one clean blow.
“No, please!” squeaked the creature. “It’s not what you think!”
Rustum lowered the shovel and stared. The creature stood on its hind legs and rubbed its front paws together. “I’m not a dragon – he is!” it squeaked.
“What?” Rustum exclaimed.
“Did he tell you he was conducting an experiment?” the creature asked. “The truth is, I am Sir Norgard, and I was the one doing the experiment. But somehow the dragon found a way to use my own research to exchange bodies with me. Why do you think I am burying these hateful rats instead of eating them? I can’t bear the sight of them.”
“Then it’s Sir Norgard I must kill!” Rustum said.
“No, no!” squealed the wart-lizard. “The dragon is very clever, much cleverer than you or me, and he has used what I have learned to make it possible for him to change bodies in the blink of an eye. By the time you reach the house, he will be in this body, and I will be in the other!”
Rustum leant on the shovel and considered. “Excuse me for a moment, would you?” he said, because even when you are talking to a wart-lizard who may or may not be a dragon, it pays to be polite. He hopped back over the wall to where the flying carpet was waiting, and flew back to the king and explained that he would need the carpet for another hour at least.
The king said, “Hmm, well, you can use next month’s hour, I suppose. But if you are even a minute late, the deal is off.” Rustum said thank you nicely, and flew back, stopping at his home for a few minutes to collect something on the way.
He climbed the wall into the dragon’s garden again, where the wart-lizard had gone back to digging industriously.
“You there!” Rustum shouted.
The creature jumped. “Oh! You frightened me! It’s not as if I’m a fearless, fearsome dragon, you know.”
“It seems to me that with all this swapping between bodies, some of the dragon must have gotten mixed up with some of you,” Rustum said. “If I were to kill the dragon, I might accidentally kill you at the same time.”
“Yes,” said the creature. “What a dreadful thought!”
“But I only need to kill part of the dragon to kill it completely, so all I have to do is kill the dragon part of your body and the whole dragon will be dead,” Rustum said.
The wart-lizard went a little pale. “But how could you possibly know which part to kill, so that you kill the dragon without killing me too?” it said, its whiskers trembling and its tail twitching.
“If I pick you up by the tail, like this,” Rustum said, picking it up by the tail, “then the heavier human part will run down to the head end. Then I just cut off the end of the tail with my knife then hit it with the shovel, and kill the dragon quite easily.”
“Wait, wait!” squeaked the creature. “What if the dragon part is the heavier, and when you slice off the tail, it’s me that you’re slicing off?”
Rustum held the wart-lizard up, swinging it by the tail, and considered. “Tell me how long you have had the dragon, and how big it was when you got it, and how much you feed it every day.” The creature hummed and hawed and told him, and Rustum did complicated mathematical sums in his head, which is why you should always learn your times tables thoroughly, in case you ever have to calculate the mass of a dragon under pressure.
“By the merest fraction, the human part of you is heavier,” Rustum said, when he had finished calculating. He lifted the creature high and sliced the end of its tail off. The creature drew a quavering sigh of relief, and staggered a little, unbalanced without its tail.
Then to its great surprise, Rustum drew the sword that he had strapped to his back under his shirt, and pieced the creature to its heart.
For what Rustum had realised was that one of the holes that the creature had been digging in the garden was bigger and deeper and darker than any of the other holes. In fact it was a tunnel through which the dragon had slipped with the speed of lightning, up to the house and back again, taking the form of Sir Norgard when Rustum was in the house, and the form of the wart-lizard when Rustum was with him in the garden.
The sword was one that he had been given when he was much younger, by a notable dragon-slayer who was the granddaughter of the greatest dragon-slayer in all the seven kingdoms. Rustum usually kept it under his bed, for occasions just like this.
He buried the wart-lizard in one of the holes and the rats in the other holes, and covered them up well. Then he cleaned the shovel, and hopped back onto the flying carpet. If he had stopped to think why the dragon had been digging so many holes and killing so many rats and burying them, he might have saved a great many people from terrible danger, but that’s a story for another day. The important thing was that he managed to return the flying carpet to the king exactly on time.
A Wombat Named Benson 