Every year, C.M. Simpson gathers up the
short stories, flash fiction and poetry she’s written, published, or prepared
for publishing, and puts them into a single volume. This year, there are two
volumes. The second volume consists of all the work produced, prepared for
publication or published in 2013.
As C.M. explains at the beginning of each
volume “poems and short stories form the
playground I use to explore ways of putting words on paper to create different
effects” and each volume contains a variety of styles and subjects,
accompanied by what it was that inspired her at the time. Sometimes, the
inspiration comes from experimenting with new ways of treating monsters
familiar from myth or legend.
Written on December 14, 2013, for the December 10
entry for 365 Days of Flash Fiction,
this piece once again returns to the themes of dragons, colonisation, and
creatures of myth mingling in a science-fiction setting.
“If that damn thing buzzes us again, I’m
going to shoot it up the arse and damn the consequences!”
It wouldn’t have
been so bad if Hadigan had been referring to a blowfly and a slingshot, but he
wasn’t . He was referring to a dragon, and a jeep-mounted harpoon. Why a
harpoon and a jeep? Because it beat the heck out of sitting behind a catapult
until your prey came to you—and the jeep had jet propelled rocket grapples for
anchoring it to the ground, if we actually caught something.
Today, that looked
likely. Running along the headland, on a strip of road, too narrow for the
catapults, we’d seen the largest beyznou we could hope for. Massing at around
two tonne, if we could harpoon that, and anchor the jeep deep enough not to get
dragged out to sea, we wouldn’t have to hunt for another season. It was worth
the risk.
And then dragon
had arrived.
As well as proving
to be an annoyance to us, it was probably going to spook the beyznou, and we
needed something by the end of the day, or there wouldn’t be enough fuel for
tomorrow and we’d be back to the farms until next year. Neither of us wanted
that.
Nope. It was the
beyznou or bust. The dragon sure as hell was making it look like bust. We
watched the damned beast loop hard and come at us crossways.
“Sonuva—“ Hadigan
began, and lined up the harpoon.
And that was when
the beyznou turned and my gut went to water.
“Hadigan, get out
of the truck,” I said, keeping my voice low.
The beyznou
started to lift itself out of the water, its beady eyes fixed on us, and not
the dragon coming straight at us. I jacked on the brakes, pulled the hand brake
up, hard, and fired the first grapple into a nearby rockface.
“Get out of the
truck!” I screamed, standing up in the driver’s seat and grabbing Hadigan by the
arm, dragging him from behind the harpoon mount.
Hadigan came out
of his seat, turning his head to give me a face full of invective, but taking
one look at my face and glancing back at the beyznou. That monster had lifted
half its body length out of the sea, undulating its full length as it dropped
its jaw wide. And Hadigan was suddenly holding my arm and leaping with me over
the edge of the jeep.
We braced to hit
the ground running, hoping to make the other side of the outcrop I’d fired the
grapple into, but we didn’t make it. The dragon stooped, catching us at the
apex of our jump and lifting us as it flipped into a vertical climb.
The beyznou
screamed, its voice bouncing eerily off rocks that exploded at its touch.
“Not a beyznou,”
Hadigan said, gasping for breath.
“Siren,” I puffed
back.
“And old,” Hadigan
said, as the creature raised tentacles, flicking them towards us.
The dragon
swerved, jinking sideways before tucking its wings to drop in a gut-wrenching
dive. Hadigan wrapped an arm around my shoulders, pulling me hard against him,
and I locked an arm around his waist. We then did our best to brace inside the
cage of dragon claws, as it spiralled into another climb and dropped again.
Shards of
slime-coated chitin whistled past us, trailing filaments stronger than the rope
around our harpoon. If we could only have caught the siren, I thought, and
heard its haunting scream once more. The dragon flew on. Dodging twice more,
before gaining enough height that I found it hard to breathe. Hadigan wheezed
beside me, but his grip on my shoulders eased.
By turning our
heads, we could see the coastline change beneath us. The view improved as we
descended, and Hadigan’s breathing eased, although we both grew tense when the
creature skimmed wavetops and wheeled around the base of iron-coloured cliffs.
We relaxed when it climbed once more, but the tension returned as it backwinged
and came to rest inside a cave high up in the cliffs.
“Shoot it up the
arse?” the dragon said, setting us carefully on the sun-warmed rock. “That’s
hardly hospitable, is it?”
To his credit,
Hadigan flushed beet red.
“I’m sorry,” he
said, and my mouth dropped open in surprise. I’d never heard Hadigan apologise
before, not even when he really needed to. I was also relieved that he had, and
closed my mouth.
“Do you know how
many days that siren had spent stalking you?” it asked.
Hadigan shook his
head.
“Ten.”
This time I
managed to keep my mouth closed. Ten? That was… We’d been manning a catapult
ten days ago. On the Far Arm.
“Is it the first?”
Hadigan asked.
“No.”
“Can we save
them?”
“Your people don’t
like to owe us debts.”
“But can you save
them?”
“I will need
help.”
“How many?”
“Five of my kind.”
Hadigan swallowed,
and I slipped my hand into his, felt the dampness of his palm, felt the same
hollow fear I heard in his voice, leant on him a little and felt him lean back.
“What would you
ask?”
“Five pairs,” the
dragon said, “to live among us.”
“As your slaves?”
Hadigan’s voice was hoarse, with grief for our future, perhaps, but also with
fear. No one knew what the dragons did with those they took.
“We do not keep
slaves,” the dragon replied.
“As food then?”
Hadigan’s voice was a bare thread of sound.
“Never that.” The
dragon sounded ill.
“For what, then?”
“For that, we are
bound to secrecy,” the dragon replied, and settled back on its haunches,
waiting.
“How long?”
Hadigan sounded weary.
“Now? Your people
will have hours.”
I felt Hadigan’s
hand tighten around mine, and looked up at him. We, of course, would be the
first couple. I nodded. The sirens could devastate the settlement before enough
help arrived. We both knew the dragons were the only chance they had.
“Go,” he said and,
with a roar, the dragon took flight.
Other roars
answered, the settlement’s salvation on its way. I pulled Hadigan over to a
portion of the cave that gave us an ocean view. We would know when they
returned. We would greet our kinfolk, comforting them in exile.
