Twelve Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Jane Yolen Read Free Book Online Page B

hold tight with his thighs and grab ‘round with his arms. The sea dragon’s scales were as cold and as slippery with foam as a fish’s, and the edges of each scale sharp as a honed knife. In the sun the dragon glowed with iridescence, like a hundred sharpened rainbows under him.
    Robert had but a moment to be frightened at what he had just done. And a moment to realize that his legs and palms were being slivered. Then he remembered his brothers, whose bodies had never been found.
    â€œYou great lump of putrescence!” he cried. “You murthering, heathenish fish!” It was a long speech for a McLeod. Paying no attention to his own wounds, he reared back, holding on to the neck with his legs and one hand, and set the hook with all his might into the monster’s glistening eye.
    The pain of that must have been something horrendous, for the dragon screamed, a sound so loud it was heard all the way to Arbroath, where the fishermen mistook it for a foghorn though the day was fully dear of the haar, the sea mist.
    The dragon tossed its head back and forth, its scales now aglitter with green blood as well as foam. Robert was flung
off
on the third toss, but luck held him again in its fist, and he landed against the Zulu’s bow. Climbing back into the boat, he realized he still had the rope end of the hook in his hand. This he made fast three times around the mast, then he tied it with his father’s best knot. Then he sank down, exhausted and bleeding from a hundred small cuts.
    But there was no time to rest or to tend his wounds for, in its agony, the sea dragon had headed down to its watery lair. And if it had gone all the way, that would have been the end—of Zulu and Robert, both. But the hook—luck three times—had caught up under the monster’s eyebone, and the pain when the rope had pulled tight was so great that the dragon gave up its dive and turned back to the water’s surface, where it fell onto the flat of the sea. There it began to swim, paddling awkwardly—for it was a deep-sea creature—into the east end of the firth, tail and flippers lashing the water into a froth that bubbled onto the beaches as far west as Queens-ferry, and upsetting a bevy of pleasure boats out for the day.
    Of course it dragged the little Zulu behind, with the exhausted Robert hanging on to the gunnels in terror. But there was nothing he could do except pray.
    The morning and afternoon sped by and night was coming on, and the dragon kept swimming westward, towing the boat and Robert in its wake.
    They passed the Isle of May after dark, startling puffins off their nests, then circled three times around Bass Rock, and all the while that dragon tried to rid itself of its unwanted cargo. Then it headed back east again and out to the open sea.
    That hook, made of cold iron, held fast in the fey creature’s head. The Zulu, being of good East Neuk make, did not break up. And Robert, like a true Scot, went from terror to anger to cool courage. His wounds stopped bleeding and scabbed over; his heart scabbed over, too. He became a man on that first night, and something even greater by dawn.
    He was to say, later, that there had been porpoises on either side of his boat, encouraging him, some riding ahead like beacons and some skirling in his wake. But that sounds like fancy to me, though the storymakers have picked it up as part of the way they now tell the tale. Still—how could he have seen porpoises in the dark? I suspect they were only the haverings of a hungry, wounded lad, for he had not had a bit of food or drink with him but only some Fisherman’s Friend drops he carried for a sore throat. They were all that had sustained him on that wild ride.
    Nothing, however, sustained the sea dragon. It ran out of steam by noon of the second day, tried once to stove the little Zulu in, and only succeeded in toppling the already loosened mast. The mast crashed into the sea where the