Dragon

The water jar came back without its handle.

Myrto caught it against her knees as it rolled down the channel. A little water slapped her wrist. Above her, behind the limestone lip of the spring, her brother said her name in a voice she had never heard him use.

She put the jar down carefully.

“Dorion?”

“Don’t come up.”

She climbed three steps.

His back was pressed against the rock on the far side of the basin. One sandal lay in the water. Between them, something thick as an olive trunk curved across the ledge where she had stood that morning. Its scales were green where the light reached them, almost black underneath. Myrto followed the curve until it disappeared behind the spring, found it again beneath her brother’s feet, and understood that both lengths belonged to the same animal.

Then the head rose.

It rose past the height of Dorion’s shoulder, past his head. Water threaded from its lower jaw. Its eye faced Myrto, bright and still, while the rest of its body continued to arrive from the dark hollow under the rock.

She stepped backward. Her heel struck the jar.

The head moved toward the sound. She flattened herself against the steps as the serpent struck. Clay burst beside her foot. A shard skittered into the channel, followed by the small, unbearable splash of the water they had come to carry home.

For a moment she could only stare at the wet stone.

“Myrto.”

Dorion had both hands over his mouth now, as if he were afraid of what might come out of it.

“Stay there,” she said.

He looked down at the loop beneath him.

“I am.”

That morning she had sent him up with the jar while she inspected the new pipe. He had asked whether the hollow above the spring was deep. She had told him to mind the water and leave holes to whatever lived in them.

She could still hear herself saying it.

Below the basin, her clay conduit ran down the slope in twelve fitted lengths. She had shaped and fired every one. The village had promised her grain enough for the winter if water reached the trough before the last well failed. By noon she had bedded the upper mouth in stone and packed a collar of clay around it, stopping the old overflow so the spring would feed her pipe.

Nothing had reached the trough.

She had thought there was a bad joint farther down. Dorion had gone to fill the jar, and the thing in the hollow had come out.

Now its body lay across the pipe’s mouth.

She crouched behind a boulder, close enough to see her brother’s bare toes. Above him, a root grew from a crack in the limestone. To his right was a shelf no wider than a hand. To his left, the basin deepened under the overhang.

“Can you reach the root?”

He raised one hand. His fingertips stopped well below it.

“Don’t jump.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

The serpent turned its head toward his voice. Dorion lowered his hand so slowly that Myrto’s own shoulder began to ache.

She needed it to move. Only a little. Enough to uncover the ledge between Dorion and the steps.

Her tools lay in a leather roll at her feet. She took out the wooden mallet, weighed it, then put it back. She found a loose stone instead.

“Watch me,” she whispered.

“I am watching it.”

She threw the stone far down the slope.

It hit another rock with a sharp crack. The dragon’s head turned. Myrto came up onto one knee, ready to run across the ledge.

The head turned back.

It had not moved an inch from the spring.

She sank down again, her hands cold despite the sun. She had wanted a hungry animal that could be led away. What she had was a body filling the only way to the water, and an eye that kept finding her whenever she approached it.

Dorion shifted his bare foot.

“I’m slipping.”

“Bend your knee. Put your heel against the wall.”

He tried. The wet stone gave him nothing. He slid a hand sideways, searching for a grip, and his fingers closed around a tuft of grass.

Myrto saw what he meant to do.

“No.”

He pulled himself toward the narrow shelf.

The grass tore out by its roots.

Dorion fell to one knee. The nearest coil tightened against the rock, pushing water over the basin’s edge. He snatched his leg out just before the gap closed, but now he was crouched on the little shelf beyond it. The place where he had stood was gone.

His breath came in short, angry sounds.

“I told you,” she began, then stopped.

He would have climbed back down if she had let him that morning. He would have left the jar empty. She had called after him that she could not do every small thing herself.

She took the mallet.

Below the dragon, water crept across the broad upper scales of a coil. The pool had risen nearly to Dorion’s knees. It should not have been that high. Even with the pipe blocked, the spring should have spilled down its old channel.

Except that she had stopped it.

Myrto looked at her stone packing, at the neat collar she had smoothed around the conduit with two wet fingers. Behind it, the old overflow cut a shallow passage through the limestone lip. That passage began just below Dorion’s shelf and emerged beside the steps. Before she had closed it, a child could have crawled along it. A frightened, skinny brother might still fit.

She pictured breaking the collar, pulling out the stones. The pool would fall. The little shelf would stand above the water again. If the channel cleared, Dorion could get down into it and come out below the dragon’s body.

If the creature let her reach the packing.

She looked at the twelve lengths of pipe, their reddish backs warm in the sun. At the lower end, beyond the trees, the empty trough waited. She had imagined the women standing round it when the first water arrived. She had imagined being paid before anyone asked for another jar on credit.

“Myrto, my leg.”

She looked up.

Dorion was holding his knee with both hands. His face had lost its anger.

She slid the mallet through her belt and got down on her stomach.

The Overflow

The first stone came out easily.

She drew it toward her with the hook she used to lift hot pots, keeping the boulder between her face and the dragon. The water behind the packing began to make a thin sucking sound.

The second stone would not move.

She hooked it, pulled, and felt the iron slip. A scrape rang against the pipe.

The head appeared above her.

Myrto let go of the hook. She rolled backward down a step as the serpent’s jaw struck the boulder. The impact passed through the stone into her elbow. She clamped her teeth together, trying not to cry out.

The hook lay under its chin.

For several breaths neither of them moved. Up close she could see the pale edges of the scales beneath its jaw, the water swelling between them and falling one drop at a time. Its throat expanded. The hiss filled the hollow and seemed to press against her teeth.

She could not reach the hook. She could not reach Dorion.

But she could reach the next pipe.

It lay below the boulder, clear of the serpent. If she broke that length, she could pull the upper one down from its socket. The collar might come with it.

She struck.

The mallet bounced. A white mark appeared in the fired clay.

She had made it well.

She struck again, harder. The pipe cracked across its crown.

Above her, Dorion cried out. The dragon was moving. Myrto saw its flank slide over the ledge, scale after scale, taking away the strip of light beside her brother.

She drove the mallet into the crack. Clay fell inward. A dark space opened beneath her hand.

“Myrto!”

“Into the channel. When I tell you.”

“It isn’t open!”

“I know.”

She tore away broken pieces until she could get both hands around the upper pipe. A sharp edge cut the heel of her palm. She pulled. The pipe shifted a finger’s breadth and stopped.

The collar held.

She braced one foot against the boulder and leaned back with all her weight. Wet grit ran down her wrists. Something loosened above her, then settled again.

She needed Dorion to help. To help, he would have to leave the shelf.

“There’s a flat stone by your foot,” she said. “The one across the channel. Push it toward me.”

He stared at the water below him.

“Look at me.”

He did.

“I’m holding the pipe. It can’t fall on you. Push the stone, then come straight down after it.”

A coil rubbed along the wall behind him. He flinched forward, caught himself, and lowered one foot into the overflow.

The dragon raised its head toward him.

“Now.”

Dorion kicked.

The packing stone tipped. Myrto pulled, felt the upper pipe come loose, and fell backward with it across her chest. Water struck her face. For a moment she saw nothing but brown foam and the red curve of the thing she was still holding.

She flung it aside.

Dorion’s hand came through the gap.

She caught his wrist. He was on his belly in the channel, shoulders wedged between the limestone sides. Behind him, the dragon’s neck folded downward. Its jaw struck the rim of the passage with a noise like a door slammed against stone.

Dorion tried to turn his head.

“Keep coming.”

“My belt.”

The buckle had caught behind a knob of rock. She could see the leather pulling tight across his waist. She could also see the serpent lifting its head for another strike.

Myrto seized her brother’s tunic at the shoulder and hauled him onto his side. The buckle scraped free. He slid into her, both of them tumbling down the steps with the water, his heel striking her mouth hard enough to fill it with blood.

They stopped against the broken pipe.

Myrto held him there, his back pressed to her chest. Her hand was still closed around his wrist. Above them, loose stones rattled into the emptied space and the dragon’s body moved across the basin, searching for purchase where the packing had been.

She waited for the head to follow.

Water ran over their legs.

The head stayed above the limestone lip.

Dorion began to shake. When she tried to stand, he caught her arm with both hands.

“Not yet.”

She sat down again.

For a long while they listened to the water.

By the time they could walk, the old overflow was running clear. It went around the wreck of her conduit and down its former bed, a narrow stream flashing between stones. Farther below, much of it soaked into the thirsty slope before it reached the trough.

They would have to carry it. Tomorrow she would have to explain the broken pipes, and the day after that find another way to earn the grain.

Dorion picked up the bottom half of the jar. A crooked wall remained on one side, enough to hold a little water if he kept it tilted.

“Will they pay you anything?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

He held out the broken vessel.

She knelt beside him where the stream passed beyond the last coil’s reach. He filled it, spilling half, and lifted it toward her mouth. She drank carefully over the chipped edge.

Up at the spring, the dragon rested its jaw upon the wet stone.

When Myrto reached for the vessel, Dorion kept one hand under it. Together they carried the water down.