Chapter 12. The Tales and Legends of the Heathens

The travelers’ thoughts now turned to finding the Salt Spring. Magda hoped fervently that they would not have to look for too long, and that this third spring would finally provide the right kind of inspiration for Bookworm to write his poem. She really wanted to go home! The one comforting thought was that they were now moving north, roughly in the direction towards Seven Hills.

They descended to a plateau covered with thick forests of fir trees interspersed with frozen marshes. They had to be careful on the roads; there were groups of heavily armed knights roaming here and there on some errands. Of all the lands they had crossed so far, Magda liked this one the least. In part, it was because she was weary of traveling and feeling more and more homesick. Also, the dark weeks of late fall and early winter are not a pleasant time to be out in the wilderness. But more than that, there was a grim feeling about the landscape that they were traversing. The travelers passed by heavily fortified cities of gray stone and by gaunt villages, some of them with burnt or partially destroyed houses, apparently the results of raids or warfare. In the churches and in the shops there was frequent talk of witch burnings and military campaigns of conquest or revenge. Gibbets in the midst of market squares raised their horrific burdens to display them starkly against the winter sky. Magda began to have nightmares and frequently woke up screaming under the wing of the worried dragon.

In the meantime, their quest was at a standstill; they could not get any clues that would help them narrow their search for the Salt Spring. For one thing, Magda struggled with a language problem. People here spoke  a patchwork of different dialects. They were all closely related to the language she had learned in the mountains. But the pronunciation was different and varied a lot from one small kingdom or duchy to another. As they moved from town to town, Magda was able to understand the local speech tolerably well, but she struggled to make herself understood. More than the language barrier, fear made it difficult for her to make inquiries and get information. With the threat of witch-hunts ever present, like a dark miasma hanging over the landscape, Magda was afraid to mention magic directly. And the locals certainly did not venture anything about the subject, even when they were willing to talk about the places shown on the maps. The maps continued to sell well. But as winter wore on, Magda's spirits sank lower and lower. She resolved that if they did not find the spring by Candlemas, she would beg Bookworm to give up and take her home.

But in mid- January they made a breakthrough discovery!

They were reading an old book called The Tales and Legends of the Heathens. It was written three hundred years earlier, in Latin, by a monk named Brother Stephan. The introduction was unpromising. Brother Stephan stated that his purpose in recording these tales was "to expose and set as a warning to the faithful these old wives' tales and uncouth legends that reveal the dark confusion and unholy terrors which haunted the heathen mind."  But as Bookworm and Magda delved into the book, they came to believe that the introduction was merely a pretext — a ruse used consciously or unconsciously by the monk to get away with collecting and writing down the old stories that he found so beautiful and stirring. Brother Stephan retold them with great talent, verve and loving attention to detail. One of the tales, or more precisely an interconnected sequence of tales, had to do with the Salt Spring! According to the book, the Salt Spring was known to people from time immemorial. "The heathens" held it in great awe and built a shrine around it. They believed that it was the point where the world of humans came into direct contact with the realm of the gods.

The location of the Salt Spring constantly shifted. It was elusive and could not be reached by traveling over the surface of the earth. Yet, the path to it was clearly specified. It started in a deep fissure in the rock and wandered for a long time somewhere underground before it came out again, right next to the spring. A stone grotto "of prodigious size" had been built over the starting point of the underground path. Many people came to gaze in wonder at the grotto and to take a few steps along the dark path. But few had the mixture of courage, desperate desire and heedlessness to plunge along the path "into the bowels of the earth," and fewer still made it to the goal and came back. Brother Stephan recounted the stories of a handful of men and women who had made the perilous journey. "Alas!" he exclaimed at the end of the tale, unable to completely conceal his true feelings, "even this dark path was closed to all seekers four hundred years ago, when a dragon made its lair in the grotto. Many a great warrior challenged the wicked creature when it first moved in, but the monster defeated each one of them," Brother Stephan reported. He added wistfully, that perhaps the knights of his day, better protected by armor and steel swords and with hearts "made strong by true faith," might be able to kill the dragon and liberate the grotto. He even gave detailed directions for where it could be found. "But," he concluded with some bitterness, "none of the kings of this age had deemed slaying this monster to be a worthy quest. They are more craven than the heathens of the age past. Nowadays they buy ignoble peace by means of paying the dragon an annual tribute of gold and jewels.”

Bookworm was very excited about Brother Stephan's tale. He sat for a long time, lost in thought, muttering to himself now in one language, now in another, as he searched his memory for everything that he had read and observed about this region.  Eventually he announced that he had narrowed down the likely location of the ancient grotto to a relatively small area. He estimated that it would take him no more than two weeks to survey that area completely.

The travelers decided that for the sake of efficiency, they should separate for a while. Magda and the horses moved into an inn and prepared to wait, while Bookworm, laden with book bags, took off on his search mission.

The weather was damp, windy and cold, so Magda spent most of the time in the inn. Days crept by slowly. After many months of traveling with the dragon, it was strange to find herself in a house packed with people, to hear them talking, singing, laughing, quarreling and snoring at all hours of day and night.

The innkeeper, her hired hands, the merchants who stayed at the inn, and the townspeople who filled the common room in the evenings, everyone was curious about the strange "outlander" girl traveling by herself. They all wanted to know who she was, where she was from, where she was going, and on what errand. Magda's story that she was on a religious pilgrimage to visit a particular convent did not satisfy their curiosity. To escape their nosiness, Magda mostly kept to herself, reading or mending her travel-worn belongings by the dim light of the small windows and of the burning logs in the fireplace in her small attic room. Her aloofness only increased everyone's curiosity, and she was the subject of lively debates over many a mug of beer.

The innkeeper, who was not above snooping on her guests under the guise of bringing them food and firewood, reported that the "outlander" girl had lots of books in her room, and also that she had the habit of opening her window and looking at the sky every morning and evening, at twilight. A few people muttered darkly that it was not natural for a girl who was not a novice or a nun to sit around "with her nose in a book" and shun decent company. But the innkeeper did her best to nip in the bud this line of reasoning; she did not want to have one of her guests accused of witchcraft, especially before she had paid her bill. Eventually, almost everyone accepted the romantic explanation put forth by the innkeeper. The good lady was convinced that the girl had run away from home and was waiting for her lover to come fetch her, but was waiting in vain. The books were a gift for him, and the girl's sky-gazing merely part of her "mooning and pining for the unfaithful cad." It was lucky that no one guessed that Magda was actually searching the sky for a signal from a dragon!

On the ninth day, at dawn, Magda saw what she had been waiting for: three short pulses of fire in the sky, a pause, then three more pulses. The girl packed hurriedly and settled her bill with the innkeeper, feeling a bit puzzled by the woman’s knowing look sympathetic sigh and pat on the hand. The she hurried out of the town to meet Bookworm at the appointed place in the forest. The dragon was excited. He had found the grotto! It would take Magda no more than ten days to get there on horseback. But there was a hitch. The grotto was still inhabited by a dragon. Bookworm did not dare to get close to the lair because he did not want to challenge its inhabitant quite yet. But he saw the golden-crested head and shoulders protruding from the grotto; apparently, the dragon was sleeping at the time. Judging from the size of the head, the owner of the cave was huge, much larger than Bookworm. Bookworm noticed the glow of gold and the glittering of jewels spilling from under the head and paws of the sleeper — it appeared that the dragon was resting on a hoard. These observations squared with Brother Stephan's tale. Bookworm thought that this might be the same gold-hoarding dragon that occupied the grotto more than six hundred years ago. Certainly its size suggested that it was of considerable age.

So, now they knew exactly where they wished to go. But how to get past the dragon? A dragon would not let one of its own kind into the lair without a battle to the death. Magda was terrified of the idea of mortal combat between Bookworm and another dragon. She was, therefore, set against trying to force their way into the grotto. Bookworm, who felt it was a matter of his honor to propose challenging the other dragon, let her talk him out of it quite easily. The truth is, he did not want to engage in a deadly confrontation, especially with a much larger and older opponent.

There was another possibility, suggested by Brother Stephan's tale, and Bookworm was hoping that Magda would think of it and be the one to bring it up. She did. "Bookworm, didn't the book say that the kings gave the dragon gold and it left them alone? Maybe we could offer it gold if it lets us use the grotto?"
"This might work," replied Bookworm, trying not to make it obvious, how relieved he felt by the suggestion. "Gold hoarding dragons are usually the least aggressive kind, as long as their hoard is growing nicely and is not threatened. If they can get treasure without too much risk and complication, they prefer to do that. Also, if it really is the same one that is described in the tale, then it must be in its late six hundreds by now; at that age dragons tend to mellow out a bit, to prefer peace and quiet."
"Do we have enough gold, do you think?"
Bookworm glanced at the bags and shook his head. "I am afraid not. If the dragon really has been living up there all this time, it is likely to have a large hoard already. We will only have one chance to deal with it peacefully, and we will be asking for a lot: to let us into the lair! We have to offer it a noticeable addition to its collection, not a ho-hum kind of gift."

Magda sighed.

For the next three months they were completely preoccupied with making money. All their talk was of customers, orders, the price for this or that size of map, the cost of supplies. They were moving slowly, gradually advancing towards the dragon’s territory, trying to get as much gold as they could in each town along their way.

CONTINUED IN THE NEXT CHAPTER