Laurence was falling, wet leather slipping between his fingers and a smooth-scaled hide refusing to provide purchase, and he jerked up gasping from beneath the carpeting of leaves. Beside him, Junichiro slept on as soundly as if he had been upon a featherbed in a palace, his cheek pillowed on his arms and his face serene. Laurence ran a hand over his face, wearily, and pushed aside the remants of his covering. The sun was near making noon, he thought, though he could not see it very clearly for the leaves overhead.
They had continued on all the night, stumbling beneath the trees and over rocks. The dragon’s roars had pursued them, but her flight had fallen behind; she had turned one direction and another away from their trail, it seemed to Laurence, perhaps led astray by some wild animals leaping in fear from her approach. Fortune had saved them, he could only imagine.
Junichiro had turned aside abruptly, near the dawn, and led Laurence down a narrow barely marked trail to their present resting place: overshadowed by a great standing gate, two enormous pillars joined by bars painted in an orange now faded and peeling. A little beyond it they had found a stand of trees grown wild and engulfed in vines, sheltered from the wind by a great smooth boulder. Laurence rose, brushing himself free of dead vines, and looked up at the gate again. The scale was immense, and yet it seemed to lead nowhere; as far as he could see through the frame in either direction was only wilderness.
In the dim light they had buried themselves beneath dry leaves and slept as the dead. Laurence was yet tired and footsore, but he did not think they dared linger for long. There was a little trickle of a stream running through the woods, ending with a little burbling over rocks in a great clear pool beside the gate. Laurence limped to it and drank deeply, washed hands and face, and took off his sandals and soaked his feet in the cold water as long as he could bear: it was a long time since he had scrambled barefoot over the ropes and planks of a ship as a boy, and the sandals had left him bruised and sore.
He rose at last and tied them back on, then turned to go back to Junichiro and halted, gone very still. The boulder he had noted last night had raised its head and was regarding him with enormous unblinking interest: it was a dragon, hide dark greenish black and with large eyes of pallid grey, which evidently had curled up to sleep against the comfort of the trees.
It yawned, widely, and said something to him in Japanese; Junichiro, still soundly asleep and huddled up against its side, woke with a start and scrambled up and away. The dragon turned and inquired of him, instead; Junichiro answered with a slightly evasive air, backing away towards Laurence. “What is it asking?” Laurence asked him, low, but the dragon overheard.
“Ah! So you can speak!” the dragon said triumphantly, in Chinese. “Are you,” it leaned towards him with almost a longing air, “a Dutchman?”
“No, sir,” Laurence said. “I am an Englishman.”
“An Englishman?” The dragon rolled the sound around slowly, tongue flicking out to touch the air. It was only the size of a Yellow Reaper, perhaps, with a wide ruff and long dangling tendrils that hung down about its mouth: something of its appearance seemed strangely familiar, though Laurence had certainly never seen a beast anything like. “I have never heard any English poetry,” the dragon announced, after some consideration. “You must tell me some! Come, let us go up to the temple and have something to eat and drink.”
He uncurled himself and rose onto four feet, shaking himself out almost as might have a wet dog. He was long and as narrow in the chest as at the base of his tail, with feet widely spaced; his wings were short and peculiarly stubby, folded against his back. He ambled with a swaying stride through the gate itself, stopping briefly to knock his head against one of the posts three times, and went onwards up the rising slope beyond, where now Laurence saw the underbrush was lower, and trampled in places.
He glanced at Junichiro—he was not sure if they ought to take the chance and try to flee. But Junichiro was trailing wide-eyed after the dragon, and the promise of food was a powerful one. The beast at least did not seem to be immediately hostile.
The trail led a winding way through increasingly difficult undergrowth, where at last the dragon paused and looked back and said, “Why, you are falling quite behind. Up you get,” and reached out a taloned hand to deposit them each in turn upon his back. Junichiro made a small sound almost of protest, and Laurence would have liked to question him—what was the beast, and why did it seem to have no fear of the same law which bound all others against a foreigner—but he could not find it politic to do so when aboard the very beast’s back.