The Dragon Maker
Elizabeth Baxter
Copyright 2013 Elizabeth Baxter
The Dragon Maker
Color was leaking out of the land like running paint on an artist's canvas when Olivia finally persuaded me to put my work away. My arms ached and my eyes leaked tears of fatigue. Yet I still found it hard to stop. Wasn't I abandoning that which needed me most? My creature lay on the canvas before me: an image of conception waiting to be born.
Olivia took my hand and, with quiet murmurings, led me from my studio and into the glass dwelling we called home. She might have spoken, muttering words meant to sooth me, but I did not hear. I had nothing to give her. Everything I had, everything I was, had already been given to my creation.
You see, I am an artist, the last of my kind. And I have a duty.
When did we lose our love of art? When did we stop appreciating beauty? Some say it was the day they felled the last tree, a Giant Redwood, hundreds of years old. Others say it began the day the last tiger choked out its final breath on a hunter's bullet. Or perhaps it was the day the seas became too saline to support life and the song of the deep, which had sung for eons, fell silent.
Others are not so romantic. They say art died because we no longer needed it. When technology advanced so far we could leave the earth that spawned us, what need did we have of art? We already had everything we wanted.
What I do, then, is more than paint. I am trying to save the world.
Why me, from the billions who cover the earth? Why me who first took up a brush and tried to create the thing we lacked? I cannot answer. But I did. And I was lucky. My work attracted the attention of President Mchebe herself. With her patronage I received the time and space I needed to work. Do I call it luck? It is more than luck. The few who still believe in God would mutter about destiny, that I am a tool of God's will.
I retired to the mountains, to the snow-mantled peaks of the Swiss Alps. It was a place of peace and as I lay in bed that night, Olivia curled on her side away from me, I listened to the soft growl and hiss of the wind as it moved through the heights above. The breeze spoke to me of need, an urgency to finish what I started.
The sound of rain thrumming on the roof woke me early the next morning. I turned to look at Olivia. Her dark skin looked so delicate; her lips so full, her eyes soft and peaceful in sleep. I almost touched her, almost rolled over and took her in my arms, almost surrendered to my love for her. But a deeper and more urgent need took me. My creature was calling; its need for life greater than Olivia's need for me.
I left her sleeping and hurried to my studio. My creature lay on the canvas just as I had left it. He seemed like a seed. All the ingredients of life were contained within his image and he only needed the final ingredient-my paint and emotion-to burst into life. His head lay fully formed and magnificent: silver eyes gleaming, red scales alight like fire. I took up my palette and mixed red ochre with burnt sienna and then lifted my brush. He grew easily; my strokes barely seemed to touch the canvas. I hardly needed to think at all.
I worked all morning, only stopping once to snap at Olivia when she came to tell me I was on the news again. My work had sparked a revolution, they said. People were protesting in Paris, calling for the re-opening of what had once been the Louvre. But I had no time for such things. Let them do as they saw fit. Guilt flared in my belly at the look in Olivia's eyes when I yelled at her but she knew never to interrupt my work. Why did she provoke me so?
After she left I felt a humming in the air, like a note on an instrument played out of key. The sound came from my creature. In my irritation I had not painted the scales on his back correctly: they were too dark and did not reflect the light the way I wanted. I picked up my palette, mixed in a little raw umber and worked it in until I was satisfied. I poured my annoyance into my creature, along with my frustration, anger, and even my love for Olivia until he hummed with energy.
I worked all that day and the next, retiring long after Olivia was asleep. Every morning I rose before she did and spent all day in my studio. How could I describe it to someone without the art? How might I find the words? How might I make Olivia understand the exhilaration that filled me as my creature began to take shape? I could not. So I did not try.
Over the years I had painted many creatures but this one seemed to have a life of his own, more than the others. He developed in a way I had never imagined, as though he dictated how he would grow and not my brush at all. I became increasingly convinced this was the one, the creature I had been trying to create all these years.
In the past, my creatures-magnificent and wonderful in their own way-had not been quite as I wanted. While they lived they were the wonder of the known world, but they survived only a short time. They were only copies of life, an artist's impression, and when the power that animated them failed, they fizzled away to nothing, leaving only the faintest of impressions on the fabric of time.
But this time things were different. I knew this time I was creating life. This was the creature that would save us.
Over the weeks and months, my creature developed as slowly as a child within the womb. It was a painstaking process. Layer upon layer of color and detail: the veins in his neck, the hairs on his eyelids, the tiny cuticles around his claws. Each time I touched my brush to his body I sensed the life in him growing until I sometimes felt he would tear himself from the canvas right there.
Near the end, I moved my easel outside so he would be close to the air for his quickening. On a calm evening when the shadows on the snowy mountains were lengthening, almost a year since I had first put brush to canvas, I finally put my palette down and knew he was complete. I left him there, up on the mountain, knowing my toil was over at last.
When I returned in the morning the canvas stood bare. No trace of paint remained. My heart sang with joy. He had torn free of the canvas of his birth, severed his umbilical cord of paint and charcoal and seized a life of his own. A drumming sound suddenly filled the air, as if a thousand bellows pumped at the same time.
My creature shot over the mountains, flying toward the swollen red orb of the sun. His bulk cast a huge shadow over the earth. I looked up in wonderment, amazed at the majesty and beauty of the thing I had created. He trumpeted once, a deep and resonant, taa-roo, and the peaks echoed to the sound of a living creature as they had not for years untold. Then he was gone. I watched until he had dwindled to a speck in the distance and at last I experienced a peace only an artist can feel when their work is displayed for the entire world to appreciate.
But when I returned to my dwelling I found it empty. There was no sign of Olivia. I knew she was not coming back. Perhaps I had always known she would leave me but her absence felt like an icicle to my heart nonetheless: she had not seen the culmination of my work.
My creature spread wonder and awe throughout the world. He was wild, untamed, full of strength and splendor. Finally, he taught us the meaning of beauty. President Mchebe was so moved she introduced a motion in senate to re-open the Louvre, and to set up an art school, of which I would be the patron. But when I was alone with her and she saw the look of loss in my eyes, she laid a hand on my shoulder and asked me if it was worth it. I could not answer her.
From that day to this, I have asked myself the question a thousand times. What price are we willing to pay for beauty? They gave me everything a man could want: adoration, women, galleries and monuments named after me. I had fulfilled my duty. But my life became like an empty husk, a dark hole Olivia used to fill. So, I ask myself, is it worth such loneliness to give something great and wonderful to the world? Is the weight of my lonely years a fair price to pay for the joy and wonder on children's faces as they behold my creation? Sometimes in these later years I find myself staring into the
fire, pondering such things.
But then I will hear that strange trumpeting and I go outside and glimpse the red dragon circling in the sky above me. The moonlight gleams off his scales, his eyes are alight like silver fire. He is an untamable force of nature.
And then my answer comes to me: yes. The price is fair.
END
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The Last Priestess
Book 1 of The Songmaker
By Elizabeth Baxter