| Go Down Killing |
| You stoop down from the cloud cover, so fast they don�t even know you�re on them, feeling the fire, building the fire in your belly, a warmth, a comfort, a threat soon to be carried out. You stoop down and suddenly they see you coming out of the twilight sky, death with wings, the majesty of death, and they run, they scatter, they seek for shelter. And then the fire is built, the fire is ready as any fire can be in the belly of a dragon and you swoop still lower, drifting, lazy, and you open your jaws and let it go, the fire, watch it ripping through their dirty huts, cleansing, cleansing. And the bodies, yes, the bodies are the best part, see them blacken and seethe, see the eyes boil, know that the number of men on the face of the earth has been reduced since you came down from the silent secrecy of the cloud. It is a good feeling to see men burn. It was not always so. There was a time when we were not enemies. Rivals, yes, for the men hunted the same animals we did, yet there were animals enough for all of us to kill and eat our fill. We let the men alone then. Dragons took no pleasure in killing. It was a means to an end. A good killing was a full belly and a full belly was a bellyful of fire to take to the next killing. Kill and eat, eat and kill. So simple then. Hunt men? Who wants to eat a man? They are scrawny and their flesh is vile with thinking. Even when some accident brought us face to face we did not kill. We laughed at them, poor puny things, dragon laughter, the nostril smoke wreathing into our eyes, and they ran away in terror, knowing the harm we could do them if we so chose. But they changed, the men, while we remained immutable. They hunted less and herded more, fat sheep on the hills, cows in the valley. Then they took to muttering among themselves that we stole their sheep and cows and it was true, yes, though only in the dead of frozen winter when the other animals grow so thin there is no meat to them, for no dragon would deign to touch a sheep in spring when the mountain deer are ripe and ready. The men learned to count their flocks and moan and wring their hands when even one animal was missing. They could never get enough of flocks and herds and they grudged the few we took no matter how many we left behind untouched. Fools! Did they not know the wolves would have taken far more had we not kept the wolf population down? Oh, and we were fools, too, for we thought the wolves were our real enemy, miserable pack animals that would kill not out of hunger but to prevent us from eating. |