No Everyday Dragon (Dragon series Book One)

By Pamela Lamb

Gryff the dragon doesn't like getting wet, doesn't eat food and doesn't understand human behaviour. He and Briony are supposed to be a team. Briony makes wishes and Gryff grants them. Or, at least, that's the general idea. The trouble is Briony knows nothing about dragons and hasn't a clue how to wish properly. It isn't going to be easy ...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pamela Lamb
• Release date: Feb 17, 2012
• ISBN: 9780987221810

Pamela Lamb

Must ... stop ... writing ... Sometimes I really wish I could. It gets in the way of real life. At the weekend I prefer sitting in front of the computer with my pretend friends instead of going out with my real ones. It destroys my sleep. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night knowing I need to change one word in the paragraph I wrote the evening before - and I have to get up and do it. And it makes me a dangerous driver. Get me on the road and my characters start having conversations in my head. And why are they so much more lucid and logical then than when I attempt to scribble them down at the next red light?I write because I love language. I love English with its collection of mongrel words. It's like an enormous button box where you can pick between half a dozen languages each one of which holds the history of Britain at its heart. I love the shape of words and the sound of them. I love what you can make them do on the page. And what you can make them do to your readers. Laugh, cry, stay up at night.What I like best is having a conversation with a reader about one of my characters. The reader talks about my character as if s/he is a real person. Discusses the character's motivation. Speculates about what the character did after the end of the novel. And I think, but it's all made up. Every bit of it. Out of my head.Then I know it is all worthwhile. Bringing characters alive to walk on the page. Creating a world for them to live in. Immersing myself in the shape and rhythm of a novel in the making. It's exciting stuff. And it's even more exciting when the book is finished and I hand it over to you, the reader. Enjoy!

Book preview

No Everyday Dragon

Pamela Lamb

Published by Agneau Press at Smashwords

Copyright 2012 Pamela Lamb

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Chapter 1

Briony thought, ‘It’s like being in a ship. A wooden sailing ship racing over the dark ocean.’

From her bed she could see through the window to the wild sky. Lightning flashed and crackled. The wind bent the trees and sent torn leaves spinning and fluttering like tiny birds. It thumped the side of the house making the old timbers creak. Upstairs a door slammed.

Then the rain came and it wasn’t like a ship any more. It was like falling off the end of a water slide into cold bubbly water, or sitting under a fountain. Something which Briony had done once, long ago, when she had been taken into the city to sit on Santa’s knee.

Gradually the lightning diminished as the storm raced towards the city to disturb someone else’s night. The rain gurgled in the drainpipes and drummed steadily on the tin roof of the laundry below Briony’s window. She slept.

The morning was bright and fresh. Small white clouds sailed on the blue ocean of the sky. The trees were hung with rain drop diamonds, sparkling in the sun. Briony climbed out of bed and went to the window. Down at the bottom of the steep garden the creek had flooded the grass, creating a circle of still water.

There was something down there. Something making ripples that disturbed the smooth surface of the little pool. Briony leaned out of the window trying to see. She knew it wasn’t Parsley, her mother’s cat, because she would be under Mum’s bed sound asleep. She only went outside to kill things. But it could be a possum fallen into the water. Or maybe one of the bearded dragons, the big, brown, knobbly-skinned lizards that lived in the tall trees in Briony’s garden.

Briony ran down the steep wooden steps, under the washing line and through the long, wet grass to the bottom of the garden. The creature was still now. It lay at the edge of the little pool. And it was a dragon.

But this was no everyday dragon like the ones that lived in the trees. It was about the size of a medium-sized dog. It was covered with shiny green scales. It had a thin tail that ended in a point like an arrow. It had a long snout with two large, oval nostrils. Its eyes were stuck up on top of its head like a frog’s eyes. And it spoke.

‘About time!’ it said in a voice that was half way between a growl and a whisper.

Briony did nothing but only stood and stared.

The dragon raised its voice. ‘Well, come on, young maiden, get me out!’

Briony stuck her knuckles into her eyes and rubbed hard. When she took them out the dragon was still there. But now it was shivering and its eyes held a look of pleading.

‘Prithee maiden, w-w-w-won’t you get me out?’

Briony took a deep breath. She reached down and grabbed the dragon around his middle. She expected him to be heavy but he wasn’t and he came out of the pool quite easily.

Briony sat down on the damp grass and wrapped the dragon in her dressing gown. He felt quite warm to the touch and his scales were dry and soft, not at all as she had expected. The dragon shut his eyes and Briony could feel him shivering. She watched him turn from the bright green colour he had been when she first saw him to a sort of dull blue.

After a while he opened his eyes. ‘Well, don’t just s-s-sit there! T-t-take me somewhere warm. Up into your t-t-tower.’

Tower?

Briony looked up. From where she sat at the bottom of the garden her house did look a bit like a tower. A tall old wooden building with not much paint on it and a strange collection of odd shaped windows. At the bottom was the underneath of the house with nothing inside it except the dusty hillside, hidden behind a lattice screen. A small fibro laundry with a flat roof where Parsley the cat liked to sun herself. Next to the laundry was an untidy heap of kitchen scraps and grass clippings which was the personal breakfast table of a certain scrub turkey who came every summer morning to inspect it.

On the next level was the flat that Briony shared with her mother. Her own bedroom that had felt so much like a ship during the previous night’s storm was just a boxed-in part of the verandah. Above the flat was the house where Briony’s Granny Curtis lived by herself.

It was hard to believe that this strange ramshackle tower of a house looked like an ordinary cottage from the street. But it was build into the side of a very steep hill. From Granny’s verandah you could see straight over the top of an ancient frangipani tree to the television towers winking their lights at the top of Mount Coot-tha.

Briony took the shivering dragon into her bedroom and put him in the middle of her bed. She put all the covers she could find on top of him so there was nothing showing except the end of his snout. Then she went over to the window, put her elbows on the sill, her chin in her hands, and stared out at the early morning garden. She had a dragon in her bed. A real live, fairy-tale dragon. A dragon that spoke!

After a while she felt a warm glow on her back. She heard a low grumbling sound coming from the bed. She turned around. There were wisps of smoke coming from the pile of blankets where the dragon lay. There were wisps of smoke coming out of his nostrils too. In fact he was blowing smoke rings and his snout had turned a wonderful shade of bright green.

‘Are you feeling better?’

The dragon poked the rest of his head out of the covers. ‘Much better, I thank thee,’ he said, breathing smoke gently out of each nostril.

‘You’re not on fire, are you?’

‘Of course I’m on fire! Dragons die if their fire goes out. Why do you think I wanted to get out of that wretched puddle?’

‘Well, I didn’t know, did I?’ Briony sat down on the edge of the bed. ‘I didn’t even know dragons were real. I thought they were only in stories.’

‘Didn’t know we were real? What do they teach you in school these days?’

School!

Briony stood up. ‘I’ve got to get ready for school,’ she said to the dragon, tossing the covers back on top of him. ‘You stay here.’

Which the dragon was quite happy to do. Briony was the first human he’d ever seen close up. He thought she was a very strange creature with her round, pink, hairy head, and her arms and legs sticking out at funny angles. And she didn’t know how to treat dragons properly, that was