The Dragon Book Read Online Free PDF Page A

pushed slowly, gently forward, most of her body stuck fast; but her foot moving, then her thigh, her hip, until she worked her way around the bump in the rock.
    The tunnel widened. It began to climb upward, twisting and turning, but always up in the dark, until she was helping herself along with her outstretched hands. Then the climb came to an end in a blank rock wall, with water spilling down its surface.
    She felt her way along the rock wall, found a place where she could climb, and went up. Her hands groped ahead of her for holds, and her feet pressed against the rock. If she fell from here, she might die. Break her leg. Die slowly. Then, reaching up, she realized that she could see her hand.
    She followed that grip into brighter light. She could see where to put her hands now, and the stone was warm. Above, beyond the edge of rock, was pink sky: the sun just going down. She pulled herself the last few feet up to the grass beside the pool of water, and lay down, exhausted, and closed her eyes, and slept.

     
    SHE had nothing to eat, but the spring had come; the meadow was full of mushrooms, and the trees of birds’ nests and eggs. She walked a whole day and much of the night, through a brilliant full moon, before she came at last to the high road where it came down from the mountain passes and veered toward the sea. It was deserted. Even from its crests, she could not see the coast. Off toward the ocean, a plume of thick black smoke clotted the air; she wondered if the farmers were burning off their fields for the spring planting.
    She walked on, eating whatever she could find—roots, nuts, even flowers and grubs. On the third day, she came on some travelers, who gave her some bread.
    They were surprised to find her walking alone; they said, “Be careful, there are robbers on the highway. The Duke has gone south to a war, and there is no law.”
    “And raiders on the sea,” said another. “Be careful.”
    So she watched out for strangers, walking along, but she thought that she was near her own village and looked for the path down to it. She wondered what she would find there—if anything were left there. She wept once, thinking of Marco. But she was still walking along the high road, her feet sore, and every muscle aching, when someone shouted, and a skinny boy bounded down out of the rocks toward her.
    “Perla! Perla!”
    It was Grep, who had rowed third oar on Marco’s boat at Dragon’s Deep. She laughed, astonished, her hopes surging.
    Grep bounded around her, laughing. “You’re alive! You’re alive! Come, hurry—Marco will—”
    “Marco,” she cried, running down the steep path beside him. “Marco is alive?”
    “Marco, Ercule, Juneo, me,” he said. They slowed to a crawl under a fallen tree. “Everybody else went down in the storm.”
    “The storm,” she said, startled.
    He put his finger to her lips. “But you’re alive!” He laughed again, joyous, as if nothing else mattered. “Come on—” He ran out ahead up a short, steep slope and onto the flat top of the sea cliff, shouting.
    “Look here, everybody! Look here!”
    She stood there, looking around her. She knew this cliff, which had stood behind her village. Now on its narrow height stood a cluster of huts inside a ditch—half as many huts as the old village, and now from each one, faces peered out.
    And she laughed, delighted, and stretched out her arms, and they were running toward her, her sister, all tears, and her friends.
    “Perla! Perla! You came back!” She flung herself into their arms, and for a while nothing mattered.
    “Where are the men?” she asked, in her sister’s hut. Her sister set a piece of fish before her, a slab of bread, and she reached greedily as a child for them.
    “They’re out,” her sister said vaguely. She said, “The few there are. Marco has been the saving of us.”
    Perla looked around the hut, smaller than before, stoutly made with stone footings, a withy wall domed overhead, and covered