One
Bruno was a dragon.
He was, wasn’t he?
Well, he looked like a dragon. He had leathery wings divided into flaps with knobbly ridges between them. He had stubby little forearms and strong back legs, each sporting three claws. He had a thick tail that finished in a triangular point. His eyes were narrow and red, and his snout was long with two bulges for nostrils. His mouth contained two neat rows of teeth as sharp as a chef’s kitchen knives, perfect for chewing goat. He was even starting to grow a few whiskers, and like all dragons, he had a blue tongue, forked of course.
So, yes, Bruno looked like a dragon – he was yellow and green by the way – but he didn’t necessarily feel like one. Or not a very good one anyway. Take those nostrils I just mentioned. In the final year at his school (dragons only go to school for three years) he should comfortably have been able to make black smoke belch out of them. But no matter how hard he tried, all he got was this noise:
PHHFFFFFLLLLHFFFFFFTTTT
Unfortunately, he was making it right here, right now, in Ferocity class. The teacher, Mad Malcazor, was making each dragon show what they could do to make their enemies quake, quiver and quail (or anything else beginning with Q that you do when you’re terrified out of your wits).
‘PATHETIC!’ Malcazor roared.
Bruno had been dreading his turn. Everyone before him had at least managed to belch smoke and give a few good roars, even if their flames needed plenty of work. Sure enough, Malcazor had picked on him.
The other dragons – they were all male – stomped their feet and set up a great flapping of wings. It sounded like a hundred rugs being beaten against a wall. Amidst the din a crimson and black striped dragon named Maug bounded up onto Bruno’s desk and snorted a black cloud right into his face (Maug was the top snorter in class, in fact the most ferocious in most departments)
Bruno coughed and spluttered.
The class shrieked.
‘SILENCE!!’ Malcazor bellowed. Bruno tried to duck to avoid another lungful of smoke, but overbalanced and toppled off his chair.
‘BRUNOOOOOOOOOOOO!’ Malcazor sent a jet of green flames shooting across the room over the heads of the dragons.
‘Get up this instant, or I’ll send you to the dungeons!’
*
This was a fairly typical day in school for Bruno. Actually, his wasn’t a normal school. Normal dragon schools aren’t like this. They have the subjects you might recognise: language, maths, geography, art and so on. Bruno’s school did have some of these subjects, but only in small doses. Mainly they focused on the three F’s.
Ferocity.
Ferociousness.
Fire Breathing.
‘Couldn’t I just go to a normal school?’ Bruno had asked nearly three years ago, just after his Dad had told him that he was going to be sent to a Special Dragon Military Imperial Academy, one of only two in the entire Kingdom.
It was one of the rare times when his Dad was home – he spent most of the year away for work - and they had been sitting in the garden at the back of his grandmother’s comfortable red brick cave. Bruno was eating slices of watermelon that she had prepared for him. Juice was dribbling out of his jaws onto the rug she had spread on the grass. Suddenly his Dad lashed out a wing and flicked the slice he was holding off into the bushes.
‘What did you do that for, Dad?’
His father, a purple-grey dragon, bounded close to him. So close that Bruno could smell the barbecued goat meat on his breath.
‘Look at me, Bruno,’ he growled.
Bruno looked into an angry red eye.
‘The reason you can’t go to a normal school is because…’
Bruno waited.
‘because…’
Bruno began to feel nervous...
‘because you are not…a normal dragon!’
*
Bruno had grown up normally enough, he’d thought, considering his mother had died when he was just a baby. He’d been raised by his grandmother, in a small dragon community, two hours flight from the capital city. He’d had friends and been happy enough. He wasn’t the fastest at learning to fly, but that didn’t seem to be a huge problem for anyone, except possibly his father, who wasn’t around much anyway.
‘Don’t you worry about him,’ his Grandmother used to say. ‘Just because he was an early flier he thinks you should be one too. But every dragon’s different, don’t you forget that Bruno.’
But now he was here, in the Northern Military Academy, and his grandmother wasn’t alive any more to wrap her old wrinkled blue and yellow wings around him and tell him he was the best.
All of which meant that Bruno, it pains me to tell you, was an extremely unhappy young dragon. In fact he may have been the most miserable in the entire Kingdom, and that was before the Assembly, one week after the Ferocity Class where Maug humiliated him.
Comments