Gilbert Guttlebocker,

Defender of Dragons

5. It's Just Good Math

Finally breathing freely again, Gilbert stepped off the elevator at the foot of the rocket ship and onto solid ground, safe at last in the sovereign territory of Siberia.

“Oh! Isn't it beautiful? This will be such a magnificent experience, don't you think? We'll be able to explore together and see all of Siberia at each other's sides and learn about chivalry and grow closer to one another as we devote ourselves completely to love and…”

“What was your name again?” Gilbert asked Bernice, who, as you have probably already noticed, had awakened from her nap when the ship landed.

“My name?” she asked, playfully surprised. “Bernice, of course, silly!” She quietly looked around the landing area at the charred rubble, blackened earth, and mangled skeletal corpses which formed a vast clearing in the trees, at the center of which stood the rocket ship they had just exited. Then she turned back to the young man. “What was your name again?”

The boy, watching the incoming parade of greeters and maintenance men emerging from the shadows of the distant tree line in front of them, turned his eyes toward the young woman without moving his head. “Gilbert,” he told her, returning his gaze to the approaching janitors, mechanics, limo drivers, trumpet blowers, and innumerable others, each of whom had some particular purpose regarding the ship or its passengers.

Most of the other passengers were already headed in the direction of the distant, incoming masses of people.

“Check him out,” Barkley suggested to his two fellow students, chuckling and pointing at the toasted bones of a knight, laying near the foot of the rocket, half-buried in ash and wreckage, broadsword still visible in his seared skeletal hand.

Gilbert suddenly felt sick to his stomach.

“Oh, what a pretty sword!” Bernice shouted gleefully, looking at the soot-covered relic. “If I were a man, I would love to have a sword like that!”

Gilbert, ignoring them both, threw his pack onto his shoulders and began walking toward the approaching crowd, attempting to get as far away from Bernice, Barkley, and the scorched corpses as quickly as he possibly could.

Bernice hiked up her skirts and chased after him. “Gilbert, sweetie! Gilbert!”

Barkley shook his head, a smirk on his face. He cautiously stepped over unidentifiable debris toward the fallen knight and took hold of the dead man's sword, yanking it out of the deceased knight's stiff grip. Wiping some of the soot off the sword with the hem of his cloak, he saw a glimmer of Spanish steel, heavily tarnished but still recoverable.

Something wasn't right. Gilbert was sure of it. All of this death surrounding him. Surely this couldn't be the result of rocket thrusters alone. Everyone would have moved out of the way if a rocket were coming or about to take off, wouldn't they? How did all of these people and…

Then he realized the odd stump arrangement he was now walking through was not merely a series of trees that had been charred beyond recognition as he had supposed, but the remains of the ribcage of a giant creature.

“Why is everything dead?” he asked himself out loud, shuddering as he picked up his pace, wanting to get out of this clearing of death even faster than before, virtually flying by the other passengers.

“Oh, I'm not dead, silly! And neither are you, and neither are they!” Bernice, just behind him and trying to keep up, pointed at the incoming crowds, which were still too far in the distance to hear their conversation. Then, after a pause, she added, “And neither is that thing.”

Gilbert stopped immediately, the girl bumping into him with an “Ooof.”

“What thing?” he asked, petrified.

“What? Oh, that thing up there,” Bernice explained, pointing back behind them, above the horizon.

As the other passengers continued past them again, Gilbert swallowed hard and slowly turned his head to follow the line of her pointed finger into the distance.

Gliding gracefully into the clearing behind them all, merely a silhouette against the setting sun, was an immense winged serpent, its wingspan equivalent to at least twice the height of the massive rocket they had just disembarked. Coils of black smoke curled from its fist-sized nostrils and its hooked claws flexed eagerly. A glimmer of light suggested something shiny, perhaps a medallion, hung from its cedar-like neck.

“Why did you stop like that?” she asked. “You know, when I bumped into you, I lost my balance and I almost fell, and if I had fallen, well, my skirts would have been covered with soot and ruined. You need to think more about me if this marriage is going to work…”

“Run!” Gilbert shouted, grabbing the girl's hand and taking off at a gallop toward the approaching greeters.

As they ran past the clown and the monk, the Viking and the punk, Gilbert shouted, “Dragon! Run!”

“Dragon? Where?” Mugsy demanded.

Gilbert threw his outstretched finger behind him as he ran. “Back there!”

“Oh good — he must be my ride to the school! See alls you guys later!” he shouted, turning around and heading straight toward the menacing beast, briefcase full of sticker sheets in one hand, tommy gun in the other.

Gilbert stopped and spun around, unintentionally hurling Bernice to the ground. “What are you doing?” he called. “It'll get you!”

“Yep! Tell your friends abouts my stickers, okay? The mores I sells, the mores I makes!” Mugsy continued straight toward the oncoming beast.

“Hey, honey! You're doing it again — not thinking about me!” the girl complained from the ground. “Now my dress is ruined.”

“You're crazy!” Gilbert yelled at the mobster.

“Nope, not crazy, son, it's just good math!”

The dragon approached rapidly, pushed forward by favorable air currents, unhindered by gravity and friction. As the monster passed the rocket ship, it slowed in its approach, eyeing the lone man with the briefcase. Lifting its head and breathing in deeply as it floated majestically just beyond the sticker salesman, its lungs expanding as its chest filled with oxygen, Gilbert's mouth dropped open in terror.

“Mugsy!” he screamed.

As the mobster turned around to see why the young man had called his name, the fire-breathing menace exhaled with all its might directly at the zoot-suited salesman. Flames surrounded the man, licking the scorched dirt, a cascading shower of reds, oranges, yellows, and blues engulfing his broiled body.

“Just look at this dress. It's filthy. You're going to have to help me clean it now, Gilbert sweetie,” the girl said as she lifted her delicate body from the ground.

“Get down!” Gilbert shouted at her, throwing his body on top of her as they tumbled into the soot.

“Ooof!”

The other passengers continued on their way toward the nearing crowds, thoroughly undisturbed by the events behind them.

Gilbert continued to press Bernice to the ground, not allowing her to move.

Behind them all, the dragon gulped down Mugsy's charred remains and departed, soaring off into the distance, satisfied with the small amount of destruction it had already caused, the taking of one life sufficient to satisfy its cravings.

“You know, Gilbert, this really isn't helping my dress,” Bernice complained from beneath him.

Gilbert was sure he could hear Barkley laughing maniacally in the distance.

The boy looked up, scanned the horizon, and saw no further sign of the terrible creature that had taken the life of his new acquaintance, Mugsy.

Gilbert climbed off Bernice and stood up just as the approaching crowd and the other passengers met, slightly ahead of them. After helping the girl to her feet, he brushed himself off. He could hear people calling out to one another in the crowd, old friends meeting up again, strangers connecting for rides, workers heading past all of them to perform routine maintenance of the craft.

Does no one care about poor Mugsy? He wondered, looking back toward the area where the mobster had been standing.

He saw Barkley walking casually away from the rocket ship, headed towards them, swinging a broadsword back and forth.

“Kerfuffle! Looking for Kerfuffle!” came a voice from behind them. “Are you Kerfuffle? Does anyone here know a Kerfuffle?”

Gilbert turned around and saw a man in a clean black suit and tie, with a chauffeur cap on his head, holding a large white card in front of him for all to read, with the letters K-E-R-F-U-F-F-L-E hand-written on the card in thick black ink.

“I'm Kerfuffle,” said the large black man with the white face paint, oversized shoes, fake red smile, and red ball attached to his nose.

“No, no, no,” replied the chauffeur. “I'm looking for a guy that's supposed to be dressed like a clown. You, sir, on the other hand, are clearly a cartographer.” Dismissively, he looked around the crowd of people gathered nearby. “Kerfuffle! Is there a Kerfuffle here?”

“Sir,” said the clown, “I am Kerfuffle. It's me you're looking for.”

“No, I'm looking for someone dressed like a clown, I've already explained that.”

“Well, I'm Kerfuffle.”

“Is there another Kerfuffle here? I wasn't expecting someone dressed like a cartographer. I was looking for someone dressed like a clown.”

“Dude,” the cowboy approached the chauffeur, “Something I can help you with?” The cowboy's cold stare held the chauffeur silently for a moment.

“Um,” the chauffeur sputtered. He shook his head, blinking his eyes to escape from being sucked into a trance. Instead of looking at the cowboy, he fixed his eyes on the clown. “I'm looking for a Kerfuffle, a guy dressed like a clown. This guy says he's Kerfuffle, but he's obviously a cartographer, not a clown.”

“What makes you think he's a cartographer?” the cowboy asked, unblinking.

“Well, the stethoscope, of course.”

“Hmm.” The cowboy considered what he had said, staring straight into the limo driver's soul. “I see your point,” he conceded. “So, this Kerfuffle you're looking for is a clown, huh?”

“No, of course not. He's a cartographer. But he's supposedly dressed like a clown.”

“And this isn't him?” the cowboy asked, gesturing toward the clown.

“No, of course not. If someone were dressed like a clown, they would appear to be a clown, not a cartographer. This man is plainly a cartographer, as I've explained, and thus cannot possibly be the man I'm looking for.”

The cowboy stared at him.

Suddenly the clown shouted, “Kerfuffle! Is there another Kerfuffle here?”

“Kerfuffle! Hey, Kerfuffle!” The cowboy joined in, shouting in random directions.

“Kerfuffle!” shouted the chauffeur. “Kerfuffle! Looking for a Kerfuffle!”

Gilbert then heard another voice, coming from the far side of the crowd.

“Master Luther! Master Luther!”

He saw a slim priest in rough clothing burst through the crowd and grab hold of the monk he had met on the flight, his face radiating with pure delight.

“Master Luther! It's wonderful to see you again! Holy Trinity Church hasn't been the same since you left! Come, come — we've a long walk ahead of us! I trust your flight was good?”

The monk responded grumpily to the query, but Gilbert could not hear his response. The two old friends walked off together, and Gilbert observed the direction of their path, assuming Holy Trinity Church was in that general direction. Perhaps he would see the monk again this Sunday.

He glanced despondently back toward the pile of ash that remained in the place of Mugsy Marchesioni. That poor man, he thought.

“Academy students?”

The voice came from the crowd.

“Yes! Yes! We're academy students!” Bernice announced in the direction of the voice, peering intently at the faces in the crowd for who the voice belonged to. “Have you come with our limousine? Is it white or black? Is it a stretch limousine? Is it pink? Oh, let it be pink!”

“Madame.” A small, half-naked man with dirt in his matted black hair stepped forward out of the crowd on bare feet, a leather string tied loosely around his neck with three sharp teeth hanging from it, a Gurkha knife strapped to his hip. “Please,” he said in well-cultured English, “Follow me.”

As they followed the little man out of the loud, warm gathering of total strangers, Barkley came up behind them. Walking toward the edge of the clearing, the three students awkwardly avoided stumbling over tree stumps, rocks, and bones of all kinds, everything charred and covered with black soot.

At the edge of the clearing, while gesturing that the three children should follow him, the little man disappeared down a rocky dirt path cut jaggedly through dense foliage and trees that were larger than any Gilbert had ever imagined.