Acting the Legend

By Daniel J. Bishop

Perhaps it was fate that made him what he was, fate that had drawn him to a deserted beach in Northern California, on a warm autumn night. He was an athletic man, with thin pale hair redrawn in dark melancholy strands by the damp air. The ocean, muffled by the low fog, hushed into the rocky shore. The taut membrane of the night sky stretched tight overhead, ready to burst golden starry shrapnel at the slightest provocation. The clouds had settled on the ground, and the stars were brighter than the slivered moon.

The fog obscured the line between sea and shore. It hid Gilmour's feet. He stumbled on hidden rocks. The night was heaven and darkness and unseen currents. Like Marcella had been. He was aware of each misstep only as the cold water washed around his ankles and shins.

It would have been easy to wade out, away from the water-worn rocks of the shore, into the cool darkness of night, to swim under bright stars, flashing brighter limbs in the thin moonlight until his world became water and shadows, until arms grew numb with the cold and exertion, and the future was taken out of his hands.

Someone had built a wrought iron fence, to mark a property line, perhaps, along one edge of the beach. It had been painted black at one time. The paint had mostly peeled away, and the fence was now more a line of linked rusty spears than a real barrier. He followed it north along the beach, counting the rusty spears to keep his mind from the dark water.

From ahead came the soft sobs of a woman crying, drifting into the night until the fog swallowed them. There was a quality of despair to the crying, and a quality of nobility. Dark currents were pulling at the night, destiny in the sound of tears. Without knowing why he did so, Gilmour followed the sounds and the fence up the beach.

A great rock rose out of the fog, a longstone, twisted and pitted with time. The water broke around the stone with a noise only slightly louder than that of water meeting shore elsewhere along the beach. The weeping was louder than the surf, as though coming from the rock itself, half-in and half-out of the Pacific Ocean. Gilmour was barely able to make out a dark silhouette, huddled beneath the great stone, hiding in the fog.

"Are you...are you all right?"

The crying broke off suddenly.

"Who is there?"

"Don't be afraid. I won't hurt you."

"Who...? Who are you?"

"Saint George," he said, and didn't know why he said it. It was the legend pulling at him. His name was not Saint George. "Are you all right?"

The woman stood up. As she brushed tears from her red and swollen cheeks, Gilmour saw that she was beautiful.

She wore a white antique dress. It lay plastered to her skin from fog-dampness and salt water, revealing her dim outlines. Her long black hair was braided with bits of silver and jewelry or glass, in thick, elaborate plaits. "What time is it?"

Gilmour looked puzzled, and she had to ask again. He looked at his watch, the little light behind the numbers shining in the darkness.

"11:45," he said.

"Good. Then we have a little time before... We have a little time. There was a Greek myth. Perseus slew the Dragon to rescue Andromeda. Later, Saint George killed it for Sabra. Both Sabra and Andromeda were princesses."

"I still don't understand." Gilmour shook his head. She was beautiful, yes, but Marcella still haunted his heart. A strange feeling was coming over Gilmour. He had stepped deeper into madness than he had expected. The night was crazy. The woman was crazy, to be out here crying by that rock. Gilmour wanted to be gone from here. From her. From the beach. But instead he asked: "Why were you crying?"

"It keeps happening. Other times, other places. Here. Now. It's happening again. I'm the princess. That town" --she raised a long white arm to point into the darkness, away from the sea, and, for the first time, Gilmour saw that she was chained to the rock-- "is Silene. And the Dragon is coming."

Gilmour thought he understood. "You're acting out a legend."

"This is a sacrifice. I'm here to die. Unless," she said, giving him a shy, unsure smile--a playful smile that meant she understood his role in this drama better than he did. "Unless you are Saint George. What time is it?"

"Almost midnight. Why?"

"The Dragon comes at midnight."

"I'm not Saint George. Not really. Sorry."

"Someone else will come along. It's part of the legend. So someone has to come."

"I don't think there's anyone else out here."

"What time is it?"

"11:57."

Silence, and seconds trickling by.

"I don't want to die," she said, lines well rehearsed but genuine as she spoke them. "I...I'm trying to be brave, but I don't want to die. You have to help me. There's no one else."

"Look, I'll tell you what. I'll get one of the bars from that fence up there. I'll come right back. Maybe I could pry the chains You could run away."

"But the Dragon...! It'll destroy the town."

"Have you ever seen this dragon?" Gilmour asked.

She shook her head no.

"I didn't think so," Gilmour said. "I'll be right back."

He turned from her and began to walk away from the water.

"Wait! What time is it?"

"You've got a minute or so." The numbers on the watch changed under his gaze. He grinned up at her with a sudden triumph of reason, a sudden bittersweet ache of loss, spreading his hands toward the still and no-longer-menacing sky.

"Midnight," he said. "And no dragon."

His grin faded with the first tremor.

The earth shook and the water lashed the rock. The atmosphere broke, and sound rushed into the night: the crash of the surf, the far-off chimes of a church bell tolling the hour. From the deep, a throbbing echoed, like a submerged gong, and the woman's head jerked as though pulled by a cord, her eyes searching the sea. The terror on her face was so sudden, so complete, that it ran through Gilmour as well.

Fear sped over Gilmour's skin, and he found himself fleeing, irrationally, up the beach, away from the water, until he came to the rusted fence of black spears. He threw himself onto the fence, intending on climbing over it to safety--There's nothing to be afraid of. There are no dragons--but the iron stakes would not bear his weight. They ripped from the ground, throwing him onto his back. He landed hard, pummeled by the rocks, and his breath was knocked out of him. The black iron spears fell from his numb hands, landing across the rocks with a clatter.

Again the submerged gong sounded, and the earth rippled as though from an earthquake or a tide. Maybe it was an earthquake, because a deep roar answered the gong, as though the world itself were being torn in half. For Gilmour, lying on his back, the sea was the sky, and the Dragon fell from it like a bolt of golden lightning. Gilmour sucked in a shallow, ragged breath, and another, this time drawing more air in. He rolled to his stomach, to his feet, and stood, facing the Dragon.

Gilmour looked insanely for wires, although he could clearly see muscles moving beneath the golden scales. Great drops of water, like black pearls, rolled down its metallic hide, breaking on the Dragon's intricately scrolled armor plating and falling back into the ocean. Where the droplets fell, clouds of ink spread beneath the towering neck.

The princess screamed.

The Dragon was more serpent than a lizard. Majestic horns swept back behind its skull, flanking a stiff silver crest than ran down the center of the creature's back. Itd its mouth, exposing crimson flesh and foot-long ivory teeth, spiraled like unicorns' horns. Murky fumes wreathed the Dragon's head, a condensed, toxic fog.

Gilmour took a step backwards. His foot brushed one of the black metal lances that had fallen from the fence, and it hit the rocks with a clang. Cold-wrought iron, the point was still unrusted, coated in thin black paint, and strong. Gilmour reached down for the weapon.

The Dragon paused to look at him.

Gilmour felt the fence stake cold against his hand, transformed into a black lance that was itself a gift of the night. Holding the lance firmly, Gilmour Saint George straightened to face the Dragon.

The Dragon's eyes were on fire. They burned like garnets and rubies, brighter than diamonds deep in the molten earth. Roiling scarlet lasers, they reached into Gilmour's mind, burning through walls and doors and cutting through him. They held him fast. They cut him to pieces.

But while Gilmour was paralyzed by the Dragon's gaze, Saint George was not. His athletic body, alive with its own body-knowledge, completed the arc that his mind had begun. The fence javelin flew straight and true, into the Dragon's mouth, piercing that poisonous flesh and driving upward, into the creature's brain.

Gilmour screamed silently, but the fires died. The Dragon's eyes turned cold and lifeless, and it slid beneath the waves. The fog rolled over the Pacific Ocean, and Gilmour stood there wondering if the Dragon's gleaming body lay dying beneath it, or if it had all been in his mind. A hallucination.

"Oh God, my God," the woman breathed. "You did it! You killed it! Oh, I knew you were the one!"

Two spears had fallen from the rusty fence. One had disappeared with the Dragon. Gilmour picked up the other and carried it down to the rock. He pried first one, and then another chain link freeing the woman. The second iron stake fell free, and landed clattering on hidden rocks beneath the fog.

"Come on! We have to go to the town!" she said. "They'll want to congratulate you. Oh, father will be so pleased."

"No," he said.

"Oh, but you have to. We'll be married tonight."

"No."

"But, you have to. It's part of the legend. Unless...unless you don't find me..."

"Look, it's not that. You're beautiful." And that was the truth. She was beautiful. But never as beautiful as Marcella had been the first night, at her father's party, when Gilmour had been unable to pull his eyes away. "Until tonight I didn't believe in dragons," Gilmour said instead. "I'm not sure that I want to believe in dragons. I sure as hell don't believe in love at first sight or fairy tale marriages."

Not anymore.

She reached out for him, but he pulled himself away.

"Go home to your father. Find someone else to marry. "

"But the legend... Your destiny?"

"There's already a woman, even if she'll never love me again. Go home. Please."

The mist broke away. The shoreline stood revealed. The black iron stake from the fence glittered in the moonlight, wet where it had fallen. There was no sign of golden scales, no shadowy bulk visible beneath the dark waves. Only three things remained of Gilmour's encounter with the Dragon: that stake, the woman, and the longstone to which she had been chained. If he had the power to, Gilmour would have pushed the longstone into the sea.

"What about destiny?"

The sea played with the shore, crashing into it and falling away in an endless rhythm. "Maybe destiny made me what I am, and brought me here, but people aren't like the tides. We can choose to give up. Or we can choose to keep trying. I can choose my own path. You can choose your own way, too."

He continued down the beach, away from one legend, and into another. Perhaps it was nothing more than the burning stars, but the future was bright again.

Originally appeared in Jackhammer.

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