The Day it Rained Forever

George Smith drew back and stood away.

The artist glanced up, surprised to find someone so near. Then he simply stood there, looking from George Smith to his own creations flung like idle footprints down the way. He smiled at last and shrugged as if to say, Look what I’ve done; see what a child? You will forgive me, won’t you? One day or another we are all fools … you, too, perhaps? So allow an old fool this, eh? Good! Good!

But George Smith could only look at the little man with the sun-dark skin and the clear sharp eyes, and say the man’s name once, in a whisper, to himself.

They stood thus for perhaps another five seconds, George Smith staring at the sand-frieze, and the artist watching George Smith with amused curiosity. George Smith opened his mouth, closed it, put out his hand, took it back. He stepped towards the picture, stepped away. Then he moved along the line of figures, like a man viewing a precious series of marbles cast up from some ancient ruin on the shore. His eyes did not blink, his hand wanted to touch but did not dare to touch. He wanted to run but did not run.

He looked suddenly at the hotel. Run, yes! Run! What? Grab a shovel, dig, excavate, save a chunk of this all too crumbling sand? Find a repair-man, race him back here with plaster-of-paris to cast a mould of some small fragile part of these? No, no. Silly, silly. Or …? His eyes flicked to his hotel window. The camera! Run, get it, get back, and hurry along the shore, clicking, changing film, clicking unti l…

George Smith whirled to face the sun. It burned faintly on his face, his eyes were two small fires from it. The sun was half underwater and, as he watched, it sank the rest of the way in a matter of seconds.

The artist had drawn nearer and now was gazing into George Smith’s face with great friendliness as if he were guessing every thought. Now he was nodding his head in a little bow. Now the ice-cream stick had fallen casually from his fingers. Now he was saying good night, good night. Now he was gone, walking back down the beach towards the south.

George Smith stood looking after him. After a full minute, he did the only thing he could possibly do. He started at the beginning of the fantastic frieze of satyrs and fauns and wine-dipped maidens and prancing unicorns and piping youths and he walked slowly along the shore. He walked a long way, looking down at the free-running bacchanal. And when he came to the end of the animals and men he turned round and started back in the other direction, just staring down as if he had lost something and did not quite know where to find it. He kept on doing this until there was no more light in the sky, or on the sand, to see by.

He sat down at the supper table.

‘You’re late,’ said his wife. ‘I just had to come down alone. I’m ravenous.’

‘That’s all right,’ he said.

‘Anything interesting happen on your walk?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said.

‘You look funny; George, you didn’t swim out too far, did you, and almost drown? I can tell by your face. You did swim out too far, didn’t you?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Well,’ she said, watching him closely. ‘Don’t ever do that again. Now – what’ll you have?’

He picked up the menu and started to read it and stopped suddenly.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked his wife.

He turned his head and shut his eyes for a moment.

‘Listen.’

She listened.

‘I don’t hear anything,’ she said.

‘Don’t you?’

‘No. What is it?’

‘Just the tide,’ he said, after a while, sitting there, his eyes still shut. ‘Just the tide, coming in.’

The Dragon (#ulink_36d15979-3311-5048-bd90-31c668c4c028)

THE night blew in the short grass on the moor; there was no other motion. It had been years since a single bird had flown by in the great blind shell of sky. Long ago a few small stones had simulated life when they crumbled and fell into dust. Now only the night moved in the souls of the two men bent by their lonely fire in the wilderness; darkness pumped quietly in their veins and ticked silently in their temples and their wrists.

Firelight fled up and down their wild faces and welled in their eyes in orange tatters. They listened to each other’s faint, cool breathing and the lizard blink of their eyelids. At last, one man poked the fire with his sword.

‘Don’t, idiot; you’ll give us away!’

‘No matter,’ said the second man. ‘The dragon can smell us miles off, anyway. God’s breath, it’s cold. I wish I was back at the castle.’

‘It’s death, not sleep, we’re after ’

‘Why? Why? The dragon never sets foot in the town!’

‘Quiet, fool! He eats men travelling alone from our town to the next!’

‘Let them be eaten and let us get home!’

‘Wait now; listen!’

The two men froze.

They waited a long time, but there was only the shake of their horses’ nervous skin like black velvet tambourines jingling the silver stirrup buckles, softly, softly.

‘Ah.’ The second man sighed. ‘What a land of nightmares. Everything happens here. Someone blows out the sun; it’s night. And then, and then, oh, God, listen! This dragon, they say his eyes are fire. His breath a white gas; you can see him burn across the dark lands. He runs with sulphur and thunder and kindles the grass. Sheep panic and die insane. Women deliver forth monsters. The dragon’s fury is such that tower walls shake back to dust. His victims, at sunrise, are strewn hither and thither on the hills. How many knights, I ask, have gone for this monster and failed, even as we shall fail?’

‘Enough of that!’

‘More than enough! Out here in this desolation I cannot tell what year this is!’

‘Nine hundred years since the Nativity.’

‘No, no,’ whispered the second man, eyes shut. ‘On this moor is no Time, is only Forever. I feel if I ran back on the road the town would be gone, the people yet unborn, things changed, the castles unquarried from the rocks, the timbers still uncut from the forests; don’t ask how I know, the moor knows, and tells me. And here we sit alone in the land of the fire dragon, God save us!’

‘Be you afraid, then gird on your armour!’

‘What use? The dragon runs from nowhere; we cannot guess its home. It vanishes in fog, we know not where it goes. Aye, on with our armour, we’ll die well-dressed.’

Half into his silver corselet, the second man stopped again and turned his head.

Across the dim country, full of night and nothingness from the heart of the moor itself, the wind sprang full of dust from clocks that used dust for telling time. There were black suns burning in the heart of this new wind and a million burnt leaves shaken from some autumn tree beyond the horizon. This wind melted landscapes, lengthened bones like white wax, made the blood roil and thicken to a muddy deposit in the brain. The wind was a thousand souls dying and all time confused and in transit. It was a fog inside of a mist inside of a darkness, and this place was no man’s place and there was no year or hour at all, but only these men in a faceless emptiness of sudden frost, storm, and white thunder which moved behind the great falling pane of green glass that was the lightning. A squall of rain drenched the turf, all faded away until there was unbreathing hush and the two men waiting alone with their warmth in a cool season.

‘There,’ whispered the first man. ‘Oh, there .. .’

Miles off, rushing with a great chant and a roar – the dragon.

In silence, the men buckled on their armour and mounted their horses. The midnight wilderness was split by a monstrous gushing as the dragon roared nearer, nearer; its flashing yellow glare spurted above a hill and then, fold on fold of dark body, distantly seen, therefore indistinct, flowed over that hill and plunged vanishing into a valley.

‘Quick!’