Free The Dragon's Eye by Dugald A. Steer Page A

a leather ball and told us to kick it around between ourselves.
    â€œYou’ll find out why later,” he said. “But it’s going to be fun.”
    That evening, when Billy was talking to Dr. Drake, Darcy came and showed me the sheets of paper he and Billy had been given. There were two dragons on it. One looked a bit like an imp with arms, legs and claws and was the sort of thing you might expect to see on the side of an ancient cathedral. It was called a gargouille. The other was a small, nasty-looking creature that seemed more like an evil crow than a dragon. It was a cockatrice.
    â€œDr. Drake says that cockatrices are very rare, but that they are among the most dangerous of dragons because they can kill their prey merely by breathing on them. They usually live in Mediterranean mountain forests, but I’m sure Dr. Drake mentioned one that lives in England or Wales somewhere. It’s called Bog-Crow. He also said that a few of them migrated to North America. He thinks that it might have been the source for the legend of the
Marie Celeste
— all the passengers and crew were killed by cockatrices, but the dragons got away.”
    â€œLet’s show Beatrice,” I said.
    But when we knocked on the door of the girls’ dormitory, there was no reply.
    I knocked harder, and a voice shouted back, “Sorry. Closed for Q.T.B.”
    â€œBeatrice,” I hissed. “Do you want to see a cockatrice?”
    The door flew open. Inside, the room was already covered with pictures and diagrams of dragons that Beatrice and Alicia had made, and their dragonological record books were open alongside Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species.
Beatrice had obviously been teaching Alicia everything she had learned about evolution. Alicia was sitting on the floor beside a large version of the map and some figures of dragons and dragonologists. It seemed as though Beatrice had made up some kind of dragon game.
    â€œWhat’s Q.T.B.?” I asked.
    â€œIt’s a club,” said Beatrice. “No boys allowed.”
    â€œAll right,” I said, “I believe you. But do you want to see this cockatrice?”
    Beatrice fetched a piece of paper so that she could copy it all out.
    â€œDo you mind?” she asked Darcy.
    â€œNot at all,” he said. “And I’m sure Dr. Drake won’t mind either, now that you have done the homework he set.”
    â€œThank you,” she said.
    While Beatrice copied out the details, I tried to have a look at the game she had invented.
    â€œHow do you play?” I asked.
    â€œSorry,” said Beatrice. “Q.T.B. members only.”
    â€œBut what does it stand for?” I asked.
    â€œQuicker than boys.”
    And she shut the door.
    The following morning we had an introduction to Eastern dragons. We learned that while dragons in the West are often thought of as horrible monsters, in the East, dragons are considered beneficial helpmeets to mankind and are celebrated with dragon dances and dragon boat races.
    In the afternoon we learned about a polar cousin of the European dragon known as the frost dragon. We charted the migratory routes of some frost dragons based on sightings by various S.A.S.D. agents. One of the sightings had come from a place in northern India. I wondered if our parents had reported it.
    The next day Emery and Mademoiselle Gamay taught a class on the life cycle of dragons. Mademoiselle Gamay told us that dragons grow continually through their lives, like snakes and crocodiles, and we spent some time looking at various pictures of dragons and estimating their ages from their sizes. Emery showed us an interesting series of pictures that showed how a dragon embryo develops in the egg.
    On the fourth day Dr. Drake brought in to the schoolroom a pile of what he called dragon-tracking paraphernalia. There was a flameproof cloak, which looked like a piece of canvas that had been painted with some sort of flame-retardant