Roman Games
by Anne Gay

Rome station seemed to rattle as the train began its farewells. A hand, freeze-frame black-and-white, banged silently on the outside of the pullman's double glazing that slid away. Inside, a boy with his leg in plaster babbled in anguished Italian. In her corner, Sister Thomas read a detective book so that - for once - she could pierce the secrets of men's souls. It was typical, so it was, that she almost missed the Drama of the Ticket as she hid in her book from her failure in Rome. And when she got back to Ireland - ?

"My ticket!" The boy pulled at her skirt. "I no have the my ticket!"

Sister Tom looked: saw the boy with his crutches, whose ticket was outside the window. The poor bobbing uncle, distraught, tied to the train's motion by the ticket he could not pass in to the nephew, trotting along the platform walloping the panes. A frenzy of silent shouting like a fish outside its bowl.

Sister Thomas ran to the door, hurled its back in its track; the corridor; the carriage door; slammed down the window and snatched the ticket.

"Grazie! Mille grazi-"

The platform fell away to gravel: goodbye uncle. Outside the station it was dark. Sister Thomas pushed the window up, no longer leaning on the sign that said "It is dangerous to lean out of the window." Where her head might have been, a telegraph pole whizzed past. A miracle that passed her by.

Nephew, his leg horzontal in graffit and gypsum, was very thankful in his heathen tongue. A pity our somewhat good sister didn't understand one word of the canticle. But she smiled.

The train headed north as Sister Tom tried to remember what faith was like. It was impossible. So she tried to sleep instead.

Stops and stations, then a long blank hourney towards dawn. The boy and the graffiti on his leg were gone. The Rome-Ostend express was a world of light and life travelling through the outer darkness of Italy.

* * * * *

What of Thomasina's opponent? She's hungry, that's what. Dawn is brilliant up in the mountains, and on this particular dawn she blunders over the valleys, hunting. Her scales, like her teeth, need cleaning. As her wings crank her stiffly over the rosy Alps, she thinks of fresh marrow and picking her fangs afterwards with a nice, juicy rib.

The trouble is, people don't believe in her any more. There isn''t room in this bright winter's sky for her and jumbo jets: their slip-streams dull her scales and bring on her bronchitis. Draco Vulgaris is mucky with other people's neglect.

She turns her head, trying to spot a victim. Hope - and memories - of feasts always make her nostalgic. Those Romans were nice and crunchy with brass and spiky iron. There's been a virgin or two - knight-bait, they were, a morning's sport molto bene, very good. Thieves and murderers, fat millers with lungs en croute.

Draco spotted the train as a stream of colours, hugging the snowy side of the pass. She spiralled in lower. Sulphurated saliva dripped from her jaws. Her last meal was partisans with gunpowder sauce. Dinner was forty years ago and she was ready for breakfast.

Round One

In her compartment, only Sister Tom was awake. It was incredibly hot, redolent of garlic and bodily effluents. The double-glazing, of course, maintained its efficient seal. Five-feet-eight-inches of Irish nun did not fit the seat; her short-cropped head was jammed at an uncomfortable angle, so that every time her unwilling eyes jolted open she could see the frightening mountains. Little faith and less hair did a poor job of cushioning her. Her curls had stopped growing by themselves thirty years ago. She sometimes thought her hair was more religious than she was.

"Is this a dragon I see before me?"

Sister Tom rapidly checked her watch, set to this foreign time. Not yet six o'clock. Besides - when the frost-jewelled cliff shot by - Holy Mary! - the abyss held no dragons.

Back in her village in the Mountains of Mourne - proper mountains they were, nice and soft and gentle - it would be just past three o'clock, the witching hour. Many's the night Sister Tom had sat up with the dead in a candle-lit room. She knew that midnight was nothing. But three o'clock in the morning, when death squeezes the souls out of bodies, that was when horrors enter the mind of a nun. For doesn't a nun see only the underside of men, now? At three o'clock by God's time in would slide a banshee, maybe, in the soft mist around the corner of vision. Or a large, creaky dragon over the sudden, jagged Alps.

It was nothing, now. Just a bad dream. And it was gone.

Draco dimmed a little more, wounded by disbelief.

Dragon 0 - Sister Thomas 1.

Round Two

Draco singed a pine tree out of pique. Disbelief always put her in a flaming temper. No doubt she had once been a pure, innocent hatchling, but she'd soon grown out of a diet of sheep and chamois. We are what we eat, and she had eaten liars, cheats, cowards and killers, man-unkind with all his little failings. In short, she had eaten people.

After the nightmare, Sister Tom needed air. Yawning and stretching, she staggered along the corridor as the train swayed round the cornice. At the carriage door, she lit a filthy, cheap, foreign cigarette, all the better to savour the cold air. She rested her forearms on the window, trying not to see the river right down in the black depths of a gorge. Sure the Alps were pretty now, but better with a picture-frame safe around them.

More importantly, could a nun who apparently believed in dragons not have a little more faith in God?

There it was again! Dull bronze, dull green, dull soot - Mother of God, it was there before her eyes! All it needed to be believeable was a tongue of -

Flame ripped out at the smart carriages crafted by robots in Milan. The blue paint blistered, that was all.

No is like the old days, thought Draco nostalgically, going through her gizzard to find another belch. Then I really make them blaze!

Pride was just one of the sins she had consumed.

"Oh God, I wish I wasn't an atheist," a humorist once said in danger. Sister Tom prayed, for real this time, as if it might do her some good. Too long had prayer been a comfy, cosy thing, like her night-time Guinness or warm slippers.

Hands together, eyes closed - but with one eye cheating, because the dragon was closer than God - Sister Thomas prayed. Harder still, when the dragon's talons raked along the roof, and in fear Sister Tom closed her other eye.

Draco backwinged, puzzled, and hauled herself higher in retreat. Why hadn't her claws ripped through the metal? The pink sun shone in her eyes and she shook her head in annoyance. She must be getting old.

Arrowing her tail, she dived like a cormorant, trying, trying, trying again. A downdraught from the snowfields gave her a helpful shove.

It was dangerous to lean out, and the good sister didn't need the notice to tell her. Head and shoulders crammed through the window, Sister Tom howled her prayers upwards, eye to eye with the dragon, only partly so she wouldn't see the chasm below.

English, Latin, Gaelic - Sister Tom tried everything. What did the dragon speak? What would work?

Draco was an omnivore. That is, she'd eaten men of all tongues, and so she spoke the lot. And she knew the power of prayer, whether the deity was called Mithras or God.

Nonchalantly she wheeled away over an arête.

"Saints be praised!" cried Sister Tom, falling to her knees in the corridor the minute the beast was gone. The sky was as blue as Mary's robe, the mountains white and majestic. Pale sunlight gilded all, even the battered old face with its thorny crown of Irish hair, even the bulbous nose her mother had passed on from the tinker who'd made her laugh - until she'd conceived Sister Tom. She'd not laughed then till the dates worked out, and it might have been her husband after all.

Sister Tom shook her head. What a terrible confession to hear from her own darlin' mother on her deathbed. Had that started her doubts?

What if it had? She'd done a Saint Patrick! Smiling, full of faith, she resolved to give up the weed for good and put the money in the poorbox. This would be her last cigarette. Faith! She could do it now.

Dragon 1- Sister Thomas 2

Round Three

Draco was in a bad way. Quindi - she'd pretended she'd just changed her mind, but the prayers had made her sick de vero. Perched on a black rock in the corrie, her tail draggled on the snow and her head drooping, she gave way to the pains that griped in her stomachs. She almost overbalanced when she put a claw down her throat, but the indigestible prayer gave her hell. It wouldn't come out but it wouldn't stay down.

Sister Tom walked back along the bouncing corridor, bouncing herself with joy. The spring-door fought back when she slid it open, but what did it matter today?

The boy with the broken leg had got out at Turin; now two tubby men slept in his seat. One was a salesman, one an accountant: besuited but naive in sleep, their scepticism dormant in their pockets with their spectacles. It was too early yet for businessmen.

What time was it? Sister Tom's watch on its old leather strap still said before six: she could tell by its single pointer.

"Must get a big hand," said Sister Tom to herself, and opened her one bottle of Lambrusco. "Never too early for a heroine to drink," and she thanked God for screw-caps. She was in that rare, generous mood that ascribes to the Creator all the good things He - or She? - had dreamt up. Sister Tom would have thanked God for the velcro on her veil if she'd thought of it.

Imagine her surprise, then, as she swigged surreptitiously from her bottle - silently, out of consideration for her sleeping partners, watching the cars on the autostrada - and Draco appeared!

For Draco had eaten atheists, and their proteins swallowed prayers in the stomach of unbelief. It just took time.

Sister Tom gulped wine from the bottle. The beast was still there, though, hovering behind a big motorway sign, lurking until the sparse, early cars thinned out.

The cheek of it! Thought Sister Tom, pushing the damned door sideways. Pound, pound went her boots along the corridor, and her heart did the same. Back to the carriage door, where a dog-end lay before the open window.

What weapon could she use this time? If it was sweat, she'd have won hands down. Sister Tom lit a cigarette with shaking matches.

Sure the beast was so vain, wasn't she creaking over the train now? Making sure Sister Tom had seen her. And on the stilted autostrada, no cars but one for miles. A mother - black hair, blue coat - was peering in its bonnet that was open to curses, if not to coercion. For the thing wouldn't start.

Lazily cocking her tail as a snoot at the nun, Draco strolled across the sky. What could the nun do, but nothing and rage?

On its corniche, the train had stopped for no reason, as trains do. On the flyover with delusions of grandeur, the woman was slamming shut the boot, putting up a pushchair, wheeling her baby to the emergency phone! Mother of God, the dragon was going to -

"You're no dragon at all! Just an overgrown lizard, so y'are!"

Draco balked in surprise, and had to flap twice to stay up.

"Dragons are noble, glittering beasts," yelled the woman who'd kissed the Blarney Stone. "Hordes of treasure they've got, and never eat less than a virgin princess. You don't want her - she'd not make a mouthful for ye."

And she prayed again in desperation for a natural catastrophe, just a little one. Dragon-size, for preference.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. Our present imperfect Draco had eaten plenty of it. She leered at her puny foe - grubby grey serge and skin, waving a fist through the window of the train - and Draco showed off her vanity.

And for all Sister Tom's prayer, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, not a ghost of an avalanche.

Flaming, terrible, Draco dive-bombed the mother.

Madonna of the motorway! Yes, she ran - but she snatched her baby and fled - towards the phone.

Draco's breath hurled the pushchair through the parapet. Sister Tom watched the pushchair's parachute progression. Held on its web of metal, it tumbled into the gorge, a gorgeous red flare of fire on its charred black frame.

Sister Tom almost collapsed - vertigo was catching.

Two all.

Round Four

Then Draco, seeing no other cars about, nor anyone else astir on the sleepy train, craftily burnt up the phone. Vain, yes, about her ability to destroy, to scare, to terrify. But smart enough to know that armies in the nineties have tracker-planes and bombs. And all for the price of a phone-call.

She settled, wings spanning the concrete carriageway, teasing tufts of fire towards the mother. The woman stopped. Stood still, while a wind from nowhere picked up her skirts. The baby wailed - wouldn't you? But the woman didn't. Pale face, pale legs - only the blue of her clothes was colour against the white of the concrete and the black of the cliffs. Mouth slack, she didn't scream. She could see the monster's eyes.

With an insolent wink at the nun, on the train on the hillside helpless across the yards and yards of air, Draco advanced. A step at a time.

"My prayers are useless!" Thomasina - she'd be Sister Tom no longer! - slammed her forehead on the window.

Prayer was no good. The trip to Rome had done no good. A lifetime's savings gone to prove faith had no virtue. The Vatican was just a museum. All those monuments of marble and gold, canvas and flesh, to glorify God. And what had God got to show for it? People.

And Thomasina had heard enough confessions to know what people were.

Draco strutted another step. Her wings rattled in a sudden gale while she concentrated on grandstanding to the arena. Even her cockscomb crest was playing to the crowd.

Even the mother's tear-ducts were frozen with fear.

Like a gladiatior, Draco minced forward. Step by step. Closed in for the kill. Belched like hell.

Will the Madonna die? Will her infant?

Thomasina couldn't watch faith's final death.

Out sprang the fire -

Two things happened. All over Europe on the farmers' news, weathermen moved symbols to show wind over the Alps. A small, natural catastrophe, just dragon-sized: the mini-hurricane blew the dragon's flames in again. In short, Draco backfired.

And while Draco skittered in surprise and the child cried and the woman's shaky legs tottered her away as far as the parapet, and while the weathermen pushed stick-on isobars around their maps, and the full-cheeked wind roared off down the valley, carooming off the train - while all that was going on, our doubting-again Thomasina from the back of Ballymartin groaned a prayer for the effectiveness of prayer. Despairing, self-loathing, eyes shut, she missed the lot.

Around another cigarette she wailed, "Oh Lord, help Thou mine unbelief!"

Slowly, slowly, slowly, lace appeared on Draco's skin. The woman saw the cliffs through Draco's wings. She saw the veings, the viscera, the ichor.

Draco glanced wildly at herself, the inner dragon. Ecco qua! She hadn't known her guts were that colour.

And Sister Tom opened one eye just a crack, peeking to see where the thunderbolt had got to. She coulnd't believe her eye.

The train started up again with a jolt. Away on the autostrada hung a surprised outline of a dragon, made entirely of soot. The tail end of the wind pulled it along to play. Like a newspaper kite, it fell to bits.

As the train rounded a bend, all Sister Tom could see was the woman in blue with a baby, the Madonna of the Flaming Phone-Booth. Sister Tom hoped her car would start.

Dragon 3 - Sister Thomas 4.

Oh - and Sister Tom took out a cigarette to savour with her heroism's wine. And sent the rest of the packet spinning into the abyss.

* * * * *

© Anne Gay 1998. First published in Other Edens, ed. Rob Holdstock & Chris Evans, Unwin, UK, 1988.

Reprinted in The Year's Best Fantasy, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terry Windling, St Martin's Press, USA (two editions).