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No Such Thing As Dragons

Ansel is nine years old when he is sent off to be a servant to Brock, a man who travels from village to village in the high mountains, slaying dragons. At least, that’s what Brock says he does. Of course, there aren’t really any dragons. But the superstitious mountain villagers believe there are, and they’ll reward Brock well for getting rid of them. With a few well-chosen props and some hair-raising stories he is able to make quite a good living as a dragon hunter… until he is summoned to the village of Knochen, high on a mountain called the Drachenburg, where he and Ansel learn that there may be more to the old tales of dragons on the heights than they have bargained for…

No Such Thing As Dragons comes from an idea I had many years ago when I was walking up the Old Man of Coniston in the Lake District. In those days I was always on the look-out for a low-budget film idea, and I imagined three characters in mediaeval costume making their way up the mountainside. But why would they be up there? Well, dragons live on mountains, don’t they? I remembered reading that in the Middle Ages almost every peak in the Alps was supposed to be haunted by its own dragon. There are lots of fantasy, fairy-tale stories about dragons, but might it be possible to do a gritty, grainy, believable dragon story?

By the time I came down I had a whole story roughed out in my mind, and I filed it away and forgot about it. Then when I got stuck in the middle of writing Fever Crumb and started thinking about doing something different, I remembered the dragon story and started working on it properly. Since Fever Crumb was very long and complex I made sure that No Such Thing As Dragons was short and stripped down; there are only four main characters, and just one plot. Because Fever Crumb was full of lengthy dialogue scenes where people explain things to each other I tried to keep my dragon hunters’ dialogue to a minimum. (Ansel, the hero, is mute, so he doesn’t have any dialogue at all.) As for the dragon – if it is a dragon – well, you’ll have to read the book and find out for yourself.

TWO PICTURES: 2 riders/ Mountain with dragon.

David Wyatt has done his usual excellent work on the cover illustration, but he was too busy to do the pictures inside which introduce each chapter, so I’ve ended up doing those myself. The images here are some of the original pencil roughs.

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