Harvesters

A short story about conscience, conviction and dragons

I wrote this for the ‘Crossroads & Consequence’ issue of ‘Elegant Literature’ magazine, with the key word ‘scales’. The key word needs to be included in some form somewhere in the story but, as you’ll see, I ran with it.

Matty leans her head on the dragon’s flank, feeling the expansion and contraction of its lungs, listening to the slow beat of its heart. Dragons are so gentle and trusting. That’s why almost all of them are dead.

For much of human history, they had remained hidden in their caves in the remote places of the world. People knew they existed, but no one had taken much interest in the great overgrown lizards with tattered wings too flimsy to get them airborne. That was until some guy in Japan had discovered that a decoction made from their scales had the ability to extend a human life, if consumed regularly. Big pharma had quickly formulated an intravenous form, and soon anyone who could afford it was shooting scales. But they were unable to synthesise the active ingredient in a lab, and unable to breed dragons in captivity. So they had to go straight to the source, and for that they needed people to harvest the dragon hides.

For decades, being a harvester had been a pretty lucrative career. Matty remembers when she started out, recruited from a teenage life of petty crime. She’d been confident and light on her feet with no moral compass - a prime candidate to turn into a dragon slayer. It wasn’t much different from conning people. Dragons were like easy marks - it was a walk in the park to gain their trust, and then take what you wanted. In this case, with a knife to the heart.

Matty had always insisted on taking part of her payment in scales. She decocted them herself the old-fashioned way and drank the liquid. It had been a decade since she’d last made a harvest, though, and almost as long since she’d had any scales in her possession. There were simply no dragons left to kill.

Without the scales, Matty can feel herself getting older: these days, she wakes up in the mornings feeling like she’s drunk too much the night before when she hasn’t touched a drop. Of course, she has years and years left, if she doesn't get sick or get on anybody’s bad side. But she knows the truth: her body has begun the slow process of dying.

She isn’t alone. Everyone who had once consumed scales is in the same boat, and some of them - the ones with money to burn - are willing to pay almost anything to get their hands on a dragon hide. But humankind’s thirst for immortality has sucked the world dry of dragons. Although the internet is still full of videos of potential sightings, and articles about the Last Dragon, it’s all doctored footage and fluff pieces these days.

But Matty has found one. Up here, in the mountains. A big dragon, female, maybe sixty years old. She could sell its hide for more money than even she could dream of. Or she could keep it secret, drink it up day by day, and add centuries to her life. But, now she is here, Matty is wondering, why? What’s the point?

It’s not the first time she’s had these thoughts. They’ve been coming on gradually for a few years now. Perhaps she’s gone soft. Perhaps coming to terms with the idea that she is dying by degrees has opened her eyes. Either way, she can no longer justify the death of a giant dragon to prolong the life of a bunch of inconsequential humans. The scales don’t balance.

Matty looks at her dragon now, nestles against it. It’s a beautiful creature, shining green-gold, curled around the greatest treasure Matty has ever seen: five huge dragon’s eggs - the future of a species.

Matty doesn’t know what to do. Every hour she looks at those scales, fingers the hilt of her knife, counts the eggs and kisses the dragon’s soft snout, just beneath its amber eyes.

She has been here for three weeks.

Photo credit: Daniel Coello on pexels.com

The rise and fall of the dragon’s chest lulls her into a state of semi-consciousness and she is dozing when she hears the crunch, crunch of footsteps on loose stones, approaching the mouth of the cave.

Matty is on her feet in an instant.

A man is standing in the entrance; dark hair, dark clothes, dark eyes. She knows him. She still thinks about him sometimes - about kissing him, about killing him. It’s been over twenty years, but old loves die hard.

“Jem,” she says, trying to keep her voice even and ignore the irritating flush she can feel creeping over her cheeks. “How did you find this place?”

“Followed a tip-off, same as you,” he replies. “Ain’t been nothin’ on the comms sites for years, you know that.” He looks past Matty's shoulder, checking the dragon over. “So, you want to split it? It’s gotta be worth ten times its weight in gold by now.”

“I was here first,” she says stubbornly.

He grins. “Fair point, but you’ll need some help dragging that hide out of here - and protection. How about we go 40/60?”

“How about we don’t?”

“Come on, Matty! This is a feckin’ diamond mine. There’s plenty enough for the both of us.”

“There is no ‘both of us’.”

Jem throws his hands up. “Seriously? You’re gonna bring that up now? That was years ago. Danni’s been dead for years -”

“This is not about Danni,” Matty snaps, but she knows it is, a bit. Everything between her and Jem will always be partly about Danni, since he left Matty for her. But she'd shot too many scales in the end, the stupid girl. Matty had never understood why. Danni had been a stunner, but it took some people like that. They knew the risk, but they did it anyway; extra shots in the hopes of attaining that impossible standard of youth and beauty.

Matty pauses, searching for the right words, knowing that she’ll sound like a snowflake anyway - one of those protesters from the early days with their placards and their slogans: Dragons deserve better; Humanity not immortality.

She gestures to the dragon. “She’s the last one, Jem. Well, she might be. And she’s got eggs. If we do this -”

“We’ll be feckin’ millionaires, Matty, that’s what we’ll be!”

“We’ll be responsible for wiping out a species.”

“We’re already responsible for that. Hell, hundreds of species have gone extinct over the past few centuries, all because of human activity. You ain’t gonna save anything by not harvestin’ this one. All that’ll happen is some other bugger’ll come along and get rich off it instead of us.”

“She’s got eggs,” Matty repeats.

“So what? You gonna wait for them to hatch? It could take a decade. Look at us, Matty. I ain’t had no scales for years, and neither have you. I mean, you look good an’ all, but time is tickin’ for the both of us. Plus, you can’t keep her safe for that long. I found you. Sooner or later, someone else is gonna find you too, and they won’t know you like I do. They’ll put a bullet between your eyes, Matty, soon as look at you.”

He’s right. She knows he’s right. But she’s stubborn as hell, always has been.

They go back and forth, over and over: the same arguments, the same snide comments. Voices are raised, old wounds scratched open, until Jem is shaking with frustration and Matty finds angry tears springing to her eyes.

“I’m not going to change my mind, Jem,” she says, her voice unsteady, but her resolve unshaken. “Just leave, OK?”

Jem draws a pistol from the holster he wears around his hips.

Most harvesters don’t carry guns, simply because you can’t shoot a dragon - its hide is like bulletproof armour. It has to be a knife, slid carefully between the scales, through the ribcage and into the heart. That’s why you have to get close - why they have to trust you.

Jem has a gun, though, and he’s pointing it at her.

“Don’t, Jem. Please.”

“Give it up, Matty. Don’t be a feckin’ idiot.”

Matty has no doubt he is going to shoot her. Jem always loved money more than any moral code. More than her. But she’s still not backing down. She doesn’t even know why. Once she’s dead, Jem will just kill the dragon anyway. Hers will be a pointless death - the kind she probably deserves, after all the pointless deaths she has doled out over the years to creatures who never had the chance to defend themselves.

She raises her chin, locks eyes with Jem, draws the knife that was meant for the dragon.

“Matty, for feck’s sake -”

“Screw you, Jem!”

She flings her knife at him, missing spectacularly. She never learnt to throw knives, only how to use them at close quarters. Jem pulls back the slide on his gun and releases it. Matty closes her eyes.

Strangely, she feels quite calm. Maybe it’s actually better to go like this than to grow old, dying slowly every day.

She feels the dragon move before she hears the gunshot. Her eyes fly open and she sees the kickback as she’s knocked aside. The bullet hits the dragon's foreleg and ricochets off, colliding with the cave wall. The creature doesn't stop there. It advances on Jem and he begins to talk to it in that soft, coaxing tone all harvesters learn before they go out on their first job. He’s trying to gain its trust, but it only lasts a second. From where Matty is lying, bruised and winded on the rough, cold rock, she hears Jem’s voice shake and catch in his throat. Then, a terrified scream and a heavy, wet thump.

The dragon turns to look at her, blood dripping from its mouth. She gapes at it. She has never heard of a dragon attacking a human before. They only eat small prey - rodents, rabbits, nothing bigger than a lamb. But the dragon didn't want to eat Jem - she killed him in defence. In defence of Matty.

The dragon lumbers back to her nest and curls around her eggs. Matty gets to her feet and shuffles over to pick up Jem's gun. She’s careful not to look at his body, although she knows she'll have to deal with it eventually. She glances down at the eggs and then up into the dragon's face.

"I'm on your side now," she whispers. "I'm sorry I wasn't before."

It's a useless apology; the creature can't understand her, and it doesn't change anything, but Matty means it.

"Come on," she says. "There'll be more like him. We need to make this place defensible - keep those babies of yours safe."

The dragon can’t comprehend the situation, but it knows that Matty is a friend and not a threat; that they have both survived an attack on its place of safety together. It stretches out one tattered wing and envelops Matty within it, pulling her to its side. With her face pressed against its scaly hide, Matty lets a few tears fall for Jem, even though he'd been ready to take her life in exchange for cold hard cash. She tries to tell herself that he hadn't always been like that, but deep down she knows that's a lie. It's just that, back then, she had been like that too, so it didn't seem to matter.

As Matty sniffs and wipes her face with the back of her hand, she hears it - a sound she has never heard before. She drops to her knees on the cave floor, scrubs at her eyes and watches, entranced, as the shell of one silver-blue egg cracks open. A dragon chick forces its head out to take its first wheezing breath, its tiny claws curling around the shell. Then the shell snaps and the chick tumbles forwards, crawling out and into Matty’s outstretched hands. The adult dragon doesn’t stir - perhaps it is sleeping - and Matty raises the chick up to eye-level, inspecting every minute reddish scale that will one day be worth its weight in diamonds.

In the silence, she hears the crunch, crunch of footsteps outside for the second time. She straightens up, facing the cave entrance, the chick still on her palm with its tail curled around her wrist. With her free hand, she picks up Jem’s gun. She feels the dragon move behind her, alert.

Matty cannot see beyond this moment. Perhaps the harvesters will keep coming until their bodies fill the entrance. Perhaps this cave will become Matty’s own tomb. She hardly dares to hope that they’ll make it out of here, to somewhere even more remote, where they can survive like living legends: the last dragons and the harvester who saved them.