Drachenerwachen Chapters 8-12: How to Care for Your Dragon

Frau Tossilo still can’t quite bring herself to believe in dragons, even when she’s cuddling one while he sleeps:

Tossilo: ‘What are you staring at?’

Janka: ‘You – you’ve got a – dragon?’

‘Why should it be a dragon?’

‘Uh – because it looks like one?’

‘And how would you know what a dragon looks like?  Have you ever seen one?’

It’s hard to argue with that, really.  Or at least, it isn’t a good idea to argue, because, when Frau Tossilo loses patience and yells at the children to clear off and leave her in peace, the baby – creature – inevitably wakes up and starts to cry and wriggle – not to mention snapping and displaying razor-sharp teeth, and trying to bite his way through a can of deodorant.

Johann points out logically that the creature is probably hungry, and Frau Tossilo retorts that if Johann thinks that, he can be the one to go and fetch it some chicken.  The creature points out that he only eats ‘burtl’ or, failing that, nettles, or greens generally.  Frau Tossilo doesn’t have anything suitable, so Janka hurries to her own flat to fetch a bag of salad leaves and a leek.  The creature hurriedly devours them, and thanks Janka, explaining that ‘Dragons need lots of greens.  Lots of greens, and a name.’

So, we have two mysteries.  The first is why, if these dragons are vegetarian, they have such sharp teeth – though it’s possible that they are vegetarian only when very young. This question may be one that won’t be answered and doesn’t matter.  A reader once asked me why the dragon hero of one of my stories has eyes with horizontal pupils like a goat’s, despite being a carnivore.  I hadn’t really thought about it, except that I think goats’ eyes look creepy.

Going back to Drachenerwachen, probably a more important question is why this hatchling knows so much.  He knows that he is a dragon, despite having chosen a human as his mother.  He knows that he only eats green vegetables, despite having tried to bite through the deodorant can (after all, it might have been a tin of spinach).  He isn’t like Tigger, randomly sampling everything until he finds a food he likes.  He has enough sense of self to know that he needs a name.  And yet – he doesn’t already have a name, or any idea of what he wants to be called.

So we cut to a scene of Johann and Janka back in their own bedroom, with Johann monologuing about Frau Tossilo’s choice of name (periodically interrupted by his sister or his mother telling him to shut up and go to sleep):

‘Is she stupid?  Or is she completely, totally stupid?...

‘I mean, hello-o?  Somehow or other, she suddenly has a dragon in her home, that’s crazy enough, but then – Kurtie?  How does that work?

‘Kurtie?  That’s not a name, that’s an insult!

‘At least without the “ie”, “Kurt” wouldn’t be quite so silly.  But still daft enough.  How did she come up with something so weird?  A dragon needs to be called Morgolit, or Silfur, or at least Quartzeye.’

After all, Johann reflects, it may not matter so much to a baby dragon, but what’s it going to be like for him when he’s a full-grown majestic creature with glowing eyes and wings that darken the sky, and everyone looks up and says, ‘Oh, here comes Kurtie,’? 

A good point – and one that Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III should have kept in mind when naming his hunting-dragon Toothless, considering that he won’t always be a baby too young to have grown any teeth yet (in the first book, he does grow one milk-tooth, but it soon falls out).  It makes even less sense in the film version, where Toothless turns out to have ferociously sharp retractable teeth.

Returning from the Viking Archipelago to modern-day Berlin, however, Frau Tossilo is finding out, like Hiccup, that baby dragons are highly demanding to look after, and that when they are hungry, they want feeding now.  In fact, she has much more of a problem than Hiccup, in that she has to keep her dragon a secret:

‘Oooh, got burtl-hunger.  So-o-o much burtl-hunger.’

‘Yes, yes, I’m on my way.  I’ll just nip out to the supermarket and get some greens.’

‘Come with you.  Gotta stretch my wings.’

‘Uh, no, I don’t think that’s such a good idea.  I’ll just go quickly on my own, and then I’ll be home soon.’

‘Have to be alone?  All alone?’  (On the verge of crying – and, as readers of the Last Dragon Chronicles know, you must never, never make a dragon cry.)

‘Well, all right, I’m not going out.  I’m still here.’

‘’m hungry!’

So, they have to find a solution – and no, Frau Tossilo, trying to go out shopping with a dragon hidden in your handbag isn’t a good idea either – it isn’t good for the dragon, and the trickle of green steam wafting out of the handbag is a bit of a giveaway.  No, whether she likes it or not, Frau Tossilo is going to have to rely on her young neighbours to dragon-sit.  Conveniently, it is now afternoon and Johann and Janka are home from school, but, even more conveniently, their parents aren’t yet home from work and college.

It’s just as well that the children do take over, as by this time the poor dragon has gone ominously still, and as they lay him on the desk hastily cleared of Johann’s laptop, box-files, and ‘pencil-chaos’, they fear that the little dragon lying ‘like a dying rag’ might already be dead.  (This book has some wonderful phrases.) 

We don’t know whether the dragon’s alarming state is more the result of hunger, being zipped into a handbag, or both.  At any rate, the children are still busy bickering about his name, with Janka insisting that when someone is unconscious, you have to call them by their name to wake them, and Johann retorting that being landed with a rotten name like Kurtie is probably what is making him sick in the first place. 

Janka suggests that Kurmo might be a better name, and then, more practically, decides to make a cabbage smoothie, as it should be possible to dribble a few drops into the dragon’s mouth.  Johann, trying to research what to do, is discovering the limitations of technology: ‘Stupid internet!  For every sort of rubbish there’s about eight hundred thousand pages, but not one of them can tell you how to cure a motionless, steaming dragon.’

I was so intrigued by the thought that Johann expected to find useful information that I tried researching dragon healthcare online myself and found a video on treating radioactive dragons in Minecraft (who mostly seem to be based on the film version of How to Train Your Dragon), which isn’t much help if your dragon isn’t a computer game character:

HOW TO CURE YOUR RADIOACTIVE DRAGON! - Minecraft Dragons 

Similarly, there is an article on Wikihow, How to Care for a Dragon (Role Playing) which does discuss healthcare, but assumes that your dragon is imaginary and that you can therefore take it to an imaginary vet without problems. 

One interesting point in the Wikihow article is that the dragons in the illustrations seem to have additional small wings on their faces.  An increasing number of dragons have small additional wings on their heads, though it is more common for them to have wing-like ears like this one

or wing-like flaps at the back of the head behind the ears, instead of wings on the snout. 

There is also a Youtube video demonstrating how to care for a frilled dragon with an eye infection:

How to cure your dragon 

But, again, frilled dragons are normal lizards, and only very distantly related to magical, winged, midnight-blue and golden dragons like Kurmo – though the demonstration of squirting medicine into a small creature’s mouth with a syringe is probably transferrable.

At any rate, Janka’s technique of sucking a little cabbage-smoothie into a straw and dribbling ten drops of it onto Kurmo’s tongue works enough for him to revive, decide he needs more of a meal than this, and devour three packets of frozen spinach (without taking them out of the packet.  Apparently, ‘burtl’ is Dragonese for spinach.

By the time Kurmo has satisfied his hunger enough to start agitating about the absence of Frau Tossilo, Johann is starting to wonder what you actually do with a real live dragon.  Computer-game dragons offer so many possibilities for adventure, whether you slay them, ride on them, train them or befriend them – but what can you do with a tiny baby dragon crouching miserably by the door, waiting until he can go home to his adoptive mother?

(Not that he’s nearly as tiny as he was even that morning.  By the time Frau Tossilo comes to collect him, he no longer fits into any of her thirty-three handbags, or even into Janka’s rucksack, and they have to use the Pink Prince to smuggle him back down to Frau Tossilo’s flat.)

Well, one thing he can do is name the dragon.  But, in addition to this, and giving him a chance to practise flying, they have time to have a conversation with Kurmo, and discover that he is far more than the simple baby he seems to be who keeps asking for ‘burtl’ and ‘krux’, but a being who is as old as life itself.  Nevertheless, in baby-form he isn’t yet able to talk in complete sentences, so can only drop oblique hints about ‘creature of renewal’ and ‘light and being together’ and ‘the great balancing’.

Kurmo explains that the first human a dragon sees on hatching is his Heart-Human, and the first name by which someone calls him is his Heart-Name.  What is a Heart-Name, Janka asks?

‘Digs deep in.  Takes root, develops dragon-power, can’t ever be torn out.’

So it turns out that Johann was right to take the business of naming quite so seriously.  Conveniently, the baby dragon was asleep last night when Frau Tossilo announced that she wanted to call him Kurtie, so, as Johann has now addressed him as Kurmo Silfur, this is his name forever.  And when Frau Tossilo tries to correct them, the children can look the picture of innocence and say, ‘Sorry, didn’t you say Kurmo?  We must have misheard…’

So, the plot is thickening.  Kurmo may be a very lovable dragon, but he has far too much depth to be a pet, or even an ordinary child.  And this suggests that this story isn’t likely to stay a cosy domestic comedy with dragons, but will grow more surreal, and potentially more dangerous, as the novel and the series develop.  Just as the Last Dragon Chronicles develop from a gentle story about a college student helping his landlady’s daughter rescue an injured squirrel into an epic fantasy saga involving evil sibyls, shapeshifting shamans and aliens; and How to Train Your Dragon develops from a story of a young Viking boy having to pass his initiation test by capturing and training a baby dragon, into the story of the now slightly older teenage boy and his friends having to end an epic war between humans and dragons; so any kid-meets-dragon story that doesn’t end with ‘and the child grew out of wanting to play with dragons’ has to grow as its characters grow.