Damnit it all. Such a ruckus I could barely hear myself think. All I had to do was apply three layers of paint to my snout but the whispering and scheming and plotting out there was fit to wake the dead and send them over to complain.
It was the Sun-days. These days, it was always the Sun-days. At my age I should be sprawled out wide in the morning bask, guzzling heat out of the air like it was dead cattle, but no, no, no, no – I had to be a priest. Had to be all respectable, a pillar of the community; the same community that insisted on waking me up at the crack of dawn with four sacrifices and a pleading look and absolutely no offer of help whatsoever.
Oh no priest, we wouldn’t dare intrude upon the sacred pool.
Oh no priest, we wouldn’t insult you by offering help.
Oh no priest, we’ll just slink off and start basking without you. It’s Sun-day, after all.
Jackasses.
At least the pool always looked nice. Water glistening on the jagged, bloodstained rocks. Barely a ripple to mark the water, a hundred feet below us. Clear and cool and filled with bones gleaming in the early yellow light. Very lovely.
I applied the last layer of paint with a little more force than necessary and stepped out of my meditation chamber and recognized every single one of the faces looking at me. Not the individuals, no – the squishy ape-things all looked the same to me – but the faces.
I sighed. Why did they always have to be like this? If horrible little sacrilegious murdering looting ape-things were going to ruin every single Sun-day for the rest of my life, couldn’t they at least be varied about it?? But no.
Might as well get this over with.
I approached the one that was trying and failing to look frightened. A wiry thing with a permanent quirk to its eyebrows (god how those things nauseated me; they looked like caterpillars) and a smirk waiting behind every twitch of its freakishly mobile lips.
“Oh please, sir,” it said in a voice it probably assumed I wouldn’t recognize as sarcastic, “spare me, spare me.”
Ah. This chestnut. “No,” I said. Damn, their language grated on me even coming from my own maw. It was so high pitched everything sounded like whining.
“If I can’t be spared, sir, then may I make one request?”
Heeeere it comes. “Request?” I asked.
“Please, please, please, please sir, on behalf of all that is kind and merciful, don’t throw me in that sucker-vine clump halfway down your sacrificial pit. A quick death please, sir, not a slow one. Please don’t throw me there.”
I glanced into the sacred pool. “Okay.”
“Wait, wh-”
I added a little spin to the throw, which was unnecessary but made me feel better. He had good reflexes – still managed to scream most of the way down before it cut off in that messy way that suggested sharp rocks.
“Request granted,” I said.
***
The silence after the first always was a little louder than any other, and of course that’s when my stomach decided to rumble.
Oh c’mon. I’d practically eaten last week; surely I didn’t need more now?
Well, a little wouldn’t hurt. In a bit. A day or two.
Hell with it, I was famished. As soon as I was done with these chumps I was going to swallow a damned cow.
The holy man was next. I had to admire his composure; you’d have thought he was perched at home in his own little heathen temple from the expression on his face. The smell of urine did spoil the effect a bit, but he was doing a great job of pretending it wasn’t there.
“Why do you do this, lizard-creature?” he asked as I picked him up by the front of his robes.
“Prayers,” I said.
“Prayers to what wickedness? Surely this is not the will of the Glowing King.”
Oh good, one of those. “Explain.”
“The Glowing King is all that is bright and good and great and powerful and wonderful and admirable and worthy of care in this world,” said the priest, who was clearly warming to his subject and probably eager to take his mind off the dampness in his clothing. “He is the most spiritually and physically vast of all gods, existing wherever there is light or life. Your barbaric actions here will win you no favour with him, and can only consign you to an eternity in the glowless pits of-”
“Request granted. Not interested. Bye.”
The priest didn’t scream on the way down, possibly because he was out of breath. But I still heard the bonk.
***
I paused to work out a kink in my shoulder. Oh hell, had I pulled something? Not exactly as young as I used to be; maybe I’m bigger now but I don’t heal any faster and there’s a lot more of me to muck up without warning. Could even swear I lose more teeth now than I used to.
The third one was…oh hell. He was wearing even more elaborate robes than the priest. Gaudier, too – spirals and runes and etchings and who knew what kind of claptrap. Most of it was probably for show, just like him.
Wizards. Ugh.
(sorcerers, warlocks, witches, whatever they were called they were all bad news)
“My request,” he said, “is much less tedious than that oaf’s.”
“Explain,” I said.
“Simple. I challenge you to a game of chess.”
“Chess?”
“I win and you release us. You win and you may throw us into your holy hole or whatever it is. I’m sure a mighty priest such as yourself can easily best-”
“Request denied.”
“What?!”
“Don’t know chess. You’re up to something. Bye.”
“You can’t just-”
The one pleasant thing about wizards: you can get a pretty good distance on them. The man couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred ten under that robe, and even all the flailing didn’t spoil the aerodynamics. He skipped three times before sinking.
***
And at last, there was one. Glaring at me with generic stoicism. Chin jutting out in what I was pretty sure was meant to be defiance, (I wouldn’t laugh, I wouldn’t laugh, I wouldn’t laugh….DAMN human chins looked funny), eyes smouldering with generic justice and rightful fury.
“Request,” I said.
“Untie me,” he demanded. “I’ll throw myself in.”
Ah. One of THOSE, and right on schedule.
Heroes. Ugh.
I bent over, mouth agape, and shredded his restraints. Much to my surprise he didn’t bother jumping me – not that any weapon he could’ve hidden would’ve penetrated my scales – and instead stood slowly and deliberately, rubbing his wrists and ankles and pacing slowly at the edge of the sacred pool. Calculating. Weighing.
Oh, this could be good.
At last he straightened up to his full (deeply unimpressive) height, looked me in the eye, and spoke.
“I will return.”
“Bye.”
A beautiful dive for a land mammal, arced like an arrow. He hit the water with barely a splash, and no red flowed forth – every rock had been missed.
Astounding. I broke into applause as he surfaced, gasping for air, and I think he must’ve impressed the sacred crocodile too because it didn’t attack until he was halfway out of the water.
A job well done and noon still not here. Might be just enough time to eat a cow and bully my way into a decent basking spot.
Maybe Sun-days weren’t so bad after all.