DRAGON’S GREEN
Worldquake Book One
SCARLETT THOMAS
Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Scarlett Thomas, 2017
Extract from The Chosen Ones copyright © Scarlett Thomas, 2018
Extract from The Once and Future King reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd and David Higham Associates © T.H. White, The Once and Future King (1958).
Extract from The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated with notes by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Penguin Books, 1997, reprinted 2000). Copyright © Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1997, 2000. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78211 702 5
eISBN 978 1 78211 703 2
Typeset in Horley Old Style MT by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire
This book is for Rod, who took me to Dragon’s Green
when I most needed to go there, and for Roger,
who showed me the way out of the enchanted castle.
It is also for Molly, a wonderful first reader who
reminded me why I always wanted to become a writer.
‘We are ourselves a term in the equation, a note of the chord, and make discord or harmony almost at will.’
Robert Louis Stevenson
‘Fold your powers together, with the spirit of your mind . . .’
T.H. White
Contents
1
Mrs Beathag Hide was exactly the kind of teacher who gives children nightmares. She was tall and thin and her extraordinarily long fingers were like sharp twigs on a poisonous tree. She wore black polo necks that made her head look like a planet being slowly ejected from a hostile universe, and heavy tweed suits in strange, otherworldly pinks and reds that made her face look as pale as a cold moon. It was impossible to tell how long her hair was, because she wore it in a tight bun. But it was the colour of three – maybe even four – black holes mixed together. Her perfume smelled of the kind of flowers