I’m disappointed.
I thought I’d found a fantasy author who used the areas around Devon as his canvas, and I had. This would have let me push the free material for Ars Magica further east, to join up with the Cornwall and Bristol channel material already available. The problem is that now I’ve discovered that Phillpotts abused his daughter for thirty years, its very difficult to listen to his dragon pontificate upon the principles of enlightened society. To salvage an episode: the core idea is good for Ars Magica, so let’s explore it in general.
Decades ago, a dragon and his mate were ambushed by humans with crossbows, and the female dragon died. The male dragon avenged himself, buried his partner, and decided this war between the species needed to end before his own people were entirely extinct, The only way to assure this was to improve the morals of humans.
He sets up a community by abducting people who are outsiders, and bringing them to his bride’s grave, which is now a lavender covered hillock. Single mothers shunned by their villages. Artists, dreamers, foreigners, minor criminals. As he collects people, they also suggest others who might like to be collected. The humans build huts, and eventually, a walled town, with the dragon’s aid. The dragon helps them live a life somewhat better than that of the average medieval peasant, and they have enough free time to consider seriously questions about how life should be lived. It’s basically a rationalist utopia sitting on the back of the muscle power of a dragon. Eventually he even abducts a priest and helps him build a church, because humans like that sort of thing.
The story starts when a knight is hired to kill the dragon, and is instead kidnapped to the utopia. The dragon, it turns out, is dying. He’s very old, and has been kept in good health by the liniments of an alchemist who lives in the town. As the dragon gets weaker, people debate what to do after he passes away. At his death, his rule that people may not leave the community ends, the walls are cast down. Some people stay on, particularly the younger ones who have no desire to join medieval English society. Others become missionaries for the town’s philosophy, going back to their old villages. These become potential covenfolk and plot hooks, respectively.
The dragon, himself, sensing death approach, designs a sort of platform on a metal track and crawls up on it, so that he’s easier to bury. He rests beside his wife in the hill, in the middle of the town, covered in flowers. This is obviously a vis source. That it was the laid of a dragon, and the grave of two, means it has an Aura. The walls can be put back up again pretty easily and the dragon’s defensive earthwors are still in place. It seems the dragon took his mate’s body to some remote place before burial, so its further suitable for a covenant.
The whole novel is available from LibriVox and Internet Archive, and I was going to do one of my lengthy dissections, but, seriously, once I found out what Phillpotts was like as a person my desire to go through his work with a tooth-comb vanished.
Games From Folktales 