Once, long ago before your grandparents were children, after the end of the time of angels but before the end of the time of dragons, there lived a scholar. A scholar is a person who spends a lot of their time reading books and trying to find out interesting new things. Often they are clever people, but quite ordinary people can be scholars too.
This scholar's name was Maria. She had brown hair, brown eyes, and two cats called Cloud and Company-of-Wrath. The cats don't come into the rest of the story, but I thought you might be interested to hear their names. Maria lived in a town full of other scholars, and she often wondered whether she was as clever as the other scholars in the town, and if she was not, whether the others would find out one day and laugh at her. In fact, she was one of the cleverest in the town, but she didn't know that herself.
Maria wore a thick black robe every day, because the town where she lived was a cold one. Everyone needed to wrap up warm and cosy against the northern wind, so all the scholars were given black robes to wear from the first day they started studying, and stripey scarves to wrap around their necks. Maria lived in a single room in a big white house, with her two cats. There were ten other scholars living in her house as well, but she didn't know them very well. The other scholars were mostly learning about chemistry, which was a subject that didn't fit well into Maria's head.
Maria was not studying chemistry. Maria was an Asnac. An Asnac is a person who studies the way people lived a long, long time ago, far longer ago than the time when Maria lived, and looks at the things they made and the writings they left behind. She loved her subject, and she was hoping one day to become a doctor.
I don't mean the kind of doctor that people take you to when you're not feeling very well, who asks you to stick out your tongue and writes things on their little pieces of paper. That kind of doctor is a very important kind of person, and I'm glad there are so many of them in every town, otherwise what would happen if people got sick? But that kind of doctor is a doctor of medicine. If you want, you can be a doctor of anything you please. The main thing you need in order to be a doctor of something is to love what you're studying, and to be ready to spend a lot of time on it: years and years. And Maria had been studying for years. She was going to be a doctor of Asnac.
Now in order to become a doctor of something, there is a simple rule to follow. You must find out something new, something nobody in the world has ever seen or known or thought before. You might suppose that with all the many people there are in the world, and with all the thinking that goes on every day, it must be difficult to find a new thing never thought before. But everyone has ideas every day, and there are so many different ones that, sooner or later, everyone must find something new. You yourself saw something nobody had seen before the last time you cracked open the shell of a nut.
After you have found out your new thing, you must write a book about it, a big, heavy book called a thesis. Then, last of all, you must explain your ideas to the other scholars, and the other scholars must be happy with your work. One day, when Maria had finished doing all this, she would be allowed to call herself Dr. Maria, and allowed to wear a scarlet robe instead of her black one. That way, everyone would know how hard she had worked to find out something utterly new.
But that day was still quite a long way in the future, and Maria still had a lot of work ahead of her before it would come.
On the day when this story starts, Maria had just woken up. And as she ate her breakfast, she was thinking to herself about the things which she had to spend the day doing. At that time in her studies, she was learning about some stories which had been written down by a man called Geoffrey of Monmouth, hundreds and hundreds of years before. She particularly wanted to find out what Geoffrey's ideas about dragons were, because she was meaning to write a chapter in her thesis about it. So she decided that she would have to go to the library and find a copy of his book. She put on her raincoat, because the weather was cold and it was raining quite hard, and got on her bike, and off she went.
I will take a moment here to tell you about the library. It's a special library because the law says that if anyone anywhere writes a book, they have to send a copy of it to this library. Because of this law, the library is very large inside, and at the top it has a brown brick tower that's hundreds of floors tall which contains almost nothing but shelves upon shelves of books. The books are arranged very carefully so that the librarians can find them, but the way they are arranged is very complicated and confusing if you're not a librarian.
When you enter the library through its great bronze door, you find yourself in an entrance hall full of statues of all the librarians who have ever worked there. Then you climb the stairs into a long room with patterned friezes around the walls, called the Reading Room, which is where you sit and read the books. There are a lot of books on the shelves in the Reading Room, but most of the books are in the tower, and ordinary people like you or me or Maria are never allowed into the tower. Instead, you have to ask the librarian to climb up inside the tower for you, and fetch you the book you want.
When Maria got to the library, she was surprised to see that the edges of the door had scorch marks around them, as though someone had burnt them with a very large match. When she entered the building, there was a smell inside which Maria couldn't place.
"I wonder what that smell is," she said to herself.
"Sulphur," said a voice behind her.
She turned. The Librarian stood there in his librarian robes, looking doleful and a little scorched around his long grey beard. He was a very old man, who had been looking after the library for as long as Maria could remember. If she had thought about it, she would have realised that he had probably been a young man once, and one day he would probably need to retire, but in fact nobody ever thought of these things. To Maria he seemed as much a permanent and unmovable part of the library as the reference desk.
"Are you here to borrow anything from the twelfth century section?" he asked. "We had a rather unusual patron, who has borrowed the lot. And I don't think he's going to bring them back any time soon." A patron is what librarians call the people who borrow books.
"Yes, I wanted to borrow the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth. But how in the world did you burn your beard?" asked Maria.
"That was the problem," sighed the librarian. "Do you know much about dragons?"
Maria knew quite a lot about dragons, from the books she had read. "A little bit," she said.
"All the Asnac books we have, and there are a lot of them..." he paused, and corrected himself, "there were a lot of them, anyway... all our Asnac books were borrowed this morning. Quite forcibly. By a dragon."
"A dragon?" Maria looked puzzled. "I thought they were extinct."
"So did we all, until this morning."
"And I thought that they usually came looking for treasure," Maria went on. "Why wouldn't it have gone to steal gold from the goldsmith's, or the town bank, or somewhere, instead of here?"
The librarian shrugged. "I really don't know, I don't know at all. All I know is, one moment I was sitting at my desk, trying to stop people bothering me for five minutes so that I could get the card index back into alphabetical order, and the next moment, there's a cloud of sulphur billowing around the room, and a great red lizard trying to break the door down."
He pointed at the door, which was a great brass door with figures carved into it showing people reading books and scrolls. Around the edges it was noticeably bent, and the deep scratches across the top of the door, which were just in the place where a dragon's spines would be if it tried to crawl through the door of a library, had certainly not been there the day before.
"I'm afraid you're out of luck if you want to read about Geoffrey of Monmouth," said the librarian. "Ordinarily, if you wanted a book which was already out, I would advise you to visit the person who had borrowed it and ask them whether they were finished with it. But in this case I'm afraid you're going to have to study something else. Can I interest you in the study of chemistry?"
Now, Maria's friends thought they knew her quite well, and if you had asked them what sort of a person she was, they would probably have called her timid. So it would have given them quite a surprise to hear her say what she said next.
She said: "Well... I need the book. And I like a challenge. I think I shall visit the creature who borrowed it. And I think I shall ask it whether it's finished with the book. Do you know which way the dragon went?"
The librarian looked worried. "I must try to persuade you not to go. Not only will it be a very dangerous journey, but dragons themselves are not tame animals. I only just escaped with my beard. How someone like you, without a beard, might manage, I don't dare to think."
"Thank you, but my mind is quite made up," said Maria. "I have been working for years to get my doctor's degree, and I will not have anything standing in my way. Not even a dragon."
"Well, if you're sure..." said the librarian.
"I am."
The librarian hesitated for a moment, then decided to co-operate with her. "Let's see. An old friend of mine is the librarian at Oxenford. I telephoned him this morning to warn him in case the same dragon attempted to borrow any of the books from his library as well. He told me that four of their scholars had reported seeing a dragon flying over their city to the north-west, in the direction of Cadair Idris. I suggest you try exploring in that direction to begin with."
"Thank you," said Maria. "I hope to bring your books safely home again in a few months."
The librarian nodded. "Good luck. Don't forget your exeat." And with that he went back to sorting the card index.
Now, if you are a scholar studying to be a doctor of anything, there will always be someone to look after you. The person who looks after you is called your supervisor, and Maria's supervisor was called Dr Rose. Supervisors are usually fairly good at giving you advice, because they are already a doctor of whatever it is. So whatever troubles you might be having, they have probably also gone through the same difficulties themselves when they were younger. Dr Rose had often been helpful to Maria in the past, but Maria worried that this time would be different. She rather doubted that Dr Rose had ever had her textbooks carried off by a dragon.
But Maria needed to talk to Dr Rose for another reason, too. Your supervisor is supposed to worry about you if you disappear for a long time. If you are going away on holiday, or to try to find out your new ideas in another town, or even simply to hunt a dragon, you need to get a special permission from your supervisor, so that they don't worry and so that they can be sure you won't miss too much of your work. Your supervisor needs to sign a piece of paper to give you the permission, and the paper is called an "exeat". That word means "she may go out".
Dr Rose lived on B staircase in Maria's college. All the people who lived in the college lived in rooms which you reached by going up some staircase or other, and each staircase had a letter. Dr Rose was sitting in an armchair reading a book about toasters when Maria opened her door. "Hello, Maria," she said, "how can I help you?"
"Did you hear about the dragon?" asked Maria.
"Yes," said Dr Rose, "very sad. I expect the university will survive. It always does."
"But the dragon has taken my books!"
"Oh dear," said Dr Rose. She looked puzzled for a moment, and then said, "I suppose you could study something else instead. Have you considered chemistry?"
Maria felt her heart sinking inside her. She tried not to sigh in front of Dr Rose. Then, since (as I told you earlier) she was a clever person, she tried another approach.
"Well, you see, I've come to ask you for permission to do some field work," she said. "It's all very well discussing the ideas of Geoffrey of Monmouth, but I thought my thesis could use a chapter on real dragons. So I'd like to go and find an actual living one, and investigate its habits and behaviour. I think it would make a very interesting chapter."
"Hm," said Dr Rose, but Maria could see she was interested. "Until today, I believed they were all extinct."
"Some of them must still be alive. For a start, there's at least the one which raided the library this morning," said Maria.
"Very true, very true," said Dr Rose. "What do you think it wanted the books for? Do dragons eat books? Does Geoffrey have anything to say on the matter?"
"I really don't remember Geoffrey mentioning the subject of a dragon's diet. That's part of my plan, you see: I'll learn what they eat if I can watch one. This is the sort of information I want to find out and write up in my thesis," said Maria.
"Good plan, good plan," said Dr Rose. "Here, I'll write you an exeat."
So Maria thanked Dr Rose, folded her exeat and ran back excitedly back down the staircase. She asked her chemist housemates to feed the cats while she was away, and packed enough clothes and food in a suitcase for at least a week. Then she jumped back onto her bike and pedalled happily off through the rain in the direction of Oxenford. Maria was never happier than when a job was underway, and this time she was just starting to feel that her determination was beginning to pay off.