I. Arrival

Great dunes, huge slow silent waves of sand, rolling away beyond distant horizons.

All through the day the sandscape changed colour. From midday's blinding white glare slowly to the rich gold of afternoon.
The sky paled to egg-shell blue, then faded to grey and pink, orange and violet at sundown, ushering in nightfall. A sickle moon rose against an obsidian night-sky spangled and sparkling with countless stars. Darkness fell fast over three lonely islands at the heart of that sand-sea. Three ancient stone-faced kings, crags for crowns, shoulders cracked and jagged, cliffs for cloaks.

Just as the shadows of dusk sharpened in the silver-bright light of night, a golden-red flash slice down across the sky like a falling star, then swooped to a halt half-way up the central crag. It was a Sandragon, returning home, bearing apples. Most unusual golden ones, which our dragons are most fond of.

They love these apples above all because they are so very Strictly Forbidden, which in itself makes them utterly delicious. Also, they are extremely hard to get hold of, for they grow on just one single tree in all the world.

The tree is a very long way off, on an enchanted island, in the middle of an ocean, the devil's-own-job to find, and guarded by a most ferocious, foul-tempered dragon, who has nothing better to do day or night than seek, scorch and chase off any and all potential intruders or apple-thieves. The only creatures fast, quiet and agile enough to even try and steal those apples are Sandragons. And even then it's a pretty dance. There was some proverb about the apples keeping doctors at bay, but given the risks involved in getting the apples, Sandragons never set much store by that.

The homebound dragon came to rest on a narrow ledge, folded his wings down across his back, looked out across the darkening sea of sand, then turned and vanished quietly into a dark crack in the rockface. He squeezed down a long dry passage, into a cavern deep in the heart of the mountain. The air here was warmer than outside, the clean white sand on the floor hot under his paws.

His lady Sandragon was waiting there, curled into a ring on a raised circle of sand and grown rather hungry waiting for her mate to come home. The dragons greeted eachother silently, then settled down to eat the apples which had been so hard to get hold of. They curled up together and soon fell fast asleep, dreaming Sandragon dreams of impossible aerobatics in cloudless skies, their sleeping breath blowing soft fans of pale blue flame over three golden Sandragon-eggs, keeping them at the blazing heat needed by the little baby Sandragons growing inside.

Deep in the night a clear sharp sound rang out, as from a small bell.
One, then another, and still another.
Ding... Ding...
A hairline crack appeared in the glowing surface of one the eggs.
It grew longer.
A baby Sandragon was trying to get out.
The parents did not waken.

At last the little one managed to squeeze through, out of the metallic shell of the egg. The moment his wings were free he shot up into the air like a spark from the hearth. Sandragons are fliers from the moment they are born and this mere sliver of a dragon almost hit the ceiling of the cave when he burst from his egg. He arched his wings and slammed to a halt just in time, a hair's breadth from the rock above. Still blazing red-hot from inside his egg, he flickered round the cave three times in the bat of an eyelid, then decided it was much too cold up there and dived back down into the ring of his sleeping parents' coils, where their fiery breath kept things more pleasantly blazing. There he too fell asleep and dreamt about apples, without the faintest idea of what they might be.

The following morning, when the Sandragons awoke, the parents were delighted to find their first little baby had arrived.

They soon saw that he was an adventurous little fellow and so decided to call him Sikander, after a man who had once strayed into the Dreamdesert wearing a pair of curly ram's horns on his head and mumbling about divinity. For weeks he had kept them amused with long confused stories of armies and olives, philosophers and fencing-masters, cousins and assassins, forced marches and pitched battles, treachery and treason, Persian kings and Afghan princesses, Indian summers and a shadow-scared steed from Macedon. Then one day he had vanished away, grumbling about ravens, mosquitos and his worst little enemy trespassing out of bounds east of the Nile, never to return again.

Baby Sikander Sandragon spent his first months growing up in the secret cave in the heart of the mountain. He played swatting-games with his Daddy's tail, engaged dogfights with his two little sisters, born not long after, and tried to set his Mummy's nose on fire.

His first venture up the passage-way to the outside world seemed most exciting until, peering over the edge of the outer ledge, he saw a drop of several hundred feet. Then it seemed more frightening than exciting and it took his father quite a bit of teasing and encouraging before Sikander finally launched off the edge and for the first time swooped up into the open sky.

And that really was exciting. The thrill of diving down and sweeping round between the rocks of the three mountains was such fun that Sikander spent two weeks doing next to nothing else. Landing square on the ledge required a certain amount of practice and there were two or three crashes which gave him a sore nose and helped to sharpen his skill.

Climbing high into the sky until the three mountains looked like three little ink dots on the tawny parchment of the desert dunes, Sikander grew stronger and more confident in the air. He learnt to feel the wind in his wings and to adjust to every gust and change in the breeze without even thinking about it.

That is how Sikander's first happy years slipped by: nights fast asleep deep in the heart of the rock, days whirling past in the sky. Never too far from the safety of the cave. Never so far that in case of need one of his parents could not come to help at a moment's notice.