Rain & Fire (7 page)

 

unnatural eye
— an eye in which there is a deliberate defect in the duct, in every natural dragon. This is a kind of sac, a safety mechanism, in one eye only, that won't allow the whole fire tear to pass. A dragon shedding its tear in this way will always retain a little of its spark, and thus be enabled to hibernate for many thousands of years until the tear has fully regenerated.

 

Wearle
— a dragon colony.

 

wearling
— a young dragon belonging to and brought up in a dragon colony.

 

white fire
— “the fire that melts no ice.” The title of a book written by David Rain. Also see
Fire Eternal, the
.

 

whuffler
— descriptive term for some of the Pennykettle dragons. They are responsible for the “central heating,” given that there are no radiators to be seen anywhere at number 42 Wayward Crescent.

 

wuzzled
— sleepy or dazed.

 

wuzzled off
— went to sleep, or a gentle euphemism for “died,” depending on the context. Usually used with regard to animals, but can be expanded to include humans.

C
hris is often asked why, if the Last Dragon Chronicles is a fantasy saga, most of it is set in the real world of day-to-day life, but where magical things happen. He has two answers to that. One is that the squirrel story at the heart of the first book,
The Fire Within
, is necessarily set in such a world, and so everything else had to be; the other is that he was initially very wary about creating something “other,” given his then rather poor track history of attempting to write science fiction stories. His confidence has grown considerably since (read
Fire World
, for instance!), but the scene was set (or rather, the scenes were set) beyond any substantial change long before that point. Perhaps there is a third reason — that he simply thoroughly enjoys writing
family drama–type scenarios. It's what he relishes most of all.

Although there are many, many settings throughout the series, these can be largely separated into three distinct groupings. These are Earth (modern day and, paradoxically, in the last book in the series, in early times), Ki:mera, and Co:pern:ica. As Ki:mera, the home thought-world of the Fain, is never actually seen, it obviously cannot be described here. Co:pern:ican settings are entirely fictitious and not based on any particular places currently in existence. Many of the Earth settings, however, are recognizable as specific locations around the world. As Chris lives in England, most of them can be found there. When the Last Dragon Chronicles was published in the US, though, it seemed natural to relocate some of the settings to North America, as you will see.

Scrubbley is, as already mentioned, a thinly-disguised Bromley, in Kent, England. In the United States,
Scrubbley is a fictitious town in Massachusetts, near Boston. Number 42 Wayward Crescent is a traditional 1930s house. Lucy's room faces the road at the front of the house. David's room is on the ground floor and faces onto the backyard, where much of the action featuring Henry Bacon, who lives in the house next door, occurs. Most of the domestic scenes within the Pennykettle household center around the kitchen and the Dragons' Den, the studio where Liz makes her clay creations:

 

All around the studio, arranged on tiers of wooden shelves, were dozens and dozens of handcrafted dragons. There were big dragons, little dragons, dragons curled up in peaceful slumber, baby dragons breaking out of their eggs, dragons in spectacles, dragons in pajamas, dragons doing ballet, dragons
everywhere.
Only the window wall didn't have a rack. Over there, instead, stood a large old bench. A lamp was angled over it. There were brushes and tools and jelly jars prepared, plus lumps of clay beside a potter's wheel.
The sweet smell of paint and methyl acetate hung in the air like a potpourri aroma.

 

The scent of potpourri also hangs in the air in Zanna's New Age shop, The Healing Touch. She bought this property with the aid of royalties from David's two commercially successful books after he was lost in the Arctic, presumed dead. Liz helps her with child-care duties so that Zanna can work on building the shop up from scratch. The shop layout was inspired by that of a local health-food store, though the latter is a bit smaller than Zanna's business and has neither an upstairs open to the public nor a potions dragon to assist in making up the tinctures.

 

The previous owner had run the property as a small gift shop and had passed it on with all the fixtures in place. Pine shelving racks occupied the two long walls and a glass display counter faced the door. Behind it, curtained off by bamboo strips, were two utility areas that served as stock room, preparation room, and
kitchen. The two rooms upstairs were bare and dusty, but over the next three years, as her turnover increased and her reputation for producing effective “lotions and potions” expanded, Zanna was able to decorate throughout and turn them into her consulting area, for clients requiring her unique brand of healing.

 

Tam Farrell, a journalist who is investigating David Rain's mysterious disappearance in the Arctic, buys a clay dragon from Zanna's shop one day and invites her to attend a poetry reading at Allandale's bookshop in an attempt to win her trust and get her to open up to him. This bookshop is based on one called Browsers, which used to be situated in Allandale Road in Leicester, England, but is sadly now closed; Sandra, who co-owned it, became Cassandra in the books.

 

It was the same room, set out in just the same way, with three arcs of soft-backed chairs and a small lectern at the front. The main ceiling lights had been
turned off, and the room was illuminated by filtered blue halogens built into the two walls of bookshelves. Ten or a dozen people were already randomly seated, poring over programs, but Zanna's eye was drawn to a larger group, clustered around a table where tea and fruit juice were being served. She spotted Tam Farrell in quiet conversation with a spiky-haired woman, whom she knew to be the bookshop owner, Cassandra.

 

Zanna is distraught and very angry when she discovers that Tam is only befriending her because of his professional interest in David. However, when she is attacked by semi-darklings, on a place called North Walk, it is Tam who rescues her and thus becomes a trusted companion after all. In real life, North Walk is the image of a beautiful tree-lined avenue in Leicester called New Walk, which runs from the heart of the city to a lovely open park next to the university. It's exactly as described prior to the attack scenes, even including the museum and double-mouthed mailbox — but minus semi-darklings and Tam Farrell.

New Walk in Leicester, the inspiration for North Walk

[North Walk] was a wide asphalt path that cut through the professional heart of Scrubbley. The houses that ran along one side were mostly occupied by lawyers or accountants…. Alexa preferred the other side of North Walk. There were houses and offices along here, too, and a fine museum of art. But dotted between the buildings were squares and rectangles of urban grassland, shaded by vast maple and oak trees. Lucy had once written a story for school about two squirrels that lived on the edge of such a square. The name of
the story was “Bodger and Fuffle from Twenty-three Along.” The number twenty-three referred to the broken glass lantern, on the twenty-third lamppost from the top end of the Walk, where the squirrels had built their home. One of Alexa's favorite games was to count the lampposts aloud, even though she knew exactly which one (by the double-mouthed blue mailbox just beyond the museum) was home to the legendary squirrels.

 

Not far from the park end of New Walk, Rutherford House (previously a lunatic asylum, in the books) is based on a slightly adapted part of Leicester University's campus, which, incidentally, shared the same history before it became an educational establishment.

Although Caractacus the crow attacks Conker the squirrel in the garden at 42 Wayward Crescent in the Last Dragon Chronicles, the idea for this scene was implanted in Chris's mind many years before in the graveyard adjacent to another part of the university campus — the Medical School's parking lot. This is where Chris worked for twenty-eight years, before becoming
a full-time writer. The Med School, not the parking lot, of course.

One day, he was called outside by a friend to witness (and try to capture) a gray squirrel running around in wide circles, obviously trying to escape from something but unable to move in a straight line. It transpired that a crow had made a lunge at it, for reasons unknown, and damaged one of its eyes. Despite a crazy half hour with Chris running around after it with an empty cardboard box, it did eventually manage to get itself away from both the crow and Chris, and finally disappeared under the fence and among the graves. Chris followed in hot pursuit, but never saw it again. The image and the memory stayed
with him for over a decade before ultimately being written into literary history.

Conker's sanctuary

A little farther afield, the location of the Old Gray Dragon guest house, where Lucy and Tam stay in
Dark Fire
, was based on a bed-and-breakfast that Chris and I stayed at in Glastonbury, England, right at the foot of the Tor. A tor is a small hill, and the one at Glastonbury is a major tourist attraction. The owners of the bed-and-breakfast were a wonderfully welcoming couple and absolutely nothing like the characters of Hannah and Clive, who own the Old Gray Dragon in the book. The back door of the guesthouse opened onto a private path that led onto the public one and thence right to the top of the Tor.

Once at the top of the Tor (called Glissington Tor in the novels), and with Tam's help, Lucy surveys the land with the intent of raising a natural dragon that she believes has been in stasis for hundreds of years,
somewhere beneath their feet. Opposite the Tor is another hill, Scuffenbury, where there is a chalk horse etched into the grass. It is alleged that when moonlight falls in a particular way on the horse's head, the dragon will awaken, but Hannah later suggests to Lucy that there is a better and easier way to achieve that — by touching the dragon itself. To this end, Hannah guides Tam and Lucy through some tunnels under the Tor which have been professionally excavated in years gone by, abandoned, then later extended by her husband.

In real life, the horse on Scuffenbury Hill is based on the white chalk horse at Uffington, in Oxfordshire, England. Glissington Tor itself, although based mainly upon Glastonbury Tor (especially for shape and size), is further influenced by the man-made mound at Silbury, in Wiltshire, England. It is at this site that excavations were professionally made. Nothing unexpected was found there. When it came time to “move” Scuffenbury Hill to its new location for the US edition of the Chronicles, however, there was a slight snag: There are no chalk hills anywhere in the United States!
Therefore one was created specially, in (very appropriately) New England. Maine, you now have a new tourist attraction….

Farther afield again, and in London now (US version: Boston), both in the books and in real life, Apple Tree Publishing (the company that publishes David's books) is highly reminiscent of Chris's UK publisher's old offices….