Every spring, for as long as anyone could remember, a blue dragon came down the river into the valley, and the rain came with it.
Nobody called it. Nobody thanked it much, either. The children ran out to dance in the first rain, the old men grumbled about their knees, and the women set every bowl in the house outside to catch it. The fields greened, and that was that.
Then one spring it didn’t come.
The valley waited. It waited through a second spring, and a third. The river thinned to a ribbon, then to stones. People began to hold on. Wells and barrels got lids, and the lids got locks. Water was measured by the cup, and neighbors watched each other’s cups. Nobody danced. When old Maren sang at the washing stones, as she always had, someone told her it was hardly the time.
They tried to bring the dragon back. The strongest men climbed east into the mountains with ropes to drag it down, and came home with blistered hands and nothing else. The priest went up to remind it of its duty and came home hoarse, which some said was the most useful thing to happen all year. The elders argued over whose fault it was until hardly anyone in the valley was speaking to their own relations.
Maren went up last, mostly because no one stopped her. She took no rope and no speech. She took bread, because it was a long walk.
High up, in a dry pool under a ledge, she found it. It was smaller than the stories said, curled tight, blue as deep water, its eyes open. It wasn’t sleeping. It was holding its breath, and it looked as though it had been holding it for three years.
She sat down on a rock, broke her bread in two, and set half in front of the dragon. After a while, because it was what she did, she began to hum. One of the dragon’s whiskers twitched. She hummed a little louder. The whisker drifted up and settled across its nose like a mustache gone badly wrong, and Maren laughed out loud, at the whisker and at herself: an old woman singing to a lizard on a mountain.
The dragon let out its breath.
It laughed, and the laugh was thunder, and the thunder rolled down the valley, and behind it came the rain.
It rained so hard the cracked fields couldn’t drink it. Water sheeted off the hills, poured through the lanes, and ran away down the empty riverbed, taking the good soil with it. By the time Maren came down, soaked and grinning, the whole valley was standing in the mud, watching its rain leave.
Nobody said anything. It was worse, somehow, than the drought. Three years they had waited for this, and they couldn’t keep a drop of it.
Maren stopped grinning. Then she went to her shed, came back with every shovel she owned, and started handing them out. “Well,” she said, “the rain’s done its part.”
They dug channels where the water wanted to run. They rebuilt the terraces stone by stone, and the strong men finally found a use for their blistered hands. The priest carried baskets of soil and, for once, said nothing at all. They took the locks off the wells and the lids off the barrels. It took all summer, and most evenings someone was singing, because it’s easier to dig that way.
In the autumn a short shower came, the ordinary kind, and was gone by supper. The next morning Maren’s grandson ran up to the top terrace and found the water still standing in the furrows. A frog sat in the middle of it, looking very pleased with itself. He shouted, and the entire valley climbed up to look at a puddle. Maren laughed until she had to sit down.
The dragon came down the river that spring, and every spring after, and the water stayed. And the valley sang when it came. Not to call it. Just because it had.