For as long as I can remember, my parents told me stories of my uncle John, a knight errant who had slain a dragon. He was a man who ventured forth on noble quests to defend the honour of great ladies. On the morning of my sixteenth birthday, my mother summoned me to the door of our hovel and pointed across the fields to a path that emerged from the woods. A tired nag plodded through the dirt and on it rode a fat old man with a red bulbous nose, the sort of nose I had seen sniffing its way in and out of the Boar’s Head Tavern. When he got closer, I saw how his rheumy eyes were filled with a yellow puss and I heard how he wheezed his death rattle breath. He drew up to the door and nodded to my mother. She might have run to hug him but for his filthy clothes and the stench of his body.
For the rest of the day until suppertime, my uncle John regaled us with tales of his travels, though he never finished any of his accounts, not a one, but instead let his voice trail away as he stared into his empty tankard and wondered where all the drink had gone. By the time supper arrived, he had wondered so much that he could barely keep his head off the table. He roused himself at the smell of cooked meat and ate enough for a family of six, and when he was done, he gave a loud belch and laughed and thanked my mother. He pushed back his chair and rummaged through a sack that lay slung over the nag’s backside. From it he produced a cloth-covered object. It was a gift for me now that I was coming of age. I unwrapped it and found a chalk-white skull.
Uncle John smiled: That is the first dragon I ever slew, or at least its head, or what’s left of its head.
Later in the evening, as Uncle John dozed by the fire, I crept to his side and prodded him. That’s not a real dragon’s head, I said. That’s a dog’s, isn’t it?
The fat old man winked with a crusted eye and smiled. No, he said, it’s not a real dragon’s head.
And you never rescued damsels in distress, did you?
He coughed and smacked his lips. I once saved a cat from a tree. That should count for something.
I tossed the skull on the floor. It’s a stupid gift, I said.
Now, now. And he set a hand on my knee. Those stories I told you. They may not have been true in a factual sense, but there was still truth in them.
The next morning, my uncle John left on his tired nag. Soon, the skull found a special place on a high shelf in the Boar’s Head Tavern. There, I regaled the village drunkards with the legend of my uncle John, the greatest knight errant in all the land, a man who had slain a dragon and rescued great ladies. And my listeners gazed into their empty tankards and were so fraught with where their drink had gone that they never thought to question me. And so my stories became true.