by C. Litka
01
If you're thinking of taking a long voyage in a small boat with two Simla dragons, don't. Not if they're Siss and Hissi, anyway. By the time we left the Temtres behind, they had apparently caught up with their sleep. Bored with life on a small boat, Hissi taught Siss how to play Dugan's Folly. Simla dragons apparently take games very seriously - or, perhaps more accurately, very intensely. Every card they played brought a vocal response and reply - long sinister hisses, barks of delight, deep growls of anger and challenge. There were times that I thought the game would end in a thrashing, whirling ball of feathers. And though it never did, their vocal style of card playing got old very fast.
Desperate for some peace and quiet, I suggested to Hissi that she show Siss how to play chess - the theory being that a more cerebral game would be significantly quieter. It wasn't. They were constantly, and noisily, commenting not only on every move, but apparently on every contemplated move as well. If I could have gotten close enough to them when they were sleeping, I'd have lashed their snouts closed - but it's impossible to spring surprises on telepathic dragons, and even my best Captain Miccall impression would only subdue them for a few minutes.
Naylea found it amusing, at first, but eventually grew tired of the ruckus. We all needed to sleep, and couldn't sleep unless the dragons were sleeping as well. Her solution was to introduce them to a St Bleyth card game En Garde! - with suitable modifications for the Saraime set of cards. The beauty of En Garde! was that it was a very complex game played by two teams rather than individual players. As long as we had the two dragons on the same team, they both could win and were content to express their pleasure and contempt with little barks of laughter and hisses of sarcasm - when they were winning - which they did consistently as long as they weren't playing against Naylea. They could just as easily played Py's or my cards as well as theirs, since they seemed to know them so well. But when Naylea played the game, rules tended to be, ah... more fluid? En Garde! was a complex game, and translating the rules to the new deck perhaps meant that the rules had to be somewhat improvised, which Naylea did while playing the game. The dragons didn't like it, but she had a way with them; either her mind was too devious to read, or too dangerous enough that the dragons preferred to be in her good graces, so that they were content to lose, sometimes, when she played. Still, they won most of the games without her, and were delighted to watch their cumulative score against us humans grow ever greater. You'd have thought it really mattered. They apparently did. Still, it was a small price to pay for some peace and quiet.
In addition to playing cards to pass the timeless time, we practiced our martial arts. Since we all knew the Laezan forms, we could work through them with swords and staffs, in safety. I never could trust KaRaya to actually follow the form, but with Py and Naylea, I could comfortably go through the form with a real sword.
I have this image of sitting at the tillers in the stern etched in my mind. The dragons were playing their vocal game of cards in the bow, sheltered by the rocket launcher shields. In the light broken into squares by the arching ribs and netting amidships, Naylea and Py were dashing back and forth, working through their forms with their iron-vine staffs whirling and rat-a-tatting against each other. Before me the boiler smoked quietly, the gleaming iron and brass steam engine huffed and thumped away, while behind me the propeller whooshed. And beyond, behind us, and all around us; the milky bright featureless sky, which seemed to stifle every sound and movement as they left the boat. I've sailed the black and bright seas of the Nine Star Nebula, a speck of steel in millions of kilometers of nothing but a bit of dust and gas, and never felt smaller and more insignificant than aboard that Temtre launch in the middle of the Endless Sky. We seemed to be a very small and strange universe of just ourselves.
And so the rounds slipped astern, standing watch at the helm, playing cards, going through long martial arts exercises, preparing meals, and after meals, spinning tales, all without any sign of the islands that I had gambled on - as our supply of black-cake slowly drifted away as smoke.