I froze. What could this bode?
The wounded dragon cried piteously; my glance was drawn irresistibly down to it. And then I saw.
An arrow. It protruded from the dragon’s side, below and just behind one wing. A dark red rivulet of blood welled up from the wound and ran down the dragon’s belly.
I looked up with sudden fear into the eyes of the watching dragons.
“Humans!” The word whipped through my mind again as if it had been spat.
One of the larger dragons nuzzled about the arrow shaft, seemed to be trying to pull it out. The shaft snapped in two; the wounded one whimpered. Other dragons converged upon the arrow but only managed to bite the shaft down to a splintered nub.
They would never get it out. What they needed was … hands. Hands, and maybe a knife as well.
I rummaged in my pack until I found the dagger Gudjen had given me. Hesitating, I fingered its edge. How if I hurt the dragon, trying to help it? How if I killed it? I knew I would not live long past that. And yet …
The wounded dragon was whining with pain; it tore at my heart.
I drew in breath. “I think I can help,” I said.
The big green-black dragon whipped her head up and spat a lick of flame in my direction.
“Go away,” she said.
“I have done this before,” I said, changing to the kenning way of speaking. “One of my brothers was shot in a hunt—”
The dragon shot me a look of pure scorn. “Go!”
“—and I dug the arrow out. With my hand.” I held up my hand and mimed pulling out the arrow. “And a knife.” I held up the dagger.
The murmur again, the rumbling murmur that rippled through them. I knew they were talking among themselves, but I could not separate out the words. At last, the big green dragon turned to me. I could see the pulse of her bloodbeat beneath her massive jaw.
“We watch,” she said.
I slipped the dagger into my sash and climbed down from my island. The dragons loomed all around me. I flinched at their every movement, for the slightest shift of foot or tail could crush me. A few moved reluctantly back to make room for me. The wounded one whimpered and whined.
And I recognized him now by his broad face and bright, wide-set eyes. He was the one who had blocked my way up on the ledge.
He seemed not quite as large now, lying down. The tallest point of him—his back ridge—came chest-high on me. I knelt by the wound and wiped my sweating hands on my cloak. Carefully, I placed my hands on the bloody flesh around the stump of the arrow shaft.
It had a thick, leathery feel to it, this dragon flesh. It was not hard and scaly like the dragon’s back, nor thin and fluttery like its wings. This was the dragon’s soft underbelly, and it felt—almost—like human flesh. Probing with my fingers, I could sense the hard lump of the arrow beneath the skin. I jiggled the shaft to discover how it lay; the dragon let out a sharp cry and clouted me with his wing.
I heard the shifting of dragons in the sand behind me; their hot breath stirred my hair.
I turned to the big green-black one. “I must hurt in order to help,” I said. “First, it will hurt.”
The dragon fixed me with her fierce slotted eyes. “We watch,” she said at last.
A bead of sweat trickled down the side of my face. I braced one foot on the wounded dragon’s side near the shaft, then drew the dagger from my sash. Speaking to the green-black dragon, I said, “Now I must cut.” I slashed the air with the dagger.
The dragon eyed me long and hard. Then, “We watch.”
Any other time I would have cut slowly, carefully, sparing all the pain I could. But now I knew that if I were to cause pain, I must have something to show for it—and soon. I grasped the shaft, readied the dagger, traced in my mind the line I must cut in the dragon’s flesh. Then, holding my breath, I sliced down quickly and yanked hard on the shaft.
I sprang back at once, clutching the arrow.
The wounded dragon let out a howl that singed my hair; he beat on my head with his wing. The other dragons closed in around me, glaring. Their breath was hot—scorching hot. I held up the arrow. “Look!” I said quickly. “It’s out!”
The dragons stared at the arrow, then turned back to the wounded one, who whimpered and moaned. At once they moved in close about him, shoving me aside, and began nuzzling him, licking his wound.
I scrambled up my dripstone island and huddled there, shaking.
Over the next few days I settled in to await my chance to escape. After what had passed with the arrow, I no longer feared so much for my life. The fierce contempt the dragons had held for me seemed to have softened to grudging toleration. They went about the business of their lives paying small heed to me, except when I drew too near to the cave mouth. Then one of them would warn me, by moving to block me or just eyeing me, that I was not to go out.
Meantime, I repaired my cracked ski with strips of leather cut from my sleeping fur. And at night, when the dragons left to hunt, I felt my way along the dripstone of the cavern wall, seeking a passage.
I marked my days by the hunt. It was the high point of the dragons’ day, and it became so with me, as well. I came to love watching them poised at the lip of the cave, then dropping down and out of sight, then rising up through the dark mountains into the stars. Moonlight sparked off their scales; their wing-wind gusted in my ears. And all was hushed, as if they performed some ritual not to be tainted by the voicing of it. I was the only human ever to have witnessed … this.
During the second day I resumed my work with Skava, directing her to places ever farther afield: to the rocky outcrop just outside the cave mouth, to a needlecone tree below, to a crag across the gorge. On the fourth day I pictured the king’s tent in my mind and tried to send her there. But she only looked at me, puzzled. I had not heard shield-clashing since that first night; likely they had all left by now.
Skava’s progress seemed slower than it had used to be. She was wilder, more independent, less eager to please. But I resolved that one day, when she was ready, I would direct her to the mews—to Corwyn. And then I would summon them both back to me.
This work with Skava I did while the dragons slept, which they did for much of the day. Their sides rose and fell; their breaths escaped their nostrils in curling wisps of smoke. The younger dragons settled down in a clump: heads draped over tails draped over necks. Occasionally one would groan, or another would snort out a puff of smoke. Ofttimes they dreamed, their eyelids flickering, their tails twitching convulsively, like a cat immersed in visions of mouse-catching.
When they awoke, the young ones found their own diversions. Sometimes they played a sort of “catch.” One dragon would puff itself up, curl into a ball, and hover in the air. Then the other dragons whacked it with their tails and sent it drifting slowly across the cave. Other times, they played the splash-and-flame game I had seen before. One dragon would plunge into the pool, sending up watery geysers; the other dragons flamed, vaporizing the geysers into fantastical phantoms of mist.
They minded me of Gudjen’s steam-workings—her first with a single dragon and her second with many. She had presaged all, I thought: my calling of Flagra, this kyn of many dragons. And yet something felt amiss with the second steam-working; it did not ring true….
The older dragons, upon waking, began a conversation that seemed to continue day to day. It rumbled through my mind, flowing from calm, droning murmurs to an agitated pitch, sometimes culminating in fitful exchanges of flame.
At first I could comprehend only snatches of meaning, as with some Ulian bondmaids we once had. I could understand them when they spoke only to me, but when they spoke among themselves, the words came so fast and overlapping that they seemed only gibberish. Still, as with the Ulians, the longer I listened to these dragons, the more I attuned myself to their speech, until I began to grasp the gist of it.
It was during these colloquies that I learned the dragons were hungry. Many had starved this past winter; they feared
more would do so before long. For years the dragon kyn had been moving steadily north to escape the depredations of humans. But in these northern wastes, food was scarce. And still there were humans. Ever there were humans. Even the seas swarmed with their ships.
Some of the dragons wanted to move farther north to where humans were scarcer still. Others despised the cold, said the chill sapped their strength so they could neither hunt so long nor so far. And every night during the hunt two dragons went to seek out a better place to lair. They had found one cavern farther north, I gathered, but it was small and far from water, and whether or not to move there was a source of much contention.
Of me they said little. I learned only that they would not release me, lest I betray them to my kyn.
My own supply of food had dwindled alarmingly. By the sixth day I was down to two strips of elk meat and a hunk of barley bread, though I had stinted to stretch it out. Skava was not trained to hunt for me, and I could not teach her to do so unless I could go into the field with her, which the dragons would not allow.
Help came from an unexpected quarter.
It was after the hunt when the young arrow-struck dragon approached my island, carrying a rabbit haunch in his mouth. His wound had closed, I saw; it was only a dark, raised ridge on his side. I stood as he approached, backing away. He dropped the haunch at my feet.
“Eat,” he said.
Warily, I looked round at the other dragons. Absorbed in eating, they paid us no mind.
“Eat!” the red dragon insisted.
Gingerly, I picked up the haunch. It was bloody and raw and dirty. But I didn’t want to offend him, nor provoke his wrath, nor discourage him from bringing more food. Besides, I was hungry.
Steeling myself, I took a bite.
“Good,” I said, chewing, pushing back my revulsion. I smiled brightly.
“It displeases you.” This, matter-of-factly; a statement, not a question.
“No, no, it’s good but I …” There was no lying in dragon speech, in which feelings count for more than words. I shrugged. “I like my meat cooked.”
“Cooked?”
“With fire. Flame,” I said.
The dragon regarded me speculatively. I lifted the haunch for another bite, and at that moment—whomp!—he belched out a blast of flame, setting fire to the meat.
“Yow!” I dropped the meat and jumped back from it, almost falling off my perch. The other dragons looked up sharply from their meat, and I heard a strange, low vibration that felt to me like … laughter.
I fanned the burning haunch with my cloak, the dragons watching me closely, until the flame went out. Then I picked it up, using a corner of my cloak to protect my fingers. I blew on the end of the haunch to cool it, and then I took a bite.
“Good!”
This time the dragon believed me. He slowly blinked his eyes; there was a gleam in them that I took for a smile.
He snorted out a burst of steam, then turned around and rejoined his friends.
Perhaps it was watching the young dragons play, with their fire and water and steam. Perhaps it was that my thoughts drifted more and more to Kazan. Or perhaps that the dragons’ dilemma had begun to gnaw at the edges of my mind.
At any pass, an idea had begun to tease at me. I pushed it away at first. It was outlandish, unworkable. It trailed in its wake a dark, chilly current of fear.
But the idea kept nudging at me. At last, on the ninth day since I had come to the cave, I let it in.
Chapter 19
Power inhabits their names.
—THE BOK OF DRAGON
I mulled over my idea for the better part of a day, pushing through the fear, persuading myself that I was only thinking about it and in no way beholden to act.
But in the end I knew that I must.
As long as there were dragons, the king’s men would ever seek me. Nowhere would be safe—my father’s steading least of all. And I could no more aid in the killing of these dragons than I could murder my own kin.
All my life I had run from things I did not want to do: to the hills to escape spinning, and even here to escape calling dragons. But now—if I were not to run for the rest of my life—I must make straight for the maelstrom’s heart.
I bided until the early hours of the morning, until the dragons had returned from their hunt and had finished off their kills. The full-grown ones settled down to their rumbling colloquy, and the old contention arose again: whether to stay here or move farther north.
Shadows pooled around the dragons’ massive forms. I could barely make out Skava, silhouetted on the back ridge of her favorite green dragon near the edge of the throng. I needed to speak to the big greenish-black dragon, but she lay somewhere in their midst.
I stood on my platform, waved to her.
Nothing.
“Dragon!” I called to her.
She paid me no mind.
“Uh, craving your pardon,” I said aloud.
Not even a dimple of turbulence in the smooth rumble.
I cupped my hands around my mouth. “CRAVE PARDON!” I shouted, and my voice beat in dwindling ripples against the walls of the cave.
At once the rumbling stopped. A forest of dragon necks and heads swiveled round to regard me. Their eyes gleamed in the dark—wide, incredulous, outraged—as if a bondmaid had dared interrupt a parley of kings.
I found the big greenish-black one and spoke to her, not aloud, but in the kenning way. “I know a place,” I said. “It is far beyond the lands of humans, and it teems with prey, and it is warmed by a fire beneath the earth.”
There was silence in the cave, save for the echoing plink of dripping water. Even the young dragons had stopped in their play. Then a murmur slowly arose among the dragons: “A place, she knows a place? She? She!” The tone of it shifted from incredulity to indignation, and at last the green-black dragon’s voice whipped through my mind: “What place is this?”
“An island, far into the northern sea. Whence Skava comes,” I said.
“If it is beyond the lands of humans, how came you to know of it?”
I related as best I could what Kazan had told me. Some of the dragons muttered skeptically about the absence of humans and the fire under the earth. But another dragon said that he had seen such a thing—smoke rising up through a hole in the snow.
“And how would we find this place?” the green-black dragon asked. “The sea is large. We could fly until we dropped and never catch sight of it.”
I swallowed. This I had prepared for, although it was the chanciest part of my plan. “Skava will lead you there,” I said. “Only … she does not yet know the way. I will direct her, but …” I hesitated. “I need to speak further with Kazan before I can do so—”
The convocation erupted in an explosion of smoke. I caught fragments of meaning—“A trick! A trap! She seeks only to escape!”—and I feared for a moment that they would flame at me. But then the green-black dragon began to speak. I heard it in my head: soothing sounds, directed not at me but at her kyn. Gradually the smoke dissipated and tempers ebbed. The green-black dragon turned to me and said,“ How can we know you speak truly?”
“You can discover for yourselves. You needn’t come within bowshot of me—Skava can fly to meet you and lead you there.”
The green-black dragon snorted. “This plan serves a bit too closely your wish to escape.”
“The bird is her slave!” This from another dragon.
“She’s not my slave,” I said. “She’s with you now.” I nodded toward the green dragon on whose back Skava perched. “When she comes to me, she does so of her own will.”
The voices arose again, so dense with words that I could not unravel them. At last the green-black dragon said, “We will ponder this now,” and I knew that I was dismissed.
I pulled my cloak around me and huddled on my island, listening as the drone of dragon-talk throbbed in my bones. Voicing my plan had made me see how full of snags it was. It was a desperate plan.
Things must be worse with them than I had thought.
The conclave went on all through the day. Dragon voices eddied through my mind, sometimes calm, sometimes rising in temper to a smoking, tail-thumping exchange. The young dragons forsook their play and came to listen, cocking their heads one way and another as different dragons spoke, turning often to stare at me.
I tried to attend to the thread of the debate, but the tide of opinion turned so often, and their words came so thick and intermingled that my mind veered often onto its own course, dreaming of a time when I could return to the king’s steading—to the mews, to Corwyn and Rath and Myrra. And Kazan … I would see him again….
At last I came up out of a doze to the whipcrack of my name in my mind. I looked up to see all the dragons staring at me.
“We will see what this land is, and whether it is to our liking,” the green-black dragon said. “You will return to your kyn and speak to this Kazan. Go with him to a place near the sea, where no men are about. Then call my name.”
She paused, and I sensed her reluctance to entrust me with her name.
“Byrn,” she said at last. “Call Byrn. But three of you only: Kazan, the bird, and you. With no others.”
I breathed in deep. So they agreed to it. This was the beginning.
“This night we move from this lair to another. But when you call, we will come.”
And then the dragons were moving toward the mouth of the cave. “Go,” Byrn commanded me.
I hesitated. “Where?”
“To your kyn. Go now.”
“But … food … I will need …”
Byrn flamed at my feet. I jumped back. Sparks sprayed out on the rock where I had stood before.
“Go.”
I snatched up pack and skis and clambered down from my perch into the press of dragons, terrified lest they would step on me or crush me among them. But their great talons moved neatly over and around me. Struggling into my pack, I felt a blast of hot breath just behind.
Byrn. Prodding me forward.
Flight of the Dragon Kyn Page 13