"Not Chinese!" the attacker shouted. "I am a samurai of Nippon!"
"Nippon? Oh, are you mean Japan!"
"Nippon!" And the samurai slashed the dragon's side again, for emphasis. Scales that could turn the best steel the West had to offer, gave under the second blow of the samurai's sword. The Dragon muttered in his sleep, gave a short howl, but did not wake, for the fighting within him was so furious that it kept him in a coma. The samurai shouted and slashed, again and again.
The Japanese had conquered Manchuria. Now they invaded China, dismembering the armies, attacking civilians. Chiang Kai-Shek hung agonized in a dilemma, unsure whether to continue his fight against the Communists, or to turn all his forces against the Japanese. Finally, his generals virtually forced him to make peace with Mao so that he could turn and fight the army from the eastern islands.
"How base a deed, to attack one who sleeps!" Saint George cried.
"We cannot let him kill a sleeping beast," the Puritan stated.
"Surely not," said Saint Mark, with a cynical smile, "for if he did, there would be nothing left for us to dismember."
With a shout, the samurai turned and slashed at the Puritan. The monochrome man cried out, leaping back as he raised a forearm to shield his face. But he did not leap quite far enough, for the arm came away with blood spreading over the cloth.
In the middle of the Pacific, Pearl Harbor burned, and the people of the United States, who had been determined to stay out of Europe's war, found themselves clamoring to fight the Japanese. President Roosevelt asked Congress for a declaration of war.
"There is no doubt who we must attack now," the Puritan said grimly, and his clothing metamorphosed into a military uniform.
The knights shouted and attacked with their lances.
The Puritan attacked with a rifle.
But the samurai's armor deflected both lances and bullets, and his marvelous sword actually pushed the Europeans back, then back again, before the Puritan shouted "Nuts!" and bore back in, his rifle turning into a machine gun. The saints followed him, lances turning into machine guns, too, and foot by foot, they drove the samurai away from the Dragon, marvelling at the way his sword whirled, almost invisible, deflecting blow after blow—but some of them pierced his armor, enough so that he retreated and retreated again, to his home islands. There he raised a howl and set himself, both swords high, and the Europeans paused, knowing this would be a battle to the death—the samurai's death, and their own severe wounding. They were not at all sure they wished to kill so valiant a fighter.
The Puritan settled the matter by throwing a grenade.
It arched high, but the samurai tried to watch both the hurtling spheroid and the Europeans, alert for attack—and the grenade landed beside him, then bounced up under his armor to explode. The samurai cried out and fell, wounded; the swords dropped from his hands as he fell unconscious.
The Puritan was at his side in an instant, wrenching off the armor, placing a tourniquet, and binding the wound.
The saints turned back to the dragon, watching the shudders that racked its unconscious body, ready to step in with swords as soon as it raised its head.
Chiang Kai-Shek and the Europeans harried the Japanese; who shifted strength to fight the battle of the Pacific. The Chinese drove the islanders out. Then they turned to fighting among themselves again—and Mao Tse-Tung was all the stronger, for he had held aloof from fighting the Japanese, knowing that Chiang would weaken himself expelling them. Now that they were gone, he renewed his own attack, pressing closer and closer to Peking, conquering one warlord after another, driving Chiang Kai-Shek and his Nationalist Chinese off the mainland and onto the little island of Formosa. Finally, the Red Flag floated over all of China.
The Puritan looked up from his patient, sure he would live, and frowned. "He ain't China," he said. "Not that Commie. That guy on the island, Chiang, he's China."
"Neither of them are China." Saint George gripped his sword and raised his shield over Hong Kong. "The Dragon is China—and now the Dragon has turned Red."
They looked, and sure enough, it had. They stared, watching as the convulsions tapered off into shuddering, which quieted into natural sleep. The Europeans gripped their weapons nervously, for surely, this was a very large and mighty beast. They lifted shields, ready for anything, but deciding that perhaps they should seek trade, not plunder.
Mao consolidated his rule. Transformed into the Party, the ancient Civil Service was invigorated, streamlined—and answered only to him. All of China answered only to him.
And the Dragon awoke.
CALL HIM MEIER
by Roland J. Green
"I have bad news," my mate Evelyn said, as I slipped into the cave.
"Your brother Malcolm has learned to play the bagpipes," I said.
It had been a fine night's flight, taking me well over Ireland. That was the best place in the British Isles for a dragon to stretch his wings in this high summer of the Human Year 1940. Over Wales and Scotland, let alone England, one found too many airplanes and barrage balloons, not to mention eager human gunners both on the ground and in the air.
So I was not as ready as I ought to have been to be a sober audience for bad news. Or as Evelyn thought I should have been, at any rate—if her glare had been flames, I would have sported blackened scales for months.
"Bombs fell where the children were playing," Evelyn said, letting each word drop like a stone from a cliff. "A fragment struck Damar's wing. A foot-span lower, it might have severed his spine."
I curled in the entrance to the cave and invoked the Spell of Otherness. This conversation promised to last longer than we could safely leave the cave mouth visible to humans.
Also, Evelyn knew better than to interrupt me while I took us into Otherness. She thought I needed total concentration. That was true once, and I have found it useful to let her think it remained so. It gave me a chance to organize my thoughts and reply like a sensible dragon.
At last we were invisible to any human senses. (I made a mental note to see if the radar both sides were now using could detect an object in Otherness. It was a machine sense, rather than a human one; such have been known to make difficulties for dragons.)
"How is he?"
"Asleep. I cast a binder spell over the wound, then brewed a mild sleeping draught. It should heal. Whether it will heal in time for him to learn to fly before winter comes, I do not know. I am not hopeful."
I went into the chamber where our dragonets slept, to see Damar with my own eyes. He was our youngest, born the year of Edward VIII's abdication; at the time I feared he would be our last. Evelyn was young and healthy enough, but she was reluctant to bring more dragonets into a world growing more hostile every month. From what we knew at the time, I would not say that she was wrong.
Damar was asleep and seemed in no pain, but he would not be taking even his first wing exercises for a while. Our daughter Rhiannon also slept, but as usual Daffyd our firstborn was only pretending.
"Youngster, you need your sleep too," I said firmly.
"But I saw what happened to Damar, and told Mother. Did she tell you?"
I wanted to lie, but Daffyd's magic is Truth-sense. It is impossible to lie to him—a serious handicap for the parents of such a dragonet as he seemed likely to be.
"No."
He described how a formation of Royal Air Force bombers had flown over the valley. They were slow (Handley-Page Heyfords, he said) and dropped only practice bombs, otherwise he and Damar might not have been able to get away. Fortunately he could carry Damar far enough to be safe, when he did not have to fly high.
"Of course, staying down low helped. I tried to stay over the brown rock. A red dragon shows up against gray or white rock."
I was torn between praising his good sense and wishing I had locked up the Boy's Book of the Royal Air Force along with the Ars Amatoria. (Not the human version; Ovid's long-suppressed one for dragons, that he wrote during his exile in what is now R
omania. It is even stranger than the human one, but what would you expect of a book based on the study of Transylvanian dragons?)
"None of them saw you? None of them came down low?"
He looked pensive. "I suppose their not coming down low doesn't prove much. Those Heyfords are so big, slow, and clumsy that even if they saw all of us sunbathing they probably would not be able to come down and chase us."
"But they might have sighted you and radioed a report, no that the humans will be sending a Limburger—"
"Lysander, Father. That is the one that can fly low and slow, and land even shorter than a dragon."
It was my turn to look pensive. Our lair is far up in the Welsh mountains, surrounded by cliffs and crags that challenge even seasoned rock climbers. (I remember George Leigh Mallory as the human who came closest to stumbling on our cave, and was not wholly unhappy when I heard of his disappearing on Mount Everest. I hope that it was an accident, however, and that the yetis have no blood-guilt.)
But humans curious about dragons or suspicious about anything unusual going on, and able to land by plane with machine guns, grenades, and other dragon-slaying weapons—that was a wholly new threat.
Also one I would be able to deal with a trifle better after a decent nights sleep. I had fasted most of the way to Ireland and only taken a single sheep for myself, apart from the two I brought back. (If Kelvin of Aberystwyth had not developed the potions that let us live mostly on vegetation, with only a bit of meat for catalyst, the dragons of the British Isles would long since have eaten themselves out of any hope of survival.)
So I told Daffyd even more firmly than before that he would need to be well-rested tomorrow, and went off to our own sleeping couch. Evelyn was already asleep, and I curled close without waking her. I do not know if she needed the comfort, or even felt it; I know I did.
The Heyfords came back the next day, and the day after that. The third day brought no Heyfords, but another, smaller kind of bomber—Blenheims, Daffyd said.
The fourth day brought no bombers, only Evelyn's brother Malcolm with a bulging sack of gifts for us all. Even in wartime Scotland, Malcolm was a master scrounger.
His new coloration was more of a surprise. He had always been darkish on the bottom; now he was flat black, with barely a trace of scale-sheen left. His upper surfaces were in broad stripes of dark brown and dark green.
"You're in Bomber Command colors!" Daffyd cried, when he got his first good view of his uncle.
"Aye, lad," Malcolm said, and that is about as far as I am going to go in reproducing Malcolm's dialect. He had been nearly two centuries old before he left his birthplace in the Outer Hebrides, to fly with Bonnie Prince Charlie in the Forty-five. It was a minor miracle that he did not speak Dragon Gaelic; an impenetrable brogue was something we had learned to take for granted, and mentally translate.
"It's simple enough," Malcolm went on. "The local humans at least have a good deal on their minds. So if they see something bomber-sized and bomber-colored, they won't be curious about the rest. If they do come close, I pull back my head, kink my tail so that the end stands up like a rudder, and lower my forefeet so they look like fixed landing gear. That fooled a flight of Spitfires, and those lads are about the sharpest in the RAF."
Daffyd insisted on his telling about the meeting with the Spitfires in detail. We went through several mugs of herb tea laced with a bit of Evelyn's mead before he was done. Then Evelyn excused herself to prepare dinner, and Malcolm went straight to business.
"The RAF's converting this territory to a bombing range," he said. "You've been lucky so far. If that hadn't been a practice bomb, or if it had been someone doing low level work the way they do on the barges over in France—"
"Barges in France?" I asked.
Malcolm shot me one disgusted look, my wall of books a second. "You ought to add a few copies of the Daily Express to this museum of old human learning," he grumbled. "The Germans are getting ready to invade England, or hadn't you heard?"
He lectured me about being informed of current events until I was ready to throw a mug at him. Empty or full, it didn't matter. Finally he ran out of ways to parade his knowledge.
"I flew south with that vanload of equipment because I'm leaving the British Isles for the duration of the war. I think you and your family ought to go with me."
The idea of being bombed five times a week and then overrun by the Germans (make that the Nazis: the Germans had usually been friends to dragons except during the Thirty Years' War) did not appeal to me. The thought of leaving everything we had built or collected here over nearly a century since I flew Evelyn across the threshold was even bleaker.
"I'll listen, if you have any ideas about where we should go," I told him. "Believe it or not as you wish, I have been aware of the war. Western Europe would not seem to be a very safe place for us."
"Who said anything about Western Europe?" Malcolm replied. "Ever heard of the Pripet Marshes?"
"Somewhere in Russia—"
"Ah, the Soviet Union. You'll have to be careful about that, when we get to the refuge. One of our hosts is a Pyreneean dragon who thinks he's a Marxist."
My experience was that dragons who took up human religions and ideologies (if there's a difference between the two) could hardly be said to be thinking. But Malcolm would likely take that as an insult to his Jacobite sympathies. Dragon romantics are much like human ones; reasoning with them is a waste of breath.
"Who are the others?"
It seemed that the Pyreneean dragon had mated with a vastly elderly Russian dragon, who had lived for centuries on a patch of dry ground surrounded by the marshes. Perhaps longer—part of her hoard was Kievan gold, hidden from the Mongols. Then there was gold hidden from successive tsars, from the French in 1812, and finally from the Bolsheviks when they took over in 1917.
"She has enough to bribe the local hunters and peasants, as well as any secret policemen who allow themselves to believe in dragons. Good Marxists, you see, regard us as peasant superstitions. They can't seriously go hunting what doesn't exist."
It began to seem that Marxism might be more useful to dragons than to humans. "Are our hosts offering charity? Or are we expected to bring something?"
"I'll pay for both of us, at the refuge. My father thoroughly examined certain Spanish Armada wrecks. I've collected the gold, and also turned some of the heavier antiques into British currency, which our friends will accept."
"My flame dies from the depth of my gratitude."
I meant the ritual phrase. I had always wondered if I was wise in making my hoard rare books, rather than more traditional and portable forms of wealth. We can't all manage a chest of rubies, like one Cornish dragon I knew (he was on terms with local wreckers who had looted a stranded East Indiaman during the Napoleonic Wars). But first editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Gutenberg Bibles are hard to both move and sell.
"I never did think too well of your using the Otherness to pile up books," Malcolm said. "Gold doesn't rot."
"You and your sister agree on that," I said shortly. "But that doesn't solve the problem of repayment."
"Oh, I think it's not so great a problem," Malcolm said. His explanation almost took longer than my patience could endure.
The substance was that he had sworn human associate in Edinburgh, who knew several book dealers in London. If I arranged to preserve the books, he would arrange to tell the human of their location, and the human could pass the word on to the dealers. A share of the money for the books would end up in Malcolm's account at the Bank of Scotland, and that would repay him for whatever he spent to settle us in the Pripet Marshes.
I could not say it pleased me, certainly losing the books and probably the cave as well; we would be homeless even after the war was over. But the world was running mad, in ways dangerous to dragons as well as to humans. To lie with one's neck outstretched for the death stroke was a habit most dragons had long ago abandoned.
I could have said, but did not,
that Malcolm had certainly been stretching our customs of secrecy in dealings with humans. However, there was never a Scot, dragon or human, kobold or elf, who balked at law and custom when there was a chance of profit.
We left two nights later. Malcolm was true to his word; his pack was a hoard of everything we might need on the journey and to settle in afterward. He had also brought so much gold that it was a wonder he had managed to get into the air.
For the long trip east, we would of course divide everything. All those who were flying on their own wings could carry a share, except for Rhiannon. She was just barely able to make the flight herself. Even though she offered to carry something, we had to refuse.
Damar could not have flown the distance even had he been whole and flight-taught. Instead he rode under his mother's belly, in a carrier that made us all stare, except for Malcolm.
Evelyn tapped it with a claw. "Iron this close to both of us, for so long?" We dragons mostly have enough magic in us that cold iron is like radium to a human—it does not kill immediately, but death comes early and painfully if one is exposed too long.
"Not iron." Malcolm said, "Aluminum from crashed airplanes, and the straps are leather cut from flying jackets and seat backs."
Evelyn still looked dubious. Daffyd launched into a long explanation of airplane construction, which proved he'd read that Boy's Guide attentively. I decided that we could take that book along, if he carried it himself.
He couldn't agree fast enough. The rest of the family nerved itself to the hard decisions about what to take and what to leave, and the rest of the time before we left is a blur in my memory to this day.
No, not quite. The last thing I did, as we gathered to leap into the sky, was a bit of a trick. I cast the Otherness on the cave. Not the full Otherness, where only the dragon who cast the spell can take it off (and there are only a handful of dragons left with the Otherness in their blood). It was a lesser form, that humans could take off with the proper chants and charms.
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