by Paul Cook
It became a sought-after honor to present the dragon with the twice-weekly offering, one the families in Yala-tene vied for. To keep the peace and determine fairly which family could serve the select haunches of beef and venison, Amero had to institute a rotating schedule, fixed by the positions of the white moon.
It was an arrangement that suited Duranix perfectly. At first the dragon had maintained his stated lack of interest in the humans that accompanied Amero back to the lake. Gradually, over many months, he found himself intrigued by their activities. It was as though the very shortness of their lives imbued them with a sense of urgency. Duranix still came and went according to his desires, but he acceded to Amero’s wish that he not absent himself for extended periods, since the fledgling settlement had come to rely on him completely for protection.
Duranix seldom went among the people himself because, even in his human form, most of the villagers feared him and wouldn’t speak or act freely in his presence. Amero, who still lived in the great cave, became the dragon’s go-between, and through him, Duranix kept up with the villagers’ affairs. He knew them all by name, their rivalries, their passions, their triumphs and travails.
In the second year after the founding of the village, Amero devised a hoist by which he could he raised and lowered from the cave to the lake. At first this was a simple rope of vines tied to a man-sized basket made of woven willow wands, and it required Duranix to haul the basket up or lower it down. By year three, Amero had added a counterweight and a windlass to the hoist so that he could raise or lower the basket without the dragon’s help.
Though still a young man, Amero was generally recognized as the chief of Yala-tene, by virtue of his special relationship with the dragon. At twenty-three, he was a lean young man of middling height. He was pale for a plainsman, a consequence of spending so much time in caves and tents. After getting his long hair tangled in the windlass one day, Amero had gone to Konza the tanner and had his hair cut short. Elder plainsmen were shocked — they thought the length of a man’s hair reflected strongly on his virility — but boys in the village took heed of the change and began cropping their hair in imitation of Amero. In time, only the most elderly men still wore traditional plainsman’s braids or horsetails.
One evening in early summer of the eleventh year of Yala-tene, as shadows lengthened and the first fires began to gleam in the village below, the timber frame attached to the lower mouth of the cave creaked, and the thick vine rope piled up in a heap on the cave floor. The basket arrived bearing Amero, who leaped out and tied off the hoist.
Amero hailed Duranix as he entered the cave. The dragon, in his natural form, was lying atop his platform at the rear of the cave. He held a stone in one foreclaw and rubbed and scratched it with the other claw. The stone’s surface glittered in the dimly lit cavern. Duranix’s tail was wrapped around an oblong slab of granite, and he repeatedly lifted and lowered the slab. Amero knew what that repetitive motion meant — the dragon was bored.
“What do you have there?” Amero said, climbing the steps to the platform.
“I found it on my last flight east,” said Duranix, squinting with one enormous eye at the stone in his fist. “It’s extremely hard. I’ve been trying to work it into a more pleasing shape.”
He paused his scratching and held the glittering stone on the points of two claws for Amero to see. It resembled a ball of ice the size of a child’s head and was almost completely clear. Amero could see through the stone to Duranix’s eye. The globular stone distorted the image, making the dragon’s eye seem even larger than usual.
“It’s beautiful,” said Amero. “What kind of stone is it?”
“Diamond.” He tossed the bright rock aside. “How go the storage caves?”
“Slow. The diggers hit a vein of black stone that’s stopped them.”
The villagers had decided to emulate Duranix and carve a series of tunnels in the cliff face — not to live in, but to store their supplies of dried and smoked meat, vegetables, and other foodstuffs. Early work went rapidly, and three galleries had been sunk into the mountain, but after forty days, the diggers met tougher rock. All three passages were blocked by the same impenetrable black stone, and their deer-antler picks and stone hammers could make little progress against the impervious wall.
“Do you need my help?” Duranix said.
“Not yet,” Amero replied. “There’s no better way to wake a lazy mind than to put it to work. Mieda will figure out some way around the problem.”
Mieda was their chief digger, a man of many unusual talents. He’d walked into Yala-tene a year ago, starving and unable to speak. With patience and many good meals, he’d recovered, though he remained a taciturn, enigmatic figure. He had many skills, but his black skin and tightly curled hair marked him as being from a far different place.
Amero had been thrilled to meet Mieda, remembering the glimpse he’d caught of the two black men the day his family was attacked by the yevi. However, any questions Amero and his fellow villagers had about his origins were doomed to remain unanswered. Mieda would not talk about where he was from or about his past, but he did work hard and well, winning the trust and respect of the plainsmen.
“Speaking of problems, how’s yours?” Duranix asked.
“Oh! My fire!”
Amero ran down the steps to the great hearth in the center of the cave. He used the leg bone of an ox to rake the ashes away from the morning fire. Buried under the ashes were several bronze dragon scales. Amero was trying to find a way to work Duranix’s bronze into forms the villagers could use. Gingerly, with much waving of singed fingers, Amero snatched the blackened metal from the ashes.
Duranix slipped off the platform in one sinuous movement and came to the hearth. He found the notion of formulating tools from his hide peculiarly human. His wide reptilian head hovered over Amero’s shoulder.
“Well?”
Though warped and blackened by heat, the scales had not melted. “Failed again!” Amero cried. “I was sure it would work this time!”
“What did you do differently?”
Amero threw the hot shards of bronze back in the firepit and dusted his sooty hands. “I wrapped the scales in wet river clay. I thought it might hold in the heat and melt the bronze.”
“You laid an ordinary fire?”
Amero ran a hand through his cropped hair. “Yes. I’ve already tried using different kinds of wood in the fire. That had no effect. Are you sure your scales can be melted?”
“So I was told, long ago. It’s not something I’ve given much thought to, you understand,” said Duranix, rapidly losing interest. He flowed under the larger cave opening and reared up, resting his foreclaws on the rim of the hole and stretching his wings slightly. “I’m leaving the valley tonight. I may not be back till dawn.”
Amero yawned, stretching his arms wide. “I was in the diggings all day, breathing dust and smoke from torches. I think I’ll just wash up and go to sleep.”
Long ago, at Amero’s request, the dragon made a rent in the outer wall of the cave. A steady trickle of water from the falls flowed down this crack and filled a deep basin Duranix clawed out of the rock.
Amero stripped off his buckskin shirt and dipped his hands in the cool water.
“Where will you go?” he asked.
“South by east.”
Amero stopped, water dripping from his cupped hands. “You’ve scouted that direction twice in the last five days. What’s out there?”
“I don’t know. Something. I’ve seen large clouds of dust hanging in the air at twilight. I’ve seen swaths cut through the grass by some large, moving formation. The tracks I’ve found are of four-footed creatures.”
Amero dipped his hands in the water again and splashed a double handful on his face. “Yevi?” They’d periodically had to hunt down and destroy small yevi packs, but there’d been no massing of Sthenn’s minions in almost ten years.
Duranix shook his head. Several loose scales fell from his
neck, ringing when they hit the stone floor.
“It’s the wrong direction for yevi unless they moved east in large numbers without my detecting them,” the dragon said. “Whatever it is, they don’t want to be seen. They move by night and hide by day. Game animals flee before them but follow after them, if that makes any sense.”
The dragon thrust his head through the cave opening and sniffed the evening air. “Nothing seems amiss, yet something is,” Duranix rumbled. “I’ll find out what. Nothing on the plain can hide from me for long.”
With his back feet gripping the rim, Duranix squeezed his bulky shoulders through the hole and unfurled his wings. A single push of his massive rear legs launched him skyward.
“Be careful!” Amero shouted. It was a silly thing to say to a creature as powerful as a dragon, but Amero meant it. He’d grown extremely fond of Duranix, slowly coming to understand the dragon’s odd sense of humor — and developing a sense of humor himself in the process. He enjoyed their companionship greatly. It still amazed him that he had such a fantastic creature for a friend.
He pulled a fur blanket around his shoulders and sat down on the warm hearthstones. Scratching a piece of scorched bronze with his fingernails, he pondered his problem. He needed more heat if he was ever to melt the bronze. What made one fire hotter than another? Women in the village would sometimes hurry a pot to boiling by blowing the flames with a reed fan. Would such a technique work on metal? Maybe he could get one of the town basket weavers to make him a big fan for the experiment.
Amero lay down on the hearth. Sleep claimed him, but his rest was not peaceful. For the first time in many years he dreamed of the day the yevi had killed his family. In his dream he kept looking back over his shoulder to see Nianki running behind him. Faster! Go faster! She mouthed the words, but no sound came out. Amero raced for the nearest tree. By the time he reached it and looked back again, Nianki had vanished under a seething mass of fanged, gray-furred bodies. He woke calling her name.
Duranix cruised slowly at a great height, buoyed by warm updrafts rising through the cold, high air. Far below, the valleys were deeply shadowed clefts where any number of enemies could hide. The valleys opened onto the plain, which by night resembled a featureless sea of gray grassland. The dragon gazed down, trying to detect movement. Individual creatures would be invisible from this height. Even the heat of their blood wasn’t discernible. It would take a hundred creatures moving in unison to register in Duranix’s vision.
He floated for some time, bearing south and east from home. Far to the south was the homeland of the elves, a region he could safely ignore. They were no danger to him. The elves were too civilized, too powerful to succumb to the influence of Sthenn. The host moving across the eastern plain by night, slowly closing on the mountains, could be an elf band, but he discounted the idea. He’d found signs in the Khar River region that the elves had been fighting a formidable foe there. Daylight investigation revealed half a dozen elven strongholds burned to the ground since the red moon last waned.
Duranix had landed at one such site. The log stockade had still been smoldering when he arrived, but the only bodies he’d found were of slain elves. There had been no clues left behind to identify the marauders. Whoever had attacked the outposts carried away their own dead and scoured the battlefield for lost weapons.
The dragon hadn’t shared this with Amero or the villagers. The settled life of the plainsmen was still precarious. One wrong word and many frightened humans would flee for the imagined safety of dispersal on the open grasslands. Amero had worked long and hard to win the trust of his people. He cared deeply that the village succeed. Duranix was too fond of his friend to allow his great project to fail, so he’d decided to hold his tongue until he had more certain knowledge of the possible danger.
A red glimmer broke the monotonous gray expanse below. It was only a momentary flare, but it caught the dragon’s attention. Wings beating hard, he held his place and watched for a repeat of the telltale light. It did not appear again.
He spiraled down as quietly as possible, slowing his speed by letting his feet dangle. The savanna gained more detail. A strip of silver water running east-west, probably the river the elves called the Thon-Tanjan, appeared on Duranix’s left. The ground was dotted with a few very large, widely spaced trees, burltops and vallenwoods. Scores of men or beasts could hide under a single one of them. He’d have to get closer still to investigate. At least the hilly terrain afforded him a concealed place to land.
The dragon alighted in a narrow draw and shrank to human guise. By the time he climbed the highest of the near hills, the denizens of the night had recovered from his intrusion. Crickets chirped in the grass, and clouds of mosquitoes filled the air.
He ran down the hill toward the spot where he’d seen the crimson gleam. When the pungent smell of burning pine reached him, Duranix flattened himself against the ribbed trunk of a giant burltop. He’d hardly taken up this position when a pair of animals trotted past. Mounted on the animals were riders carrying long spears.
Duranix froze. Grand as he was, as a dragon he was still cousin to the lizard and the snake, and when he wished he could remain perfectly motionless. The riders passed within arm’s length of him. Their shape and smell was unmistakable — two humans riding two horses. Duranix knew elves tamed and rode horses, but he’d never heard of humans doing it until now.
He considered snatching one of the men and forcing him to answer questions, but paused when he heard them conversing in the tongue of the plainsmen.
“… so I said, ‘The best flint is the black kind from Khar land,’ but you know Nebef, he thinks he knows everything, so he says, ‘The yellow flint of the east mountains makes the best points…’”
Interesting, Duranix thought. Whoever they were, they were wide-ranging if they knew both Khar and this eastern plain.
After they’d passed, Duranix stepped out from behind the tree and watched the riders continue down the draw. He was so distracted by his discoveries that he didn’t hear a second pair of riders steal up behind him.
Suddenly, a rough hide net was thrown over his head. Two horsemen, shouting in triumph, tried to sweep by on either side and scoop him into their net. They hadn’t reckoned on snaring a dragon in disguise. Though he looked no bigger than a sturdy man, Duranix weighed as much as full-grown bronze dragon. When the net snapped taut, he merely planted his feet, and the riders were yanked off their horses.
Duranix pulled the net apart as easily as a man can tear a cobweb and stood over the two dazed riders. One was a rangy fellow with yellow hair, a flowing mustache, and a smoothly shaven chin. His companion was a short, dark female, clad in a strange outfit consisting of a buckskin tunic with short lengths of twig sewn on. The twigs had been peeled of their bark and matched to length. The female’s arms and chest were covered in tight horizontal rows of white wooden pegs.
He picked up the woman by the collar and held her off the ground. She shook off the effects of her fall and stared at Duranix.
“Uran! Uran, get up!” she yelled. The yellow-haired man only groaned. The woman yanked a sharply pointed flint dagger from her waist and slashed at Duranix with it.
He caught her wrist with his free hand and squeezed. She screamed and let the knife fall to the ground. Duranix dropped her.
“You broke my arm!” she gasped, collapsing to the ground. “I haven’t broken it yet, but I can,” said Duranix
“Who are you?”
“I’ll ask the questions, though I can’t improve on yours. Who are you?”
The woman glared at him fiercely and wouldn’t respond. He picked up the stone knife and snapped it in two with one hand. His great strength caused her anger to dissolve into shock. To further intimidate her, Duranix allowed his eyes to flash with contained lightning.
“Forgive me, Great Spirit! Forgive us! We thought you were an elf!” the woman said.
“What is your name?” asked the dragon.
“Samtu.”
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“And him?”
“Uran. We are of Karada’s band.”
Duranix folded his arms. “And who is Karada?”
“The greatest hunter, the bravest warrior, the keenest tracker, the cleverest — ”
“Yes, yes,” said the dragon, interrupting a no doubt lengthy list of superlatives. “Where is this Karada? I would like to meet him.”
All at once something gripped Duranix’s ankles. There was a sharp tug and he lost his balance and fell backward. This is why four feet are better than two, he thought in disgust.
Samtu yelled, and her companion, Uran, leaped on the fallen Duranix. It was a brave deed, but entirely futile. With only the slightest effort, the disguised dragon hurled Uran aside. The plainsman flew some distance and landed heavily in the grass.
Duranix rose, irritated at being tripped by such a puny creature. He grasped Samtu by the hair and dragged her to her feet.
“I should pluck the head from your shoulders like a ripe cherry,” he said coldly, “but first tell me where I can find this Karada.”
“Spare me, Great Spirit!” she begged. “I’ll take you to the camp! It isn’t easy to find in the dark! Please let me live!”
Duranix released her, embarrassed he’d caused such terror. Humans, with their spears and stone knives, were far too weak to present a serious danger to him. He might as well torment a rabbit.
“Look to your companion,” he said gruffly, gesturing at the fallen man. “He landed hard.”
Samtu went to Uran, who hadn’t moved since landing. She found him wide-eyed and staring, dead of a broken neck. She reported this to Duranix.
“My apologies,” he said.
He was surprised when Samtu shook her head and declared, “It was a fair fight, though not an even one.” She closed the dead man’s eyes and removed the flint knife from his belt. Favoring her injured arm, she managed to heave Uran’s body onto his horse. Samtu tied the reins to her mount’s bridle.
“Come, Great Spirit. I will take you to Karada.”
He expected to find the human chieftain camped beneath a spreading vallenwood, but the truth was more subtle. The plainsmen had cleared a large area of the shoulder-high grass in the midst of the open plain. Nets, supported by poles, were spread across the clearing. The cut grass had been layered on top of the net, which kept the camp from being spotted from above and gave shade to the artificial clearing beneath.