by E. E. Knight
Perhaps Natasatch was right. This mania of his to be isolated, remote, out of the affairs of the hominids—lurking in a cave listening to groaning glaciers between flights to warn off deep-water fishing boats or treasure hunters chasing legends of an entirely imaginary “wizard’s trove” on the Isle of Ice wasn’t much of a life. Besides, he owed it to his mate that she might see some of the world. He’d traveled all those years she’d been chained in a cave.
Don’t be a blockhead, gray dragon. The outside world isn’t that bad.
“It will be a long flight,” he said, giving her both a warning and a chance to bow out gracefully.
She fluffed her wings with a leathery crackle. “I don’t mind at all.”
“Oh, very well. Let’s enjoy ourselves. But Natasatch, try to keep out of the business of my brother’s alliance. I don’t want us joining any factions.”
“Factions? Us? No, my love, you’re quite right that we should keep out of politics. I just want us to be sociable with our relatives to the south. It never hurts to have friends for when we desire a change of scenery, and I do so want to be able to congratulate AuSurath in person.”
“To tell the truth, I’m curious to see how he looks, now that he has wings. I always thought he rather resembled my father.”
Natasatch looked downcast for a moment. She hadn’t known her parents at all before being snatched away to the Isle of Ice. “Very well. Shall we bring Istach?”
“She has young wings,” AuRon said. “The exercise would do her good.”
“My lord is wise,” Natasatch said. Her tone was light, and the wording was the one she used when she teased him for dispensing what she called “the wisdom of the obvious.”
He snorted. “You’re right, my love. You mated a dragon with delusions of sagacity.”
Istach, their striped daughter, was a bit of an odd-hatchling out. Always had been. Quiet and thoughtful, she stuck close by her home cave, learning the tongues of blighters and wolves and sea mammals. She brought home game almost every day. It was unusual for a dragon her age to dote on her parents so, but again, she was an odd-hatchling.
Her sister Varatheela was a Firemaiden and took after her mother in her desire to enjoy the social struggles with other dragons. He doubted he’d see her; from what he understood, the Firemaids and younger Firemaidens spent most of their time guarding the beating heart of the Dragon Empire, the Lavadome, running or flying messages, or learning about the lands under their Tyr’s subtle control.
At least that’s how Wistala explained it to him when he asked her advice about Varatheela joining. But Varatheela was a full-fledged dragon now, and able to shape her own destiny.
It was a longish flight to Hypatia. AuRon, being scaleless, could make it in three hard days, but Natasatch and Istach were weighed down by scale and inexperience in distance flying.
To give themselves energy for the flight they feasted three days on a dead whale AuRon found beached on one of the tiny islands surrounding theirs. The gulls hadn’t torn it up too badly. There was still plenty of juicy fat and it was too cold for flies. Then they spent a day in short conditioning flights cleared their digestive systems, and accustomed themselves to the air. They flapped off to the south the next day, as the weather promised fair.
Though he’d steeled himself against the departure, AuRon couldn’t help but leave his island with regret, the pain all the sharper for Natasatch’s eagerness to leave.
To think, when his hatchlings were first above ground, his worry was overpopulation on the Isle of Ice and running out of sheep or goats in consequence. Now most of the dragons were gone, eager for the gold and glory of his brother’s glittering new empire. Save old Ouistrela. Too cantankerous for dragon society, always hungry, she rained contempt on the young dragonelles who flew north with messages. The Firemaid who brought the message from the Tyr, letting him know about the victory against the men on the western side of the Inland Ocean and his son’s promotion into the Aerial Host, had had her tail shortened by a mouthful for taking a sheep without permission to refresh herself.
He had paid Ouistrela a visit to bid her goodbye and heard the story about how she’d seen off the “trained dog of a dragonelle” with noise and teeth, the one resource of the Isle of Ice’s old Ouistrela made free with. He’d brought her some of his pitifully small hoard in return for keeping an eye on the cave and not causing his wolves too much grief.
“Some price for my services. If you’re gone longer than a year, I’ll go looking for the rest,” she said.
The trio traveled with the wind; with winter coming it was blowing hard out of the north, their flight alternately serious and playful. Istach had the energy of a newly fledged dragon and enjoyed swooping around her parents and experimenting with surfing the air currents created by their hard-beating wings in their wake. AuRon, unhindered by scale, could outfly any dragon he’d ever met without sucking wind much deeper than he did on the ground, and continually asked his mate and daughter if they wanted to float and rest. Natasatch responded, as a proud dragon-dame should, by flapping harder and forcing him to catch up.
Istach simply took over the lead position, so her parents might suffer a little less drag by riding in her wake.
From the air, AuRon always thought Hypat, capital city of the Hypatian Empire, looked like a white vase dropped on a coral-strewn shore and shattered. From a beautiful core bits of it were scattered in all directions; even the toothlike sails in the great sand-choked estuary of the Falnges River might be mistaken for broken pieces of a greater structure.
Whoever had first laid out the city had thought the design through, with a star of broad avenues running out toward the old city walls and riverfront. The heart of the city held several magnificent buildings and pillars.
In human fashion, something well begun was finished badly. The wide avenues were choked with barrows and carts and wooden shacks and some of the graceful buildings had fallen into disrepair—though AuRon noticed sets of scaffolding and canvas marking where restorations had begun. The city’s lovely gardens, run wild and crawling with livestock on his last visit, were still in disorder, but the worst of the overgrowth had been cleared and there were no longer pools of distressingly fouled water. Outside the old walls a jumble had built up, beautiful homes and buildings looking out on the sea, and a rats’ nest of tightly packed dwellings growing around the docks and wharfs like barnacles.
Hypat was thriving again, if in a messy and disordered fashion.
A fast-flying dragonelle rose to greet them. Istach swooped down to interpose herself between the stranger and her parents.
“Welcome, AuRon of the Isle of Ice, on behalf of the Tyr of Worlds Upper and Lower and Keeper of the Grand Alliance. Welcome, AuRon’s family.”
The lack of reflective scale did make him recognizable, even from a distance. He’d been quietly called a “plucked griffaran” by some wit in the throne room of his brother’s rocky home in the Lavadome according to his hatchlings. He bore the moniker without challenge. He’d learned long ago that words couldn’t pierce your skin.
Natasatch panted out a response and asked about a place to stop and take refreshment. The dragonelle offered to guide them in.
AuRon only half-paid attention as they descended toward the outskirts of Hypat, capital city of the Hypatian realm.
Tyr of Worlds. His brother did enjoy his titles.
“I’m bid to tell you your sister Wistala, soon to be formally named Queen-Constort, invites you to reside with her at the circus campground,” the dragonelle said. “I will guide you to a safe landing,” the dragonelle continued. Natasatch beat her wings vigorously and lazily performed a few acrobatics, showing she was a match for any young thing who’d only been in the air a year.
It was easy to determine where his brother was residing. Bright-colored creatures, half feather and half skin, sunned and preened over a sort of open clamshell of masonry, wood, and canvas near the great round building where the Hypatian Directory met. Near both, the layo
ut of an impressive palace was growing in what AuRon remembered as a pile of rubble and wreckage along the inner walls left over from the invasion of the Red Queen’s Ironrider horsemen.
Such magnificent works. AuRon wondered if it was all to succor a twisted little dragon’s vanity.
Other dragons were enjoying themselves in the rough waters off a rocky point that flanked the city from the seaside, swimming, fishing, or taking the sun on their own private perches. A few humans watched, and little boys dashed across sand and surf to collect dropped dragonscale. Older servants brought the playful dragons platters of food and roast meats suspended from poles born by two stout servers.
Empire had its privileges, he supposed.
“Brother, welcome,” Wistala said as they alighted outside a brightly painted wall. Images of animals and performers decorated the walls of the circus. It was much as AuRon had remembered it from when he stayed briefly before, but now a flag fluttered above, green and white with a dragon’s profile on it. Below the flags, angled masts, a cross between ship’s timbers and lifting cranes, held up canvas to shade the seats. “Natasatch, you are most welcome. I’m glad you could come. And young Istach. Your sister is doing well as a Firemaid, though I don’t expect she’ll take the Second Oath. She’s beginning to display a bit in front of the young dragons, so we will lose her to mating one day, I suspect. Your young dragons are both fine examples of dragonkind.”
“Thank you for news of the offspring,” Natasatch said. “We’re so cut off in the north.”
A crowd gathered but kept a respectful distance. Wistala sidestepped and gestured with her neck and tail. “Perhaps we should retreat within the gates. There’ll be beggars here any moment, asking for loose scale.”
They proceeded into the circus arena. Piles of sawdust and matting showed that several dragons were staying for the duration of the celebration.
“Sister,” AuRon said. “I am told you are taking an important new role soon.”
“Formally, yes. Informally, I’m already helping the Tyr.”
“Rounding up slaves for the Lavadome?”
“Nothing so distressing, AuRon. My duties are mostly to represent the Tyr at minor functions when he’s busy elsewhere. But sometimes problems are brought to me when it is thought that NoSohoth or our brother will refuse aid. I wish I had a mouthful of gold to offer, but it flows out as quickly as it flows in. I have some copper scraps, however.”
His mate and Istach gratefully swallowed a few battered remains of cooking pots. With so many dragons about AuRon wondered what even these odds and ends had cost his sister.
Natasatch asked Wistala about arrangements for the celebration, who would be there with whom, whether there were any important humans she should greet or defer to, what kinds of dishes might be served—“all the flying put me in good appetite, and I’ve long been hungry for society.”
Her life wasn’t yours. Try to understand.
Did he expect his mate to always trail along in his wake, dutifully waiting for the next clutch of eggs? No, if she was as hungry for company as she was for precious metals, he could put up with a few cheers for his brother. He might even have done something to deserve them.
Wistala assigned them a thrall to help them with her traveling household, and made her excuses. Already she reminded AuRon of one of these smooth-talking dragons of her brother’s court. What had his sister grown up to be? Not another preening decoration, he hoped.
At least Natasatch wasn’t vain. The dragons of his brother’s empire accumulated small armies of human retainers and servants. Every scale polished, filed, and aligned, claws smoothed and sharpened, teeth picked as clean as a corpse in the desert he’d crossed in his unfledged youth with the girl Hieba.
He consented to a bristle-brush scrubbing of his skin, more to keep his mate company while they worked to clean beneath her scale. She chattered happily to him the whole while, and he suddenly felt better about the trip south. Maybe he’d encourage her to visit Hypat more often. Wistala seemed to like her and might appreciate a companion on her rounds, doing whatever a Queen of Two Worlds did.
She’d refused several friendly loans of “body thralls”—slaves, really, to help her prepare for the victory banquet by filing and shaping her scale. “A healthy dragonelle is perfectly capable of attending to her own scale, and I wouldn’t care to go into a fight with those oversharp talons you underground dragons seem to favor.”
Fashionable dragons are such a bore, she thought to him. He’d never been more proud of her.
They had good weather for the feast, with just enough wind to disperse the dragon smell so that the humans could enjoy themselves. The only part of the banquet AuRon enjoyed was the fact that Natasatch gloried in the polite exchanges and friendly conversations. It did his hearts good to see his mate so happy.
It was held before the Directory, a vast building where the Hypatians met and schemed and governed, a place of alliances and betrayals, of promises public and secret agendas, or so Wistala’s quick history of it explained when AuRon and Natasach were shown inside. There were circular ranks of benches fitted for humans running around the walls looking down on enormous statues of the beasts of the world: Oxen and dolphins and lions and such, along with a dragon who had the wrong number of toes and his crest-horns growing in the wrong direction.
Wistala had a high opinion of the traditions of the place, something to do with some old elf friend of hers who’d been a “Knight of the Directory.” To AuRon the place only echoed with noisy vanity.
AuRon noted an empty place next to his brother—where his Queen Nilrasha would be had she not been restricted from travel by injuries. Perhaps for the first time since their hatching he felt a pang of sympathy for the Copper. Tyr RuGaard was grave and ate little, though he offered elaborate praise and politenesses to his guests. On his other side Wistala reclined, supplying him with names when he forgot the identity of this, that, or the other so-and-so.
“My tongue does you an injustice,” his brother said, after mispronouncing the name of a human thane from the north.
The human, awestruck and uncomfortable in the presence of a throng of dragons, assured “my Tyr” that he was utterly unable to pronounce half the dragon names in attendance.
When it came time for the banquet, the dragons ate on the great pillar-bordered street leading up to the immense Hypatian Directory. Even that vast building couldn’t fit this many dragons, at least in such a way that they might be fed. Using a road allowed oxcarts to carry food to the dragons, stretched out on their bellies in a vast rectangle—the oxen were blindfolded and had Ghiozian camphor rubbed in their noses to cover up the dragon smell to forestall panic.
Dragons, humans, and a smattering of elves and dwarfs and even a blighter or two with hair neatly bound and ribboned dined in two long lines flanking the road. The dragons lay on their bellies to eat and many of the humans and elves did likewise, reaching for tidbits from bearers carrying plates in endless procession.
AuRon and Natasatch, with Istach trailing behind, were both last and first. They were the last dragons to be introduced—as “distinguished visitors from the north and relatives of our great Tyr,” ahead of various humans and elves and dwarfs representing their kind.
In the interval between the feast and the ceremonies Wistala talked with a dozen rather wizened, bent-over humans, whom she introduced as “librarians”—keepers of knowledge and secrets.
“Oh, would you look at that little bit of tail?” Natasatch said, spying the mate of one of Hypat’s “Protectors.” “Dyed all in red. She looks like she’s trying to pass as male.”
AuRon glanced over at the dragon who’d chosen a bright shade of red favored by the Red Queen, who’d ruled Ghioz until she settled on war against the Dragons of the Lavadome. He’d had more than a claw in the killing of the strange creature who claimed to be too busy to ever die. He half-hoped one of her supply of bodies still lurked at the edges of his brother’s realm, ready to wake him out of
his dangerous dreams of an ever-expanding rule.
“Oh, and look at that painted advertiser,” Natasatch said, referring to a graceful young dragonelle, some sprig of dragon nobility with fledging scars still dripping and wing skin hardly dry, who’d painted the fanlike griff that protect a dragon’s neck-hearts with gold and added jeweled designs to her claws. “Practically simpering in hopes of a mating flight,” she thought to him. “Some young dragon will get a mate and a hoard in one quick flight. Weighed down like that, she could get caught and breeched by an eager eagle.”
His mate displayed a rather perverse sense of humor at times. She explained it as the product of long years sequestered on an dismal egg shelf with nothing to do but dream erotic dreams.
“Mother!” Istach said, scandalized.
“Isn’t that Varatheela with her?” AuRon asked aloud.
“No, surely she would have greeted us,” Natasatch said.
“It is Varatheela,” Istach said. “She’s with some firemaids, if I read the designs on their wings correctly, that is.”
Well, dragonelles had to grow up sooner or later, AuRon decided. Still, it felt odd to be at a feast without even a word from your own offspring.
The hominid guests, AuRon noted, ate on their stomachs in the fashion of dragons, perched on cushioned benches. The oddly proportioned human frame looked only a little more dignified in that manner, though some of them stuck their hindquarters rather high in the air like a cat seeking a mate.
A silver-with-black-tipped dragon settled everyone down and introduced Wistala as the new Queen Consort to roars of approval. The dragon went on for quite some time, lauding her ability with languages, her rank in the Hypatian hierarchy—AuRon wondered how she managed that—and her prowess in battle. The stuffed dragons, with ample coin in their gold-gizzards and juicy joints in their bellies, roared their approval in a manner that sent pigeons in flight all over the city like little feathery fireworks.