Dragonmaster

by Chris Bunch

  “Didjer happen to do a count?” Farren said. “Twennyfive of th’ monskers. Assumin’ that we, like the eejiots afore, take these mooncalves off to war as our personal mounts, a’ter they’ve finished trainin’ us, that means that somebody’s allowin’ for either cas’lties or bustouts. So fifteen of us’re doom’t.”

  “Most likely both,” Ev Larnell said gloomily.

  “Yar, well, I don’t plan on bein’ either,” Mariah put in snappily. “Fly the skies, spy the ground, that’s my fambly motto.”

  “Since when?” Larnell asked suspiciously.

  “Since right now,” Farren said. “What’s a good fambly ’less you can shake it, change it, turn it all about?”

  There were very immediate changes. Garadice had brought five of his dragon-buying team, all experienced dragon fliers. He announced he had orders to take over command of the school, and everyone would now please help unload the dragons.

  “Cadre included,” he said.

  Sir Pers Spense departed, and no one saw him leave.

  Garadice appeared at the dinner formation, told all the students to gather around.

  “I’m not one for speeches. I understand from the good Serjeant Te you’ve been getting marched back and forth a great deal, and it doesn’t appear much was done about why you all volunteered.

  “That’ll change.

  “Serjeant Te will take charge of whatever military drill needs doing, which I don’t think is much, and the bulk of the time will be spent trying to teach you men and women not only how to fly, but how to stay alive once you reach the front.

  “The battle has worsened, and no one is quite sure how dragons will fit in. So it’ll be up to you to not only fight bravely, but determine the future of dragon flying.

  “There are quite a few . . . well, I shouldn’t say old fuds, but that’s what they are, who think an army should forget nothing, and learn nothing.

  “It’ll be your job, and the few that have gone before, and, hopefully, the many that will follow, to make them learn differently.

  “Now, go in to eat. I’m afraid tonight’s meal is nothing but cold victuals, pickles, tomatoes and bread. I was forced to discharge the cooking staff, since I believe we should eat no worse than dragons, so until we bring in some better qualified people, we’ll have to shift for ourselves, and some of you’ll be detailed to help prepare and serve.

  “Not that any of us will have much time to brood about food. We’re all going to be very, very busy.”

  “Very well,” Garadice said, propping a pair of half-moon spectacles on the bridge of his nose, “you might want to pay attention here.”

  He lifted an enormous folio onto the lectern. It was stuffed with papers, some printed, some scribbled on.

  “This is what I think I know about dragons, from twenty years’ experience.

  “But if any of you know better, or even think you do, please interrupt me.

  “Remember, we’ve only known about dragons for three hundred years or so, when they first appeared on our shores.”

  “Where did they come from?” Sir Loren Damian asked.

  “Almost certainly from the far north, even beyond Black Island.”

  “Better, why’d they come south?” Farren asked.

  “No one knows, precisely. Some have theorized the climate changed, and drove them south.

  “Another theory is that they feed naturally on the great herds of oxen that roam the northern wildernesses. Perhaps a plague of oxen, or even overcrowding their natural grounds, could have caused this migration.”

  “More like, somebody was chasin’ ’em,” Farren said.

  “That’s not unlikely.” Garadice smiled. “Which may be one reason why the far north remains unexplored, besides the problem that Black Island, the logical jumping-off place for any such exploration, is claimed by the kingdom of Roche.”

  The students were paired off, almost two to a dragon, and stable duties began. Somehow Vad Feccia ended up as Hal’s stable partner. Hal did most of the work, since Feccia seemed terrified of the monsters.

  That didn’t bother Hal. He cheerfully put Feccia to pumping the stirrup pump they were given, and sprayed his beast with soapy water, then scrubbed it with stiff-bristled, long-handled brushes.

  “His” dragon seemed to like that, at least it only tried to sink its fangs into him at the beginning of the session and at the end.

  Saslic determined the dragon’s sex was probably female. “All to the good, Hal. Easier to train, easier to keep.”

  Saslic had a male dragon, which she’d named Nont, after, she said, “one of my imaginary friends when I was a little girl.”

  Hal didn’t name his. He knew that it was going to be a long war, and this dragon might be the first of many, especially if his ideas bore fruition.

  After washing, Hal oiled his dragon’s scales, checked its talons for splitting, although he wasn’t sure what he’d do if one was broken, carted out the amazing amount of waste a dragon could produce, changed the straw it slept on, odorous with the beast’s pungent urine.

  He then took it, on a very long lead, its wings bound, for a walk around the horse ring. He thought it was a good sign that “his” dragon wasn’t very friendly to the other beasts.

  The dragon was fed twice a day, generally a sheep or calf in the morning, perhaps some salt fish at night. Hal was grateful there was a butcher attached to Garadice’s unit. As a special treat, a handful of rabbits might be tossed into the dragon’s cage alive.

  “There are four, most likely more, species of dragons. It’s also possible that three of these are merely variations.

  “The other class, known as the Black Island or black variation, is significantly larger in all dimensions than other dragons, is predominant black in coloration, and is considered untamable, and the deadliest of mankillers.

  “As a side note, though,” Garadice said, “a number of dragon fliers, back before the war, were able to obtain, tame and successfully ride dragons that had supposedly been gotten from Black Island, so here, again, nothing is certain. Do these other species interbreed with the black dragons?

  “I simply do not know.”

  New cooks had been brought in, Garadice permitted the issue of beer at the end of each week, and one afternoon was given over to free time.

  None of this was important to Hal as Rai, who’d quickly been promoted to cadre, gave him a hand up into the rear saddle of a docile dragon cow for his first flight.

  “Now, here’s the way you steer this brute,” he said, “which I suppose you know from your days with Athelny. Slap her with the reins on the left side of her neck, and, with training, she’ll turn that way. Hit her on the right—and I don’t mean hard, you’re not supposed to be cruel—she’ll go that way. Drag the reins back, and—with any kind of luck—the beast’ll climb. Rap both reins on her neck, and she’ll probably dive.

  “Kick if you want her to fly faster, pull back on the reins again to slow her down.

  “That’s the hard way to do things. Some dragons—I remember the one my father gave me—obeyed by voice. Others I’ve seen can feel the rider bend in the saddle and will turn with him.

  “This lumbering cow is purely stupid, and thinks just getting off the ground is repayment enough for her daily meat.

  “Strap yourself in, and let’s go flying.”

  Hal obeyed, and Rai slid into the front saddle.

  “Hup,” he shouted, and the dragon stirred, got up from her crouch, and staggered forward, out of the pen. Her wings uncurled, beat, beat again, and, very simply, they were flying.

  Rai let the dragon climb of her own will, giving no commands.

  He looked back, saw Hal’s look of pure glee, nodded.

  “You were a flier, or anyway you’ve been up, not like some of us.”

  Hal didn’t answer, intent on looking at that most magical of all sights, the ground lower away below him, and the horizon unroll.

  “I’ll not take her higher,” Rai said. “I
want you up front here as soon as possible, really learning something, not joyriding with your finger in your nose.”

  The classroom training was very much by guess and by the gods. Garadice and the other instructors taught map reading, use of a compass, survival skills in case they landed and were trapped in enemy territory.

  There was an infantry training camp about half an hour’s flight distant, and the trainees helped the class learn what horsemen, marching infantry, a command group looked like from the air.

  Hal thought it mildly amusing that the soldiers, when the dragons landed, treated the prospective fliers with a mixture of awe and incredulity that any normal-looking man or woman would trust themselves to the monsters they loved.

  He could see the use of most training, but it was evident that no one, instructor or student, was really sure how these dragons, and their fliers, would serve Deraine.

  Hal, keeping his own council, was following Garadice’s lead, and keeping a notebook that filled up with his own, rather bloody, thoughts on what use dragons might be put to.

  “Damnation, Kailas,” the instructor shouted. “Don’t saw at the reins—you’re not trying to cut this poor beast’s neck in half!”

  Hal tried to be lighter with his controls, and the dragon ignored him. He tried leaning to suggest a command, and the dragon ignored him.

  He felt sweat on his forehead, under his arms, in spite of the wintry day.

  “This isn’t producing much,” the instructor said. “Bring him down toward the ground, and I’ll take the reins.

  “I do hope you do better next time,” the instructor added, gloomily.

  Hal nodded dumbly, terrified that he would be one of the ones found unsatisfactory, and returned to his unit. There were already half a dozen failures, after only two weeks.

  Hal Kailas was afraid he’d be the seventh.

  Saslic was a natural flier, and her dragon seemed to revel at every moment in the air, the pair quickly progressing to aerial acrobatics, turning, twisting in the stormy skies above the base.

  She tried to help Hal on what he was doing wrong, but had to admit, finally, that it was just a matter of “feel,” and he should maybe relax, and it would come to him in a flash.

  Sir Loren Damian also learned easily, as he seemed to do everything, without effort and with a bit of a smile on his lanky face.

  The other knight on the course, Calabar, was stodgy, but competent. One nasty habit he had was carrying a dogwhip with him, and belaboring his dragon at the slightest “failure.”

  Garadice told him he was heading for trouble, that dragons, like men, loved masters, if masters there had to be, who were easy in the saddle.

  Calabar curled a lip and said, “In my experience, a master who gives a serf an ounce of slack is on the way to making a rebel, a bandit, and deserves a whipping as much as his disobedient thrall.”

  Asser seemed to be learning, then, one day, he was absent from roll call. Two days later, he was brought back, in manacles, by a pair of military warders, who’d caught him on the streets of Rozen.

  Everyone expected him to be thrown out, and finally vanish. But he was kept on, although his evenings were spent with a shovel and broom under the tutelage of Serjeant Patrice. No one knew what story he told Garadice, but Farren said, a trace of envy in his voice, “Th’ bastid must’ve a throat that’s silver, pure silver.”

  “It seems fairly certain,” Garadice read, “that the dragon’s egg, which is about two feet long, is sat upon, in the nest, for about four months before hatching. The kit is carefully tended by both parents for almost a year, until it is deemed ready to leave the nest. During this time, it’s vulnerable only to two things: the weather, and man.

  “Dragons seem to return to the same nest, year after year, refurbishing it with considerable skill before the cow deposits the egg.”

  He closed the book.

  “Stop yawning, Mariah, or were you signaling for a break? Outside, all of you, breathe some rain, and wake up.”

  The class clattered out of the room, and down the hall to the main hall’s entranceway, staring out at the rain, almost as gray as the stone and the sea beyond, that sheeted down.

  “Damned glad to be inside on a day like this,” Saslic said. “Look . . . way out there, to sea. That fisherman’s in heavy weather.”

  Mynta Gart was staring at it.

  “Sometimes, I think I wish . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “You were out there, getting bobbed around?” Hal suggested.

  “Just so.”

  “The hells with that,” Farren said. “Old Garry—sorry, Rai—goin’ on about the dragon’s egg, and nary a word about how they ring th’ bell for each other, which might’ve kept me awake.

  “D’yer know, I was brushin’ that beast of mine, and his wanger came shootin’ out, like a dog’s. Big as one of these damn columns here. I skittered out of the way in a shot for fear he was feelin’ lovelorn! Makes a man humble, feelin’ inferior, even me, the grandest of lovers, an’ ud put me off my feed for a week, were there anyone around here who’s feelin’ romantic-like about me.

  “Which there ain’t, an’ I’m thinkin’ about tryin’ a new brand of soap.”

  Hal sat glumly in the stables, staring at the dragon across from him, which he was thinking of as his less and less. The next beast that would be his, the way things were going, would be another horse, back in the cavalry.

  He wasn’t supposed to be out of his hut, but the curfew regulations, like most of the others put out by Pers Spense, weren’t being enforced, to Serjeant Patrice’s annoyance.

  “These men and women are adults, or had damned well better be if they’re going to be trusted scouting for an entire army,” Garadice had said flatly. “So we’ll treat them like adults until they give damned good cause to warrant other considerations, in which case it will probably be best to just return them to their parent formations.”

  The penned dragon across from him had stared at Hal, wondering what he was doing here this deep in the night, but eventually the yellow eyes had closed, and the monster started breathing in a soft bubble.

  Hal wasn’t really seeing the dragon, but thinking over and over about what he was, what he must, be doing wrong, and why he couldn’t seem to get it right.

  About half the surviving class were now flying alone, well on their way toward graduation, while Kailas farted about like a stumblebum, having not a clue as to what he should be doing.

  He started, hearing the stable door creak open, saw Saslic slip in, close the door behind her.

  “What—”

  She came over to him. “I couldn’t sleep, and went to your hut. Farren said you’d gone out, probably to offer yourself as a sacrifice to the dragon god.

  “I figured I’d find you here.”

  “Farren always makes life easier,” Hal said. “Pull up a bucket and help me sulk.”

  Saslic stayed on her feet.

  “You’ve got to stop worrying, Hal. You get all tensed up, and then you get jerky, and get more tense, like a kitten chasing its tail.”

  “I know,” Kailas said. “But knowing and being able to do something about it seem to be two different things. Hells, I’m such a dunderbrain, I probably deserve being back on a horse, chasing bandits.”

  Saslic moved behind him, started rubbing his shoulders.

  “I can feel the muscles knotted up,” she said softly.

  “Do you remember,” she said after awhile, “the night we got caught, sitting out by Patrice?”

  “I do.”

  “I had the idea you were going to kiss me before that asshole materialized.”

  “The thought was in my mind.”

  “Well?”

  Hal stood, turned, and was holding her. She was small, light, and felt very good in his arms. He kissed her, and that felt better. She kissed him back, tongue writhing in his mouth, and he couldn’t remember having felt that good in a long time.

  Then they were lying, close tog
ether, in a hay manger. Her tunic was unbuttoned, and he was kissing the small buttons of her nipples, her fingers moving in his hair.

  She broke from the kiss, and said, breathing hard, “You could be a gentleman, you know, and take off your breeches and tunic for a bedsheet. Straw isn’t the easiest thing on a girl’s bottom, you know.”

  They didn’t stop making love until the drums of reveille began tapping.

  “Dammit, Hal, quit trying to pull the poor dragon’s head off,” Rai snapped. “Gently! Feel what you want!”

  Hal clenched his teeth, felt, again, his muscles clenching. Then his body remembered Saslic’s gentle fingers, and all at once, he had it. He felt one with the dragon he was riding, and the monster responded, banking easily left, tucking a wing, and coming back on its own course.

  “Now a right turn,” Rai said, his voice suddenly excited.

  Again the dragon banked, and this time Hal tapped it into a shallow dive, back toward the base, a gray blur in the grayness.

  He didn’t feel the cold wind coming off the sea, nor the spatter of rain that caught him as he sent the dragon curveting through the skies.

  He did have it, and knew it, and wondered at his own clumsiness of bare minutes ago. It was, he thought, like watching a butterfly stagger out of its chrysalis onto a leaf, and, moments later, soar into the summer air.

  He looked back over his shoulder, saw Rai grinning at him.

  “See how easy it is?” the young Garadice said.

  And it was easy.

  “There probably has never been a creature so perfectly adapted for fighting as a dragon,” Garadice read, “from its dual horns to the impressive fangs. Dragons, in territorial or mating battles, also use their neck spikes to tear at their opponent.

  “The four claws are equally adept at ripping at their enemies with the three talons on each.