The Pygmy Dragon

by Marc Secchia

  “Students,” he said, perching on the edge of his desk. “Thank you for joining us. I believe Pip belongs here in this Academy, with us. But I am concerned. What shall we do about the bullying?”

  “Have Emblazon threaten the class, Master?” suggested Maylin.

  Kassik chuckled behind his hand. “I considered that. Yaethi?”

  “Master, she needs to re-sit today’s examination. It isn’t fair, what the Journeyman did. And it’s not fair if she’s placed second not having finished half a paper.”

  Pip smiled at her friend. Yaethi was a stickler for fairness, to the point that a simple swap of students in the line for food could send her into a towering rage. She was also one of a select few who possessed real magical powers, and was taking extra lessons in how to direct her magic or shield against attacks.

  “Consider it done, Yaethi. Kaiatha?”

  “Feed their carcasses to the windrocs, Master.” Everyone stared at the normally shy Kaiatha. She coloured richly, as rosily as the ruby-coloured headscarf she wore in addition to her floor-length Fra’aniorian gown. Pip was surprised to see her noticeably pointy ears outlined beneath the silken scarf material; they had been learning about Island-cultures recently as they delved into the modern history syllabus. She added, “I don’t like bullies.”

  Yaethi said, “You could put a Dragon’s eye on–”

  “Silence,” commanded Master Kassik. “We do not discuss the forbidden lore. I need to think. This situation needs to be addressed in a way that does not make it all about you, Pip, or the harassment will only worsen. Leave it with me. You are dismissed. Go sleep. All of you.”

  Maylin protested, “But our exams …”

  “I’ve moved the entire examination schedule by a day on account of one student.” He rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “Never before in the history of this school. Say, ‘Thank you, Master Kassik.’”

  “Thank you, Master Kassik,” they chorused.

  “Now get out of my office. And you, Pip–much as I enjoy our little chats–stay out!”

  At breakfast, taken as usual in the dining hall, Pip was surprised to be patted on the back by a number of students and even several sympathetic Mentors and Journeymen. Each Mentor was an adult in charge of a student dormitory. Pip’s Mentor, Hailia, was a brusque Jeradian woman with twin six summers-old girls who seemed to think Pip was a child just like them, and existed for the sole purpose of playing their endless imaginative games. Her husband Tana was a Red Dragon Rider.

  The suns blazed through the huge, iron-barred crysglass windows of the dining hall, so dazzling that their knives and spoons threw sparkles around the table. Maylin and Kaiatha cheerfully discussed plans for their day. Yaethi had decided the time was best used for extra study. The others wanted to go swimming at a pond at the eastern end of the huge grassy balcony that stretched outside the dining hall. The terrace wall on the far side was a favourite place for Pip to sit and gaze out over the mist-wreathed volcanoes.

  What should she do about Hunagu? And the Shadow Dragon? Pip searched for answers in her bowl of Jeradian porridge, which was richly spiced as always.

  “Pipsqueak.” Durithion slipped into the seat next to her. “Alright?”

  Pip caught an arched eyebrow from Maylin, opposite, for whom romance blossomed in the breath of every breeze. She flushed. “Hey, Duri. Have I got a story for you–um, but first, can I write to your family on Sylakia? I didn’t–”

  “Did that already, scrap.” Duri made a droll face at her expression. “Couldn’t let Telisia get the first word. I told them everything. It’ll be a few weeks before we get a reply.”

  “I should write, too.”

  “I think you’ll hear Dad’s scream all the way from Jeradia.” Duri sighed. “Wish I could have been there. They would’ve found the footprints in the cage. Can’t miss those. He probably thinks a Dragon ate you.”

  “Ah’ll eat yah myself,” said Mistress Mya’adara, hauling Pip effortlessly out of her seat. “Yah get to bed, yah wicked runaway. Ah scare easy, girl. What yah do to mah poor heart?”

  “Sorry if I made you angry, Mistress–”

  “Angry?” Mistress Mya’adara drew herself up to every inch of her six feet and six inches and bawled, “Yah want to see angry? Ah’ll boot yah scrawny behind to the next volcano, girl! The worry yah caused, Ah can’t tell yah. Now, yah scram! Ah’ll have none of yah backchat and ‘Ah’m just a cutesy little bundle of pranks, Mistress Mya’adara.’ Yah three feet nothing of pure trouble. Well, trouble’s bit yah this time!”

  To a chorus of laughter from the students and various well-meant cuffs and threats from the Mistress, she chased Pip out of the dining hall.

  * * * *

  An afternoon’s swimming and relaxing was just the tonic she needed. Pip stretched luxuriously, warmed from below by the glittering, black volcanic sand next to the small pond, and the suns-shine from above. The day was so sultry, she just wanted to fall asleep again. How could anyone wear actual clothes for swimming? These big people were so silly about nudity. And how could Yaethi study in this heat? But she lay next to Pip on the blanket and pored over a scroll on Dragon anatomy. Stomachs. Claws and wing-struts. Every bone and joint and strut had its own name. Pip wondered if the names had not been purposely mangled by a vindictive scholar bent on vexing generations of students.

  Maylin sat in the middle of a group of boys–Duri’s first year friends–laughing uproariously at some joke or other. Duri had somehow tempted Kaiatha into the water with him. The graceful Fra’aniorian Islander was usually so shy … Pip’s eyes widened. They were holding hands underwater! Durithion, unusually dark-haired and dark-skinned for a Sylakian, was trying not to appear too pleased with himself, but he behaved as a cat whiskers-deep in cream. Pip tried to tell herself she was pleased for her friend, but she sensed an annoying depth of jealousy in her response.

  “You told Master Kassik about the Shadow Dragon?” Yaethi asked.

  “Yes, that was before he started shouting at me.”

  “We heard. Who didn’t?” Pip groaned loudly. “What were you doing there in the forest, Pip? You’ve broken the school rules twice now.”

  “I miss the jungle,” Pip offered, rather weakly. “I … well, you know I speak Ape, Yaethi. I made friends with some monkeys there. I didn’t want anyone else to know because they already call me names.”

  Yaethi seemed to accept this half-truth. “I wish I could speak to the messenger monkeys,” she said. “I could find out a lot that way.”

  “Or create chaos.”

  “Yeeeesss,” Yaethi smiled. “A whole Pygmy mud pool of fun.”

  “Hey!”

  “Master Shambles is your new admirer. You should just hear him extolling your powers of memory.” Yaethi grinned wickedly. “Maybe you should ask him about the Shadow Dragon.”

  Pip snapped her fingers at Yaethi, a rude gesture on Jeradia. “Zardon said I’d be safe here.”

  “Even a Dragon has to be wrong sometimes,” her friend pointed out. “You said he was as loopy as a fledgling doing aerial cartwheels.”

  “He’s not loopy.”

  “See? You’re crazy about Dragons. Maybe … maybe mighty, magnificent, muscular Emblazon floats your Dragonship. Does he?” She elbowed Pip slyly.

  Pip yelped, “He does not.” She lowered her voice as a dozen curious stares came her way. “Yaethi, you stop teasing–you stop yanking my hawser this instant. Oyda will fry you like a grasshopper if you–”

  “Yeeeee-uck.”

  They both laughed.

  “Oyda and Nak,” said Yaethi. “That’s the answer to matchmaker Maylin’s riddle.”

  “Nak?” Pip squeaked, and bit her lip unhappily. “Oyda doesn’t like Nak.”

  “Ah, but their Dragons like each other,” Yaethi said, archly. “I’ve seen the way Shimmerith blushes like a Northern Isles maiden whenever Emblazon looks at her.”

  “You’re ralti-silly. Dragons do not blush.” Shimmerith did not care for Emblazon
, she had said. “The only person who’s going to be blushing around here is you, if you don’t get your pale skin out of the suns-shine right away. Mentor Hailia made me promise–”

  “And you listened to her? Loosen up, girl. Better still, find yourself a boyfriend. Don’t you like Duri?”

  “Duri’s taken.”

  Pip could have kicked herself. Yaethi’s eyes snapped to the still pool, where Duri and Kaiatha were immersed in earnest conversation, oblivious to anyone or anything else in the world. A wicked smile curved her lips. “Ooh … he’s positively steaming in there.”

  “What are you plotting, Yaethi?”

  “We should cool him off, Pip. Double Dragon bomb?”

  “Sure.”

  They raced each other to the edge and leaped toward Duri and Kaiatha, tucking up their legs and arms to make as much of a splash as possible.

  “Dragon bomb!” they yelled.

  Durithion looked up, and was swamped.

  * * * *

  By the end of examinations week, Pip was more tired than she would have believed possible. All she had been doing was sitting and writing. But the dining hall was abuzz with excitement that final afternoon, as the staff and students gathered for the traditional end-of-exams feast. The kitchen had been a madhouse all week, generating such wonderful smells that every time Pip walked past, she wanted to drool like the school’s entire population of jallada cats, great tan-and-brown striped beasts who stood waist-high to her, who had gathered to meow piteously outside the kitchen windows in the hope of scraps.

  Each segment of the school population was dressed in their formal robes–purple for the first years, emerald for the seconds, bright yellow for the third and fourth years, black for the Journeymen and Mentors, and crimson for the Masters. Pip, to her annoyance, had endured a tailor’s sniggers as he cut her robes down to make them fit.

  Glorious suns-shine, so rich and golden Pip imagined she could swim through the beams like a trout, blazed through the great crysglass windows to light the colourful gathering. At the clear blast of a bugle, the Mentors and Journeymen stood up, climbed onto their bare tables at the head of the hall to tumultuous cheers from the students, and began the traditional dance. Every year, the tradition was to make up a more wildly descriptive and funny song in praise of the kitchen staff, before the food would appear magically through the swinging doors along the side of the hall. The Masters gathered on the stage and began a counterpoint chant, ridiculing the efforts of the Mentors and Journeymen.

  “Smell that food,” groaned Maylin. “I could eat a whole ralti sheep myself.”

  Pip goggled. She had only just seen her first ralti sheep grazing near the kitchen that week. The sheep had been seven feet tall at the shoulder, an ambulatory boulder with improbably short black legs. It was probably sizzling under a Dragon-sized grill right now.

  “I could eat like a Dragon,” agreed Duri, who was sitting opposite Kaiatha.

  Pip grinned at him. “Did I tell you about the time Zardon ate over two hundred blackwing stork eggs?”

  “Oh, do you have to bring up the fact that you’ve flown on a Dragon, again?” Yaethi sniped, rather more waspishly than Pip thought necessary.

  “Don’t listen to her. Yaethi’s talking Dragon farts,” Maylin put in. “Sulphurous, suppurating Dragon farts.”

  Yaethi flashed her a blistering glare across the table.

  Just then, a bugle began to blast somewhere outside the hall. Pandemonium ensued as the confused students shouted and joked and looked for the source of the commotion.

  “Silence!” thundered Master Kassik. His voice stilled the entire hall–some kind of magic, Pip realised. “It’s a lockdown. Students, sit still and keep quiet. Masters and Journeymen, to your posts.”

  “A lockdown?” Pip whispered to Kaiatha, growing alarmed as the doors began to slam shut. A number of the Masters raced outside before the hall’s main doors were barred and locked.

  “You missed the orientation,” she whispered back. “It’s an alarm.”

  “Or an attack. How exciting,” said Maylin.

  The students nearest the windows made a rush for the barred crysglass, pressing their noses against the panes. Immediately, cries of excitement and disbelief rose from those who could see.

  “What’s that?”

  “Islands, it’s an Ape!”

  “No way, that’s a Dragon.”

  “It’s a giant Ape, stupid.”

  Suddenly, Pip had a sickening realisation. She leaped up onto a table, but still could not see over the crowd. “Duri! Lift me up.”

  He stared at her. Several of the Journeymen shouted for the students to calm down.

  “They’ll send out a Dragon,” Pip heard someone say.

  A Dragon? Pip gasped as Duri hoisted her into the air. Her eyes leaped frantically from window to window. There, peaceably ambling across the open field, was Hunagu.

  Oh, no …

  “Oh, yes!” shouted one of the Mentors. “Here comes Shimmerith, everyone.”

  Chapter 16: The Power of Command

  WrigglinG out of Durithion’s grasp, Pip leaped down from the table and raced for the main doors, where Journeyman Gelka stood guard. Who else?

  Pip gasped, “Journeyman, please, I need to get out, it’s my friend.”

  “No students outside in a lockdown.”

  “I need to! Please. Open the door. Make them open it.”

  Framing his words as if she were the greatest idiot in the Island-World, Gelka repeated, “No students outside in a lockdown. Student Pip, the Dragons will take care of this. Return to your seat.”

  Pip spun on her heel, frantically searching for a way out. All of the doors were locked. The windows were barred. The entire student body of Dragon Rider Academy was, in fact and in deed, held prisoner in the hall.

  Nearby, a Journeyman said, “This is going to be great. Shimmerith will gut that beast like a luckless rat.”

  Tearing at her hair, Pip wailed, “Let me out, please!”

  Someone shook her shoulder. “Pip, calm down. What’s wrong?”

  All she could think of was big, gentle Hunagu out there on the grass, while a Dragon’s claws and fangs ripped into him. “I have to get out there.”

  “Pip.” Durithion held her shoulders. “What is it?”

  Through streaming tears, she screamed, “He’s my friend and they’re going to kill him!”

  “Your … oh, great Islands, it’s the Oraial from the zoo, isn’t it?”

  Duri began to yell at the Journeyman, too. But he refused to listen, as stony-faced as only Journeyman Gelka could be. Pip sank to her knees, grinding her teeth together. The pain! The pain within her was too great, the fear of loss so deep and intense, that it threatened to kill her. The hubbub of the dining hall gathered into a swirling storm, battering her ears without respite, raging through her mind and sweeping away all reason and restraint.

  She surged to her feet, brushing Durithion’s hand aside. There was a word growing inside of her, a word of enormous consequence; a word that burned with unstoppable power.

  Taking a single step forward, Pip reached past Gelka to lay her right palm flat against the massive, five-inch-thick jalkwood doors of the dining hall. Power burned lava-hot within her. Her arm jerked back, her fingers balled into a steely fist. She roared, Smash! The door exploded outward from the locus of her blow. A shower of jalkwood splinters narrowly missed impaling the Master standing on the far side. The entire sixty-foot panel sagged crazily on its hinges.

  Pip darted into the entryway. She sprinted across the wide portico area, blazing past several Journeymen watching the spectacle of Shimmerith plummeting toward the Oraial Ape. Hunagu stood in the open, unaware of any danger, scenting the breeze, searching for his friend. Catching sight of her, his broad, placid face broke into a beaming grin.

  Her speed was not enough. No Human speed could have been. Shimmerith’s wings flared, her hind legs extending, all ten claws sliding free of their sheaths as sh
e swooped in for the kill.

  Too slowly, as if in a dream, Pip stretched out her arm. A second word, more a plea than a command, ripped free of her throat. Stop. It was not even her language. It was not a language she knew.

  The world faded. Pip was dimly aware of stumbling, falling on the flagstones, skinning her knees and palms as she lost control of her muscles. She came round–it could only have been seconds, because fresh crimson welled from a cut on her palm as she watched–and rose dizzily to her feet. Hunagu! She had to reach Hunagu before Shimmer … Pip stumbled in confusion. She stared stupidly at the scene before her. Hunagu and Shimmerith were frozen like flies in amber, the Dragon caught mid-air in the act of thrusting her talons into the Oraial’s spine; Hunagu with a half-smile of recognition pasted onto his lips as he gazed in her direction.

  She rasped the first thing that came to mind. “Uh … Hunagu, come here.”

  The Ape jerked into motion. “Pip! I found you.”

  Pip shook her head, dumbfounded. What was holding Shimmerith aloft? There was a roaring in her ears, a sheath of ice encasing her spine. Magic? Of all the weird and inexplicable things which had happened in her life, this had to be the strangest of all. Everything about Shimmerith was perfect and deadly, from the flare of her wings, to the angle of her claws and the snarl pulling her lips back from her fangs as she focussed on the spot where the Ape had been. Yet she hung mid-air as if suspended by invisible ropes.

  Hunagu swept her up into his great arms. Here came Master Adak on the run, his sword held left-handed, his right arm still in a light sling as he angled for the Ape.

  “Stop,” she called in Pygmy. “It’s alright. Hunagu and I are friends.” And to the watching Masters and Journeymen, she called, “Everyone, simmer down. Shimmerith? Be free.”

  This time, the words were unimportant. The sentiment was. As if she had released a taut rope from her mind, Pip suddenly felt relieved.

  Behind Hunagu, Shimmerith slammed into the ground with the grace of a flying boulder–robbed of her prey, her strike went away. She whirled, tearing up great clods of earth with her claws as she oriented on her target.