by Marc Secchia
* * * *
So much for flying. The following morning, after a pre-dawn breakfast taken in the deserted dining hall, Pip trudged along the trail leading to the volcano the Dragons called The Roost. An early mist wreathed the steep volcanic cliffs, but above, through gaps in the drifting mist, she saw several Dragons circling aloft. The Dragon Elders had tripled the guard on the Academy. Tripled! Workmen had removed the door she had smashed.
Glumly, she wondered if she would ever belong anywhere. Dragon? Human? She was neither, apparently. A Shapeshifter. Neither this nor that, as she had been all her life.
Ralti sheep droppings. Heaps of them.
The trail led up the saddle between two volcanic peaks, across a barren landscape of black rock and sulphurous fumaroles, before descending a gentle, bushy slope to the green lake’s shore. The water steamed gently, bubbling in a few places. Opalescent in the gleaming, golden dawn, the waters seemed to invite mystery. Pip paused in admiration. A muscular Jeradian carp breached before her astonished eyes, grabbing one of the foot-long, iridescent dragonflies which skimmed over the surface. Her joyful exclamation was stolen from her lips by the sight of a gold-orange Dragon spearing through the mist, snatching up the hapless carp mid-leap, and downing the eight-foot fish in a single bite.
The Dragon then seemed to fold herself double, switching direction to swoop down on Pip, who ducked instinctively.
“Sulphurous greetings,” she trilled, in a voice as melodious as the frilly edges of her wings. “I am Imogiel the Hatchling-Mother. Kassik assigned you to my care. May I show you to Nak and Shimmerith’s roost?”
Pip took the proffered paw with alacrity. Imogiel deposited her upon one broad, motherly shoulder and watched closely as Pip seated herself between her blunt, solid spine-spikes.
“Comfortable? You’ve done this before.”
Pip laughed brightly. Usually as a Dragon’s captive, mighty Imogiel.
Imogiel bared her fangs. Don’t think you’ve earned any trust yet, little one. Every Dragon knows what you said and did. Be thankful you live to serve your penance.
Abruptly, clouds rolled in to mist her sunny morning. Pip scowled at the lake as it receded in their wake.
At intervals up the steep flanks of The Roost, Dragons preened on rocky ledges and in the mouths of caves, taking in the early suns-shine, such as it was. Pip peered about with every sense alert. She saw a Red father instructing a fledgling with unmistakable sweeps of his forepaw. On a ledge above them, a young Yellow Dragon displayed his wingspan to an aloof, pretty Dragon the colour of a rosy dawn sky. Courting? Pip grinned. He would have to work harder than that.
Here is Shimmerith’s roost, said Imogiel. Be respectful, young Pip, or Shimmerith might just toss you into the lake for fun.
Pip eyed the drop pensively. The lake had to be two thousand feet below her position. You’re awfully stern for a Hatchling-Mother, she said, speaking her thoughts in Dragonish before she thought the better of them.
Imogiel flexed her claws crossly. Shall I send you back to the Elders?
Pip scrambled down her flank in a hurry, landing first on the top of her bent foreleg, then taking the ten-foot slide to the ground with an ungainly yelp.
“Come in, Pip.” Even Shimmerith’s Dragon-voice was melodious. She heard the flutter of Imogiel’s wings as she dropped away from the ledge.
She entered a broad but shallow cave, tucked away to the left of the entrance. A wide, curved crysglass window provided plenty of illumination. Pip sniffed the air. Damp, rot, and … phew, Shimmerith. Did something die in here?
That’s Nak’s area, she said. I’ve grown used to it.
Shimmerith sounded nonchalant, but she examined Pip with eyes that effervesced with magic.
She shrugged, trying to mask her irritation. Shimmerith, you were there. Nothing happened. The Dragon Elders tore scales off my hide, Master Kassik turned Brown-Dragon, I apologised, and I still speak Dragonish today, in case you’re wondering. I mean, I need to think about it, but I can.
Little one, are you a Dragon, as Kassik believes?
I wish I knew.
You do speak Dragonish as though born to it.
Pip wrinkled her nose. She was convinced she smelled a dead rodent. As her eyes adjusted, she saw the end of a bed protruding from behind a tucked-away alcove furthest from the cave entrance. Nak’s booted foot dangled off the end. Clothes were strewn about in piles that seemed designed to breed new forms of insect life. Shimmerith’s bowl-shaped bed in the centre of the cave was no better. Pip saw several ralti sheep bones and part of a skull half-hidden beneath Shimmerith’s belly, and her ralti-skin rugs smelled rank.
She did not know what to say. How could she avoid insulting Shimmerith again?
Um … Shimmerith, where would you like me to start?
Anywhere you like, little one. Just don’t disturb Nak before noon. It’s not worth it.
How’s about we make you more comfortable? Pip struck a note of cheer she did not feel. This job was going to be worse than she had imagined.
By mid-morning, Pip had a much better appreciation of exactly how much worse. She dragged every stinking, mildewed ralti skin out of Shimmerith’s bed and piled them on the ledge outside the cave. There had been a leak in the cave roof–still not fixed, of course–as Nak was apparently far too lazy to care for his roost or his Dragon. Clearing out the remaining sheep bones and fish-heads, Pip disturbed a nest of grey rats and received a nasty bite on her left calf for her trouble.
“Where do I get fresh sheepskins?” she asked Shimmerith.
The Dragon opened one eye sleepily. “Ask Mistress Mya’adara. She knows everything.”
Pip hiked back to the Academy. She returned with three sheepskins and dragged them all the way up to Shimmerith and Nak’s roost.
Those smell nice and fresh, said Shimmerith, shifting to allow Pip to arrange her bed beneath her. She pawed the skins with evident approval. I think I’ll need another twenty or thirty, or so. Can you arrange that?
Sure.
That’s why it was called ‘punishment’.
She managed to haul four sheepskins up the mountain on her next journey. Pip arrived hot, sweaty and breathless at the roost. Nak perched on the end of his bed, looking as though he had wrestled all night with a Dragon and lost. “Ah, my personal servant,” he said, with heavy sarcasm. “I’m hungry. What have you brought me to eat?”
Pip would dearly have loved to hit him.
Instead, she bowed. “What may I bring you, Rider Nak?”
Nak stroked his chin. “Ah. Allow me a moment’s contemplation, my fine minion.”
Five further journeys brought her to the end of her day’s work. Shimmerith smiled a gap-toothed Dragon smile at her. See you tomorrow, little one. Roost well.
She was asleep before she hit her bedroll.
The following day, she ran herself ragged behind a team of masons who had arrived at her request to repair the leak in the cavern roof. Nak assisted by offering her services to fetch cool drinks and snacks from the kitchens, which made him very popular with the workmen. Pip, however, caught several snarky comments about the state of Nak’s ‘stinking hovel’.
She recruited Hunagu to help carry a huge armful of new sheepskins up the mountain the following morning, but he beat a hasty retreat afterward, casting nervous glances at Shimmerith and at Emblazon, drifting lazily on the breezes above the volcano. Emblazon was being unusually attentive, she thought. And Shimmerith, unusually lazy. They would not appreciate a disgraced Pygmy girl stirring up any further trouble. She should put her head down and try to be invisible.
Nak, star Dragon Rider and apple of nobody’s eye more than his own, declared that his ‘lackey’ had given Shimmerith quite enough attention and his own roost could do with a clean-up, Dragon-swift. Pip deliberately stuffed green herbs up her nose in the Pygmy way, before entering his room.
“Very funny,” said Nak. He stalked out of the cave, miffed.
What do I
do with these? Pip asked, much later that afternoon, holding up a pair of under-shorts which were brown and furry with mould. She pulled something else out from beneath the bed. Oh, my life … this is disgusting. What is it?
I think it was women’s underwear, perhaps, several centuries ago? Shimmerith offered. Garbage pile.
No wonder Oyda doesn’t like him.
Nak chose that moment to appear at the cave entrance with a pretty Dragon Rider Pip did not know. “Out!” he commanded, hooking a finger over his shoulder.
“Oh, she’s a sweet little one,” said the woman.
Sweet? Pip rescued the filthy underwear out of the refuse pile. “Nak, where shall I put these for you?”
Nak had the grace to flinch. The other Dragon Rider patted him on the arm. “Maybe another time, Rider. Your roost seems a little busy.”
“You!” Nak howled at Pip, and dashed off after the woman.
Shimmerith rolled her eyes in a droll, Human-like way. He’s a fool where women are concerned, Pip. Don’t mind, he’s not a bad man.
Pip wondered at the note of pride in her voice. What was it between Dragons and their Riders? She did not think a great deal of his behaviour.
* * * *
The following afternoon, after class, Pip lugged a mound of fresh bedding up the mountain for Nak. Shimmerith had shown her the ‘waste disposal system’, as she put it. She aimed a blast of Dragon fire at the refuse pile outside the cave, and burned it to ash. Pip swept the ledge afterward.
On her way past the lake, she came across a group of fledglings, Dragons one to three years old, playing at the lake’s edge. They were already thirty to forty feet in length, and the older fledglings were bigger still. They bugled and hissed at her as Pip, resembling a walking laundry pile, trudged by. One Red, brasher than the rest, tripped her up with a cunningly placed wingtip.
“By my belly-fires,” he called to the others. “It’s the imp who insulted Shimmerith.”
“Yes, and I’m paying for it every day, so please let me past,” said Pip, grumpier than a Dragon with a stomach ache. “Rider Nak needs his bed made.”
The Red Dragon flexed his claws and struck a fine pose. Pip, who had flown on Emblazon, decided the forty-foot youngster was being silly. “Ooh,” she cooed. “You’re so massive.”
“Well, I am the biggest …” he began to preen, before snapping, “If you insult one Dragon, you insult us all. How shall we punish her, Dragon-kin?”
“Roast her fur,” said the Green.
Another Red jostled her from behind. “See what happens if a Dragon stands on her chest?”
Pip dropped the laundry. “You know what I’ll do to you?”
“Oh, but you’re not allowed to use your magic,” the first Red said, archly. “The Elders decreed it, didn’t they, Human runt?”
Fists balled up, she shouted, “Let me past!”
“Not until you’ve had a flying lesson,” said the Red, clutching her ankle. Before she could blink, Pip was dangling upside-down a hundred feet above the lake shore. “Why don’t we play catch? Catch.”
The Green’s paw snagged her tunic a whisker above a boulder. He spiralled lazily upward, saying, “Careful, Red, or you’ll feel Blazon’s fire. Wait, Imogiel’s calling us.”
“Aw, and I was having fun.” The Red snapped playfully at Pip’s swaying hair. “Toss her into the lake.”
Pip landed gracefully in the water, but bruised her tailbone on a hidden boulder. The fledglings were already winging up to the crag where Imogiel awaited them.
“Bullies.”
She waded out of the lake, soaked. Oh well, there was nothing for it. Nak and Shimmerith were on patrol, and chances were good the only creatures she’d meet up the mountain were Dragons. Pip took off her clothes and laid them on a flat obsidian boulder to dry. There. She was jungle-clad.
When she returned, she swam in the lake to cool off. Well, the temperature was too warm to truly cool, but still beautiful. The water tingled against her skin, full of a liquescent magic which seemed to massage her skin with prickles of a not unpleasant foreboding. Lovely. Life in the Academy was not so bad. Pip went to retrieve her clothes, and found only a pile of ash left on the boulder, with a Dragon’s claw-mark deliberately smudged through it.
“Bullies!” She shook her fist at the sky, where the fledgling group was taking lessons in aerial acrobatics from Imogiel.
Fine. Pip, naked as any jungle animal, marched back to the Academy, steaming like a pot of water left too long on the boil. First the students, now the Dragons. Did everyone have to pick on her?
She took the steps up to the field outside the dining hall two at a time. Deserted. However, three-quarters of the way across the open area, Nak emerged from the portico and strolled down the path toward her. Pip halted. Nak halted, too.
He stared at her with a strangely wistful gleam in his eye.
For the first time in her life, Pip felt uncomfortable in her own skin. She did not trust that look.
Advancing upon her, Nak declared, “Ah, thou gentle breath of the forest, thou art a flower of surpassing splendour–nay, a precious bud, ripe for the plucking.”
Pip blushed furiously. “Nak, don’t look …”
“Don’t look? Fie, the beauty of such a petal as thee should be celebrated, not hid from the admirer.” He seized her wrist. “Come away with me, my delight, my inspiration, and I shall lead thee by pleasant paths to the Isle of–”
“No!”
Nak seemed hurt, but he managed to rally with another descent into the ancient poetic language, “Surely the Island-World doth sing in mine ears, dear flower of the jungle, as it does in thine? Shall I not woo thee most gently, with words of poetry?”
A strange warmth filled her belly. Pip had never imagined a man could make her feel so befuddled.
At that moment, the entire class of second year boys came jogging around the corner of the kitchen building, no doubt on a training run, but as they caught sight of Nak and a very nude Pip apparently holding hands, the foremost runner of their group gaped and tripped over his own feet. Boys piled upon boys. Gasps and whistles and catcalls rose from them as they sorted themselves out.
Boys–did they have to stare as if they’d never seen a naked girl before? Pip raised her sharp little chin. “Ha!” And she marched off toward the girls’ dormitory.
“Pip. Student Pip!” A roar came from overhead. Pip shaded her eyes. Twenty stories up, Mistress Mya’adara leaned out of a window. “We do not run around butt-naked in mah school! Yah get in here this instant! When Ah get a hold of yah, girl, yah’d better wish yah were being thrashed by a Dragon.”
She burned as she fled into the dormitory building.
Chapter 19: Bathing Dragons
YaETHI HALTED Pip with an outstretched arm. “Just checking–you are wearing clothes today, right?”
“Oh, flying-sheep-funny, Yaethi.”
Maylin, who occupied the bunk above Yaethi’s, sat up sleepily. “Keep it down to a dull roar, will you? Honestly. Oh, Pip, where are you going at this ridiculous hour?”
“I’m supposed to bathe and clean Shimmerith in the hot springs today,” she said, pulling a face. “It’s part of my training.”
“That’s so unfair,” Yaethi complained, who had apparently managed to snag her arm while still being entirely covered by her blanket, right over her head. “The week’s over. Today’s a rest day. You should be snuggled under your covers–”
“For those who insult Dragons and cavort naked with Dragon Riders in front of the whole school, apparently not,” Maylin pointed out, helpfully.
Pip’s pout turned into a smile as Kaiatha mumbled, “Want some help?”
“Great idea!” shouted Maylin.
Groans of discontent rose from the whole dorm. “Shut your traps!” “Islands’ sakes.” “Go back to sleep.” “Idiots. Where’s the respect?”
Everyone was secretly worrying about the next cut to the first year student body, which was due the followin
g week, but the subject was taboo. Telisia had been hinting at Pip ever since the examinations. Pip held her tongue. She had graced Master Kassik’s carpet once more after the incident with Nak. Having Kassik and Mya’adara bellow at her in concert was novel. Master Alathion had been sniggering all along in the next office. Pip now understood how big people felt about clothing. Strange, but there it was. ‘Indecent?’ She could not think of a single word in Pygmy to express that idea.
In short order, Pip and her overexcited friends hiked out toward the volcanic lake, loaded up with bristly Dragon brushes and nail-clippers suitable for chopping down decently-sized shrubs, arm-long nail files, thin daggers for rooting out parasites, and a large bucket of a special concoction for polishing and protecting Dragon scales. On the way they recruited Casitha into the party, complete with harp and nothing better to do with her rest day, she said.
Shimmerith was already lazing in a steaming half-moon pool alongside the lake, which was fast becoming Pip’s favourite place in Jeradia, despite her recent flying lesson there. Even Maylin fell silent as they approached the sleek Blue Dragon. There was something awesome about the way a Dragon overshadowed any other living creature that made words superfluous. Shimmerith lumbered out of the pool, towering more than twenty feet overhead before lowering her muzzle to smile at them.
“Sulphurous greetings,” she rumbled. “Quite the committee, Pipsqueak.”
“It’s a Dragon sized task,” Pip retorted. As none of her friends seemed brave enough, she pushed them forward for introductions. She added, “We even arranged musical accompaniment for your bath, o mighty Shimmerith.”
The Dragoness stretched lazily. She waddled around the edge of the pool before settling down in a warm spot. Even her waddle had a mesmerising, sinuous grace about it that simply shouted, ‘Dragon!’
She said, “I am about to fly away to Dragon paradise. Scrape and scrub, minions.”