“Good,” Solet says.
“Besides, a dragon thinks either food or enemy,” Mylla says.
Solet has an idea. “Tell the Pyg if the dragon passes without dropping the stag, she should send up some bolts to get its attention.” Mylla flashes. “We may have to improvise a bit with this one.” That might not be a bad thing. After two successful attacks, then the dry season, the crews may have gotten complacent or bored. What could happen? they might be thinking. How many ways could a dragon and a galley fight? If they lost interest, they could lose focus, then real problems would arise.
Solet says, “Oh, and tell them, ‘Good luck.’ ”
Mylla flashes.
Barad responds, “You too, Mylla.”
She scowls at Solet. “You’re a bad man,” Mylla says as he and Jos grin.
By the time the dragon flies over the rocky shore, the crews are prepared: goggles and bandanas on, weapons ready, decks sanded, pails of water and sand at hand. The dragon glides toward them, a hundred yards high, to investigate. Solet stands at the front of the stern deck and says to Jos, “Let’s begin.”
Jos blows three shrill notes. Mylla flashes. The Pyg and the Kolos acknowledge. As the Pyg backrows, the monoremes row forward, creating a pocket between the ships.
When the dragon reaches the edge of the pocket, the Pyg blasts two large packets of pepper into the air. The spicers have charged them well: the packets explode in front of the dragon, and the pepper washes across the beast’s face. It chokes and drops, catches itself, and flings the stag, which bounces down the Pyg’s deck.
The Pyg’s crew comes alive, to Solet’s satisfaction.
The dragon swerves down and out of the cloud and straight into a harpoon fired from the Kolos. The iron finds the hollow beneath the dragon’s left shoulder, and the dragon swerves toward the Pyg. The harpoon chain, painted bright red, clatters as it unspools. When the paint changes to white a sailor locks the winch. A harpooner on the Pyg buries an iron in its right thigh. Again red chain unspools as the dragon retreats from the pocket, turning the Kolos’s bow. The white chain appears, the winch is locked, and the Pyg’s deck strains. The galleys backrow at right angles to each other, stretching the dragon between them and too far away for its breath to reach either. Perfect.
The dragon’s wings, bigger than sails, gulp huge bowls of air and drag the galleys toward shore. Solet didn’t think that was possible. It has to tire soon.
The deck around the winches puckers. The galleys are drawn closer together. Harpooners on each galley fire, landing shots in its left leg and right side, enraging the dragon and holding it more securely. The winches settle. The steersmen lean on their oars and pipe for the galleys to row back and away, which spreads the dragon out again. The galleys are still moving toward shore, though.
Now archers, who aren’t sailors doubling as crossbowmen and who can fire more frequently and accurately, move up and shoot at the dragon’s eyes. Arrows whisker its snout. The Pyg’s pepper pot gives it another whiff.
Mylla winces as the harpoons pull out the dragon’s hide, and the creature gags on the pepper. Its roars are horrible. She thinks she hears words, threats promising the worst sort of death. Its head and neck twist wildly. It heaves more furiously and to her horror the bows of the galleys lift a bit and the crews brace themselves. She has to be like Solet, though: However impressive dragons are, and in the old books she’s read dragons are spell-weaving, mysterious, and wise, in reality they are just big cows waiting to be slaughtered.
Solet says, “Jos, take us behind it. Mylla, tell our harpooners, on my signal, to pin its wings.” It can’t stay up with three galleys on it, he thinks, not with three. Jos pipes and the galley glides around the struggling dragon. Solet raises his fist, and the harpooners raise their firing rods.
When the dragon flings out its wings, he hammers the rail. One iron bursts through the right wing and falls into the water. The dangling chain widens the hole in the membrane with each flap. The second iron catches in the thicker membrane near the dragon’s left elbow. Solet orders, “Backrow halftime.” The chain unspools. When it turns white, the winch is locked, and the galley pulls the wing back until the dragon can barely stay aloft.
This is almost too easy, Solet thinks. The shipowners have to be impressed.
The dragon, desperate for lift, changes tactics and lunges, pulling the Gamo and causing the Pyg and the Kolos to lurch. The Pyg’s rowers lose their coordination for a moment, the dragon lunges again, and the chains connecting them slacken considerably. As the Pyg’s oars find the water together again, the dragon’s head lowers against its chest, its belly heaves, and its head flips up. A huge, yolky gob flies from its mouth and splashes just ahead of the Pyg’s bow.
The yolk doesn’t splatter. It spreads. Waves sloshing over it burst, and the spray wafts over the harpooners, who frantically rub their hands and faces.
Peering beneath the dragon’s wings, Mylla says, “What was that?”
Solet shakes his head. “Vomit?”
“Acid,” Jos says. “Same idea, though.”
Mulcent says, “Why is it not breathing fire?”
How long he has been standing beside them on the stern deck, still as a piling, Solet doesn’t know, but this is no place for him. “To the mast,” he says, “or to your cabin.”
“We sell phlogiston,” Mulcent says. “What use is . . . regurgitation?”
Solet’s hand is waving to larboard as Jos maneuvers them directly behind the dragon so they can pull it away from the Pyg. He says, “This is hardly—it still has hide and bone.”
“The profit is in the phlogiston,” Mulcent says. “Hide and bone won’t recoup the repair costs you will inevitably incur. Cut it loose.”
“It’s too late for that,” Solet says. “This isn’t some gamefish. It’s a dragon. It’ll swallow you whole if we let it go.” The dragon lunges again to make his point, throwing them off balance.
“Cut it loose,” Mulcent says, regaining himself, “so we can cut our losses.”
“I’m captain of this ship,” Solet says. “Mylla, two more harpoons.”
“And I own these ships,” Mulcent says. “You’re just a foreman in fancy pants.”
Jos’s eyes widen. This is too much for Solet. Before he does anything rash, he shouts down the ladder to two firemen, “Put this man in his cabin. If he tries to leave, put him in a barrel and nail the lid down.”
The men scramble up and grab Mulcent, who tries to shake them off. As they pull him down the ladder, he says, “That’s the end of the operation. And you.”
“Only a fool leaves an Ynessi with nothing to lose,” Solet says. This worries Jos even more than Mulcent’s comment.
Meanwhile, the dragon turns its head all the way around and peers at Mylla. Its eyes remind her of Solet’s when he’s up to something.
The dragon’s belly heaves again, its head whips around and another gob flies at the Pyg. The whip action gives the gob more momentum; it clears the bow and foredeck and breaks on the archers. They’re knocked back by its weight, and it spreads over their skin. The Pyg’s harpooners dance around the deck to avoid the fumes.
Firemen with pails move in to douse the injured with water, thinking the acid some strange liquid fire, but the water makes their skin boil and spit. Those with shovels scoop up the sand spread on the deck to remove the acid and toss it overboard. The deck is turning black, and all understand if the acid burns through, it’ll kill the rowers, then go through the hull and kill the ship.
One shoveler named Blass notices a clump has landed on the powder barrel. It reminds him of a jellyfish stranded on a beach after a tide. He and his sister used to poke them to see if they would move. They never did. Then the clump bubbles and drops through the steel lid.
In the dragon’s lee Solet sees a flash make the dragon’s wings translucent. He watches shards of wo
od and metal, bone and Blass, pierce the wings’ membranes and rain across the Gamo, chased by an immense boom, men’s screams, the dragon’s roar, the snap of chains, and the groaning of a ship going down by its bow. Somehow above them all he hears a long sharp whistle from the Kolos.
Through a rent in the dragon’s wing, Mylla sees Barad flash the strangest thing: “He’s coming.”
3
* * *
Bodger, the Gamo’s larboard harpooner, reloads. He barely feels the shrapnel embedded in his skin, he’s so furious that his first shot went through the wing. After an engagement, the captain, mates, and harpooners discuss every shot, and a miss will cost him part of his monthly. Worse, Gibbery, the starboard harpooner, is offering him smug suggestions for improvement. Gibbery could care less if he hits nor does he care about money, which he gambles away. He loves the hunt, and he’d be just as happy with a shortbow in the woods, waiting for a turkey to waddle by. Bodger doesn’t have that luxury. He has family, most too young or too injured to work. He decides he’ll shoot the dragon’s rump. A cheap shot, but at this point they just have to hold it.
“What is that?” Gibbery says. A thick gray line waves in the sky.
“Another dragon,” Bodger says. This one’s much smaller than the green, but he bets it will circle around the green and give him a perfect target. He pivots the cannon and readies the firing rod. This prize is all his. And the bonus for taking it.
Mulcent stalks to the porthole, which gives a view of the darkening sea, the dismal shore, and the first glimpses of the southern constellations. The Crow. The Cup. The Water Snake. His brother had known them all. From the time they were boys, all his brother had dreamed about was sailing the world like their grandfather and father. He’d made a list of the cities he would visit, creatures he would see, and tastes and smells he would experience. Mulcent, though, knew the real adventures were in the counting books, plus they offered no chance of drowning the way his brother eventually did.
He puts his goggled eye to the spyhole in the door as an explosion lights up the dragon’s wings, then debris shreds them. The Gamo jerks back, and Mulcent’s nose is mashed against the door. Blood trickles over his top lip. He has to put a stop to this misadventure. He figured Solet’s reports underplayed the risks he took, but not by this much.
Sumpt staggers into view, his bottle near empty, debris fluttering around him, pepper getting into his unprotected eyes. Mulcent’s guards try to corral him, and Mulcent takes the opportunity to slip out.
“Magnificent!” Sumpt says to the air as Mulcent passes them. “What a creature. I will have its foot for a wastebasket.”
Mulcent runs to the foredeck where he sees Bodger bent over his cannon, firing rod in hand. No more chains, Mulcent thinks. He rushes the harpooner and grabs his arm.
The harpooner, shorter than him, but solid as an iron, wheels around in confusion, then pushes Mulcent forward. They fall together off the foredeck. Mulcent feels every breath he’s ever taken crushed from his body. Over the man’s ham of a shoulder he sees a small gray dragon rip past the bow and up the larboard rail. Was someone riding it? This harpooner just saved his life. He should be rewarded in some way. Fortunately Mulcent travels with a sleeve of commemorative coins for just such an occasion.
With the Pyg’s chains broken by the explosion, the Gamo heaves toward shore, and the green dragon twists between it and the Kolos. The Pyg emerges from behind the dragon’s wing, backrowing and turning sharply in order to drag its shattered bow to shore before the galley goes under.
Mylla flashes Barad, “Who is ‘he’?” He doesn’t respond with his candlebox. Instead he points behind her.
She turns as the dragon tears over the stern deck. She yells, “Someone’s riding it!” It isn’t possible. The tales she read often featured people riding dragons, but no one ever had, at least not for long. She would do anything to ride a dragon. She notes the saddle, the packs, the spears, the bearded man in his strange black outfit, the object he drops to the stern deck, before everything speeds up again and the gray heads for the Pyg.
“Barad!” Mylla yells, as if the boy could hear her, then flashes, “Look out!”
The gray dragon swathes the Pyg’s stern deck with flames. Her captain leaps over the side, nearly incinerated by the time he splashes into the water. Her steersman disappears altogether. Barad leaps to the main deck, but she can’t tell if the flames caught him. “No!” she whispers and immediately hopes Solet and Jos didn’t hear that.
The Pyg’s oarmaster, Kley, unaware of the casualties on the stern deck and not hearing any piping to straighten out the galley, lets the rowers continue turning until the galley’s stern is aimed at the Gamo and they are headed right for each other. Before Solet can open his mouth, Jos pipes “all stop” as loud as he can, over and over, until both the Gamo and the Pyg drag oars. The Pyg pulls up twenty yards from the Gamo’s larboard side.
Solet claps Jos on the back. He doesn’t know what he’ll say to his sisters, but one of them will have this man. He may not be of the sea, but he certainly owns it.
Through the smoke and confusion Mylla sees flashing from the Pyg’s waist: “You all right?” She sighs with relief.
Solet sees the flashing and the sigh. Well played, Barad.
One of the Pyg’s stern shutters flips up. A face appears: the powder boy. Solet yells, “Kley is captain. And first mate. You’re his eyes. Get to shore.” The powder boy relays the message to the oarmaster. The Pyg pivots and heads inland double-time. They might actually make it, Solet thinks, and I am going to salvage this day.
“Mylla, flash the Kolos. Kill the green. And the rider. I want the gray.” Mylla smiles and leans over the rail to flash past the dragon.
With only the Kolos pulling, though, the dragon regains some lift, maneuverability, and, worse, heart. It shortens its wings to minimize the effects of the damage they’ve taken and lunges at the Kolos. The chains between them slacken. Its head drops to its chest.
Gibbery pulls Bodger off Mulcent. The harpooner is immediately filled with buyer’s remorse. Forget the bonus Mulcent stole from him. Forget his job. He’ll be lucky to escape the gibbet for touching an owner. Who will feed his family then?
The gray dragon circles behind the green, heading around the Kolos.
“Shoot that little gray,” Gibbery whispers to Bodger, “and the owner will forget everything.”
“No,” Mulcent says. He stands up and adjusts his goggles. “Shoot the rider, and your reward will be even greater. I want that dragon.”
Greater? Bodger thinks.
Solet orders, “Backrow, larboard!” Jos pipes. The Gamo responds instantly, jerking the dragon. Its gob of acid flies wide right of the Kolos, only splattering a few oars and sending up a caustic spray.
A cheer from the other monoreme is cut short when the green sees the gray flying behind her. It loses all sense of itself. It roars and digs through the air toward the gray, dragging the Gamo so hard its oars get disordered. The Kolos backrows, trying to keep its distance, and its harpooners blast two irons into its belly, but the dragon won’t be dissuaded. It lands on the foredeck, crushing the cannons, and crawls down the galley as if it were a bridge, dragging its chains and crushing men and deck with every step.
Solet stamps at the deck of the Gamo with his heel and orders again, “Backrow, double-time.” Jos pipes. With every step the dragon takes, the Gamo is pulled closer to the Kolos, which is so low in the water it will act like a ram.
Archers flee to the Kolos’s stern deck, and her captain orders them to shoot the rider, but the gray is darting too quickly and the galley is rocking too severely for them to hit it.
The Gamo’s aft oars organize themselves and pull. The dragon’s foot slips off the side of the Kolos and snaps some dangling forward oars, their rowers crushed beneath the smashed deck. Its eyes never leave the gray.
Jos says
, “The little one must be in heat.”
“We’ll cool it down,” Solet says. “Bring us wide of the Kolos. We’ll pull it off her. Mylla, tell the harpooners to kill the dragon. Tell the archers to shoot the rider.”
The green grabs onto the Kolos’s mast to regain its balance, and a horrible cracking comes from deep within the galley. Her hull has snapped beneath the dragon’s weight. Water rushes into the rowers’ deck, from beneath, then every side. Dozens of voices cry out in terror and are suddenly silenced.
The dragon tries to escape the sinking ship, but the chains connecting it to the Kolos are tangled in wreckage on the deck and it can’t get free. It roars in frustration and launches itself over the side, tangling the chains farther on the mast. The galley rolls sidewise. Timbers shatter throughout the ship.
Solet sees Mulcent by the foredeck. He has no idea why he’s there or when or how he got there, but it makes his next order all the more painful. “Cut the dragon loose,” he says, “before we’re pulled under also.”
Mylla flashes. The winches are disengaged. Chains unspool and clatter over the side. Mulcent looks at Solet with a miserable smirk and shakes his head.
Freed, the Gamo slides into a safer position off the Kolos’s starboard beam. Bodger and Gibbery have already undone the chains from their irons. Gibbery fires at the dragon’s head, but it moves at the last second, trying to get itself back on deck, and the iron misses. Bodger fires. His iron flies true and catches the dragon in the cheek. Its head collapses on deck. Its wings spread over the water. The Kolos settles and somehow stays afloat, now a raft.
Solet says, “Great shot. Mylla, tell the Kolos to use the dinghy to bring her survivors to us. Then we’ll use it to pick up those in the water. Let’s see if they complain now about having to learn to swim. Jos, bring us astern so we can cover them better.”
Mylla isn’t paying attention, though. She’s looking at what the rider dropped onto the stern deck. She holds it up for the others to see: a dragonskin boot.
The Dragon Round Page 18