Dragon Champion

by E. E. Knight

  He tucked his legs to his sides as he dived, plunging into the water like an arrow. Without even reading the stars, he felt the ship was heading north, so he was on the wrong side of the vessel. He opened his eyes with water-lids lowered, then pivoted under the hull of the ship.

  The chains dragged at him. He had to thrash to move through the water, and at a pace he’d never be able to keep up for with them trailing long behind him. He broke the surface at the far side of the ship and chewed his other foreclaw free. He could see nothing on the horizon to the east over the gentle swell.

  The ship was his prison, but it did float. He pressed his legs to the side and wiggled his hips, shoulder, and tail to swim to the part under the overhang of the back. Swimming would be so easy if it weren’t for the metal dangling beneath him, and the weight of his collars. He clung on to the wood of the ship with his good claw as he freed his hind legs, chewing through the leather bags. He lost teeth in the process, but they were just hatchling teeth.

  Spitting blood, he looked at the collar under his arms. That wretched human had somehow fixed it in a way that he could not see how to get it off. But he might be able to break the chain dragging at him. He clamped his teeth to the wooden wing that steered the ship and curled his spine, bringing his bigger back legs to the loops of the chain. He fixed his claws in the convenient holds and called on what reserves of strength he had, pretending he had a dwarf to gut under his hind legs.

  Auron’s legs, so long confined, hardly had the power to keep their grip, but the muscles in his back broke the chain, and its accursed links went to the bottom unregretted. He heard man voices above, searching the sea for him, but the ship did not stop. He re-gripped the back of the ship and managed to get the chain of the neck collar off as well. He tried to slip the metal collar off his head, but he couldn’t remove it without taking his head with it.

  He panted after the effort, legs shaking with fatigue. Thank the egg that sheltered me, they’re useless when swimming. More and more men were going to the rail around the ship; sooner or later one might think to look under the stern. He closed his water-lids again and swam underwater from the ship, into the pathless ocean. He might exhaust himself, he might sink, but he’d do it as a free dragon.

  Chapter 8

  Seawater provided a strange buoyancy. It lifted him, like an updraft in his parents’ memories of flying.

  If it weren’t for the collars, he’d swim forever, Auron thought. He found he could course along in the water with just his nose and eyes above the surface. With his great lungs full of air, staying afloat needed no effort at all. Which was as well, for as he swam steadily east he found he needed more and more drifting breaks.

  He realized it was fortunate he didn’t have heavy scales. The sea would not have been so kind to him with a thick layer of armor all around his body. He remembered Mother’s words about weaknesses not always being weaknesses, and he turned on his back and stretched his legs in the air until he sank for the pure joy of it. The fresh air, exercise, and stimulating seawater, after his confinement in wagon and ship’s hold, brought him back from the torpor of captivity into something like the exhilaration he felt after his first kill with Wistala. He looked to the stars and wondered about her.

  Mental state or no, his body needed rest, food, and water. He drank some seawater, but it gave him cramps. He had heard the sea was full of fish, but on his short dives, even with water-lids raised and the sea stinging his eyes, he saw nothing to eat. He bit at some floating gob of translucence that night, and it somehow hurt him on the armpit and neck, raising welts that still pained him two days later as the waves began to rise when the Air and Water Spirits took up arms.

  He floated out the mild storm, feeling it push him north. Though he could not see the stars, something in him told him he was far away from home, impossibly far from Wistala and Father. When the weather lifted, he searched the horizons anxiously, hoping for sign of land. His laps thrusting himself eastward grew briefer and briefer.

  The sight of birds flying east the afternoon after the storm gave him heart. Sure enough, they soared above the next day, and moved back east at night. He followed them as best he could, trying to rest less and swim more despite hunger and thirst, until the next morning when he saw the dawn break over a bump on the horizon.

  Sun! Glorious Sun revealed land to him. So that was why dragons used their wings, to rise to the Sun and play nearer to Her! Father had spoken of the Spirits and the Upper World, but Auron took an oath to himself that if he ever had hatchlings, he would teach them first and foremost to be grateful to the Sun, She who showered the Upper World with life-giving light.

  As the giddiness faded he struggled toward the bump on the horizon, swimming across the current. The last struggle. The land disappeared, and for a time he feared he had been having visions brought on by swallowing seawater. Then he saw it again, a blue smear on the horizon.

  It was too much for him. He stopped and rested. Every moment floating in the current dragged him north, away from the land. He clamped his teeth and started the long labor of body and tail again. He fixed his eyes on the land, and swam and swam until he felt it more desirable to sink and die.

  A strange clarity broke through Auron’s veil of despair. He knew he was being faced with the first great struggle of his life. Not against foe, not against fate, not against even the sea. The true battle was within him. His will to live was losing the battle, outnumbered by a tired body, achingly empty innards, and a bled-dry spirit ready to abandon the struggle.

  If my mind wants to give up, I’ll ignore it and concentrate on my body. That way my will only has one enemy to fight.

  He shut his eyes and sank until just the tip of his nose stood above the waves. He swam through pain, swam through exhaustion, swam past death of hope. Nothing would stop his body unless his heart ceased to beat, and he decided he would force that to keep pumping if it came to a test. . . . And so he touched sand.

  He lifted his head out of the water. Waves were pushing him up to a beach, beneath upright rocks huddled together like a family of giants crowned by bird droppings. Gulls and split-tailed avians he had no word for floated above on the air, ignoring his struggle. He felt more like a corpse than like a dragon. He couldn’t even drag himself out of the water; it pushed and rolled him up onto the beach like a piece of driftwood. The feel of being on dry land sickened him. He knew he was not moving, but the ground still seemed to lift him up and set him down as regularly as the waves. He gave in to his fatigue and let go of consciousness.

  A pinch in his nostril woke him. A little creature standing on legs like claws pulled at his flesh with a snipping little hand, holding a second giant mandible before it like a warrior brandishing a shield.

  Auron snapped at it and got it down, feeling it twitch in his throat. There was another at the elbow of his rear leg; he craned his neck around and it ran sideways, waving the ridiculous claw at him. He gobbled that one down, too.

  Splashes in the water caught his eye, too late to get the other crabs on the beach. It was night, or early morning. The wind had grown cold, and the ocean had shrunk away from where it had deposited him.

  Auron got to his feet. He wanted water. He wanted water more than anything.

  He crawled over to the rocks. They were on the highest land about; there didn’t seem to be much to this part of the coast. The sea curved away on both sides of his hook-shaped beach.

  He looked up at the top of the rocks, not even as high as the egg shelf had been from the cavern floor, but he had no strength to leap. He climbed, his twin collars clanking against the stone. He found a bird nest, but no eggs were within. Either it had been raided or it was the wrong time of year for these birds. He looked up at the Bowing Dragon. It was higher in the sky than he had ever seen it.

  Disturbed gulls screamed at him as he climbed, but he ignored them. He reached the top of the boulders and looked around. There were no hills, just trees—stumpy trees over coarse bushes with more roc
ks sticking out among them in a sea of wind-bent grasses.

  Pools of bird-dirtied water stood atop the rocks. Rainwater! He drank the vile stuff, but foul or not, it helped the cramping feeling in his innards and gave him fresh life.

  He wondered where he was. There was more ocean on the other side of this place; it seemed to be a long finger of land. Perhaps an island. He’d wait for daylight and explore to the north—

  A shape landed atop the rock next to his; he smelled dragon.

  “What-what? What-what?” a drake thundered. It had blue-green scales, like wet shale.

  “I’ve—,” Auron said.

  “What-what! Not here ye don’t, hatchling. I’ll roast ye. This me island.”

  “I’ve—,”Auron tried again.

  “Back-back to the sea! Back-back to the water! Interloper! Out-out!” it snarled, advancing on him, ready to bite.

  Auron backed up, and he fell with a thump to the sand below. The drake leaped, but Auron scuttled out of the way in time. It lashed out with a claw, sending a spray of sand at him. It charged him. Auron dragon-dashed into the water.

  “I can’t swim anymore—I’ll die,” Auron pleaded.

  “A good thing, too, by me mind, gray-gray.”

  The drake patrolled the beach, watching Auron as he swam south and around the island.

  “Can you tell me how to get to land?” Auron shouted.

  “Ye said ye’d drown. Get on with it, hatchling-hatchling.” It paced back and forth, raising and lowering its head with aggressive jerks.

  Auron’s hope fled, and he swam east around the island’s farthest point. The drake watched him, standing like a dragon shaped of stone, until Auron didn’t have the heart to look back anymore. The island receded behind him as the moon looked down on him. He swam in the calm water behind the island, not even bothering to raise his head. The stars came right to the horizon to the east. There was no more land, and his collars were too heavy. His tail thrusts gave out, and he rolled on his back and floated, neck pointing this way and that, directionless.

  Something bumped him. For a moment he feared it was the drake, come to put an end to him. But it had a smooth skin, a little warmer than the water.

  It was some sort of fish. No, fish weren’t warm, and it breathed through an aperture atop its head. He craned his neck down and looked into an eye. A merry eye, one that seemed amused with the strange creature on its back in the night.

  Another one broke the surface next to the first, looking at Auron before disappearing in a flash of glistening fin and tail.

  Auron tried thinking at them, but got nothing except a comforting feeling of friendly intelligence. A head popped out of the water: oversize forehead and a short, smiling snout. It was a familiar-looking face, more so than that of the hominids, dragonlike in general form except for the lack of crest and placement of the eyes. Dolphins, they were dolphins, he realized, dredging a memory of Mother’s from his subconscious.

  Whatever they were, they were moving through the water. The one under him sank, and another came up, gently pushing him on the belly. Auron rode it for a while, its back fin tucked under his foreleg, until it sank and was replaced by another. As if pleased with themselves, the dolphins began to leap and play.

  By the time dawn came, Auron realized he was within an easy swim of another shore. A real shore. Mountains rose almost out of the water, green moss covered mountains, with waterfalls zigzagging down their sides. He found the strength to swim into one of the freshwater inlets, and he drank carefully from the waterfall. Echoes of Father warning him never to drink too much after exerting himself sounded in his ears. The dolphins bathed in it, as well, squeaking and clucking at each other like birds. He raised his neck to look down the narrow strip of beach. Some kind of human construction hugged the rocky walls of the mountains at another wider inlet. He realized that what he had thought were stars on the horizon were the fires of man.

  Something excited the dolphins, and they vanished. Auron saw ships leaving the man inlet, three wooden ships each with a single mast—though for now, the men worked the boats with long oars on either side. Auron recognized nets hanging from the sides, and he shuddered. He froze against the side of the mountain, hiding in plain sight. Men never spotted you unless you moved. But the ships were looking for fish, not dragons, and they moved out into the bay, dragging nets between them.

  Where there were men, there would be garbage, rats that ate the garbage, cats that hunted the rats, and dogs that chased the cats, any of which Auron would gladly eat. But not in daylight. For now, he could drink and sleep. He wiggled into the cold sand among some rocks at the base of the mountain until only an eye and his nostrils were above ground, and he slept.

  That night he raided the garbage pile, crunching down fish heads and tails. He had no luck with rats, cats, or dogs. Perhaps his smell warded them off, even in the reeking trash pile.

  Not to worry, he thought, licking up scrapings unfit even for pigs, The next night, or the next, they’ll grow used to it, and get too close.

  A dog barked at him, and a second took up the call until the first was silenced by a shout from its owner. He left the waterside trash heap and nosed along the riverbank until he came across a nest of waterfowl eggs. The mother fled to the air, and when the last egg had been eaten, Auron crossed the inlet to the steep mountainside opposite the man dwellings. He climbed it in the dark, wanting a good look at the coast from the heights.

  He napped until dawn amid green mosses and grasses atop the cliff; when the sun lit the coast, he had some idea of where he was. Eastward, the northern marches of the string of mountains that his parents had chosen as their home range matched the white of the clouds with their snowcaps. There looked to be forests between mountains and coast, running almost to the edge of the dry world. North and south, the coast stretched to the horizon in broken cliffs, a narrow beach and sentinel rocks washed by the water. West, he could see ocean, a faraway chain of low islands at the horizon, including a long grassy one inhabited by an unpleasant drake. It was a cloudy, rainy land. Auron felt the pressure of clouds piled up against the mountain. With nowhere to go, they lightened their burden by dumping rain onto the belt of forest.

  He explored the cliff top and found more tracks of man and horse than he felt comfortable with, and he felt very small and lost in the vast distance between sea and mountains. He saw flocks of sheep, sheltering out of the wind. Where there were sheep, there would be shepherds, dogs, men on horses. Why couldn’t he have landed on a coast that knew the sound of wild wolves?

  He wasn’t up to a long overland journey just yet. He had to eat, get his health and strength back. From what his parents had told him, even the mountains might not be a refuge; dragons dwelt there, and they would no more accept him than the island drake had.

  Auron didn’t dare climb down the cliffs in daylight—he might be spotted. He needed time to think. Rain swept in from the ocean, and he watched the sailors on the fleet of open boats bring in their nets.

  There was another waterfall to the north of the village where the women took their water pots and laundry. The watercourse didn’t run through the settlement, but the people traveled from one side of it to the other often enough that they had built a footbridge. Some gardens stood at the foot of the cliff, there, in good soil formed by the endless fall of dead vegetation from the cliffs. Perhaps at one time the inhabitants also feared something farther north; the beginnings of a wall stood along the stream on the village side, but it had never been completed.

  The women used the wall to sort linen as they washed it, and to get some of the water weight out of the cloth before carrying it in baskets back to their homes. Auron knew all this because after another night raiding garbage in which he managed to take a bloated rat and two gulls, he spent a day watching life from the other side of the inlet. A convenient cluster of rocks stood just offshore at the mouth of the stream. He hugged them, draped with seaweed, looking like just another projection in the storm-toss
ed surf. He repeated the vigil the next day, after he decided what he would do if an opportunity arose.

  Many of the village children, especially the females, accompanied their mothers in the routine. They played or helped according to the disposition of the parent, while the women talked in melodious voices that reminded Auron of bird chatter at dawn. One potbellied child in a smock wandered across the beach, ignoring the occasional brayed voice of her parent. A long-haired boy sat on the footbridge, dangling a line in the stream. He kept her from crossing the bridge, and the girl went to the wet sand at the water’s edge and began to make hills, decorating them with washed-up shells.

  Auron slipped into the water, coloring himself like the sea bottom, and he drifted toward the beach with gentle movements. A flying pelican dipped low to take a look, and thought better of it.

  The boy perhaps saw his back appear among waves, for he shouted. At the noise, Auron shot out of the surf and had the child in his jaws before she even could turn to see what was coming at her out of the ocean. He whipped his head back and forth, breaking her neck and silencing the brief scream.

  At the stream, women forgot their laundry and snatched up their children. Auron raised his head, limp child in his jaws, and looked at the stick-thin boy. The boy dropped his pole and took up a stone from the foundation at the edge of the footbridge.

  Brave, but too late, Auron thought. He returned to the surf. Out of rock-throwing range from the shore, he came up again and rolled over on his back to eat, bobbing in the easy swell.