by Laurence Yep
“Bad luck for the airplane then,” Bayang said. “They’ve run into some freebooters. The British and Danish empires fought a savage little war for the Arctic territories thirty years ago. Eventually, the Danes wound up ceding this area to the British in exchange for money, so Nu Danmark became the Cabot Territory. But the Danish colonial forces refused to surrender. They call themselves resistance fighters, but they’re not much more than bandits.”
The freebooters circled the airplane, their rifles trained on it. But then the airplane wagged its wings, the light flickering from one wingtip to another.
A door opened on the airplane fuselage and a human stepped out. Even as he began to drop, his outline blurred and he became the scarred dragon who had haunted Bayang’s nightmares since she was a hatchling. Badik. Many years ago, he had attacked her clan.
Hatred swelled within Bayang and almost made her leap off the wing and dive for her revenge. But the human hatchlings could never control the straw wing on their own, so she stayed, gnashing her fangs together with frustrated clacks.
“Wherever Badik is so’s Roland,” Leech said.
Bayang waited for the freebooters to shoot at Badik or flee, but instead Badik and the riders seemed to be talking. Then the humans actually saluted and banked away.
When Badik gripped the open doorway of the airplane, it dipped under the weight and then righted itself. As he still held on, his shape blurred until he was human again and could step inside and shut the door behind him.
Koko said, “So those big feather dusters are in cahoots with Roland.”
“He probably hired them for whatever he’s got planned,” Bayang said. “I think we’ll carry on with our original plan and catch them in Nova Hafnia.”
The airplane suddenly increased its speed, pulling away from the freebooters. Bayang’s paws tightened on the straw control loops of the wing. They were so near their goal now.
She was just about to coax Naue into going faster when something whistled past. A second and then a third followed immediately.
The badger put a claw through one of three neat little round holes in the wing. “Please tell me that it was big mosquitoes that made these and not bullets.”
Worried, Bayang scanned the clouds ahead and underneath. Armored in scales, she had little to fear from bullets, but the human hatchlings were so fragile. The slightest thing could puncture them. It was a new sensation to feel this vulnerable, not for herself but because of others.
The freebooters were rising toward them, rifles aimed at the large target that was the wing.
“Hey, Naue,” Koko yelled to the wind, “giddy-yap and take us out of here.”
“No mere lumpling can command Naue,” the wind declared haughtily.
Bayang had learned tactics from Sergeant Pindai as well as how to fly, and there was little that the wily old soldier didn’t know. “If you can’t beat an enemy, run,” she had told Bayang. “But if you can’t outrun them, outwit them.”
Thinking fast, Bayang twisted her head around and warned the others to hold on to the straw loops woven into the wing. Then, lifting her head, she shouted to the wind, “Oh, mighty Naue, I know those lumplings below. They said they know a wind who’s stronger and faster.”
“They lie,” the wind bellowed angrily.
The air currents around them grew turbulent and the wing bucked and danced, but still Bayang went on egging the proud gale.
“Lies, lies, lies!” With a deafening bellow, Naue dove, taking their wing with him.
It was like riding a raft down the rapids of a river and it was all Bayang could do to hang on to the loops.
The shocked freebooters never had time to fire as Naue barreled through them. They were knocked loose from their stirrups, and riders and birds screamed as they spun away to the sides, and then Naue was plunging into the thick bank of clouds himself, tearing the mist apart as if it were cotton matting.
For a moment, Bayang couldn’t see, but fine drops sheeted against the invisible walls of the frame, thickening as they sank lower until it was like rain.
And then they broke through the clouds, mist hanging in tattered rags from the edges of the wing.
And—what was it the humans said? Bayang wondered. Yes, it was out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Literally.
Beneath them, a caravan of huge bargelike wind sleds slid along on runners, sails flapping from the sleds’ masts as cannon boomed from their decks. Like wolves snapping at a herd of buffalo were small wind sleds carrying freebooters. Their rifles flashed with popping noises.
And Bayang and her friends were plunging straight toward them.
3
Scirye
“Pull up; pull up!” Koko screamed as they plummeted downward and the ground rose up toward them with alarming speed.
In front of Scirye, Bayang was digging her claws into the straw mat and hauling up at the control loops as she tried to free the wing from the wind’s grip. It was amazing that the flimsy ropes didn’t snap under the strain.
And suddenly they were whipping upward again as Naue leveled off fifty feet from the ground. As they soared parallel to the ground, the wind roared with laughter. “Ho, ho, ho, you lumplings screech like baby cave zephyrs.”
Scirye didn’t think it was a compliment, but Koko didn’t care. “Zipper or zephyr, you can call me what you like. Just don’t wear out my ticker.” The badger wheezed.
Breathing a sigh of relief, Scirye checked their surroundings again. Eleven of the caravan were speeding away, but there was something wrong with the twelfth and largest wind sled. About a hundred freebooters mounted on reindeer circled around the crippled wind sled. One rider waved a tattered Danish flag triumphantly as the others darted in to throw grappling hooks at the sails, trying to tear them. The wind sled had already slowed to a crawl because of the gaps in the canvas.
Kles tapped Scirye’s cheek to get her attention and then pointed a forepaw. “Look! The sled must belong to Sogdians.”
The flag on the wind sled’s mast was beginning to droop as it lost speed, but Scirye could just make out the red fire emblem on the field of yellow. She knew that symbol because her Sogdian nursemaid had worn a pin of it.
Just to the north of the Kushan Empire, the Sogdians had once been fierce warriors. But their wars with Alexander the Great and his Greek successors, then the nomads and the Chinese, had worn down their strength. So the survivors had poured their tremendous energy into trade instead of into fighting—though they could still put up a good fight, as the freebooters were finding out.
Riflemen in red coats and steel helmets fired from the sled’s deck, and little cannon, mounted on swivels at the bow, the sides, and the stern, flashed and boomed at the attacking freebooters.
Scirye couldn’t help remembering her nursemaid, fondly recalling the soft, warm voice singing Sogdian lullabies to her and how the plump woman had wept when she and her sister and mother had left for the Istanbul embassy. Her father had stayed behind in the empire because of his duties as the Griffin Master, for he not only oversaw the imperial eyrie—from lap griffins like Kles to the full-size racing and war griffins—but he also was in charge of the tricky relationship between all the griffins and humans in the empire. As strong and commanding a person as he was, he’d been crying too as he tried to comfort their old servant.
Scirye turned to Bayang. “We have to save them.”
“I’m sorry for them,” the dragon said, “but we’re going after Roland and Badik. We can’t risk wandering into a fight that isn’t ours.”
It was a hard choice, but Scirye had already made many difficult ones. “I don’t expect you to help me,” she said, trying to keep the frightened tremor from her voice, “but Kles and I have to help them. They’re friends of the Kushans. So let us off and then go on ahead. We’ll catch up with you somehow.”
Scirye couldn’t help feeling sad. She had spent most of her childhood moving from one consulate to another whenever her mother ha
d changed posts, so she had never grown close to anyone except Kles. But in the short time that she’d been with her companions, she’d come to think of them as friends.
“Are you crazy?” Koko asked, but the look he gave them suggested he had already made his decision on that matter. “What’re you going to do by yourselves? Do you even know these guys?”
“They could be kin to a person who was very important to me,” Scirye said. Since Sogdians have big clans and extended families, someone’s probably related to Nanny.
Leech studied her. “This is one of those Tumarg things, isn’t it?” Tumarg was the Way of Light, the code of the warrior, and staying true to those laws, Scirye’s sister, Nishke, had died defending her mother and sister and one of her people’s greatest treasures.
Even though she knew she could never match her sister’s example, Scirye nodded. “I have to do this.”
“Then,” Leech said, “I guess they’re important to us too.”
It was Scirye’s turn to be surprised. “But Bayang is right. It’s not your fight.”
Bayang harrumphed. “You don’t understand. If we’re going to defeat Roland and Badik, we have to work as a team, and you’re an important part of that team.”
“So let’s vote,” Leech said, and lifted up his hand. “I say we help out.”
Bayang nodded. “I second that.”
“Well, I don’t,” Koko said, thumping his heels in frustration so that the wing shook slightly. “This is nuts.”
“The ‘ayes’ have it,” Bayang said. “Motion carried.” Lifting her head, the dragon called to Naue again: “Oh, mighty Naue. Can you help the people below?”
“Pele only commanded me to help you,” the willful wind replied. “Great Naue is not your puppet.”
Bayang frowned. “Pele will be displeased.”
“Pele is not here.” Naue laughed. “So do not tell me what pleases her and what does not.”
Scirye decided that if the strategy had worked for Bayang, it would work for her. “We understand, Naue,” she wheedled. “You are too powerful to be anyone’s servant. And anyway, a wind as strong as you could never touch such tiny sails without tearing them.” As a precaution, she motioned her griffin inside her coveralls.
“I am Naue,” the wind boasted. “I am the most delicate of winds. I can pick up a pebble without disturbing anything. A grain of sand. A tear from a baby’s face. Sails are nothing.”
The next moment the wind had swept lower and they were charging across the plain, raising sheets of snow in their wake. Naue bowled over the freebooters and their mounts like so many bowling pins.
The wind sled swelled in their view until they could see the Sogdian crew pointing at them.
“Hey, we’re the good guys!” Koko cried in alarm as the Sogdians raised their rifles and swiveled their cannon to aim at them.
Scirye’s nursemaid had taught her Sogdian, but that had been a simplistic toddler’s vocabulary. From the dim recesses of her memory, she shouted hurriedly, “Friend! Friend!”
Kles had poked his head out of her coveralls and saw what was happening.
“Oh, warriors who travel like shadows across sand and snow,” he shouted loudly in formal Sogdian. Even though Common Sogdian was used more often, the formal dialect was more polite and proper for a first encounter. “We have come to aid thee in thy hour of peril. Do not shoot your mighty weapons of death lest we perish!”
A big man in a hooded fur coat barked out a sharp command and the red-coated Sogdians lowered their rifles.
Naue puffed at the torn sails so they swelled like bubbles, and the wind sled shot forward as if it had rockets instead of runners.
“Ha, this is fun,” Naue boomed.
The snowy plain had seemed so flat when seen from far above, but now Scirye could see how it was humped by small ridges. The wind sled’s riders cried out as the sled bounced into the air and then banged down, sending crates and passengers sliding about the deck.
Still, the wind sled raced on until Scirye heard the sound of cloth tearing and saw the sled’s sails were shredding. Strips whipped back and forth, and the sled’s timbers creaked and groaned under the strain of a speed for which the sled was never designed.
“Mighty Naue, please stop,” Scirye begged.
“Yes, I’m tired of this game.” Naue laughed. “Let’s play something else.”
They veered to their right suddenly, circling back toward the freebooters.
Some of the raiders were searching for their lost weapons in the snow. Others were trying to round up their scattered mounts.
They seemed shocked to see the wing returning. A few tried to raise their guns and a submachine gun chattered briefly, but Naue twisted and curled back and forth like a snake, tumbling the freebooters onto their backs and sending the terrified reindeer bolting.
“Ho! I like this new game,” Naue declared.
“Oog,” Koko moaned. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
Scirye was feeling dizzy herself from their wild ride, and even an experienced flier like Kles was clinging to her as if he, too, was feeling nauseous. She wound up shutting her eyes against the spinning world and gripping the straps for dear life
Just when she thought the nightmare would never end, she suddenly felt the wing straighten out.
“Ha, that was more fun than wrestling a typhoon,” Naue exulted. “Now what else shall we do?”
Daring to open her eyes, she looked behind her and saw that the plain was littered with groaning freebooters lying in the snow. Beyond them the Sogdian wind sled was moving away, disappearing into the horizon as its momentum swept it on. It took her a moment to realize they were heading away from the mountains and Nova Hafnia and instead into the barren wilderness, away from Roland and Badik.
4
Leech
The others were pleading with Naue to turn around, but that only seemed to make the arrogant wind more determined to go on in the same direction.
Leech unfolded his legs cautiously, but Bayang was too distracted to notice. He still wasn’t sure how much he could trust her. She’d told him that the original Leech—he didn’t know how many lives ago that was—had killed a dragon prince and made a belt out of his hide and the dragons had never forgotten. Bayang had been hunting him down in all the lives after that.
He and Bayang had tried to form their own separate peace and had even fought side by side against common enemies. But she was still as arrogant as ever and kept limiting what he could do with his magical devices.
Stupid, she wants to keep you weak and helpless. She was trying to kill you when you first met. Though she says she’s changed her mind and swears she won’t, she’s having second thoughts. The whisper came from the back of his mind, from memories lost in shadow. He thought he’d heard it in that cellar in Honolulu when they had been following Roland and Badik to an island. He had no idea what the voice was, but he wished he could get rid of it. The best he seemed to be able to do was shove it back into the shadows and try to ignore it.
He shoved those notions away as quickly as they had come. No, not Bayang, he told himself. She was as dedicated to protecting his life now as she had once been determined to take it. She’s…she’s just being overprotective.
Oh yeah? the voice taunted. Then show her you can handle yourself. When you leave the wing, crouch real low. You’ll slice through the air like a knife.
Leech wouldn’t mind proving to Bayang that she was wrong about him. His friend Primo had always been telling him to have more confidence in himself. Leech felt a little twinge when he thought about Primo. He’d died in the museum with Scirye’s sister, Nishke, trying to keep the ring from being stolen.
But this was no time to sit and mourn. As Leech began to hunch over, Koko glanced at him.
“Hey, where are you going?” the badger asked.
“I’m going to borrow a page from Bayang and Scirye’s book on how to handle a windbag.” As he rose within the frame, he called to the wind, �
��Great Naue, I dare you to race me now.”
“Ho, Half Lumpling?” Naue said. Since Bayang and Leech could fly on their own, they’d been elevated to the status of half lumplings. “Yet another challenge? Didn’t you see? A speeding arrow could not match Naue. How can you?”
“Scared?” Leech taunted.
“Come back!” Bayang shouted.
He ignored them, rising above the fragile-looking straw frame. He intended to turn Naue in the direction that Roland had gone. That way, they could resume the chase. However, as soon as Leech cleared the straw frame, Naue’s powerful air currents caught him and he began to tumble backward like a rag doll, like a kite, like a leaf.
As he fell head over heels, he thought ruefully that Bayang had been right after all. The lower profile did not let him manage the force of Naue.
He didn’t know which would be worse: her gloating or his breaking his neck.
5
Bayang
As the little fool popped out of the wing’s frame, it was all she could do not to go after him. Because, she assured herself, I’m just trying to do my job as his bodyguard and not because I’m pretending to be his mother.
But she had other passengers on the wing whom she could not abandon, so she stayed.
Then, to her amazement, Naue slowed and banked to the left, heading back along the huge gully left in his wake. “Fool of a half lumpling,” the wind muttered. “Didn’t he realize that he was no match for great Naue?”
As they returned, Bayang’s stomach tightened. A dark figure lay still in the snow.
A few moments later, Naue slowed, circling leisurely like a breeze around the fallen Leech. “What a silly time to sleep!”
“He’s not asleep, he’s hurt!” Scirye scolded. It was like the Kushan girl to speak her mind, whether it was to a fellow hatchling, a dragon, or even a wind with the force of a hurricane.
“Hurt?” Naue asked, puzzled. For a creature with neither flesh nor bone, the concept was a strange one.