Polo Shawcross: Dragon Soldier

by Lee Abrey

  “Proves what you’ve been saying all along,” I said to Ross. Fenric shook his head at me and I stuck out my tongue. A very mature duke indeed.

  “Look on the bright side,” said the doctor, “you didn’t kill anyone while you were drunk. I gather that’s very hard to get over in the time one has between the event then sobering up and being hung. Though I suppose you’re going to have to kill people because you were drunk.” He smiled, pleased with his point. Or his joke. This seemed to be I should be happy that I was soon to be killing people when sober. Or something. “It’s reasonable to be depressed over this,” the doctor said, suddenly serious. “Under pressure from others you’ve become depressed and made a mistake, now you’re going to have to wear the consequences.”

  “Reasonable to be depressed?” I said aloud. He nodded. Well screw you, Mother and Father, I thought, and screw you, Azrael Westwych.

  “You’ll be in a good place if you need some kind of talking cure,” the doctor said, “the army has excellent mental health specialists. If you’re not feeling better soon.” Wonderful opportunity to piece together a shattered psyche, the Northern Front. He looked at me expectantly.

  “Aye, I’ll ask to see someone,” I said, “if it doesn’t lift.” I sighed. What an idiot I was for letting annoyance with other people mess up my life. The doctor sounded sympathetic.

  “Give it some time, son.” I did smile then.

  “Three years?” I said. He laughed while Fenric and Ross kept straight faces.

  “Should be enough time for you to get your head together.” As we left the others walked out first, and I thanked the doctor sincerely.

  “You’re not going to be that stupid again, eh?” he said. I shook my head.

  “Emotion,” I said, echoing something Fenric and Cree always said, “it’s the enemy.”

  “It is when you have to deal with people, son,” the doctor said, smiling. “Their emotions plus your emotions, it’s bound to end badly.”

  ****

  Food tasted like cardboard and activities that normally enthused me seemed stale, despite the appearance of logic in the form of the doctor’s opinion, which the others concurred with. I was still miserable and feeling sorry for myself, especially over my fight with Azrael. Growing up the only Blood child in a peasant village, never close to anyone my own age, I was proud of my friendship with the Crown Prince. I wasn’t a friend to him for what I could get, in fact when we first met I hadn’t known who he was.

  However, Azrael was more interested in sex with me than friendship, so my best friend was probably never a friend. Like a man who pretends to be a friend to a woman in order to get into her knickers, Azrael had pretended to be something he wasn’t. That was sad. A question resurfaced.

  How can someone be your friend when they’re in unrequited love with you? Answer? They can’t, or might not be, which is the same thing. It took me a while to come to terms with it.

  As for my parents, Father swapping alcohol for religion was bad enough but just thinking about Mother depressed me.

  ****

  The yacht made good time and our voyage up the Great Star Lake reached the Star Cut, a busy shipping channel that ran northwest to the coast. The Cut was supposed to be manmade and certainly ran as straight as a canal, but I’d also heard it was a fault line in the continent that made it so.

  Three thousand years previously, the early settlers of Galaia built much of the infrastructure, including the canals and many of the castles, though of course the latter had been redecorated, added to, and expanded, and the former needed upkeep like dredging to stay usable.

  Dragon arrived a thousand years before my birth, some two thousand after Galaia’s founding, and filled us in on forgotten knowledge of our origins, upsetting almost everyone because they knew something we didn’t. We came from the stars. To prove it, they arrived that way, destroying in the process the foundations of several religions, which refused to acknowledge their own disproving and flourished in glib, blind cults. It didn’t matter if any tenet of faith was disproved. Faith, they espoused, was enough. Their gods or god would reward the faithful.

  I suspected Dragon’s introduced pantheon of Thet and his children might simply be something invented for those who still needed gods. Some comfort while we waited for the Great Silence to end. By the time I was joining the army the last starship flight was a thousand years gone, the Great Silence nearly three thousand years long, and my dreams of slipping the chains of gravity mostly confined to dreams of flying in the planet’s atmosphere. I really wanted to fly and Dragon could fly. Not only with ships, but also just by themselves.

  Dragon’s flying ships were long gone, probably rotted away, but there was still a way to fly. Members of the Dragon tribe could change shape to one with wings. Not all Dragon, shape-changing being difficult both to learn and to repeat, and sometimes it was hard to change all the way back to people-shape, so many didn’t like to try. Despite hours of meditation I couldn’t repeat my one transformation. I had to face the possibility that I might not be able to.

  Working hard on being sad, I wandered around sighing and avoiding eye contact with anyone, tricky when underway on the water, even on a decent-sized yacht. On the distant shore I watched towns, villages, even cities slip past, looking as tiny as a miniature landscape made for a king’s pleasure.

  To my intense sorrow, adding to my sense of isolation, they were real, filled with all those people living their pointless lives. It meant nothing, said the voices in my head, we were mere dots, in a universe too big to comprehend.

  I wished to go back in time, to wake up back in Peterhaven or Malion and think, Galaia preserve me, what a vivid dream! I pined for the Polo Shawcross who was planning nothing much more than enjoyment while improving the poultry stock of the duchy with selective breeding, free use of the duchy sires for all tenants, funding riding lessons for every child, and any other useful works that struck me. More prizes at fetes and school graduations, purchases of more books, building of more libraries and schools, buying and breeding of more good livestock and very importantly, maintenance would not be neglected. I took my responsibilities as duke quite seriously and as Master Thomas said, good maintenance of existing structures was the key to an easier time for everyone.

  In my journal I posited the idea of trying harder to get on with my parents, if only the gods would grant me the joy of my predicament being a dream, but crossed that line out before the ink was properly dry. Even in the state I was in, the notion of getting on with my parents amused me. I put a note next to the crossed-out line.

  Ha ha, not being realistic!

  For now the army was reality, mine at least, and we kept sailing on towards my doom. I actually wrote that,

  I am sailing on towards my doom.

  ****

  Chapter 16 - Epiphany

  Fenric and the others left me alone, sure I’d come out of the sulk eventually, even if only to eat. If I didn’t snap out of it soon they’d get exasperated, and probably thump me until I saw sense.

  However sense was elusive. I could be told it, hear it or even write it, but my mind didn’t recognise it, not until one sunset as we traversed the Cut. I was moping at the rail, the north shore close enough to see detail. The sinking sun was shining her last, and as we passed a village, the sailors set the yacht’s running lights. On the other side of the village was a smallholding, neat fields running down to the river and a lush kitchen garden around a tiny cottage. It reminded me of Blue Hill Farm where I grew up.

  With a rising sense of deja vu, I saw they even had some sheep. I remembered the way ours tried to kill themselves in so many ways. It was a trait common to all sheep, suicidal tendencies. Maybe I had sheep and not Dragon in my bloodlines? After all, Father came from a sheep farm. I almost smiled at that.

  In the golden peach light of sunset, the little farm looked like a blessed place. I wasn’t surprised to see the boy, a dark silhouette. He looked about fifteen, staring out at the Cut from h
is seat on the end of a small pier, legs swinging over the water. He raised a hand in a wave. I waved back. Then he looked back over his shoulder as the noise of a shout reached me out on the water and I saw the dejected slump of his shoulders. He scrambled to his feet and raised his hand to me again. I waved, feeling my heart break for him. I knew what he was doing. He was pining to be me.

  To have my reality, whatever it was. He wanted to be going somewhere, anywhere that wasn’t his life, exactly the way I had longed to be free of Blue Hill Farm, with its persistent lack of hot water, the demented sheep and my equally demented parents. I used to fantasise about running away, joining a circus, even about killing Mother and Father or selling them over in Kavarlen as slaves. All those options still seemed a good idea when they were going through one of their break-ups, though together wasn’t really any better. For a long time I just wished they’d kill each other and get it over with.

  All I had to do was beckon and shout, the boy would probably dive off the pier and swim for the Lady. Instead I watched as he made his feet and began to hurry away, moving faster as he reached the shore then running for the farmhouse. I hoped his mother or whoever called him didn’t make his life too much of a misery. As the wind danced around the ship, pretending it might go away, the captain shifted our course slightly. The sails cracked and I looked up to see them filled and lit by the dying sun, in every shade of pink, apricot, and gold. To the boy on the bank I was a golden man on a gilded yacht, sailing on a steel-bright sea.

  Suddenly it struck me. Things could be worse. Things were much worse for most of my life. Aside from being trapped on Blue Hill Farm until I was nearly sixteen, after escaping I nearly died so many times that this little hiccup was nothing.

  Besides, even if I did die in some battle, what did it matter? From experience I knew there were people, or whatever Cree was, to talk to while you were dead. Maybe the goddess Galaia did send us back. I wasn’t sure where that left my atheism but decided it was too big to think about.

  For distraction I thought about what the doctor told me, how it wasn’t my fault that my parents or Azrael were who they were. It also wasn’t my fault that I was notorious and my private life was the talk of the cafes of Peterhaven. I certainly hadn’t talked about my sexual adventures. There were other reasons, big ones, to count my blessings.

  Fenric and my guards were Blood cousins of varying degrees, but they weren’t either of my parents. The sailors might be shaking their heads at me for my drunken idiocy, but they weren’t a lovesick Crown Prince. Azrael had whined for years about how in love with me he was, always begging for sex. I was still rather annoyed over how he’d made out at our last meeting that I was the one chasing him. I snorted to myself. And all those times I was nearly killed just for being his friend!

  Point was I had plenty to be grateful for. I was still a wealthy duke and getting to travel. It could be an adventure. I’d never really had an adventure on my own. For the first time in eighteen years, especially in the last two since I was at Court, I didn’t have to behave in case someone told my parents what I was doing, or worse, told my grandmother or Uncle Theo the king. Trying to control gossip in the closed world of a Royal Court was an awful problem, especially with my sexual predilections. Not at Court any more for the next three years, I could relax. I was at last an adult in foreign places, further from family than ever before.

  Who cared what I did? Why keep punishing myself? I should be filled with joy, perhaps also sensibly keeping fit and not sulking by the rail, especially when truly I was a golden man on a gilded yacht. I went straight below decks, broke out the mindweed and lit up a huge pipe. I breathed out the smoke and a pleasant and mild euphoria lifted me in familiar ways. In the galley was coffee and I drank a cup, unwinding from the inside out, feeling my back unlock with an audible series of cracks.

  While Cook made me ham-and-cheese toasted sandwiches, the only thing to hand an hour before dinner, I smoked another pipe. For the rest of the night I talked a lot, smoked like a crazy person and ate like a starving pony. I even had a glass of wine with dinner. The men tried not to sigh too obviously with relief. I liked the taste of the wine, but didn’t like the way it slowed my reflexes and affected my eyes.

  We Blood usually had much better vision than the peasants but not after a few drinks, yet any drunk, man or woman, Blood or peasant, might argue he or she was fine, even claiming sobriety when obviously drunk. Alcohol was tricky like that, a person was sure they were capable but anyone watching could tell they weren’t.

  If I was paying attention, even slight tipsiness was like a fog on me.

  ****

  As the sun rose next morning I was doing my katas out on deck before sparring. Once I started being me again the men stopped shaking their heads as much.

  “You were overwrought,” said Fenric, “you’re a good kid who went-”

  “Bad?” I said. He looked at me. “Not bad to the bone or anything,” I said, “just temporarily?” He and Archie shook their heads at that and Ross began to laugh. I smiled. “I’ll have you know I’m the notorious Duke of Starshore.” They all snickered at me. “Nanny Black said once I was like the goddess of death with testicles,” I quipped and laughed. Ross and Archie got the giggles but Fenric gave me a pitying look.

  “I was thinking more you had a kind of breakdown,” he said, “and we hope you’re better now but the poor bastard- that’s you, Polo, you’re the poor bastard-”

  “Thank you,” I said, bowing sarcastically, “I did get that.”

  “-the poor bastard’s going to pay with three years on the Northern Front.” I saluted.

  “Aye sir,” I said, and stuck out my tongue. Then I ran. Fenric let me go. I knew that because I got away.

  I went to help the grooms, who were spending hours doing things like massaging my horses’ bodies, stretching their legs and grooming them. It all added to their sensory input, kept their circulation up and stopped them getting bored and stiff. They usually had time at grass with other horses every day, so were lonely, bored senseless trapped in tiny stalls all the time, and appreciated visitors.

  ****

  The Lady of Starshore sailed along the Cut to the coast and the Western Ocean, which stretched all the way to Kavarlen, the continent to the west. The captain was Kavar. His name was Ernst but out of port he was simply captain. Even I had to do as he said when we were underway. He was slowly unwinding under a relentless charm offensive, including ostentatious use of coasters and cork mats, and a solemn oath from me to do everything I could to make sure the Lady was still sailing when I handed on the duchy.

  Captain Ernst wore his hair and beard long but cared for, trimmed neatly and often plaited. I thought him very exotic. He told me the history of the yacht and I was interested enough to ask the right questions. Turned out most of her was repaired, so nobody was sure which bits were how old, but the original ship was built when the local duke was just a man with the sense to head for high ground, the defensible kind with a good fortified harbour below.

  The Lady’s sails were laced with enough priceless solar thread to replace the usual array of solar panels, saving weight and space, and she ran turbines that drew power from the currents around us when the sun was down or lost strength, enough to run her motor if we lost the wind, or keep her lit up at night and the fridges going.

  If Ernst was in a good mood he might invite me into the wheelhouse to take the wheel, and that was something. The Lady was like a spirited horse, really quite dangerous to the novice. Her wheel could break your bones if you lost focus.

  “Even today this beauty would be terrifically expensive,” said Captain Ernst, standing easily near me despite the buck of the swell, “but everyone saw a ship was needed and the entire duchy worked without pay to get her done. Of course, the Duke of Starshore controlled the southern areas of the Great Star Lake with the Lady. In return his people were given everything they needed. Food, clothes, education, shelter, plenty of fish.” I laughed. He grinned. “S
he’s been a trader and a fishing boat in her time. Goes well out here in the open water, eh?” Her sleek lines didn’t look like a fishing boat but it was true, she still had nets stowed.

  The captain and I ended up knowing quite a bit about each other. Turned out he knew about my not-ghost Cree, the others had told him.

  “I haven’t seen Cree for a while,” I said when he asked me. “Since the day I signed up.”

  “You think he is real, Polo?” said Ernst, sounding interested. Like the bodyguards, at my request he called me by name, but the servants and sailors on board insisted on Your Grace. “They tell me other people see him too. A little to starboard. See, you’re losing the wind.” I didn’t have his knack of noticing the moment we lost full impetus.

  “Aye captain,” I said, correcting carefully, “and I don’t know. I don’t really know what Cree is. I find his presence unsettling. It poses questions I have no answers to.” I looked at some clouds. “When he isn’t around I can pretend he doesn’t exist.”

  “The logic of denial is so exquisite,” said the captain, “my former religion taught me that.” I laughed and he grinned. “Do you know about my religion?” Although an atheist I was interested in religions, even more so since meeting Cree the not-ghost.

  “The Cult of the Disembowelled Madonna?” I said, and the captain nodded. “Not very much. Bathing is banned? Shaving is too?”

  “Aye,” he said, “we call it the Church, not a cult, but cult is what it is. It’s not just cutting hair on your head that’s banned, no cutting of hair anywhere, and the devout are ordered not to wash. I left Kavarlen because of it.”

  “Talk about the logic of denial,” I said, “all religions are completely in denial. Even though I didn’t believe in his gods, our local priest wanted me to join the Temple Guild. Said atheism would make me an excellent priest.” The captain nodded.