by Dragon Lance
“I am!” he shouted, grinning madly.
“Good. Stay where you are.”
Duranix reared up on his hind legs and lumbered forward. Spears and javelins bounced off his scaly hide. Bronze-headed elven weapons pricked him, but he ignored them and darted his long neck into the mounted mass, knocking men and horses down with every sweep of his horned head.
The renegades disintegrated like snow on a hot rock. Duranix moved among them, hurling them this way and that with swipes of his claws. The ground was soon thick with the fallen, a few dead, most of the rest senseless. In the center of this tumult sat Hatu, calmly waiting. Beside him, a nervous Nacris fidgeted with her mount’s reins and obviously wished she were someplace else.
Duranix dropped down to all fours and extended his head toward Hatu. The nomad’s horse shied, but the one-eyed warrior controlled his animal skillfully.
“Why don’t you ride away?” Duranix asked.
“I don’t care to be struck down from behind,” said Hatu.
“That’s human thinking for you – as if it matters from what direction a blow falls!”
“An honorable man fights facing his enemy.”
The dragon grinned, and Hatu’s horse shied again as the nomad squeezed its sides convulsively with his legs. “Ah, you expect me to fight like a man?” Duranix hissed.
“I expect you’ll fight like the evil beast you are!”
In a motion faster than a snake striking, Duranix seized Nacris in his mouth. She screamed and struggled, but he raised her high in the air and with a single sideways shake of his head, tossed her into the center of the lake. She screamed all the way until she hit the water.
Hatu swallowed hard. “Nacris is a good swimmer,” he said, but his voice was unsteady.
“How unfortunate,” Duranix replied.
Few were the men who could look up into an angry dragon’s face and not give way to panic, yet Hatu stood his ground. For all his treachery, the one-eyed plainsman’s courage inspired in Amero grudging respect.
“Come on,” said Hatu, drawing an elven sword from his belt. “Let us fight.”
“Absurd,” Duranix replied. “If fighting a bull, should I lower my head and bang horns with him?” He advanced a step.
In his free hand Hatu held a ram’s horn. He raised it to his lips.
Amero had a sudden, shocking insight. Two nomads had entered the cave to kill him at the beginning of the fight. There could be others —
“Duranix!” he shouted. “Beware! There are men on the cliffs above you!”
Hatu blew a single bleating note on the horn. Duranix reached out a claw to snatch Hatu off his horse, but the plainsman evaded his grasp. Just then, a boulder the size of a full-grown ox slammed into the sand steps away from the dragon. Villagers and nomads alike shouted in surprise.
High up, Hatu’s men labored to lever another boulder off the cliff. Amero shaded his eyes, but the morning sun was behind the men, and he couldn’t make out how many there were. Another huge slab of sandstone smashed to the ground. It shattered into many pieces, pelting Duranix. He ducked his head under the barrage. While he was distracted, Hatu galloped away with the last of his followers.
Instead of following them, Duranix did a bold thing. He slithered with serpentine grace to the foot of the cliff, dodging a third boulder. Fixing his foreclaws in the relatively soft sandstone of the cliff face, he began to climb.
Heedless of the danger from falling rocks, Amero ran to where Duranix was picking his way up.
“Come back!” he shouted. “You can’t dodge them if you’re clinging to the cliff!”
“How many boulders can they have?” replied the dragon coolly. A fourth missile, this time a smaller, harder slab of slate, whistled down. It struck Duranix a glancing blow to the right shoulder. Scales curled up under the impact, and bluish-green blood oozed from the wound.
Furious at the rebels and afraid for his friend, Amero grabbed Duranix’s barbed tail just as it left the ground. The dragon paused and looked down at him.
“Let go, Amero. This is no place for pets.”
“I’m not a pet!” was the young man’s angry reply as he clung to the muscular tail.
“It’s no place for a friend, either.”
“I can watch out for falling rocks! Shut up and climb!”
Without another word or backward glance, Duranix started up the cliff. He didn’t have to hunt for handholds or toeholds; his powerful claws gouged their own as he went. Faster and faster he ascended, until he was racing upward like a lizard on a canyon wall. Yet he was careful to keep his long tail as motionless as possible, to avoid injuring the foolish human clinging to it.
Amero held on for dear life. In spite of his brave words to the dragon, he wasn’t able to keep watch for falling rock – his eyes were tightly shut. He did feel the powerful surge of the dragon’s muscles as Duranix scrambled sideways to avoid being hit. At last Duranix’s vertical tail lifted to horizontal, and Amero knew they’d made it to the top.
By the time he’d let go of the dragon’s tail, Amero saw that Duranix had slain three of Hatu’s men. The dragon sprang forward a full ten paces and caught one man as he was running away. With a sideways flick of his claw, Duranix hurled the luckless nomad over the cliff.
“Stop!” Amero cried. “Don’t kill any more, please!”
“They’re vermin. They’ll make trouble if you let them go.”
“They’re men! They can learn from their mistakes!”
Duranix gave a disgusted snort, but he stopped. The remaining four renegades took the opportunity to race for their horses. They galloped away.
“You’re too forgiving,” said the dragon, resting on his haunches. He growled a bit as he bent his neck to examine his bruised shoulder.
The battle was over. Amero found himself shaking uncontrollably. He slumped heavily to the ground and toppled over on his side. The wounds on his chest and back were shallow, but very painful. As his eyes closed, he felt the dragon’s cool metallic claws close gently around him.
“Lie still,” rumbled Duranix. “I will take you home.”
Chapter 21
A day passed, then another, then five, and the renegades did not return. Nianki posted lookouts on the clifftops and across the lake to watch for trouble, but it seemed that Nacris, Hatu, and their followers had been defeated.
Though his wounds were not deep, Amero contracted a fever, and for many days his survival was in question. To provide the best care for him, a large open shelter was raised near the burned houses, and the people of Yala-tene took turns nursing him. While Amero was ill, his authority fell quite naturally to Nianki. No one disputed her orders now. The villagers, who’d seen her fight for them, obeyed her without question.
For Amero, the days passed like a single bad night’s sleep. At intervals he would open his eyes – it was daylight and someone was feeding him broth; it was night and someone else was smearing larchit on his wounds. After these brief moments of wakefulness, he would lapse back into a deep slumber.
Once, he heard people around him talking, and he recognized Nianki’s voice.
“Where did you try today?”
“South, in the lower valleys,” answered a different voice. “There was no sign.”
“If I know him, he’ll go back to familiar territory, the land of his ancestors.”
“And where would that be?”
“North,” Nianki replied. “The north plain, close to the mountains.”
“Then that’s where I’ll look.”
The voices ceased. After what seemed like only a moment, he heard some scraping noises, and the sound of water being poured. Cool dampness caressed his lips, chin, and forehead. He opened his eyes.
“Nianki.” His voice was a croak.
She dipped a scrap of chamois in the clay basin and squeezed out the excess. “How do you feel?” she asked.
“Dry. Water?”
She lifted a hollowed gourd to his lips, using her other
hand to support his head. The small sip of water he managed to swallow tasted wonderful.
“Who was just here?” he asked once he was resting again. “No one.”
“I thought I heard you talking to someone.”
She smiled. “You were dreaming again. You’ve been doing that a lot. You talk when you’re asleep, did you know that?”
“No.”
She gently wiped his neck and shoulders and rinsed the chamois again. He looked past her. His bleary gaze picked out movement – villagers moving to and fro, rebuilding their burned houses.
“How many people did we lose?” he asked.
“Twenty-three of the village, eighteen of my people.”
So many. He closed his burning eyes. “How is Duranix?”
“Arrogant as ever. He and Pakito and that old man Konza took off after the oxen Hatu’s riders chased away. Your dragon still can’t fly, but his senses are keener than a falcon’s, so I guess he’ll be helpful tracking the wayward beasts.”
He smelled the sourness of larchit paste. Nianki had peeled off the dressing of damp jenja leaves to apply a fresh layer of soothing paste to his chest wound. His eyelids felt weighed down by exhaustion. Fighting against the darkness that pulled at him, Amero yawned and said, “And how do you feel, Nianki?”
“I wasn’t injured.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
She continued her ministrations, loading a twig with a gob of larchit paste. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she told him calmly. “Ever. Stop asking questions and get well.”
“Yes, Karada.” He sighed and allowed sleep to claim him once more.
*
Amero’s fever waxed and waned. On one of his good days, he was visited by Pakito. The giant warrior lifted Amero as though he were a small child and carried him outside.
The villagers and Nianki’s loyal nomads had formed a long human chain from the cliffs to the dragon’s cairn. Stones came down the line, passing from one pair of hands to the next until they reached the ceremonial rock pile. With a final heave, some of the sturdier nomads added the new stones to the pile. They must have been laboring for quite a while, Amero realized, for the cairn had almost doubled in length and width.
Reclining rather stiffly in Pakito’s mighty arms, Amero asked what was going on. Nianki, who had joined them, explained how the villagers needed some place to put the rubble from their ruined houses. At first they hauled the burned and broken rocks to the lake, then someone – no one could recall exactly who – suggested adding the rubble to the dragon’s altar. The idea took hold, and everyone joined in to complete the task.
“The dragon saved us, at peril to his own life,” explained Pakito. “We’re doing this to honor him, and you.”
“Where is Duranix?” asked Amero. It felt as though he hadn’t seen his friend in weeks.
“Sleeping off dinner,” Nianki said.
They watched the work in silence for a while. The cairn grew ever larger.
“The way they feel now,” Nianki said. “They’d pull down the mountain and throw it all on the pile, if it pleased the dragon.”
*
A chill mist filled the valley one night, and the next morning every stone and tree limb in the valley was coated with frost. The highest crags of the mountains turned white, and when the wind blew down from the heights, it brought the bite of winter with it.
The day Amero walked without a staff was the same day Duranix discarded his wing brace. Man and dragon faced each other on the sandy spit below the falls.
“Are you sure you don’t want your stick?” teased Duranix.
Amero raised his thin arms over his head and flapped them up and down. “Are you sure you don’t want your brace?”
The dragon spread his long, leathery wings and mirrored his friend’s movement, raising a cloud of grit. “No more braces for me,” he declared. “Today I fly!”
He launched himself into the air, wings flapping slowly. He drifted hack to the sand. Launching himself again, and working harder this time, he gained height. His long neck stood straight out from the strain, but he climbed upward in a wide spiral, testing his newly healed wing. It was exactly ninety days since he’d broken it.
Nianki appeared, draped in a mantle of white wolf fur. She watched Duranix disappear into the low clouds that roofed the valley. He roared with delight, and the eerie sound reverberated down the lake, causing people on both shores to look up from their work.
“Someone’s happy,” said Nianki dryly.
“Yes, me!” Amero turned in a little circle, showing her he wasn’t supported by anything. “See? I’m walking on my own.”
“It’s about time,” she replied tartly. “I was about to take Targun’s advice and shorten your walking stick a little bit each day. He figured you’d give it up when you discovered you were bent double.”
“Ha, thanks!”
Nianki turned away, and he followed her. They strolled down the water’s edge together.
“How goes the planting?” he asked. It was past time for the winter crops to go in, but so much work had been needed to repair houses and pens in the village, the second planting was late.
“It goes. The ground seems too cold and hard for anything to grow.”
“That’s all right. If anyone can grow vegetables through ice, it’s Jenla.”
Nianki nodded. “Smart woman. She should’ve been a nomad.”
They reached the southern end of the village. Piles of loose stones filled the circular holes where houses had once stood. These houses on the periphery had been demolished and their undamaged materials salvaged to repair the other homes. Most of the people who lived in them had perished in the fight.
“I’ve been thinking —” Amero began.
“Oh, not again.”
He gave her a mock glare, then continued. “We’ve relied too much on Duranix to protect us. He is, as he will tell you himself, only one dragon. Yala-tene needs to be a safe haven, a stronghold that can survive even if Duranix is away for ten days or more. What we need is not a series of strong, individual houses, but a way to defend all the houses at once.”
The chill wind had strengthened. It whistled around her ears, as Nianki raised the white fur hood of her cloak. “How would you do that?” she asked, not really interested.
“As we do the cattle: put all the little houses into one big house!”
That caught her attention. She stopped and regarded him skeptically. “You want to build a house large enough to hold every family in Arku-peli? That’s mad! Even if you could, all those people living together wouldn’t last. They’d kill each other!”
Amero went to the stump of a wall, carefully lowering himself onto it. Many weeks of illness had left him with little stamina.
“I’m not talking about building a whole house to cover all the others, though that would be quite a feat.” He looked up at the overcast sky, a far-off expression on his face.
She sighed impatiently. “Get to the point, will you?”
“Sorry,” he said, looking at her again. He gestured with his hands, making a circle around himself and continued. “A wall, Nianki. We can build a wall around the village. That would keep any marauders out.”
She folded her arms. “You want to build a wall around the entire village?” He nodded. “Sounds like a waste of sweat and stone to me. All you really need is a hundred stout fighters to defend the place.”
“Every man and woman in Yala-tene could be trained to fight,” he countered. “Spears would be provided to every family, to be kept at home for use when there’s trouble.”
“All very well, but pairing off your mudtoes and having them whack each other a few times doesn’t make them warriors.”
“That’s where you come in.”
Nianki scoffing expression froze. “Me?”
“I want you to train them – teach them to fight like your best warriors. With you to train and lead them, Yala-tene will never have anything to fear.”
She leaned against the wall of the fallen house, feeling the cold stones press against her knees.
“Well?” he said.
A tiny flake of white floated down and came to rest on the back of Nianki’s hand. For an instant, the perfect miniature net of feathery ice crystals stood out clearly against her deeply tanned skin. Then, warmed by her body, the flake vanished.
“Snow,” she said. Nianki lifted her hooded face to the sky. More snowflakes were coming down now, but only a few.
“Nianki, will you stay and teach the people of Yala-tene how to defend themselves?” asked Amero insistently.
“No.”
He was taken aback. “No?”
“I’ve stayed too long as it is. It’s time for Karada’s band to depart.”
So saying, she stepped over the broken length of wall and strode quickly away. Amero opened his mouth to call to her, but she was out of sight before he thought what to say.
There was a rush of wind, and Duranix alighted on a patch of nearby open ground. He shook his head from side to side, sending a tinkling cascade of ice crystals to the ground. He flapped his wings before furling them, shedding more ice and snow in the process.
“I hate winter,” he declared, “but I love it that I can fly again.”
Amero said nothing. He was still looking off toward where Nianki had vanished.
Duranix used his foreclaws to preen slush and water from his horns and face. “Why so morose, Amero?” he said. “You’re walking, aren’t you? Or have your legs failed you? Is that why you’re sitting out here in the cold by yourself?”
Amero stood – a bit wobbly, but upright – and said, “Nianki won’t stay. I asked her to train the villagers to fight, but she won’t do it. In fact, I think she may be leaving today!”
Duranix leaned down to his far smaller friend. The brazen nail of one clawed digit tapped the crown of Amero’s head.
“Is there anything in there but bone?” he asked. Angrily, Amero brushed the claw away. Duranix added, “You astonish me, human. You asked her to do the one thing she can’t do and still respect herself. Don’t you realize that?”