Devent didn’t know what to make of this and looked to the fiddler. Both of her eyebrows were raised, and her eyes darted from maidens to dragons and gave him a warning look, while continuing to play as if nothing untoward had happened.
He came to the part in the song when the men shot Vitia as Verity looked on. It was very dramatic and very frightening and sad. He was proud of it. It was hard to find rhymes for some of the events he’d wished to depict.
He glanced at the other dragons to see if they got the point about the guns the men used on Vitia, which was when he noticed that their faces looked odd. Now that he wasn’t singing anymore, he also heard the clanking of chains from both the dragons and the ladies. Devent’s night vision was better than average, but with the flickering of the torches around the edges of the arena, and the distortion of the shadows cast, it took him a second hard look to see that the dragons were muzzled. He had mixed feelings about the fact that the men who muzzled the other dragons (however they had managed it) had not tried to muzzle him. Didn’t they think he was dangerous? He might have liked to be considered a little dangerous. On the other hand, they would know he couldn’t sing while muzzled. When his song finished, he started another one right away and the fiddling Lady increased the tempo, volume and intensity of her performance, which the human audience would understand even if his dragon song was beyond them.
Halfway through, however, the man who seemed to be the boss, pointed at the fiddler and at the scared looking ladies in white. Other men forcibly escorted her to stand with the ladies. Devent did not like that. Men headed toward him with chains, and a heavy net and he tried to bolt. The boss unholstered a pistol he wore beneath the fine blue jacket he wore over his waistcoat.
Grudge hurried forward, saying, “I’ll show this big blow-hot who’s in charge here, sir.” She grabbed the chains and the net from the man and approached Devent. He was puzzled. He thought she was a friend, but she said in a very mean tone, “Come on, you noisy brute, over where you belong.” But when she was close enough he could see her face clearly, he saw that her very thick brow was twitching this way and that and her eyes were pleading—as much as a troll’s eyes could plead, he supposed, signaling him to go peacefully. She had a plan. At least it seemed to be a plan to keep him out of chains and muzzle because she ordered him around and brandished the net at him but never even tried to throw it, and when she led him over to the other dragons, she dropped the chains at his feet and stood beside him without forcing the muzzle on him. He felt like weeping. This was not how his big debut was supposed to go.
Recruiting Cattle
Casimir and Smelt, as well as Verity, were learning the robust art of animal herding. The Gypsy family who had taken refuge in the cave had the traditional Gypsy understanding of animals.
“We don’t tell them what you said that dragons might eat them in the new place and time we’re going.”
“It’s that or men will slaughter them here for nothing,” Casimir said. “They are doomed to meet a tragic end, so it may as well be to serve as food for the hungry.”
Verity scratched her head. She didn’t have a headache over Casimir’s logic, but it made her rather twitchy nonetheless. “I don’t know…”
Casimir shrugged, both annoyed and troubled by her sudden attack of scruples.
Verity turned to the Gypsy woman, “Marja, what do you think?”
Marja raised her eyebrows and spread her arms wide, a broader version of Casimir’s shrug. “What you really want to know is what the animals think, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Ask them yourself.”
“How?”
“With your power, of course.”
“I speak a little dragon. I’ve never tried cow or sheep before.”
“What are you, a snob?”
Timoteo laughed. “She’s a queen, luv. Of course she’s a snob, too grand for the likes of farm animals.”
Verity glared at him. “That’s not it. I just don’t know if I can.”
“It’s up to you.”
Matilda the ghost cat appeared between the horns of a bull. Verity got the message that this was probably the leader of the herd. “Er, excuse me, sir,” she said politely.
He snorted and stamped his foot, and in her head, she heard a voice demand, “Whut?”
“If I were to tell you that in a matter of hours, men will come and slaughter you and all your kin as well as the sheep and pigs and goats, but that we could save you from them, only to lead you to a time where you would almost certainly be devoured by dragons, what would you say?”
“Run!’ he replied, to her, not as an order to the herd.
“Very sensible, but what if there is nowhere to run to really? And all of the grass has been burned away and you face starvation? In the new place, although there are dragons, the men will care for most of you and make sure those not taken by dragons have food and water and room to roam.”
The bull stamped his foot and shook his horns, as Verity believed, in horror.
A very old cow, one with swaying udders that marked her as one whose career had involved providing milk rather than as one marked for her meat. She’d been standing chewing her cud so placidly that Verity hadn’t seen her before.
“Not so hasty, Durham,” she said to the young bull.
“But, Ma,” he said, mooing. “Dragons!”
“Exactly,” she said. “Starvation and slaughter anyway, of use to none, that’s a terrible fright but a dragon, now that’s another matter. Dragons are very big and very hot, and they end you very quickly and then, you know, you’re part of a dragon.”
“Part of a dragon?”
“Of course. Humans like to say, ‘We are what we eat,’ but with the rest of us, more accurately, We are what eats us. We become something larger than ourselves.”
“I’d become—him?” the bull asked, looking up at the ledge where Smelt had seemed to be sleeping until he winked back.
“Only if he was the one who ate you and he doesn’t look hungry,” the old milker said consideringly. “When are the men coming to kill us?” she asked Verity.
Marja said, “Soon.”
Durham mooed sadly then bellowed at the herd. “Herd, to me! Follow!” And with a bellow that was something of a war cry, he galloped into the Knowe, followed by the old cow who was his mother and the other cows, bulls, and calves. The sheep did not even need to be spoken to. They followed the cattle.
The goats followed more cautiously. They were not convinced, and they were also not trusting. Somewhere along the way both they and the pigs became separated from the sheep and cattle and by the time the humans and Smelt arrived at the place and time from which they’d left, they were goatless and pigless.
Verity stuck her head out of the opening to the Knowe, expecting to see her mother. Instead, she was all but knocked over by a long slurp of an unfamiliar dragon slithering inside and startling the cattle into a bellowing chorus.
Smelt confronted the newcomer casually, smoking a little around his teeth, outlined in orange from banked fire. “Who might you be, Stranger?”
“Out of my way,” Durance the Vile snarled. “The girl is on her own. I must quit this vile place and return to my treasure before the men find it and carry it off.”
“Are you sure this treasure of yours is still valuable and not a metal scrap heap?” Smelt asked him.
“What a horrible thing to say!” Durance huffed a puff of smoke.
“It can happen,” Smelt said. Only a handful of ashes sifted down from his mouth.
“Mine is there. It was there when I left. If it is not still there on my return, these men shall learn what it is that dragons eat.”
“Fair enough,” Smelt said. “Just beware of their steel and shot.”
“They’re coming!” Timoteo warned. Durance sucked his tail into the cave and gave no mind to how he stampeded the cattle as he fled down the ceiling of the passageway, dodging stalactites as he slithered.
Verity ma
de little sense of what followed, for the battle cries of the men, the screams of the women, and the bellows of cattle and bleating of sheep created a cacophony her truth seeking could not penetrate.
Sacrifice
Malady’s former favorite uncle controlled the crowd as if he had fed them all the placidity-inducing dragon kibble. Maybe he had.
“Dragons, eh? We’ve been told we can’t live without them, but the truth is, we can’t live with them, either. Am I right?”
Half the audience laughed and cheered, and the other half clapped uncertainly.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we now come to the exciting portion of the festival. Many of you have been forced for lo these many years to work beside the smelly and dangerous beasts in order to make a living. You have been frightened and alarmed by their recent rebellion. You have been told by those who would control you that the scaly brutes will become docile again once their food source, destroyed by those who seek to overthrow the government, is restored.
“But history tells us otherwise. Before the Great War, dragons ravaged the land. It was only with the coming of the Allies that they were brought to heel and the crippling strictures of superstition and witchery were banished.” He went on at some length, about the evils of a world where anything that didn’t make money within a few minutes was a false ideology. His charm (which had vanished for Malady about the time he threw her in the dungeon) slipped away as he grew more and more passionate on the topic. Malady had not previously noticed how much he seemed to love to hear himself talk. The audience, most of which did not seem to share his enthusiasm, grew restive. Finally he must have sensed their unease or perhaps he was ready to see some blood shed at last. “Dragons often demanded the sacrifice of beauteous maidens and tonight we reenact the bad old days for your entertainment in this program, starting with the Game of Dragons and Damsels.”
Malady would have been shaking in her boots if she still had any. They’d been left out of her sacrificial ensemble, along with any item of warm or protective clothing.
“How dare he!” she growled to her closest fellow incipient sacrifices. “He may think it’s a game but I for one am not game and I decline to be treated like it!”
She was further outraged when the burly men Uncle Marq ordered to ‘prepare the sacrificial maiden’ took one look at her angry face and veered away to grab a young girl, the one who had been trying to escape her shackles back in the cave, Malady was sure of it. The silly chit shrieked so piercingly you’d have sworn she was descended from banshees.
“What’s the matter with you, girl?” Malady demanded. “Rip their faces off!”
“You’re next, girly,” said the heavier of the two men, the one with the shaved head and a scar that looked as if an axe had cleaved his head in two at one point and the head had been clumsily reassembled.
Malady shrieked louder than the girl who was actually being attacked and in fury stamped her bare feet on the ground. Which hurt, and she stumbled. Someone braced her up from the back. The thugs manhandled the younger girl forward, and one of them bent to unlock her shackles.
As he stood, the Gypsy fiddler fumbled and fell against him. He pushed her back into Dr. Hexenbraun, and she too fell, in a domino effect.
Marquette took one look at the terrified youngster and pointed at his henchmen to return her to the group. Then he pointed at Malady.
“Her,” he said clearly.
The henchmen closed on Malady. The Gypsy woman, Romany—Verity’s mother, supposed to be the hereditary queen—brained him with her fiddle, which oddly enough did not break, so she smashed it into the face of the other assailant. Malady, whose shackles had mysteriously fallen away shortly after Dr. Hexenbraun fell across her feet, broke and ran for the closest tunnel. All eyes followed her, so most people did not notice the trio of dragons that flew into the arena until they swooped after her.
They were too big to squeeze into the tunnel and looked at each other in frustration until the singing dragon, Devent, who could not simply pretend to be tethered in the face of his old enemies, sang out to them.
“Three of you against one young lady! Have you no honor?”
“Uhh—nope,” said Chainy, rattling his tail.
“What’s honor?” demanded Spike Tail, turning his back to the tunnel mouth to confront Devent, who was halfway across the arena by then. “Is it tasty?”
Bobbinears dove on Devent, who easily snaked around him.
The audience went wild, trying to escape from the unplanned and unsupervised dragon dispute. They scrambled over each other dismounting from the stands, stepping on those who remained seated. The cries of those stepped on by panicked dragons rent the air.
Malady picked the moment when the attacking dragons were halfway between her cave and Devent to make her reappearance—this time with several coils of dragon encircling her.
From the air, Bobbinears had turned from pursuing Malady to confront Devent, circling him, while Devent turned to face his opponent directly. But Devent was no more a warrior now than he had been when he met the three fierce dragons before. Fortunately, Grudge was the same as well. A rock the size of a dinner plate seemed to catapult from her hands to hit the attacking dragon on the wing, crippling him.
Bobbinears screamed and fell, then flapped back to his feet and charged Devent, only to receive a face-full of troll.
“Hello, creep. You want a piece of this maiden, come and get it!” she said, crouching as she hopped from side to side to confuse his attack moves, tossing a stone the size of a man’s head from hand to hand.
“You!” Bobbinears said.
“You noticed,” Grudge said. “It’s your lucky day, hot and bothered. Pick on someone who fights back, you bullying sack of burning poop.” She threw her rock and it hit him squarely in the right eye this time. He went down like a—well, a rock.
Spike Tail and Chainy concentrated on menacing Malady until Spike Tail’s concentration wavered and he suddenly thought, why go after the loose one when there were so many others to pick off.
Flaming, he flew at the swoon of chained and restrained maidens, some of whom seemed distinctly less than maidenly. He didn’t care as long as they had flesh to sear and blood to spill. Two of them who were old and stringy-looking stepped out in front of the others and fixed him with stares that ought not to have been as compelling as they were. “Dragon, I bid you, flee while there’s still time!” the one who looked to be older said. She said it in the tongue of humans, which he did not understand.
“Ooh,” he responded in his own tongue. “You’re threatening me, old woman. I am very frightened, but I cannot run away fast enough so how about I just roast you where you stand instead?”
At the same time, Chainy swooped toward their primary target, but just as he was about to snatch her up, the tunnel seemed to fill with fire and a spikey old head poked out of it. It whipped toward him on its long flexible neck until he was face to face with it.
“Death to any who attacks my pretty, pretty princess!”
Chainy blasted a bolt of flame into his smug old face. The elder dragon dodged the blast and snaked his head up to meet his attacker, but most of him remained on the ground, wrapped protectively around the prey the gang of three had been specifically directed to barbecue.
Marquette stood in the stands now, addressing a group of armed people. “Any of you who came hoping to bag a dragon, now is your chance. They aren’t performing as they’re supposed to. Put them down.”
“We don’t get to question them about their lairs at all? Pity.”
“Perhaps when things are less hectic.”
Six men and one woman, all in hunting clothes, stepped into the field with rifles held at the ready, aimed into the dragons clustered along the side. They raised their weapons. Something sailed through the air and knocked three of their weapons from their hands and onto the ground.
In a recently vacated section of the stands, a mud-brown girl stood beside a large stack of pottery plates. She sk
immed one into the air with dead aim, and it took out another firearm. The small dragon beside her launched into the air on the periphery of the aerial battle, also carrying plates, several in its mouth and some in each set of talons. A gentleman dressed in a fern and heather colored hunting costume raised a musket to his shoulder and three plates smashed onto his head, toppling him before he could fire a shot. One of his armed companions took aim at the dragon and the girl picked up three plates and flung them in a burst so rapid it defied the eye’s ability to track. The musket flew from the man’s hands.
One of his companions took aim at the girl and he fired. With unusual accuracy for a musket, the round struck her. She looked down at the hole in her chest, which did not bleed, and stooped, scooping up a little dirt from the ground, spat on it, and slapped it over the hole. Madame Erotica and her girls saw their chance and ran in among the women distributing vials of love potion, before all concerned sprinted to the dragon side of the arena and began pelting dragons with the potion, which spattered in a huff of enchanted scent and ran pink as dilute blood down the scales it hit.
A gang of trolls from the audience tromped over other spectators to reach Grudge.
“You’re not doing this right,” her brother said. “Dummy.”
“If you can do it better, you take out a few,” Grudge said, feeling the old resentment flair within her, even though she knew this was the troll way of taking an interest.
“I should just let you die,” he said. “You were always worthless anyway.”
Grudge grinned. “You say the sweetest things.”
Her family covered for her standing stonily between the attacking men and the dragons while Grudge unlocked shackles.
When she ducked in among the other dragons to work, Devent, on an impulse, took to the sky, singing his heart out, singing of peace and freedom and gold and jewels and how nasty people tasted compared to other delicious dietary items a dragon might consider. The main thing about his song was that the tune was soothing as a lullaby and soon nerves began to be less twitchy, trigger fingers grew less itchy, and Chainy, still menacing Malady, stepped back, shaking his head as if confused.
The Redundant Dragons Page 28