The Shamer's War

by Lene Kaaberbøl

The knight halted his big gray horse and looked down on me. “I see,” he said. “And is his faintness real this time?”

  The soldier raised his sword. “Do you want me to—”

  “No.” The gray horse snorted, and the knight rested a calming hand on its neck. “I have reason to believe the Dragon Lord wants to see this one. Throw him across one of the packhorses. And see to it that you tie the knots properly. We don’t want to lose him on the way, do we now?”

  When I woke, I thought for a moment that I was back at the Sagisburg, in the Gullet with Mascha and the rest. I think it was because everything hurt, and I was so very tired, and because my foot was stuck to something, just like when they used to chain us up at night.

  My head hurt so badly it felt as if it might burst any minute. I hadn’t had enough to drink, and right now my throat felt as if it had been hung out to dry for months, like a split cod.

  Water. Wasn’t there water somewhere?

  I sat up with some difficulty. I didn’t remember how I had come to be here, in this large dark room that seemed to be a barn of some kind. There was straw underneath me, and above some long narrow… not quite windows, but slits, at any rate. I could just make out a patch of sky, sky that had begun to lighten.

  I was about to try and get up when I remembered the chained-up feeling. I fumbled in the dark. Around one ankle I found a sort of wooden shackle with a thin metal chain attached to it. Lightweight irons. How practical, I thought bitterly. This way you could shackle a whole town without dragging around several tons of metal.

  I closed my eyes for a moment. If only my head would stop hurting. And the rest of me too, for that matter. I couldn’t even think.

  “Oh, so ye’re awake, then?”

  The man next to me had noticed me stirring, it seemed.

  “Yes. Do we have any water?”

  “No. They gave the rest of us a drink before turning in, but you were out cold.”

  I squinted at him and tried to make out his features in the dark.

  “Obain?”

  “Aye, lad. And thank ye, by the way. You were right, the devil would have done it.”

  At first I couldn’t remember what he was talking about. The throbbing in my head was about all I could think of. But then it came back to me—the Dragon soldier and his threats.

  “You probably look better with two ears,” I said. “And if one has to bleed a little, it had better be for something worth bleeding for.”

  “Ye’re no Highlander.”

  “No.” The way I talked gave me away immediately, I knew.

  “What is yer name then, laddie?”

  “Davin. Davin Tonerre.”

  “Oh, aye, the Shamer’s son, what lives with Kensie?”

  I nodded, but then realized he wouldn’t be able to see it in the dark.

  “Yes. But it would be nice if you didn’t mention that to the Dragon knight.”

  He snorted. “Never ye fear. I’ll not say a word to that bastard before I can spit on his grave.”

  Obain seemed to be a fairly belligerent man. Now, at any rate. What he had been like before the Dragon Force took his town and dragged him away from house, home, and family, I couldn’t tell.

  Family…

  “Do you have any children?”

  “Three,” he said. “Those devils took my oldest girl, Maeri. The lass is only eight.”

  Maeri. That was the name of the Harbormaster’s daughter too, the one who had smiled at me and given me a full cup of toddy though I had only paid for the smallest measure. Right now I would cheerfully swap all the toddies in the world for one long drink of cold water.

  “Where are the children?” I couldn’t see them or hear them anywhere.

  “They’ll not tell us. They have them somewhere, and if we give them any trouble—” He spat instead of finishing the sentence. “Devils. If only I had my good, keen flensing knife.”

  The sun had barely risen before they came to herd us back onto the road. My bruised and weary body complained violently at being told to move, but I was almost past caring. All that mattered right now was that I was finally able to drink. Three whole cupfuls I managed to down before I was shoved away from the water barrel.

  My feet were still bare, and they were not a pretty sight. Bloody and swollen and full of cuts I had not even noticed getting. Some of my toes felt completely dead, and I knew this might mean frostbite and eventually even gangrene and death. Callan had preached at us often enough, and Mama too. In the Highlands, the cold could kill you.

  I didn’t even have a couple of rags to wrap them in. My poor, ragged shirt was already a meager shield against the chill.

  “How far are we from Baur Laclan?” I asked Obain.

  “The better part of a day,” he said. “Here, lad. Take my socks. I can line my clogs with straw.”

  I was so tired this was nearly enough to make me cry like a girl. The man was offering to give me his socks. It was the best and kindest thing anybody had done for me since… since I couldn’t remember when.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll not forget that.”

  He growled something—the only word that stood out clearly was “devils.” Normally it might have taken years before a man like Obain would have been willing to see me as anything other than a no-account Lowlander. But for making friends quickly, there is nothing like a common enemy.

  Baur Laclan was nestled in its wide valley like always. But around it…

  There were thousands of them. Thousands of men, thousands of tents and little fires, wagons and horses and weapons.

  “Have they taken the town?” asked Obain. “Lad, can ye see if they have taken the town and the castle?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But there were no sounds of battle, and when you looked down at the anthill multitude of Dragon soldiers, it didn’t seem possible that Laclan could have held out against such an overpowering force.

  Our little column, led by the scarred Dragon knight, passed unchallenged not only through the camp but also into the town, and from there right through the castle gates and into the yard where I had once faced Ivain Laclan in the Ring of Iron because I thought he had ambushed Mama and shot her with an arrow.

  There we stopped, not because anyone barred us from entering but because the foremost children suddenly started screaming and tried to run away.

  “What is it?” called Obain. “Maeri, what is wrong?”

  He pushed on through the throng and dodged a spear shaft meant to bring him down.

  “Obain, wait…”

  But he didn’t listen to me; all that mattered to him was that he had heard his daughter scream. Nor was he the only disorderly prisoner. The Dragon soldiers cursed and snapped angry commands, laying about them with spear shafts and swords. I hoped they were using the flats.

  I said a few curses myself. I could no longer see Obain; nor could I leave him to the Dragon soldiers’ untender mercies. The man had given me his socks. I pressed on through the heaving crowd myself, edging past the rear end of a frightened horse, past a Dragon man with his back turned, and on to—

  “Back!” shouted another soldier, and lashed out at me with his spear shaft. I took the blow on my forearm and kept going, dodging him too.

  “Obain!”

  A terrified little boy cannoned into me. I caught him before he ended up under the horses’ hooves and settled him on my hip like I might have done with my little sister, Melli.

  “Easy there,” I said. “Take it easy, now.”

  He was heaving and sobbing with fright.

  “Monster,” he keened. “T’sa monster!”

  Monster? Where?

  There. In the middle of the castle courtyard. Torchlight fell on gleaming scales, on a huge body taller than that of a horse and longer than… longer than a river, it seemed to me at first, but there was after all a beginning and an end to the creature, a head and a tail. And a wide stinking maw filled with needle-sharp teeth.

  I knew well what it
was, because this was not the first time I had seen such a monster.

  It was one of Drakan’s dragons.

  DAVIN

  Monster

  A dragon. In Helena Laclan’s courtyard. How could that be true? It was like seeing a whale in a garden pond, or perhaps rather a snake in a henhouse, wrong and dangerous and somehow completely inappropriate.

  The boy clung to me like a leech and tried to hide his face in my armpit.

  “Monster,” he sobbed once more. “Monster.”

  “It’s just a dragon,” I said and then realized how stupid that sounded. “Look. It’s all tied up.”

  And it was. A fat chain tethered it to one of the thick upright poles that made up the Ring of Iron. It hissed at us and did not look very friendly, but at the moment it couldn’t harm us.

  I could still barely believe it. How had it come here, all the way from Dunark? And why?

  “Give me that kid,” yelled a Dragon soldier into my face, so that the boy grew even more frightened and started bawling his head off. “And get back into line, cur!”

  My hold on the boy tightened all by itself. But at that moment, the Dragon knight rode his gray gelding in front of the dragon, so that he was between the monster and the heaving mass of frightened children, half-panicked horses, and fishermen struggling to reach their terrified offspring. The gelding didn’t like any of it, but the knight kept it under control with a firm hand.

  “Order!” he called in a bellow that rolled among the castle walls like thunder. “The dragon is chained. It will not harm you, as long as you obey!”

  A semblance of order did spread through the crowd. There were still whimperings and sniffles from the children, and two fishermen lay on the cobbles, one with a leg wound that bled copiously, the other apparently unconscious, hit by a spear butt or kicked by a horse, probably.

  “We have only one use for people who do not obey,” said the knight. “Dragon fodder. But each man who serves us faithfully and well—he has his place in the Order of the Dragon. And that place may well be a high one, as high as mine, perhaps. Think about it!”

  Nobody said anything. One of the fishermen spat on the ground and got a warning whack from a spear butt for his pains. But to me there was something chillingly familiar about that refrain. It reminded me of the Sagisburg and the Educators. Obedience was all. If you were obedient, you might end up at the Prince’s own table. If not, it was the filth and darkness of the Gullet and the knowledge that if you died there, you would indeed be dragon fodder. Oh yes, Drakan had learned a lesson or two from his grandfather.

  “The children will have their own quarters. The first meal is the gift of the Dragon Lord. After that you will have to earn their food. The child whose father or brother or uncle does not serve the Lord, that child will cry itself to sleep on hungry nights.”

  The fishermen were listening. The one who had spat now looked as if he regretted it. I had a glimpse of Obain’s face, and even he looked tense rather than belligerent. Had Drakan done this every time he conquered a new town? Then it was no wonder the Dragon Force had grown to such numbers so quickly.

  “I can tell you are already more obedient,” said the knight. “Very wise of you. You will now let go of the children and follow Balain here quietly and promptly. He will show you where you are to sleep and eat during your first days here.”

  Still, it took a little time. The smallest of the children clung to their relatives—fathers and brothers in most cases—but the fishermen had understood the message all right. And if they had a little trouble remembering, the dragon lay coiled behind the knight like a scaled and fanged reminder of what might happen to them if they did not do as they were bid. So Obain gently explained to Maeri that he had to leave her now and that she had to go along with the Dragon men and do as they told her to do. And that the dragon wouldn’t hurt her as long as she was being a good girl. Most of the fishermen took pains to hide their own anger so as not to alarm the children, and I too loosened the little boy’s tight hold on my neck, put him down, and sent him off toward the other children with a gentle push. I had hated Drakan before this, but now my hatred settled in to become a deep, abiding thing.

  “This way,” said Balain. “Down the steps here.”

  The men went. Two of them were supporting the one whose leg was bleeding; two others lifted the unconscious man as gently as possible. The children made no move to follow. The older ones held the younger by the hand, and a girl of Dina’s age clutched the baby in her arms like a doll.

  “No, not you,” said the knight when I moved to go with the others. “You’re staying here.”

  I stopped.

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. The stupid boy who tried to cheat me and to lie to me. Did you think I had forgotten?”

  They chained me next to the dragon, to one of the metal posts of the Ring of Iron. The dragon was inside the ring, I was outside. Between us was a length of rusty chain so low a child could step over it. Could a dragon?

  I didn’t think it could reach me. They were probably only trying to scare me. The knight had said that Drakan wanted to see me, and that would be fairly difficult if the dragon had eaten me. It stood to reason that they had not in fact shackled me so that the dragon could get at me. Right?

  At first it seemed completely uninterested in any case. It was cold, and like all reptiles it was slow and dumb with chill. Lying here as it did, in the middle of the castle courtyard, it had to be used to people and horses passing by all the time, and it must have learned that they weren’t all dragon food. But gradually it seemed to occur to the beast that one of the people wasn’t going away. That he couldn’t go away. Slowly, it raised its head.

  I stood still, barely breathing. If I didn’t move at all, perhaps the dragon would lose interest in me.

  No such luck. With a heave it rose and waddled a couple of steps closer on fat, short legs. I could hear the claws scrape against the gravel. It halted for a moment when it reached the rusty chain of the Ring. Then it simply flopped down on its belly and began to slither under it. I tried to take one more step backward, but the chain tethering me was taut now. If I wanted to move farther away, it would be without my left foot.

  Could the dragon really pass under the Ring chain?

  No. Not quite. Its shoulders were too high.

  I let go of a long breath I had been hanging on to for quite a while. No. It couldn’t get at me.

  The dragon wasn’t pleased. It opened its maw and hissed at me and seemed to think that anything that stood where I was standing and did not go away ought to be dragon food. Its pale yellow eyes were staring at me, and I could smell the stench of rotting meat surrounding it.

  Once before I had been this close to a dragon. That was back when Mascha and I had to save Gerik in the dragon pit of the Sagisburg. But it had all been so quick, and it had been Gerik standing there, shackled and helpless, not me.

  This was different, I told myself. Gerik’s dragon had not been chained. It would have devoured him in three gulps. My dragon couldn’t do that. It lay there, belly flat against the ground, stretching its neck as far as it would go, and it still couldn’t reach me.

  “You can’t get at me,” I told it, and perhaps I was telling myself as well, with as much certainty as I could muster.

  Suddenly it braced its thick legs and tried to rise. The rusty Ring chain went taut across its shoulders, and there was a creak of metal joints and a groan from the heavy posts. I could see the dragon’s muscles bulge with power under the scaly skin, and I lost some of my hard-won certainty. It couldn’t really burst the chain—could it?

  No. It couldn’t. But at the dragon’s second attempt I saw one of the poles move, like a tree being uprooted. The dragon felt it too, and it threw itself forward like a horse straining against its harness. And with a drawn-out shriek like the sound of a rusty old iron gate opening, the post tore free of its hole. The dragon shook itself once, like a dog shaking water from its fur, and the chain slid
down its jagged spine. The beast was clear of the Ring.

  I remembered Gerik’s scream at the end, no words in it at all, just pure terror.

  “The dragon is loose!” somebody was shouting, but it wasn’t me. I watched, dumb with fear, as the monster waddled one step closer, one step more, one more… and then stopped.

  It wasn’t entirely free. There was still the chain around its neck, like the one that shackled me. But it had managed to uproot one Ring post like that; it might easily do the same to the one it was tethered to. It leaned into the chain like a dog straining at its collar, digging in its claws for a stronger pull. I looked around wildly for a weapon—a spear, a sharp stick, a rock, anything.

  There was nothing.

  A couple of uniformed men had come running into the courtyard. They stared at the dragon, and at me.

  “It’s torn up the bloody post,” said one. “A good strong cast-iron post like that!”

  “Get the dragon keeper,” said the other. “This is for him to deal with.”

  The other nodded and disappeared back into the castle at a run.

  The remaining Dragon soldier was watching me with a strange expression—almost hungrily, I thought.

  “Are you scared?” he asked.

  Of course I was scared. What did he think? I gave him a single nasty glare and returned my attention to the dragon. It was only a short distance away—seven or eight paces, had it been free. But it wasn’t. It turned its head and snapped at the chain in irritation. But even dragon jaws can’t snap a steel chain in half.

  The Dragon soldier came closer.

  “It looks like the post will hold,” he said. “Almost a pity, don’t you think? Seeing that it wants you so badly.”

  “Are you cheering it?” I snarled. “Anyone would think you were rooting for the dragon.”

  “Oh, I am,” he said. “Always.”

  Something about the way he said it made me take another look at him. He wasn’t just an ordinary soldier, I noticed. His uniform was that of a Dragon knight, with the dragon edged in red and gold on his breastplate and on both shoulders, and his cloak and trousers looked oddly scaly, as if they might have been made from dragon hide. Who knows? Maybe they were. Dina had told me that Drakan himself had a dragonhide cloak, so maybe his knights did too.