The other guards drop their sabres. Some turn and run away. Some stay still, hands raised, squinting in the blinding light of the lizards.
Silreena calls to them, and they trot happily up to her. She pets them and with each stroke they grow brighter.
“Can go now. They’re done,” she says.
Teep curiously sniffs the petrified guards, then launches into the sky with the rest of his brothers and sisters, descending on the great wall dividing Lichtfan and Dunkelherrscht.
They tear it apart until I can no longer tell where the crops end and the compost begins. I gasp at the broken plants. Are they going to doom all Lichtfans for our sins? Or worse—doom all that lives and grows?
They dig frantically through the rubble, and I think back to the dense network of tunnels Silreena we had traveled through.
Tunnel-grubs wriggle their way out into the light cast by the lizards, basking and growing. Dunkellians and Lichtfans wander toward the destroyed boundary, faces lit by strobing lights.
“This is… this is going to change everything,” I say.
Silreena grins at me. “Told you. Take care of small, take care of big. Change everything.”
The light shines where we cast it.
The lizards were casting it everywhere.
The dragons transformed out of dark
Made their mark on the land
Casting light into the shadows
Bodies aglow with potential
They flew and bridged the rift
Caused a drift in a split society
Light was now available for all
No thralls could be, nor lords
The women who brought this change
Silreena the Strange and Zerianne
Set an example that spread
Prosperity bred when walls were torn down
That is how our land grew lush
And the sky flush with dancing dragons
-From Persalia’s Lichtfan Canto 10:21
Joseph Halden is a wizard in search of magic, an astronaut in need of space, and a hopeless enthusiast of frivolity. He’s shot things with giant lasers, worn an astronaut costume for over 100 days to try and get into space, and made his own soap. A graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop, he writes science fiction and fantasy in the Canadian prairies.
JENNIFER R. DONOHUE
DEFEND US IN BATTLE
I’m ten when Dad pulls me out of school right after lunchtime. It’s one of those hot days on the edge of spring and summer, heat shimmers coming up off the parking lot as I follow him to the motorcycle. The back of his neck already has the beginnings of a tan, and I wonder how we’ll play hooky today: fishing, or Great Adventure, or what.
“It’s time you learned what this family does,” he says, handing me his old leather jacket, too big, soft and buttery, smelling like the memory of his aftershave. It has darker, unwrinkled spots where his patches used to be. The twelve pointed star is the only one left, in the middle of the back, matching the back patch on the jacket he wears now.
“Does Mom know?” I ask, reaching for the spare helmet.
“Your mother doesn’t understand. We don’t discuss it.” He takes something else off the side of the bike, then turns and plants the tip of a sheathed sword on the asphalt between us. “Sandy, pray with me.”
“We’re going to get in trouble,” I say. Any minute the principal will burst out here with the hall monitor, yelling angrily. There’ll be police sirens and flashing lights, cops with guns.
“We won’t.” Dad waits, and I step in closer, putting my free hand on the warm crossguard. The sword is almost as tall as me, and the air smells like rain and exhaust and honeysuckles. He closes his eyes and bows his head. We almost never to go church, but we pray a lot. “Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our protection against the malice and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him we humbly pray; and do thou, O Prince of the Heavenly host, by power of God, cast into hell Satan and all evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruin of souls. Amen.”
“Amen.”
“Do you see that?” Dad asks, pointing to the south. I squint and look, and just see hazy sky and far-away storm clouds, the sudden spring greening of all the trees around us. I don’t want to disappoint him by saying no.
“I don’t know.”
“You will soon. Get on.”
I’ve been on the back of the motorcycle before, but not like this. Dad drives fast, cuts corners, and once rides on the line in between a bus and an SUV. I grip the handles under my seat and pray some more on my own, too scared to close my eyes, flinching as bugs ping against the helmet’s face shield. Somebody honks at us, and the sound zooms and fades like in a cartoon.
We pull off the highway on an exit that isn’t numbered, and pass a collapsed gate with a rusted away sign. The broken-up road grinds and pops beneath the tires, trees and bushes shouldering in closer until the asphalt peters out. Dad stops and cuts the engine.
“Keep your helmet on,” he says, waiting for me to get down before stepping off the bike and fastening the sword belt around his waist. He opens one of the saddle bags and takes out an axe, the wooden handle dark, the head smooth and unmarked. “Take this.”
It’s heavier than I expect, and I almost drop it. “Dad, what are we doing?”
He jerks his head for me to follow, and walks off through the trees. The axe feels like a solid piece of Mom’s voice saying ‘you’re going to hurt yourself’ but the weight of it settles in my hands, welcome in a way I don’t have words for. It feels right, and comforting, even though my stomach is all knotted up with fear and excitement, and I think I might throw up. My heart struggles in my throat like a bait fish trapped in the cage of my fingers, right before it goes on the hook.
The wind picks up and the trees all sway together, the leaves whispering in a furious chorus. The air stretches taut, like a storm is rolling in, and I look up at the sky to check for those dark clouds. Ahead, Dad breaks the tree line and stops, drawing his sword with a ringing flourish. “Stay out of sight,” he says, voice muffled by the helmet.
A rusty crane lists over the edge of the sudden cliff, hooked chain dangling over nothing, the landscape stony and barren. The air is oily and thunder-charged, and there’s a noise like a rising wind, or an approaching train, a heavy roaring in my ears. I can’t see anything, but I feel hot breath, and the storm squall of beating wings. For the first time since I was little, I pee my pants.
Dad strides forward, both hands gripping the sword, and I crouch damply in the tree line, fingers still wrapped around the axe because I forget how to let go. I want to run, but Dad is here. Dad is fighting, head thrown back, swinging the sword in mighty arcs as the dust and leaves roil up from the ground. I can only look, and then can only look away, when I remember how to turn my head. He has to be okay, I think, he has to win. I don’t know what to do if he doesn’t. Find his phone on the bike? Run back to the highway?
“Sandy! Sandy, bring the axe!”
The world is a sudden stillness like having my head in the biggest seashell ever, and it grows quieter even as I stumble towards him, carrying the axe carefully, my wet jeans bunching and clinging, feeling cold even though it’s warm out. He holds his hand out and I shove the axe handle into it and start to back away except he reaches across and yanks me forward, closing both our hands on the handle of the axe and raising it. I scream as we bring the axe down together, burying it into nothingness. Then the hot blood spills on my hands and I see the dragon.
It’s bigger than a school bus, gray, spade-headed, whitish scales over its eyes. Some of the hooked claws are broken off bloody, and the edges of the pointed wings are tattered like if you tied a kite off and left it to fly all day. It shudders and kicks a back leg a few times as black blood flows from its neck onto the broken stones.
I stare at it and Dad pulls his helmet off, and then mine. He dips his hands in the blood and says “This is wh
at we do,” as he draws his fingertips across my cheeks and forehead. “This is what the family has done for hundreds of years. We can still see the dragons, and we fight them.”
“Why?” I feel like throwing up, my chin wobbles with building tears, and my skin tightens under the drying blood. “Why can’t the police do it?”
“Because we are soldiers of God, and this is a sacred duty.” Dad picks up the sword and axe. “Let’s go.”
“Does Mom know?”
“No. She wouldn’t understand.”
“Like how she doesn’t understand the club?” In the summer, Dad’s friends come to town on their roaring motorcycles and camp in the backyard for a week. They make bonfires and drink a lot of beer and talk all night. Mom stays away as much as she can without completely leaving, and tries to keep me away, but nobody ever tells me why. Dad’s friends are big and loud, but they’re nice to us. They’re fun.
“Kind of like that.”
“I’m really scared, Dad.”
“It’s all right. A dragon is a scary thing.”
“Were you scared?”
“Yes. If you aren’t scared anymore, it’s too dangerous.”
“Did your dad do this?”
“Yes, and his dad. Since before there was America, even. Back to the Crusades.” He pulls a rumpled pack of wet naps out of a saddlebag and leans down to wipe the blood off my face before cleaning his.
“How did they know?”
“An angel told them. Like Michael.”
“Are we the only ones?”
“I can call the club sometimes, but they’re not always close enough. And they have a different calling. There’s more in the world than dragons that most people won’t be able to understand. You’ll see what I mean.”
“I’m scared,” I say again. Dad crouches down and hugs me for a long time before he takes me home.
I’m thirteen the next time we kill a dragon. In a way, I almost forgot the first time, like maybe it was a dream. I’d tried looking in the house and garage for the sword and axe, and couldn’t find them. If they existed, they were hidden better than the Christmas presents ever were.
Dad wakes me up just before noon; it’s summer and Mom’s at work. “Get dressed,” he says. “We’re going hunting.”
“I’m tired.” I was up late raiding.
“I don’t care.”
I shuffle around my room, pull on jeans and a t-shirt. I carry my boots out to the living room, yawning. “So where are we going?”
Dad hands me a sword. “See how that feels.”
I almost drop it. Shocked wide awake, I bring my left hand in to steady the pommel. It’s plain, no engravings, the handle wrapped in leather, and I take a experimental swing amongst our plants and furniture. The air sings softly over the edge. “It feels great.”
Dad nods. “Good. Now let’s suit up and get going.”
I have riding gear of my own, leather jacket with removable Kevlar panels, helmet with gold and white angel wings painted on it, new from Christmas. Another couple of years and I’ll have my own license, my own bike.
On the back of the motorcycle, I almost know where Dad’s going. It isn’t anything I can focus on, just a sense of the air being different, or a sound just outside my hearing. I remember how scared I was the first time, and I’m scared again, but excited too.
We park the bike halfway up a brush-tangled driveway and walk the rest of the way on cracked asphalt with bushes and grass forcing their way up through it. I try to carry my sword confidently, my heart roaring in my ears. My skin is electrified, every hair standing on end. “Dad, I can feel--”
Dad holds up a gloved hand, looking straight ahead. I look, and this time, I see it. Kind of. I can see a shape in the air where I think the dragon is, branches bending away from it. Its choking sulfur exhalations are just bearable inside the helmet. Does it see us? Did the other dragon stink like that? I see movement off to the side, try to track it. The first one was so big, and this one can only be the same. Maybe its head is over—
Then I hear it roar—really hear it this time—and it comes into shimmery focus. Dad’s drawn the first blood, ducking underneath the furious swipe of claws, the rattlesnake dart of its huge head. At first I think I can’t move, that I’m frozen like in a nightmare, and then I run forward and, two handed, drive my sword into its side.
It roars hot stinking subway breath, the air filling with heat shimmers, and Dad tackles me from the side, just in time to avoid a volcanic spume of flame from its mouth, leaving the sword stuck into the dragon.
The dragon rears back, snarling and shaking its head furiously, paws at the sword, then ducks its head to try and pull it out with its teeth, fully distracted. Dad’s on it again in an instant, ramming his sword through its eye straight up to the cross guard.
The dragon collapses, more flame drooling from its mouth and onto the ground, where some leaves catch fire for a second and go out again.Wisps of smoke rise up from the ground around us.
I get up shakily, my stomach flutter flopping over and over, and Dad just looks at me. I go and grip the sword, my sword, and put my boot against the side of the dragon for leverage, pulling it out like King Arthur taking the sword from the stone.
“I’m sorry,” I say, turning with the black-slicked blade dripping in my hand. My voice is too loud inside the helmet in the sudden quiet. The dragon ticks as it cools, like a car engine in the winter.
“You were perfect,” Dad says, grinning behind his face plate. “Now let’s get out of here before the fire department shows up.”
We get ice cream on the way home, sitting in the too hot shade licking our cones, leaving our leather jackets draped on the bike. “I’m thinking about joining fencing club at school,” I say, somehow shy after what we’ve just done. I don’t always know what Dad will think about something.
“It’s a good idea.”
Mom doesn’t think so, of course. Me and Dad practice in the backyard, long, sweaty, sunburnt hours, when Mom isn’t home. In the fall, I join the fencing club. I come home bruised and exhausted and happy, and my grades are good so there’s no excuse Mom can give. A fencing sabre isn’t really like the sword Dad gave me, but it’s the closest I can get here. There’s no European martial arts club nearby.
Dad and I kill two more dragons before my senior year of high school, and that summer I get my motorcycle license and my own bike. The club comes out to celebrate with their normal bonfire out in the backyard and this time when Mom tries to leave with me, I stay.
I have my first beer with those guys—Big John, Paul, Santiago—and hear their stories of the things they’d faced. Dad concentrates on dragons; the club, sometimes, faces worse. Actual demons. Hellhounds. Magic beyond what they’ll even explain to me.
At the kitchen table—and Mom’s maybe going to murder me—Paul tattoos a Saint Benedict’s cross on the inside of my right wrist.
The next dragon is different. It’s younger, maybe, or angrier. I wake up at dawn and the sky is bloody with the rising sun. I make coffee and get the gear ready. Mom’s still asleep when we leave, side by side on the highway, riding into the day.
We turn down yet another overgrown road that’s the same and different from the others. The asphalt’s maybe more intact, and there are more signs, bleached blank from years in the sun. I catch sight of a structure through the trees and realize it’s a little amusement park, with a roller coaster and one of those freefall rides, not close enough to the beach to really get the tourists, or maybe not big enough or exciting enough. The road opens up into the big cracked apart parking lot, and then it all goes dark.
I have dreamlike flashes, impressions.
Red hot pain up one leg and arm like from going down a metal playground slide at noon in the summertime.
Roaring like the ocean or a train, first muffled by my helmet and then loud and uninterrupted.
The high wail of a siren, ambulance or police or fire truc
k.
Then my veins are cold, so cold, but nothing hurts anymore.
It’s so hard to open my eyes again, and when I do everything is so white and bright. Then I remember the dragon and give a jerk, and hands hold me back, Mom’s perfume all around me. “Stop, stop. Sandy honey you’re going to hurt yourself. You were in an accident.”
“Dad?” I croak. My throat is drier than it has ever been. What I want to say was Is Dad okay? Did he kill it?
“Your father,” Mom says and stops. Machines in the room beep. The loudspeaker in the hallway says something, muffled worse than a drive thru. “I never wanted you to get that motorcycle,” she says. I drag my eyes open all the way, look at Mom’s red face, her wet eyes.
“It was an accident,” I ask, or say.
“On the highway,” Mom says, her voice all wavery. “You could’ve been killed.”
It seems like a ridiculous and obvious thing to say, but I don’t know how to answer, and anyway Mom starts crying again. I turn my head just a little, moving my eyes further, but can’t see Dad. “Is Dad?”
“Your father is fine,” Mom says firmly, angry suddenly, or more angry. “He called the ambulance and then called one of his buddies to come and get the bikes.” Mom keeps talking, but my eyes grind shut again and I float away in a dream of a summer day that smells like salt and honeysuckles and the heavy metallic reek of dragon’s blood.
The next time I wake up, Mom isn’t there, but the creak of a leather jacket and the smell of motor oil, sweat and old coffee says Dad is. “I’m sorry, kiddo.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“I should’ve known to look out for your better,” he says. His eyes are wet and red, but his cheeks are dry. “Your mother is divorcing me.”
“Because of this?”
“No, but this was the last straw. At least the club will always take me.”
“Dad, you’re leaving? Like this? With me like this?” I try to sit up, fall back against the pillow with my vision blurring, the room doing a slow tilting spin away from me.
Hear Me Roar Page 4
