Dragons!

by Various

  our lawful lord, it was only right that its death provide us with a replacement."

  "So you were waiting for a hero?" Caius snorted. "Been there meself. Had one on me, I did, in fact, but he bolted." To himself he thought, Wonder what did become of old Bee-wolf? Nothing too bad, I hope. Can't judge him too harsh, getting the monster sprung on him like that. How was he to know the beast wouldn't bide quiet 'til morning, then come be slaughtered all polite and planned? Luck to you, mate, wherever you are! Could be as you'll still make a hero, some day. Mithra knows there's fens aplenty in this wicked world, and maybe a dragon or two to be getting on with.

  To the old man he said, "I guess you'll have to make do with me, then. Kingship, eh? Well . . . it's bound to bring me no worse than the Glorious Ninth ever did, they can kiss me glorious bum goodbye, see if I care." He paused in his diatribe. "'Course, there's Goewin . . .

  "This Goewin, is she your woman?" the old man asked.

  Caius suddenly recalled Goewin's voice, alternately throwing him to the figurative lions during his trial and slyly encouraging Maxentius' advances. His mouth set hard. "Not any more she's not; not after all the slap-and-tickle she's no doubt been up to soon's as I got fairly out of sight. Just you tell me one thing: If I'm yer new chieftain, like you say, this don't mean I've got to be forever riding about, stealing other folks' cows, now does it? I'm strictly infantry, you know."

  "You need lead no cattle-raids, my lord." The old man smiled beneficently, if a trifle smugly. "Not if you tell the tribesmen that your faithful servant and all-wise wizard has counseled you that the gods are against it." Softly he added, "I could be even more all-wise if you'd give me a hand with the dragon's heart, Noble Chief. Unless you'd like to eat it yourself . . . ?"

  Caius gagged.

  By the light of a hastily kindled fire, the two men managed to haul a length of the dragon's dead body onto the shore a little after nightfall. Caius made some exploratory

  excavations with his dagger in the region of the beast's chest, but quickly saw that this was a futile game as well as a messy one.

  "Like a field mouse trying to rape a lion," he complained. "This job wants a man-sized blade. Bugger all, if only that Bee-wolf bastard hadn't run off with—"

  Caius remembered something. He glanced up at the hummock, where the departed barbarian's sword still stood at attention in the rotten log. "Hang on a mo', Grandda," he told the wizard. "Won't be gone but a shake."

  The old man watched him ascend the high ground. The years, and the diet that had cost him most of his teeth, had been even less charitable to his eyes. The night, the wizard's nearsightedness, and the uncertain firelight all conspired to obscure just what happened next. The wizard wiped a small bit of rheum from his eyes, blinked, and looked again just in time to see Caius' hand close around one end of a long, thickish object standing upright in a second, far more massive, object. Just as the old man had mentally discounted a number of things those distant articles might be, Caius gave a heave and brandished something long and gleaming overhead with both hands.

  There was only one possible object for a sane man to brandish in this fashion: a sword. As for what it had been sheathed in . . .

  "A stone!" the wizard shouted. "He pulled the sword from a stone!"

  By the time Caius came back down to the fire, the awe-smitten old man was groveling in the mud and gibbering about magical strength and miraculous proof of kingship.

  "Say, O Highest of the High Chiefs," the wizard babbled, "Say what this, your humblest servant and counselor, shall name you before the tribe! Speak, and I shall fly swifter than the hunting merlin-hawk to spread your name among your waiting people!"

  Caius rubbed his chin again. He was not sure what he had done to merit this, but he was not fool enough to question Fortuna's little pranks. "I am called Cai—" he began, then

  stopped. It would not take much for word to reach the Commander of someone with a Roman name jumped-up to chieftancy of a native tribe—not the way these Celts talked. It would take less time for the bastard to then dispatch the whole legion after him. The Glorious Ninth had gone to pot, true, but the strength of their old training still made them a bad enemy. Until Caius could give his new subjects the once-over and gauge their mettle as soldiers, he would do well to lay low.

  "I mean, Cai, that's just me milk-name, as I was raised with," he said hastily. "What I'm really called is—" He cudgeled his brains for a moment, desperately trying to come up with a name that was not Roman and would not ring familiar in the Commander's ears.

  He found one.

  "—Arctos."

  He settled down to clean his sword, completely forgetting his promise to cut out the dragon's heart.

  "Lord," the old man prompted. "Lord, if you do not remove the beast's heart soon, it will lose all virtue." "Sod off," said Arctos.

  The old man scowled. "Bloody foreigners, " he grumbled.

  Still, it would make a good story.

  Lan Lung

  by

  M. Lucie Chin

  Here's an evocative and fascinating look into a world as alien to most of us as many an SF writer's distant planet: ancient China . . . a place which, as the engrossing and suspenseful story that follows will amply demonstrate, might well be marked on the maps with that ancient cartographer's warning, Here Be Dragons. . . .

  Born in Oakland, California, M. Lucie Chin now lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she works in community theater as a fight choreographer and properties manager for the King's County Shakespeare Company. She made her first sale in 1980 to Galileo, where she became a frequent contributer, and later also sold fiction to markets such as Ares, Elsewhere, Faery!, Devils and Demons, and Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural. Her first novel, The Fairy of Ku-She, was published in 1988, and she is currently at work on a new novel.

  * * *

  Hsu Yuen Pao was a Taoist monk; an eccentric wanderer, an educated man, a poet and a magician. To me he was mentor, protector, companion and friend. He was sometimes called by the peasants we encountered The Man Who Walks With Ghosts.

  I am the ghost.

  Or so I have been told. So often in fact that after all the time I have been here that alone might be enough, but there is more. I remember dying. That is, I remember the event; the time, the place, the circumstances, the stupidity . . . but not the moment itself. Sometimes I think I am still falling; it was a long way from the top of the Wall, and all my life since that asinine mistake is just a dream, one long last thought between living and dying. But only sometimes. It is hard to believe when the night is cold enough to freeze dragon fire. It is hard to believe when drought turns rivers to muddy washes and rice fields to wastelands and a poor traveler must become a thief to eat. At such times it is easier to believe I have always been here, following Hsu Yuen Pao across the land, that the first thirty years of my life as I recall them are the dream.

  But in the end that too is utterly unbelievable. I know too much of another place and time. In my childhood mankind reached for the stars. The Sons of Han have yet to reach across the sea.

  I do not know the date by any measure of time I was ever taught. I can not translate the lunar calendar into the Gregorian of my memory. It is ancient China, the women have not yet begun to bind their feet, and no man in this land has ever seen a European. That is what I know of now. What of then?

  I was born in Boston, Massachusetts on the 12th of June 2010, a fourth-generation American of Chinese descent. My name was Daniel Wing and my ethnic education was limited to the salutations exchanged on Chinese New Year and the names of my favorite edibles. Barefoot on the road I stand five feet nine and a half inches, and at the time of the accident atop the Great Wall of China I was as much a tourist as any of the obvious Caucasians who made up my group, following the polite guide who filled our heads with images of the past.

  It was early April atop the Wall. Somewhere on the way down, as I exchanged one reality for another, it became warm and balmy late spring and I
became gwai . . . the ghost. Towering above that diminutive ancient population, dressed strangely, babbling incomprehensibly, understanding nothing and no one, I was a perfect candidate for ghosthood; a non-person, inhuman. Gwai. It is the only word the Chinese have for those who are not of the Sons of Han, the True People, the Chinese themselves. It expresses, more than a lack of life, a lack of reality. It suits perfectly, these days, my own concept of myself.

  It is said that a ghost grows faint when touched by the breath of a living man. To spit upon him robs him of his

  powers to change form and vanish. I was spit upon often in the days before Hsu Yuen Pao found me. He was a wise man. He understood about ghosts far better than the peasants who harried and chased me from their villages and fields. I did not trust him particularly, but he was quiet and patient and fed me and talked for me until I learned enough to speak for myself.

  He was a small man, even among his own people, and he wore his garments oddly and in a most casual manner. He was young in appearance, though generally travel-worn, but his obsidian eyes seemed old as time, deep as wells, seeming to hold yet conceal the knowledge of great age. Villagers sometimes whispered that he had found the secret of eternal life, the personal immortality the ancient Taoist monks sought relentlessly. His hair was very black and carefully braided into the longest queue I have ever seen, which he wore looped through his sash in back for convenience. There hung about his person and around his neck an array of bags, pouches and containers of many types and sizes, and across his back was slung a long, narrow sheath. It was curved, seemingly to better fit the line of his body, and nearly a yard long, black and slim enough to house only the most needle thin of blades. A most unusual and impractical weapon I felt, but surely one of great value, for the hilt was the purest and clearest of pale pink crystal, and in gossamer script of gold upon the scabbard were the two characters yii and yu, one the ideograph for abundance, the other the symbol for fish.

  He was afraid of nothing. Brave, in my opinion, to the edge of foolishness, mischievous as a child when the mood struck him, and we were frequently in trouble of one sort or another.

  There was not a dialect we encountered which he did not speak with fluency and command, and he wrote poems I have never gained the skill to appreciate. I loved them though I could not read them.

  In the quiet of night or as we walked the endless land, migrating more or less with the seasons, he would tell me of ghosts, and he would tell me of dragons.

  "The face of the earth is covered with the endless, invisible trails of the dragon Lung Mei. To build a house or bury the dead upon such a spot is a great fortune."

  He often said he felt that he and I had met upon such a spot.

  In the second summer of my new existence we made a leisurely journey toward the western mountains. At the convergence of certain mountain streams there is a cataract called The Dragon Gate. The great carp of the rivers migrate yearly to this spot to make the valiant but usually futile attempt to leap the falls. Those fish who succeed and gain the higher waters are immediately rewarded and transformed into dragons. They then climb to the highest peaks, mount the passing clouds and are borne off into the heavens.

  The Dragon Gate and the slopes around it are also the site of rare dragon bones of the finest quality, and Hsu Yuen Pao had made this journey often to collect them for geomancy and medical uses. Among the bags and pouches he wore were several in which he carried such things in small shards or ground into powders. I had seen him use them on occasion in the villages we passed through, sometimes to good effect, sometimes not. I think that if there is anything to be said for the power of belief to heal, those bones have worked miracles.

  I had my suspicions about them; not that I could positively identify them. That was the point. They could have been anything. They were not abundant except at the foot of the falls (where the implications to me were obvious) but Yuen Pao picked through such as we found with selective care.

  In the evenings as we sorted our small hoard, setting some to dry by the fire and grinding the more fragile ones into fine powders, he would instruct me as best he could, considering the still simple state of my vocabulary.

  "Small bones marked with wide lines are female," he said. "Rough bones with narrow lines are male. The variegated colors are most esteemed, while yellow and white are of medium value, and black are inferior. The light,

  yellow, flesh-colored, white and black are efficacious in curing diseases of the internal organs having their respective colors. If bones are impure or gathered by women, they should not be used.

  "Dragons occasionally change their bones, regularly shed their skins and horns. The lofty peaks of mountains, cloud-shrouded or misty, contain the bones of great and venerable dragons which attract moisture and passing clouds.

  "Remember, Little Brother, Lung is the god of all waters and the lord of all scaled creatures. When Lung is small, all fish are small. When he is of great size and well pleased with himself, there is abundance in all the land."

  He was patronizing and often condescending. But he was also totally fascinating; no less so for believing himself everything he told me. And I learned. Sifting through the convoluted speech patterns the Chinese love, the multiple meanings and implications, carefully sorting fact from myth and tradition, anecdote from parable, I slowly built a body of knowledge I could rely on . . . in one way or another. My preconceptions and skeptical nature frequently got in the way, however, and my memories of another place and time. The first severe blow to these notions came at the end of a month on the slopes around the falls.

  There had been a great display of heat lightning far off on the eastern plain during the night, and I had been amused by Yuen Pao's suggestion that it was an omen of some sort, by the seriousness with which he sat up much of the night watching the patterns of light and the scanty film of clouds hovering above the mountain tops looking for interpretations. He found none, though.

  We spent the morning descending to lower slopes through forests of hardwood and conifers and rhododendrons. Farther north and west the giant panda roamed these mountain ranges. Below on the plain bamboo and catalpa and a great diversity of flora had not yet been obliterated by the demands of cultivation. It had been a lush world we passed through on our way up to the Dragon Gate. On our

  way down we became increasingly aware that the character of the vegetation had changed.

  In the afternoon we passed a village nestled where three mountain streams converged. In spite of this the crops which had earlier promised abundant yields were now only mediocre and that at the cost of great labor to irrigate. At the next village we spent the night.

  Their situation was much the same but there was word that the central flatlands were suffering badly. What had been scanty rain upon the mountain slopes and valley in the past month had not reached the plains at all. Even here there was fear that the harvest would be disastrously poor if, indeed, the crop would be harvestable before the monsoon. Every morning the woman and girls offered sweet rice steamed with sausages and nuts, bound in leaves, to the rain god, tossing them into the streams by the dozens. Beside the fields and in the bamboo groves braces of swallows hung from poles with long banners of red paper inscribed with respectful prayers.

  Hsu Yuen Pao looked about nodding sagely as we walked and did not bother to explain. But I got the gist of things pretty well by that time. The Chinese system of education by osmosis was quite workable . . . if it was the only thing you had to do with your life, which in my case was literally true.

  He marked our course southeast as we continued toward the plain. It was his contention that we must reach the coastal lands before the monsoon season. For transients such as we the semitropical climate of the southern coast was a necessity of life. That had not occured to me the year before. Then I had simply followed. The journey would take weeks on foot, and in a rarely used corner of my mind I wondered how long it would have taken by car.

  Things were not yet so bad in the low
lands as we had expected to find on that first day, and at noon we stopped in a bamboo grove, still delicately lovely in the motionless air. No breeze rattled the stalks or stroked the leaves, but there is something inherently cooling about bamboo groves, especially the fresh yellowgreen shoots which we collected

  to boil with a little rice for our meal. I took the pack, which I had become accustomed to carrying, from my back and went about collecting the youngest shoots. When I returned with my pockets full I found Yuen Pao standing across the grove looking at me so oddly it stopped me in my tracks.

  "Brother Gwai," he said somberly. "The night of the lightning was indeed an omen. But it was not for me to understand."

  I have never been an endlessly patient man. Occasionally the obliqueness of his technique exasperated me. "Brother Pao," I said. "I do not understand. I am not a prophet. I know nothing of dreams or omens. I am ignorant. Please speak more plainly." I had learned to talk humbly in this land.

  "Lan Lung," he said in a low tone.

  The lazy deaf one? I was perplexed. Colloquialisms are confusing in any language. Particularly so in Chinese. But lung is also the word for dragon. Being unable to hear, the dragon came to be known by the word for its only handicap. Lan Lung, then, was also a lazy dragon. I had heard the term as an epithet hurled at street beggars. It made utterly no sense in a bamboo grove. I did not understand and said so.

  Yuen Pao instructed me to stay exactly where I was till he returned; then he seemed literally to vanish. When he returned there was a brace of swallows in his hand, and the odd look was still on his face.

  I went to my pack as he told me, folded back the flap, stepped aside and waited. Yuen Pao approached the pack cautiously, slowly swinging the dead birds by their feet, wings trussed with red cord.

  At first I watched Yuen Pao. Then I watched what he watched. There was the smallest ripple of movement within my bag. Hsu Yuen Pao said one word.

  The creature that emerged was tiny, palm-sized. It seemed, as the young of many reptiles may, exquisitely perfect in miniature.