Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress XXIV

by Unknown

  "Go with my blessing," said the King, "and lead them well, child," it added as it turned to Grevel.

  "Good hunting, Dragonslayer," it added as Grevel bowed one last time and turned to slide up the roan. By the time Dara reached her horse, the dragon wing had lifted into the air and was heading south.

  The roan once again refused to near the village, so Dara and Grevel trudged on foot from the crossroads, reaching the burnt-out shell of Innsbeck as the sun sank behind them. Dying fires that mirrored the red sky above glowed on either side of the road, testaments to the heat of dragonfire that they still smoldered this long after the Great Red's initial attack. Dara scanned the sky but their aerial escort was nowhere to be seen.

  "Don't worry, Dragonslayer," Grevel said, dismounting from its perch on the lances balanced across Dara's shoulders. "When the time is right, they will appear as planned.

  Dara grunted in response and moved into the village, not bothering to look behind to see if the little dragon was following.

  They found the Great Red sleeping on a makeshift nest next to the open well in the village square. Beside it the well looked like an empty beer cup next to a drunk snoring at a tavern table. As Dara paused to shift the lances to her hands, ready for throwing, Grevel snaked past her and skittered towards the larger dragon's nose.

  "Dragon." Grevel stood on its hind legs, its voice suddenly loud enough to echo off the remains of the larger buildings around the square. "I come to hold you accountable for your actions and misdeeds."

  Lazily, the Great Red opened one eye to peer down on its smaller cousin and chuckled low. "And who are you, pest, to disturb me, bringing a dragonslayer to my nest?"

  "I am sent by my King to tell you that the Gold dragons will no longer sit idle while you and your kind ravage our lands. We wish to live in peace with our human neighbors and will do whatever we must to keep that peace. My King commands me to tell you to leave this place or face his wrath."

  The Great Red surged onto its feet, mantling its wings. It towered above the village ruins, making Grevel look like a mouse by comparison. "Dragons siding with humans? You dare to say this to me?"

  It turned its head towards Dara. "And you, Dragonslayer. Have you become so weak that you must rely on this vermin?"

  Grevel answered before she could. "The Gold King has called Pax with the ruler of this land and has declared you and your kind outlaw. What say you? Do you go or do we fight?"

  The Great Red roared its response and slammed one front leg onto the smaller dragon. Dara shifted the lances slightly in her hands and prepared to attack.

  Grevel danced away from the Great Red's descending foot and bugled. The wing of fighters rose from behind the building shells on then west side of the square, each with a large rock between its forelegs. One by one, they began to drop their loads onto the head and back of the Great Red, circling out of range as the beast reared to its full height, breathing fire into the air.

  As soon as it exposed its underbelly, Dara darted forward with her lances, weaving to avoid the falling rocks and the dragon's thrashing tail. The Great Red was distracted by the circling Golds who were returning with second and third payloads and didn't notice her until she was between its feet.

  Too late, it turned its attention back to the ground, snapping at Dara as she planted her feet to throw the lances. Before it could connect, one of the falling rocks hit it between the eyes and its teeth snapped the air above her head. Ignoring the rocks falling around her and the Great Red's thrashing tail, Dara calmed her breathing, took aim, and let her lances fly towards the dragon's heart.

  The left lance bounced off the dragon's scales, but the right one hit the small soft spot under the dragon's right foreleg. With a bellow, the Great Red tried to lift from the ground, its wings beating faster with the effort of taking off from a standstill.

  Unable to see due in the dust clouds raised by the dragon's wings, Dara heard it twist in its death throws and fall on its back towards the ground. She turned and ran back the way she had entered the square, racing to get out of the way of the falling giant. A force thudded against her back, pushing her forward and onto her knees. Behind her the ground shook as the Great Red landed, wings splayed out and tail thrashing one last time.

  Dara was winded, but otherwise unhurt. She stood and turned to look at the Great Red stretched out behind her, its head only a few feet away from where she landed. There was no sign of Grevel, but a small lump under one of the dead dragon's wings was feebly moving, a tip of dusty gold sticking out.

  Dara ran forward and heaved the wing upwards. Panting heavily, Grevel slowly pulled itself out from under the Great Red's body. When it was free, Dara let the wing thump to the ground and quickly bent down to the Gold.

  As she checked the little dragon over for injuries, the fighting wing backwinged to a landing around the corpse and every member reared up and bowed. Dara dusted off her armor and watched with amusement as Grevel pushed her away – gently this time – to accept the accolades of its betters. She was certain she saw a faint blush rise on its face.

  The fighters stepped back, freeing space for the Gold King to land in front of Grevel. Dara stepped away from the pair as the King himself bowed to the little Gold. Grevel hung its head, unable to look the King in the eye.

  "Well done, little one, well done indeed." The King gently nosed the smaller dragon until Grevel shyly looked up. "You have proven that a female can be as brave a warrior as any male."

  The King turned to Dara. "Will you accept our Pax and present it to your King, Dragonslayer?"

  "I will indeed, your Magesty," she responded, "on one condition. I promised Grevel when we met that if we killed the Great Red, I would personally escort her to Kingstown to negotiate your Pax. My horse has accepted her, which will make the journey easier. And I think she has earned it."

  The Gold King bared its teeth in what Dara hoped was a smile. "What do you think, daughter of mine? You have earned your right to join our warriors, as you requested. Would you set that aside to act as my emissary to the human King?"

  Grevel bowed once. "Gladly, father, if you so wish."

  "I so wish, my dear." With a nod to Dara, the King and its fighters launched themselves into the air.

  Dara turned to pull her lance from the Great Red's breast and debated searching for its mate but decided that it had become too dark to bother. She settled the lance across her shoulders and beckoned to Grevel.

  The little gold scurried up her back to take its perch on the lance. Once it was settled, Dara carefully picked her way down the road towards the copse where the roan waited for them.

  Grevel had obviously recovered from saving Dara's life. "So what to warriors do after they make a kill? Does it involve drinking and wenching? Is there a village near here where we can find some wenches? Just what is a wench anyways?"

  Dara smiled in the dark. Ional could wait another day or two. She doubted that any of the locals would live up to Grevel's expectations as "wenches", but she was sure that with some effort, she would think of an appropriate reward for her kingdom's newest warrior.

  Sea-Child

  by Cynthia Ward

  A pirate attack upon your village is generally not considered a good thing. But this attack, and her reaction to it, ended up giving Vekki both the family she had ceased to hope for and a position in life that she had never expected.

  Cynthia Ward (www.cynthiaward.com) was born in Oklahoma and lived in Maine, Spain, Germany, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Tucson before moving to the Los Angeles area. She has sold stories to FRONT LINES, Asimov's SF Magazine, and other magazines and anthologies, including some previous volumes of SWORD & SORCERESS. She publishes the monthly Market Maven eNewsletter, which covers market news in the science fiction, fantasy, and horror fields. She is working on her first novel, a futuristic mystery tentatively titled THE STONE RAIN. With Nisi Shawl, Cynthia coauthored the writing manual WRITING THE OTHER: A PRACTICAL APPROACH, based on their fiction div
ersity writing workshop Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction (www.writingtheother.com).

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  When the pirates attacked, they came by land, where the villagers of Grunnett kept no watch.

  Vekki and her mother were the last to know, when the raiders' axes struck door and wall, cracking open their lonely shack on the isolated spit. The pirates broke in, laughing and bloody from their assault upon the village, and they fell upon Vekki and her mother almost before they could rise from their pallets in the lone room of their salt-bleached shelter.

  "Do not fight a man who would force you," the fishwives liked to say, but the old herbwoman told the village girls, "Fight, because it may stop the rapist, and not fighting never did."

  So Vekki fought, shouting, writhing, clawing. She struggled to win free, to go to her mother's side and defend her. But five pirates bore Vekki down painfully upon the hard sand floor, more men than even a girl as sturdy and strong as the seventeen-year-old could oppose.

  "The blubbery sea-cow has sharp claws," cried the pirate straddling Vekki, whose beard-patched face dripped blood from the furrows she'd dug.

  "I'll not have a female so unnatural," said another pirate, looking on. "There's skin between her fingers."

  Vekki remembered overhearing the old herbwoman scolding gossips, when they'd speculated upon whom Vekki's unknown father might be, long years ago.

  "Not one of our men," one of the gossips had been saying. "With the webbed fingers, she's one of the fish-people—"

  "Vekki's no scaled mer," the herbwoman had said. "Nor seal-girl, either, with that long, blue-touched hair. Her father's a nereus. And you don't want to anger the nerei. So be silent. Don't even think of them."

  The patch-bearded reaver pulled the cutlass from his belt and pointed the notched and bloodied blade at one of Vekki's pinned wrists. "I'll clip the sea-cow's talons for her-"

  But a pirate hung with gold, higher-ranking than the crudely dressed men who had invaded the shack, stuck his head through the shattered boards and driftwood of the wall. "Belay that," he cried, "there's an Imperial warship on the horizon. They'll see the smoke of this stinking village. Fall back to the ship, or be left behind!"

  Most of the pirates cursed and rose up, binding Vekki's mother's wrists to carry her away with them, for she did not look as old as her thirty-two years, and was pretty and hale; she could be sold to some distant merchant or nobleman of the Imperium. But the marauders marked by Vekki's nails lingered, four of them holding her fast as the patch-bearded reaver laughed and raised his cutlass for the swing that would sever Vekki's hand from her wrist.

  But as the cutlass rose and the retreating pirates bore Vekki's mother through the door, she screamed at the threat to her only child.

  The scream and disappearance of her mother raised new heights of anger and fear for her mother in Vekki, as if raising a storm in her very soul. And the sensations she felt became strange. For it seemed that the storm poured out of her, invisibly, yet with the shattering fury of a winter northeaster, which brings the gray ocean surging out of its bed, to drown villages and smash cabins and snap great pines many miles inland.

  And the five pirates' faces twisted suddenly, and their hands rose to their throats, releasing Vekki. The cutlass, dropping abruptly from loosened fingers, thumped upon the pale sand. And in the red dawn light pouring through the open doorway and split walls, the pirates' expressions turned to confusion and terror; and each man's hands clutched at his throat, as if he were strangling upon a too-large draft of ale.

  The five men opened their mouths, as if to scream, and water spilled over their lips. It drenched their beards and shirts and the entirety of their bodies, and spread in puddles that joined in a pool on the sand. Dark streaks and swirls, as of blood, showed in the dawn-lit pool. And there were seaweeds in the pool, and in the water bursting from the men's gaping mouths; and the smell of brine filled the broken shelter.

  The men toppled over, one by one, as if felled by powerful cutlass blows. In wonderment and apprehension, Vekki touched each man upon the wrist, seeking a pulse as the herbwoman had taught her, after pirates had struck the village five years ago. And as Vekki confirmed that each man was dead, a fierce elation rose in her breast; and she ran out of her mother's shack, seeking the pirates who had captured her mother.

  They were not in sight.

  "All the pirates are gone," Vekki whispered in horrified realization.

  Upon the horizon she saw a war-galley of the Imperium, a vessel seldom seen in northern waters, but always recognizable with its grand size and purple sails and great banks of oars. On the land above the rocky shore, villagers wandered through the burning ruins of Grunnett, or saw to the wounded, or wept over the dead. But Vekki was alone on the barren spit where her mother's shack stood, as isolated as she and her mother had been since Vekki's birth. Yet large footprints showed where the pirates had fled, and Vekki, running, followed them to the edge of the forest, which hemmed in the village and its fields and orchards on three sides.

  "They have gone into the woods," Vekki whispered; shy and shunned, she had the developed the habit of talking to herself. "And I know little of woodcraft."

  She sometimes wandered the woods alone, since the other children had rarely played with her, and her isolation had increased as a woman's budding curves made her more shy. The villagers were not supposed to hunt or forage in the forest, which belonged to the count. But Grunnett was far from the county castle, so many of the villagers hunted or gathered, and knew the forbidden wood-skills. Save occasionally for the herbwoman, no one had seen fit to teach these skills to Vekki.

  But, looking more closely, Vekki realized she had learned enough to follow the pirates' flight through the forest. For in their hurried retreat, they broke branches and pulped rotten deadfalls. They left footsteps in the dust of decayed pine needles and disturbed fallen leaves so their undersides showed wet against the dry leaf-mold. They rubbed moss and lichen from the dark trunks of trees and the gray outcroppings of granite.

  "But I move so slowly," Vekki whispered as she searched for the signs of the pirates' passage.

  Grunnett and its sheltered cove were enclosed to the north by a long, low, thickly forested point of land. Vekki came to the far side of the point, drawn by the damage of the raiders' flight to the place where their little caravel had stealthily moored. But when she emerged from the forest, she saw no pirates or boats or captives upon the shore; only the caravel, under sail, absconding before the Imperial war-ship might spot them.

  "They are fled with my mother," Vekki cried. "And surely they have taken others. But perhaps I can still-"

  She tried to rouse the strange surging storm in her soul; and she felt a stirring within. But it was weak, and the sensation never flowed out of her. She realized she could not use her newfound power over such a distance.

  "I might have drowned the pirates," she concluded in despair, "were I not too slow—"

  She fell silent, for the cold gray waves were calling to her, as they always did when she looked upon them. She might not run fleetly, with her muscular, clumsy-looking body; but she had always swum swiftly and well, so that the other children of Grunnett, and even the adults, had quickly learned not to race her in either river or cove. And so, with a wild, impossible hope kindling in her breast, Vekki flung herself into the ocean.

  She swam with strong, rapid strokes. Her arms cleaved the ocean as if they were slim oars. Her long, webbed fingers and toes seemed to grip the water as if it were so many deep handholds in the cliff that rose south of the village. Her skin, which seemed curiously sleek and slightly blue in bright sunlight, shed the water more readily even than that rare foreign substance called glass. Her lungs took in great breaths and held them longer than anyone else in the village might. Her wool shift, however soaked, did not impede her progress. Nor did she mark the cold that would have sapped the vigor from the muscles of the other villagers, trapping them in a strong current o
r sinking them to watery graves while Vekki continued steadily onward, warm and unwearied.

  Gods, grant me aid, Vekki prayed as she swam. God of sea, keep me buoyant. Goddess of earth, keep me strong. God of sky, fill my lungs.

  And the old memory of the herbwoman scolding the gossips came back to Vekki, and brought her a new thought.

  Father, if ever you cared for your shore-born child, aid me now!

  She mocked herself. "Maybe the gods will help you. But your father, who has never cared to meet you? Who may not be within a thousand leagues of the Northern Ocean? Who may not even be nereus, despite what the herbwoman thinks? No," she told herself, "he's never had an interest in you. And you've no chance of catching up with a caravel under sail."

  But she prayed for her father's assistance, as she prayed for the gods' assistance.

  Do the gods answer my prayer? she wondered, realizing that the winds had died, becalming the single-masted ship, which had neither oarsmen nor oar-ports. I pray you, gods of sea and earth and sky, keep the caravel dead in the water.

  And the winds did not return, and Vekki drew close to the caravel. Then, worried that someone might glance over the side and spot the speck of her upon the ocean, she took a great breath and dove beneath the glassy surface.

  Rising close beside the barnacled hull, Vekki rejoiced that she had not recently trimmed her nails. She hated her fingernails and toenails for being so thick, and for tapering to sharp, obvious points. Once, she had cut them often, trying futilely to hide her inhuman claws from the other villagers.

  It is good I grew tired of forever trimming them, Vekki thought, sinking the points of her fingers and thumbs into the slippery planks of the hull. Then she drew her feet forward and sank their talons into the wood, and began to climb.

  But she had labored long and hard in her lengthy swim into the open ocean with its powerful currents. And the cold had penetrated her slick hide and the thick layer of fat over her muscle. So she was shaking as she ascended the side of the caravel; and her muscles jumped under her skin, as she had seen muscles jumping under the coat of a messenger's exhausted horse.