by Timothy Zahn
With a contemptuous shove, he tossed Jack backward. Jack hit the floor, flailing a little for balance as he landed. As he did so he felt Draycos pull away from his neck, retreating back beneath the harlequin tunic. Hopefully, no one had spotted the dragon's gold scales before he'd gotten out of sight.
"Perform, right," he said, turning back to the children's table and scooping up three of the items from the vegetable bowl. They looked like the potato-things he'd juggled for Greb and Grib, only bigger. A higher-quality food than they gave the slaves, no doubt. He tossed one of the potatoes into the air—
A heavy hand slapped against the side of his head, knocking him flat onto the floor. He caught a glimpse of the potato he'd tossed rolling under the table as he dropped the other two beside him. "Do you deaf, human?" the drunken Brummga screamed. "She tell you perform. Not eat. Perform."
"I was performing," Jack protested, rolling over onto his back and pushing himself up onto his arms into an almost-sitting position. "I needed—"
He saw the foot coming, but there was no time to do anything but get ready for the impact. The kick slammed a glancing blow onto his left shoulder, and he rolled with it, spinning around nearly onto his stomach in the process.
"I was performing," he repeated, scrambling back around onto his back again.
His leg swiveled around as he did so, his left foot catching the bottom of the tablecloth and sliding underneath it. And as it did so, he felt a sudden ripping of the tights at his ankle. There was a surge of weight there—
And Draycos was gone.
Jack looked up at the Brummga standing over him, a tangle of conflicting emotions swirling through him. He'd been wrong: there was indeed one person in the room who cared whether he lived or died. Draycos, poet-warrior of the K'da, was loose and ready to protect him from this murderous slab of meat.
But rolling in right behind that thought came the deeper reality of the situation. Draycos couldn't risk his mission and the lives of his people for Jack this way. Even if he took out this one Brummga, there were way too many others in the room for him to handle.
Had he gotten so caught up in these senseless attacks on Jack that he wasn't thinking straight?
And then, even as his racing mind tried to sort out what to do, he felt something tug at the sole of his shoe. A dragon's claw, digging deftly into the thick rubber there.
Into the secret compartment where Jack's spare comm clip was hidden.
That fact had just enough time to register before the drunken Brummga grabbed his arm and hauled him up onto his feet again. "Now you perform," he repeated, shaking Jack back and forth and then shoving him back against the edge of the table. "Not eat. Not throw. Perform."
"Certainly, sir, at once," Jack promised. "Let me just put the food back first."
Before the Brummga could object, he dropped to his knees. Grabbing the two visible potatoes with his left hand, he stuck his right arm under the tablecloth where the third one had disappeared. He just hoped Draycos hadn't kicked it somewhere else.
He hadn't. The potato was right where he'd expected it to be.
And as his hand closed around the escaped vegetable, he felt the cool metal of the comm clip against his palm. Draycos, anticipating him perfectly, had balanced the device right on top of the potato.
The Brummga behind him was rumbling warningly. "I've got it," Jack assured him quickly as Draycos melted onto his hand and slithered up his sleeve. "See?" he added as he stood up, palming the comm clip and showing the potato to the drunken Brummga. "Let me show you."
He turned back to the table and replaced the vegetables. The children, he noted without surprise, were watching the whole thing with excited glee. They were here to eat, and to play, and to be entertained.
And whether Her Thumbleness's new toy did magic tricks for them, or whether he simply got himself beaten to a pulp in front of them, they would be happy. A
show was a show, after all.
"Now, let's see," he said, rubbing his neck where the Brummga had been squeezing. Under cover of the movement, he attached the comm clip to the inside of his harlequin tunic and clicked it on. "Brolach-ah mischt heeh simt, was it?"
" 'Do the under-the-cup trick now,' " Uncle Virge's voice murmured in his ear.
Jack grimaced. So that was what she'd wanted. No wonder his attempt to juggle had gone flat. "Right," he said briskly. "One under-the-cup trick, coming right up."
Gathering together three empty glasses, he snagged an acorn-sized nut from a bowl on the table and slipped it under one of the glasses. "Now watch very carefully—"
He did the trick twice, both times to the great and loud amusement of Her Thumbleness and the other Brummgan children. "Crastni miu simt cumos alekx,"
Her Thumbleness said when he'd finished, banging her spoon on the table.
" 'You may now juggle for me,' " Uncle Virge translated.
Jack sighed to himself. Now he could juggle. She could have had the same thing three minutes earlier and saved him a beating in the process. But no. What Her Thumbleness wanted, how she wanted it, when she wanted it, and nothing else.
"Yes, Your Thumbleness," he said, setting aside the glasses and again picking up the three potatoes.
It was going to be a very long night.
CHAPTER 15
The night turned out to be a lot longer than he'd expected.
Earlier, he'd been surprised that the whole Chookoock family seemed to have dropped in for dinner. Now, with Uncle Virge's running translation, he was able to catch enough bits and pieces of conversation to figure out what was actually going on.
It was, it seemed, Her Thumbleness's High Day.
He never did nail down whether it was her birthday, or some other kind of anniversary, or even just the day they all celebrated her favorite color.
Whatever it was, though, it was a big deal around the Chookoock household.
And Her Thumbleness was playing it for all it was worth. After dinner came a huge dessert that looked like a sentence of death by chocolate and ground-up tree bark. Apparently, the idea was to make as much of a mess as possible while eating it. Her Thumbleness and her friends did that part very well.
After that came game time, with the chocolate-smeared children and a few of the adults gathering in an underground room about the size of a regulation basketball court. The games generated nearly as much noise as the whole crowd upstairs had been able to produce, with the added feature of bone-crunching thuds and wallops as the kids ran into each other.
They played a number of different games, with a whole range of different types of balls. The nearest Jack got to figuring out the rules to any of them was that whenever one Brummga had a chance to run into another one, he did so.
That, and whenever Her Thumbleness came to the sidelines for a break her new court jester had better have a trick or something ready to amuse her.
Under the circumstances, it was impossible for him to slip away to go computer hunting. Standing at the sidelines, listening to a couple of the adults breathing loudly behind him, he wondered if the party girl was ever going to run out of steam.
He thought that moment had finally come when the children dropped their balls and disks and toss-bladders in the middle of the court and all came jogging back to the sidelines. But no such luck. After the games, apparently, Her Thumbleness had scheduled a sleepover with several of her closer friends.
They headed upstairs again, jabbering away in a dozen different conversations.
Jack trudged along behind them, bone-tired but trying hard not to show it. If Her Thumbleness's new toy didn't work the way she wanted it to, she would almost certainly send it back, and he couldn't afford that.
Besides, even a Brummgan kid on a massive sugar high couldn't keep up this pace forever. Eventually, she and her friends would have to give up on the fun and frolic and get some sleep.
Eventually, they did, winding down their chattering and boardcomp games and collapsing one by one onto the heavy mats that
had been set up for them in Her Thumbleness's bedroom suite. But by the time the girl dismissed Jack with a lazy wave of her hand, the sky to the east was starting to glow red. The rest of the slave staff was already hard at work downstairs, cooking breakfast and preparing the house for their masters' day.
And it wasn't just the slaves who were on the move, either. Some of the Brummgas and their staff were stirring, as well. Even as Jack headed along the side of the large entryway toward the stairs to the slave quarters, he caught a glimpse of Gazen going into an office on the far side of the chamber.
Luckily, Gazen didn't see him. But any hopes Jack might still have had of trying to get to the computers ended right there. Wandering slaves he might be willing to risk. A wandering Gazen he wasn't.
"Well, that was fun," he commented tiredly as he closed the door of his tiny room and dropped onto the bed. "Wasn't that fun, everybody?"
"What exactly are you doing, lad?" Uncle Virge demanded. "Some kind of marathon magic show?"
"Pretty close," Jack admitted, wincing as he bent his left leg up to get to his shoe. After all those hours on his feet, his knees were as stiff as a customs official's glare.
With a burst of gold scales, Draycos leaped out of his collar and landed on the narrow strip of floor beside the bed. "May I help?" he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he began unfastening Jack's shoes.
"Thanks," Jack said, letting his leg go flat again.
"It is the least I can do," Draycos said, getting the first shoe off and setting it down on the floor. "I have been of little aid to you so far."
"You certainly have," Jack assured him. "If you hadn't gotten the comm clip out when you did—" He shook his head.
"What do you mean?" Uncle Virge asked suspiciously. "What's been happening?"
"The Brummgas treat their slaves like low-grade costume jewelry," Jack told him.
"If the slaves don't understand what they're saying, they treat them like punching bags."
Uncle Virge muttered something nasty under his breath. "Are you all right, lad?" "I'm fine," Jack assured him, wiggling his toes as Draycos got the other shoe off. "It was really only the one Brummga at the dinner, and he was too drunk to really hit straight. Mostly, I've just been run off my feet."
"And there has been no opportunity yet to locate the computers," Draycos added.
"But I am in the house," Jack pointed out. "That's definitely progress." He yawned widely. "I'd better get some sleep while I can, though. Her Thumbleness will probably want me to brush her teeth for her when she wakes up."
Uncle Virge sighed softly. "All right, lad," he said. "Pleasant dreams."
Jack clicked off the comm clip and turned his head to look at Draycos. The dragon was pacing the floor, his back arched and uncomfortable looking. "You coming aboard?" he asked.
"I think I will remain out for a while," Draycos said.
Jack frowned. Offhand, he couldn't remember ever seeing the dragon quite this twitchy. "What's wrong?"
Draycos paused in his pacing. His long neck twisted toward Jack, then turned away. "I am all right," he muttered.
"Sure you are," Jack said, studying him. "Come on, what's the problem? Her Thumbleness getting to you or something?"
Reluctantly, he thought, Draycos came to a halt. "It is not her," he said.
"It is this place. It is all of this place." His tongue slashed out in emphasis.
"I am sorry."
"Sorry for what?" Jack asked. "I don't like it much, either."
The dragon twisted his neck oddly. "It is not a matter of liking or disliking," he said, his voice suddenly very quiet. "For a K'da, this is an echo of a time long past. A terrible time."
Jack sat up on the bed, his fatigue suddenly forgotten. Something in the dragon's tone had sent a shiver straight through him. "Sounds serious," he said in his most soothing, tell-me-all-about-it voice.
And was instantly ashamed of himself. Uncle Virgil had taught him that tone for wheedling information out of people they were trying to scam. He shouldn't be using it on a friend. Especially not on a friend who could carve his initials in steel plate. "I mean... you want to talk about it?"
For a long moment the dragon was silent. "We were not always with the Shontine," he said at last. "In the beginning we were on another world, with another host race."
"Who?" Jack asked. "I mean, what were their names?"
"We remember them as the Dhghem," Draycos said. "They were strong and cheerful, full of laughter and wisdom. We were both their symbionts and their friends."
"Sounds perfect," Jack said. It sounded too perfect, actually, but that was to be expected. Whatever nuggets of real history there might be in this story, they were almost certainly soaked in myth, sprinkled with legend, and served up with a side order of wishful thinking.
Still, he was hardly in a position to point fingers. Uncle Virgil had never talked about Jack's own parents, and he had only vague memories of them himself.
But that hadn't stopped him from spending hours wondering what they'd been like, or fantasizing about how his life would have been different if they hadn't died when he was three.
And in every one of those daydreams, his parents had come out taller and kinder and more handsome and more important than any human beings could actually be.
Draycos and his half-mythical hosts were probably no different. "So what went wrong?"
Draycos started pacing again. "Our world was attacked by slavers," he said, his voice so low that Jack could hardly hear him. "They came from the stars, with fire and death and supreme arrogance. The Cark, they called themselves. They came seeking lives to steal. They saw us, and decided they wanted us."
"You fought back, of course," Jack murmured.
"With all the power and skill we possessed," Draycos said. "But in the end it was all for nothing. The slavers had strength beyond ours, and weapons far beyond those of the Dhghem. They captured many of us and our hosts and then returned to the sky."
The dragon paused again, his neck arched, his glowing green eyes staring off into the distance. "There are songs about our time of captivity," he said.
"One day, perhaps, I will sing one of them for you. For many years, many generations, we served the Cark as slaves. The K'da worked or fought for them, or guarded their slave auctions. Their Dhghem hosts also did some work, but mostly they were held hostage for our good behavior."
"Didn't they try to fight back?" Jack asked.
"Of course," Draycos said. "There are also many songs about those attempts.
But in the end all of them failed. The Cark were too strong, and too cunning.
Eventually, most of the Dhghem gave up and resigned themselves to their fate."
"Let me guess," Jack said. "The Cark decided they'd beaten you and started getting sloppy."
"You are very perceptive," Draycos said. "But even with relaxed attention, the Cark still watched them closely enough that a rebellion would never have succeeded."
He paused, staring through the wall again. "Well?" Jack prompted.
"Something happened that had never happened before," Draycos said. "Something no one had ever thought could happen. Completely by accident, we discovered that a
newly collected group of Cark slaves could serve as hosts."
"The Shontine?"
"Exactly," Draycos said. "They were thought to be poor soldiers, so the Cark used them as menial slaves."
He flicked his tongue around again. "Much as you and I have now become for the Brummgas."
"I get it," Jack said, nodding. "Because they were just simple slaves, they gave you the advantage you needed."
"What do you mean?" Draycos asked, turning his eyes on Jack.
"I mean, it's obvious," Jack said, suddenly feeling a little flustered. Even at the most relaxed of times, the dragon's stare was a little disconcerting.
"Slaves are treated like dirt, or like animals. But you can turn that to your advantage. As long as the Shontine behaved themselves, the Cark pro
bably hardly even noticed them."
Draycos was still staring, but the tip of his tail was tracing out slow circles.
"Interesting," he said. "I do not think I have ever thought of it quite that way."
Jack shrugged. "It's the way I was brought up to think," he pointed out. "No one expects a seven-year-old kid to be able to pull the stunts Uncle Virgil taught me. And you already said they didn't think the Shontine could fight."
"True," Draycos said, still sounding thoughtful. "At any rate, the Shontine were eager to help. Together, we made our plans, and awaited our opportunity."
"Where were the Dhghem in all this?"
"Those who had not yet given up hope of freedom were part of the planning,"
Draycos said. "The others... we could not risk their knowing."
Jack grimaced. "Must have been tough for you."
"We did what we had to do," Draycos said. "Our opportunity came some months later when the Cark landed on a new world to collect fresh slaves. The inhabitants fought back fiercely; and in the battles, some of the best K'da warriors began to slip away."
"Faking their deaths," Jack said, nodding. "And of course, since the Cark were keeping tabs on the Dhghem, they knew that even if the K'da had just run away, they'd be dead within a few hours anyway."
"Correct," Draycos said. "Instead, the warriors slipped onto the bodies of the chosen Shontine, hiding beneath the long clothing they wore. And when the Cark finished their raid and lifted their ships into the sky, we struck."
He stopped, his back crest stiffening with memory. "It was a short battle," he said, his voice quiet again. "We were all aboard one ship, with all our strength gathered, and had the advantage of surprise. But even so we nearly lost the battle."
His tail lashed the air. "Someday I will sing you that song, as well."
"So now you had a ship," Jack said.
"Yes," Draycos said. "But there was no way to return home. We did not know the location, and it had been too long for the ship's records to be of any use.
We offered to return the Shontine to their world, but they were afraid other Cark ships would come looking for them and us. So instead we went in search of a new home where we could all live in peace and safety."
