“Yeah, sounds like a good idea,” I said. “We should try to encourage the other dragons to take saddles, the ones without riders,” I suggested absentmindedly. “That way they can get used to them if they ever choose a human rider…”
“No!” Char stiffened. “Don’t you remember when Monk Feodor tried to do that? It was a disaster, and Paxala will never allow it!”
“That was different! Monk Feodor had brought chains and goads with him…” I remembered well the old regime’s attempt to replicate what I and Char did so naturally. Feodor had balked at the suggestion, but he had been commanded by the Abbot to try to force the younger dragons to take harnesses, before they had even bonded with a human. How could Char think that I meant to do the same as that? Had we really grown that far apart in the short time that we had been in charge? I guessed that she must be as stressed as I was about what we were doing, and I tried to allay her concerns. “I just meant taking the saddles, bit, and tack down to the crater floor, and getting the dragons to investigate them, not forcing them to wear them,” I said. Which reminded me. We needed to find a good leather worker and smith to work on the designs that Char and I had come up with… Always more problems to solve!
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Char said (in a not-very-sorry tone of voice, I noted), “but Paxala tells me that she wants to be the ones to train the dragons, not us. She’s close to becoming one of the den mothers now, and the other dragons respect her for helping them to drive away Zaxx.”
Pax might train the dragons of the crater? I thought in wonder. I had never dreamed that one of the dragons themselves would help to train the others, and now it seemed such an obvious move. Why hadn’t I thought of that before? Another way that I am unsuited to leadership, that small, snide part of me said in the back of my mind. A true leader would have already worked that out by now…
“Neill,” Char huffed at me. “What is wrong with you? You just don’t seem to be taking an interest in any of…”
Before she could finish her statement, there was a sudden hissing noise from Morax, and we turned to see her lashing her tail and growling at the students and monks in front of her.
“I knew it! I knew it wouldn’t last…” the nervous monk cried, backing down the path back to the monastery.
“What’s wrong?” Char called out, and then I saw that Paxala raised her long neck, bared her fangs and raised her wings in a warning flap. “Oh no…” Char said a moment later, before even us humans could tell what it was.
“Ruauarggh….” A roaring sound was whistling towards us on the winds. It was fierce and terrible, growing louder and louder and full of spite. My heart hammered. It wasn’t the same screeches and calls of the younger dragons, but a guttural threat of violence and destruction, and it was heading towards the mountain.
Zaxx.
“Where is he? Can you see him?” Char was shouting as I was already running towards Paxala. The Crimson Red was flapping her wings aggressively, starting to hiss and snap at the air as she turned her head, first this way and then that. The old golden bull dragon was wily it seemed, he knew how to use the air currents and the deep ravines around Mount Hammal to mask his approach.
Not wily enough, however, as Paxala fixed her head in one direction alone, southwest, where the ground grew hillier and wilder, and her eyes flared as smoke wisped from her nostrils.
“Char!” I called, discarding the cumbersome leather jacket that was only making my movements slower as I raced to the Red’s foot. Why hadn’t I thought that this might happen? Why don’t we keep the dragon saddles nearby? I cursed my own stupidity, as Char leapt onto Pax’s other front foot, and started climbing the young Red’s scales and tines to our positions.
“Get the others back to the monastery, now!” I shouted at Dorf, as Terrence also tried to board Morax, who was hissing and twisting on her perch, too agitated to let him up. “Get the dragon horn primed, get archers to the walls!” Paxala jumped into the air above the dragon crater, opening her wide wings to catch the updrafts and soar into the air.
“Skrech! Sreee, Sreeee!” But the Crimson Red underneath us wasn’t the only dragon I saw. There, emerging from the disturbed mists came the Vicious Green Socolia, who had almost fled all the way to the Southern Kingdom just a few days before at her first whiff of Zaxx’s presence. Now, however, she was angry and hissing. At her back came other dragons, disturbed into the air by the approach of the tyrannical bull dragon that had made all of their existences a misery. As I held onto Paxala’s shoulder plates, I could see the older Vicious Greens, more of the long-tailed Sinuous Blue, hissing and alarmed, and around them exploded a storm of the smaller Messenger dragons, swooping everywhere in their shock.
“Char!” I shouted, as Paxala suddenly dove to avoid slamming into one of the immense Giant Whites, a den mother, whose eyes flashed and was growling a challenge at the offending bull.
Was this it? I wondered. Was this going to be the moment when Zaxx would wrestle back control over the crater again?
“No,” a voice said, but it didn’t come from Char. She was too busy biting her lips, holding onto the tines and scales, and trying with her hands and knees to warn the dragon underneath us of colliding dragons. The voice felt warm, female, and reptilian—it had to be Paxala! She rarely shared her thoughts with me and Char said it was because I wasn’t as strong in whatever skill or secret power that allowed Char and Paxala to communicate telepathically. But I heard it as clear as day, and I knew that Paxala was telling me that there was no way that she would let the bull back in charge here, even if it killed her.
“Pheet! Pheeet”! Messenger dragons careened and darted past us as fast as arrows. It was hard to see where to fly, or whether to raise or dive to avoid the storm of reptilian bodies all around us.
And I didn’t have any weapons on me. Why didn’t I have any weapons! Once again, I cursed my stupidity. I was sure my father always carried weapons on him. What sort of warrior’s son was I?
“Neill, up ahead!” Char shouted, as Paxala roared.
“Skreyaarckh!”
The tempest of dragon shapes had cleared momentarily, and we could see down the southern slopes of the mountain, to where the canyons were cut wide and deep and jagged runnels ran through the earth, and there, swooping down one of them, was the immense shape of the golden bull dragon.
Even from this distance, Zaxx was immense. He almost filled the ravine that he flew down, and was many times larger than the trees he flew past. A quick calculation compared to the trees made me think that he must be easily four or five times the size of Paxala – and Crimson Reds were themselves large dragons!
He’ll kill us, I thought, as Paxala bellowed her challenge, and flung herself down the southern side of the crater and toward her own father.
Some of the dragons decided to follow us, but only a couple, as it seemed the others were too upset and agitated to focus their hatred. A quick look over my shoulder showed more of the great beasts boiling out of the dragon crater, the skies about Mount Hammal now a storm of winged and hissing shapes. But the dragons were too disorganized to act as one, leaving just us on Paxala, Terence of Morax, and one of the Great Whites actually chasing the old dragon—the one who mattered.
“Can we lure him back to the crater?” I shouted at Char as we flew.
“Back? Why?” Char threw me a pale-faced, worried look. “We spent almost a year trying to get rid of him!”
“The other crater dragons might fight if he’s right there in front of him,” I shouted. It was a bad idea to force the crater dragons to fight Zaxx, but it might be our only way to finally put an end to the monster.
We dropped into the canyon where I had just seen the golden bull. A thin stream flowed in the center of the canyon floor below, and the high walls on either side of us reflected orange and grey. Where was the bull? I grimaced. There was only one way to go; to follow the canyon as it curled and curved crazily around. Our trio flew in tight formation, as fast as we could. I saw the Sinu
ous Blue Morax landing to catch some of the rocks of the walls, before launching off in our newest direction.
The roar from below was loud and bellowing, as it echoed along the canyon walls, first this way and then that. We couldn’t know if we were getting closer or further away from the beast.
“We need height!” Char said, leaning forward and closing her eyes to concentrate on communicating with the dragon who carried us.
I shouted my agreement and, with a screech, we were half-scrambling and climbing out of the canyon and launching ourselves higher into the air, with Morax following us a moment later, and the Great White continuing for a few moments before doing the same.
“Higher!” Char said, breathless either through excitement or terror, I didn’t know which. Probably both. At her request, the Crimson Red flapped her large wings harder. We circled higher over the landscape, looking down into the canyons as if they had become one of Dorf’s cherished maps.
But there was no Zaxx.
“It, it doesn’t make sense…” Char was shaking her head. “Pax?” I heard her say. “Can you track him?”
But to me, it all made perfect sense. Zaxx had done the same thing earlier, when he had ‘spooked’ Socolia on our journey to my father’s Fort. This was a new tactic that the golden bull was displaying; to upset, frighten, and vanish, destroying the good work that we were doing up at the monastery. “We won’t find him,” I said heavily. “He’s trying to disturb us, to show us he’s still in charge.”
“Well, he’s not,” Char said begrudgingly. “The crater doesn’t have any bulls in charge any more. It has den mothers ruling the roost.”
“But Zaxx can come and disrupt us whenever he likes,” I pointed out. “He’s got the upper hand.”
At that, Char fell into a silent scowl – but it wasn’t until we got back to Mount Hammal and the dragon crater that we could assess the real damage of Zaxx’s actions.
When we arrived back at the monastery, the recalcitrant monk from the training was now rabble-rousing from atop a pile of rubble that had been the rear wall, surrounded by a band of other black-clad monks.
“It’s no good! It’s hopeless!” the nervy-looking monk shouted, pointing to where both Paxala and Morax had alighted on the slopes of the mountain, eager to dislodge their human charges in order to return to the community of dragons in the crater.
“Good heavens, what now!?” I demanded, as beside me both Terrence and Char glowered at him.
“You should have seen them. Fierce, they were!” the monk’s voice rang out. “Those dragons are almost wild, I’m telling you – and any day now we’ll have just the same troubles as they do up in the northlander kingdom…”
What is his name?” I hissed at the others with me.
“Don’t know, Berlip, I think?” Char said.
“Berlip!” I shouted up at him as we climbed the other side of the stone blocks.
“O-ho, so here he comes, our great and fearless leader!” Berlip said in a snide voice. Just something that Rik would say, I thought as I balled my fists at my side.
“Neill…” Char said urgently to me. “Don’t fight him. We talk through problems now…”
Talk through problems? It would have been a whole lot better if I could simply punch him, or throw Berlip out of the monastery entirely, but Char was right. Rik and Rubin might have resorted to cuffs, slaps, and kicks to get their orders done, but it didn’t mean that I should.
“Well, you have an awful lot of talking to do, then!” Berlip said sarcastically, eliciting a ripple of amusement from the older monks assembled below. “Because we have many problems. The dragons won’t obey you. Zaxx the Great has returned, and will bring doom to us all any day now. And there’s nothing that you can do about it, Torvald!” He pointed a finger straight at me.
Nothing that I can do about it. He was right, there was, indeed, nothing that I could do about it. A real leader would know what to do, when, and how…
“Go on, admit it, Torvald!” Berlip was seizing on my moment of indecision to press his case home. It was all play acting for the crowd, I knew, but it still made me feel stupid. “Admit that you have no idea what you are doing!”
“I don’t,” I said, my words sounding heavy and thick even to my ears. “But that doesn’t mean that I’m not trying to…”
“Trying?” Berlip looked incandescent with rage. “What good is trying if we all get eaten? We helped you overthrow the old Abbot, helped you start rebuilding this place, and now you think we’re all going to live in la-la land with the feral dragons up there?” He shook his head. “It is you who doesn’t understand, Torvald. Dragons are gods, and all gods are terrible, as well as glorious. We were better when we offered tribute….”
A mixed chorus of “yay” and a few, very outnumbered “nays” from the crowd. More than a few students had emerged from the practice courts or the buildings to see what all the hubbub was about. It was hard to miss the cloud of dragons that still whirled and raged over the crater, their grumbles and screeching cries finally dying down, though they still flew about wildly instead of roosting. Even to me, it looked like the entire community of dragons that we had been so hell-bent on saving were on the verge of fleeing, or going on a rampage.
“Neill, I’m here with you.” Char stood at my side. But I could see that she was looking at me to come up with something clever and wise, strong and authoritative to put Berlip down. I didn’t know what to say to him. Sometimes arguments had to be messy, I think…
“Berlip,” I cleared my throat. “This is not the way that we do this. Dorf has set up a council, and there…”
“Dorf? Council?” Berlip made a dramatic sigh, before raising a finger and impersonating a weak and ineffectual Scribe. “‘Excuse me, sir, but shall we vote before or after the dragon has eaten us?’”
“You demean yourself, Berlip.” I said in a growl, once again feeling my chest tighten, and my fists start to clench. He could make fun out of me all he wanted, but if he thought that he could make my friends feel stupid or silly, then he had another thing coming.
“Do I? And how will our great Torvald deal with those who argue against his rule, hmmm?” Berlip said, his self-righteousness forcing him to be brave. “Will you beat me? Throw me in jail for voicing my opinion? Exile me?”
I didn’t know what I should do, but I knew what I wanted to do. Imagine my surprise when my desires were voiced not from my own mouth, but from someone else’s entirely. A brightly-clad figure stepped from the throng below and shouted up.
“I don’t know what a Son of Torvald would do, but a rover of the Shaar Anar would have knocked you onto your rump by now, little man!” The figure laughed, tall and good looking, with skin that was warm and tawny, a luxuriant black curly beard and hair and darting eyes. It was my mother’s brother Lett, of the Gypsies of Shaar. “Neill, can I have the pleasure?” The man grinned at me.
“Who are you? What right do you have to be here?” Berlip said, looking suddenly unsure next to the much broader, taller, and completely unfazed man. Uncle Lett was a man of the outdoors. He and all of his family spent their lives traveling the Three Kingdoms, sleeping in their finely-wrought caravans, training the wild ponies that they bred along the way, hunting and poaching where they wanted, and never having to be beholden to anyone but each other.
“This man has as much right as you, Berlip,” I growled, adding, “At least he wants to be here!” I offered my uncle both forearms in the traditional greeting of the Gypsies, which he clasped, our hands to each other’s elbows.
“Look at you, Neill – what sour company you are keeping these days!” Lett laughed, guiding me down from the rubble. Around us I could see the other monks muttering amongst themselves, the moment of tension and crisis starting to dissolve under my uncle’s booming laugh.
“We’ll call a council meeting!” Char said from behind us. “We’ll discuss your issues there…”
Another meeting, I groaned internally, pausing beside of Un
cle Lett as I knew that Char’s words had also included me. But what could I do that Char couldn’t? I was tired and weary, and I was failing this place. I’d probably only make the meeting worse, somehow.
But I was just nodding, too happily distracted by my uncle and his bright caravan of people who were even now parking in the central courtyard. After our panicked hunt for Zaxx, and the disastrous dragon training, the sight of these wild and unfettered people felt like home to my tired eyes. And besides, Char was handling everything just as well if not better than I was.
Chapter 12
Neill Shaar-Torvald
“This is a fine place you have made here,” my Uncle Lett Shaar Anar lied, as I led him around the grounds of the Dragon Monastery on a small tour. I had showed him the practice yards as we stopped at the stables to get my still-irritable pony Stamper, the grand architecture of the stone-built main hall, the impossibly tall Astrographer’s Tower, and the outer walls each stone several feet thick—not that it had stopped the dragons tearing them from their mortar beds when they settled on the ramparts.
I could tell that my Uncle Lett was lying because of the way that the words never reached his eyes or his lips. Like all of my mother’s people, Uncle Lett was a very expressive man. His voice boomed when he was happy, or thundered when he was not. His eyes sparkled when he talked to you, and only now, when his voice was deadpan and disinterested could I be certain that he was lying.
“Yeah, it’s…grand,” I added, looking out over the collapsed pile of rubble and up to the slopes of the mountain and the crater beyond. I wasn’t lying, but then why did I feel so out of place here?
“Show me this lake then, where you first met that big red,” Lett said, nodding up the hillside in the direction that I was peering. He could always read my thoughts, even though I only saw him occasionally, usually in the summers when his family moved north to bring rare southern silks and spices to trade with us Middle Kingdomers. I was only too happy to agree, fetching my cloak as Lett called up one of his horses and a couple of his traveling troupe to come with us.
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