by Chris Bunch
“The steering tail is also used to lash at an enemy, easily its most lethal weapon. The wing talons are used not only to impale prey, but to tear away wings, since a beast’s wings are more delicate away from the forward, ribbed edge.
“Dragons have remarkable powers of healing and even regeneration, although a dragon that’s entirely lost a wing or a limb is doomed.
“It’s interesting that the beasts not only fight in earnest, but seem, from what I’ve observed, to play at fighting, although it appears as if that can become real combat quite easily, which is frequently to the death.”
Dragon games, Hal thought, scribbling in his notebook. Men’s games.
Like war . . .
Most students weren’t as slow as Hal had been, nor flashy like Saslic and Damian.
Mynta Gart plugged along, learning steadily, stolidly.
Farren learned his new craft readily, always with a ready jest. So did Vad Feccia, in spite of his almost-fear of dragons, to Hal’s minor disappointment.
Ev Larnell was quick to learn, even if he was hesitant to try out something new. Hal was glad he hadn’t said anything to anyone about Ev’s lie about being an experienced flier, although a couple of the cadre wondered aloud why he seemed to be slower than someone with his background should have been.
Other students couldn’t seem to learn, were quietly but quickly removed from the school, their gear vanished with them, their mattresses rolled as if no one had ever slept there.
There were other losses. . . .
Hal was walking his dragon in the horse ring, and heard a dragon scream. He saw Sir Brant Calabar lashing at his dragon’s neck as the creature flapped clear of the ground, savagely yanking back on its reins.
The dragon’s wings beat faster, and it climbed for altitude rapidly. But that evidently wasn’t quick enough for Calabar, for he kept hitting the creature with his dogwhip. Hal could hear the man’s shouting, couldn’t make out the words.
The dragon was flying almost straight up, slowing.
Then it tucked a wing and turned through a semicircle, back toward the ground.
Calabar lost his hold, flailed, and, screaming, fell, five hundred feet or more. He hit near in the middle of one of the exercise rings with a sodden thud, very final, like a bag of grain tossed from a high-bedded wagon.
Hal was the first to reach him. Calabar was motionless, his eyes glaring straight up. It didn’t look as if he had an unbroken bone in his body.
His dragon circled overhead, screaming, and Hal thought his screams were triumphant.
Two more students died and were buried in the next week after Calabar. After their funerals, Garadice behaved as if they’d never been, and pushed the students even harder, spending more and more time in the air.
“Guess there was someat goin’ about,” Farren joked, and then everyone did as Garadice had, and the three had never lived.
That was the beginning of a ghastly tradition in the dragon flights.
One thing the students had to learn was there were days a dragon simply would not fly. No one seemed to know why, including Garadice, who said that was one problem with his prewar shows: “You’d have the area filled, and your dragon would be sulking in his wagon, and you’d best leave him alone, or maybe feed him or her choice tidbits until the mood passed.”
One student didn’t listen to his advice, and kept chivvying her dragon. The brute started hissing, then, before she could jump back, snapped out, taking most of her arm off.
“Now, that’s a way to get out of bein’ kilt acrost the Straits I’ve naught considered, an’ wi’ a nice pension, I’d hope,” Farren said, and everyone was a bit more careful around the beasts after that.
Hal, now that he had the flying problem in hand, but still refusing to name his dragon, spent more hours with the beast than most. He had to keep the lead on it, but let the rope and chain slack, and took the monster away from the base, into the trees around it. The dragon seemed to care little for the weather, paying little heed to winds or rain sweeping across its leathery hide.
Saslic caught him having a one-way conversation with the creature one time, and told him he’d gone right over the edge.
Kailas thought, then agreed with her, especially since he fancied the dragon had begun, by claw gestures and hisses, to talk back.
“Now,” Serjeant Te said, “Serjeant Kailas has told us how his patrols were stalked by Roche dragons, which is a new tactic.
“We’ve orders for all of you to start learning the same tactic, which is why you see those dummies on straw horses across that field.
“Each of you is to take your dragon off, and try to bring it close to a dummy. Encourage your dragon—no, I don’t have any ideas how—to grab the rider, and tear him from his horse. It’s also all right to have him take the horse and rider, too.
“Be careful, and don’t run into the ground.
“First man! Kailas! Get out there and give us a good example.”
“A question, Serjean’?” Farren said.
“I’m listening.”
“I ain’t objectin’ to killin’ Roche. . . . I s’pose that’s why I’m here, a’ter all. But this grabbin’ an’ yankin’ don’t appear economical t’ me. One expensive dragon, one expensive rider, riskin’ all t’ pull some plowboy off a horse, and takin’ a chance of some archer yoinkin’ you through th’ throat. Or puttin’ an arrer int’ yer dragon, which ain’t likely to make him happy, either.”
Te hesitated, giving Hal enough time to remember the catapults that’d been fired at the Roche dragons who’d attacked his patrol on the way back from that last scout of his.
“Orders’re orders,” Te said, without conviction. “But I’ll pass your word on to Lieutenant Garadice.”
Farren looked at Hal, made a face. Kailas nodded slightly, ran for his dragon.
Hal and Saslic made love whenever they could get away, which wasn’t that often. Their instruction was coming faster and faster, and Kailas fancied he could hear the horror that was war breathing its fetid breath closer and closer.
The winter drove at them, and cut flying time. But Hal still managed to bundle himself in all that wonderfully warm issued gear as often as possible, and prod his beast into the air, and up, through the clouds to where a chill sun gleamed.
His dragon, not happy at first, warmed, and so they would fly, sailing around the huge buttresses of clouds, sometimes through them, and chancing being tossed by the winds hiding in the softness.
Then it was chancy, as he’d lower down into the solid cover, losing altitude foot by foot, hoping there wasn’t a hidden outcropping just below.
Once he broke out into the open, only a few feet above the tossing waves, the cliffs of the base dim in the distance.
It was dangerous, but he was teaching himself.
And, as Saslic had said earlier, maybe vanishing in flight wasn’t the best way to die, but it made for as good a funeral as anyone could wish.
“That’s it,” Garadice announced at one morning’s formation, a touch of spring in the air. “We’ve nothing more to teach you.
“You’re dragon fliers.”
There was a gape of astonishment, then the students began cheering. The noise sounded like a great deal more than the nineteen who’d survived.
Garadice, at his own expense, had small golden dragons cast, and gave one to each student, telling them to pin them on their uniform, to be worn above any other decoration they won.
“I wish you all the luck in the world,” Serjeant Patrice said. “And I’m proud to have helped make you into soldiers.”
Saslic looked scornfully at his outthrust hand, refused to take it.
“No,” she said, voice bitter. “Screw the way it works in romances. You’re still nothing but a bully and a cheap prick to me.”
She stalked away, to laughter. Patrice, face purpling, scurried back into the main hall.
And so the class broke up, each with a wagon carrying his or her distinctly unhappy dr
agon, creaking toward the Straits ports and Paestum, to report to different units.
Now, Hal thought, the real learning will begin.
11
It was a bit more than six months since Hal had been in Paestum, but the city had changed almost beyond recognition. The ruins from the siege had been mostly razed, and spreading far beyond the walls were caterpillaring tents for the replacements and new units streaming across the Straits into Sagene.
When Hal had left, there’d been only the army. Now there were four, interspersed with Sagene armies down the Roche border, to meet the building threat of new Roche forces.
But the tactics hadn’t changed, still the bloody head-smashing battles as the forces moved back and forth in the wasted, bloody landscape, hoping, each time, without luck, for a breakthrough into the heart of the enemy’s country for the capital.
Hal, having a great deal of back pay in his purse, and nowhere to spend it, found a copyist involved with the replacement section who was bribable.
He was negotiating with him to keep Saslic, of course, plus Farren and possibly Ev Larnell with him, whichever dragon flight he was assigned to, having learned there’s no such word as “no” in the military if the pleader has sufficient rank or silver.
There were, at present, two flights assigned to each Deraine army, with Sagene having its own flights, roughly set up the same as Deraine’s.
The transport ship had unloaded their dragons, and the new fliers were given a tented area to themselves, while they waited for orders to whichever dragon flight would need them. They were left largely in peace, no warrants rooting through their area for scut-details, since no one seemed to want to get too close to the monsters or the lunatics who rode them.
Contrasting with this were the jokes going around that no one had ever seen a dead dragon rider, and dragon riders were mainly concerned with qualifying for their king’s old-age pension, whereas an infantryman or a cavalryman would certainly never live long enough to worry about it.
Hal was trying to figure out how much he’d have to increase the copyist’s bribe to get “his” people assigned to the northernmost First Army area, near Paestum. Even though it was cold, rainy and swampy in spots, it was the area of the border he knew well, and thought that knowledge would improve his, and his friends’, chances of surviving.
Then everything shattered.
Roche magicians managed to cloak the assembly of half a dozen armies, south, near the city of Frechin. They’d crossed the border, smashing a Sagene army.
Only the spring rains were holding them back from driving hard toward Sagene’s capital of Fovant. But each day, the salient grew longer, a finger reaching into the heart of Sagene.
Deraine’s First and Second Armies were stripped of any unit not vitally needed, all offensives against the Roche were put aside, and all replacements arriving in Paestum were detached on temporary duty to units in the Third Army, now engaged with the enemy.
So Hal’s entire graduating class of novice fliers and their beasts were ordered south, at all possible speed. The Third Army needed them for scouts, spies and couriers.
The roads below were packed with troops, marching, riding, in wagons. Hal was very glad to be high above the roiling mud below. His dragon wanted to find a nice, dry cave and hole up until the weather changed, but he drove it onward, and eventually it gave up squealing protest when he led it out from the canvas aerie the detailed quartermasters set up every night when they camped.
South and south they went, but it never got warmer, and the fliers wore everything they were issued, and still shivered.
Some of them—Feccia among them—got in the habit of buying whatever brandy they could find in their flights. Hal took barely a nip on even especially frozen mornings. He’d already learned brandy as a friend could quickly become brandy as a creaking crutch, and wanted none of that.
Of course the villagers along the roads were either bought or looted out by the time Hal’s detachment passed, but the dragons had the option of flying away from the march routes, finding villages who barely knew there was a war, eager to trade, sell or even patriotically give away their produce, eggs, or drink.
It didn’t make much of an impression to the ground-bound soldiery, seeing dragons float back to their wagons at dusk, laden with plunder. The elderly infantry warrant who’d been put in charge of the formation seemed to have no objections to what was going on, and Hal shrugged, it not being his concern. It didn’t, however, improve his mood to hear the infantry give them new labels: “Defenders of the Veal,” “Champions of the Poultry Run,” “Guardians of the Keg,” “Omelet Defenders,” and so forth.
At least he and Saslic were able to be together at least every third night or so, when one or another didn’t have guard duty around the dragons.
Other fliers made similar arrangements, or, like Farren, chased after any women they encountered with the dignity of a hound in heat.
There were persistent rumors of bandits abroad, or cross-border partisans, but Hal never saw any, and these scoundrels were, according to the tales, either a day’s march in front of or behind the yarn-spinner.
Before Bedarisi the open roads that had given the soldiers speed changed. Now the roads were packed with refugees, fleeing ahead of the advancing Roche armies.
Hal would always remember a few things from those days.
An old man, pushing an older woman in a barrow, and, from the time they first saw the pair until they vanished around a bend, she never stopped railing at him.
A middle-aged man, wearing nothing but long winter drawers, carrying only an ornate old clock taller than he was.
Three wagons full of young women, who claimed to be from a religious school, and were full of laughter. But if they were religious, they had scandalous rites, although those men—and a few women—who hadn’t made bed partners seemed to enjoy their company. Hal and Saslic visited their camp, across from the dragon fliers, for a glass of wine, and Saslic noted, behind the laughter, the fear in the women’s eyes, and the way they kept glancing south, toward the oncoming Roche.
A wizard, with two acolytes, their robes stained with travel, trudging along. Farren landed his dragon, got provisions from one of the fliers’ wagons, and walked for a third of a league beside them, then came back.
“Dreadful bad it is, in the south,” he reported. “Or so the mage says. Roche cavalry ridin’ here an’ there, lootin’, cut-tin’, murderin’, rapin’, and the Sagenes don’t seem to be able to stop ’em.
“He says we’ll have our jobs set for us, an’ wished us luck.”
Hal asked why the man’s magic hadn’t kept him from becoming another wanderer, and Mariah, serious for once, had said, “I guess magic don’t al’as help the one who’s castin’ it. Sure fire it didn’t make m’ grandsire rich, just notable. Guess that the gods, whoreson bastids that they be, don’t want wizards comin’ up as kings or, worse yet, competin’ wi’ them.
“That gives us some sort of order, I guess, though, thinkin’ from present circ’mstances, I wouldn’t mind if they let an option out f’r one short amat’ur witch, who’s doodlin’ around in the wilderness wi’ dragons at present, needin’ all the help he can get.”
One day they were stranded before a washed-out bridge, waiting for the pioneers to rebuild it. There was a small country inn on a promontory over the river, but its proprietor said, mournfully, he’d sold everything he had in the way of provender, and their chickens and ducks had been pirated away by either soldiers or refugees.
Mynta Gart flew away northwest on her dragon, and came back two hours later with a cargo net full of foodstuffs bought in distant villages.
She refused the proprietor’s money, told him to build omelets, and the man’s two daughters went through dozens of eggs at a time until the fliers thought they might cluck and peck at each other.
Now their forced march from Paestum caught up with them, and Hal could feel fatigue at his back. But he said nothing, and cut Vad Feccia
off sharply when he whined about sore muscles, merely pointing to the road they’d pulled away from, at the long lines of infantry, plodding through the mire, a pace at a time, and with nothing but a groundsheet and what they had scrounged from the roadside or begged or stolen from passing wagons for rations.
They reached Bedarisi, the streets crowded with fleeing citizens. It took them two full days to work their way through the jammed streets to open country again.
Feccia suggested low-flying the dragons over the crowd, and hoping some terror would clear the way, but the old warrant forbade it.
Beyond the city, they saw their first Roche dragons, swooping and diving in the distance, spying the country, and felt the war close on them.
Two of their dragons saw them, and Hal was pleased with their response—angry hissing and snorts, their heads snaking back and forth, mouths open, fangs dripping. He hoped the fliers mirrored their attitude.
Now the roads, such as they were, country tracks worn wide and into sloppy ditches by the army’s passings, were empty once more of everything except the military.
They stopped at an enormous post at an intersection of three of these tracks, a log stripped of leaves and branches, and buried vertically. On it were half a hundred wooden boards, each pointing to where a different formation might be found.
Far at the top, Farren saw a small painted dragon.
“Or else’t a winged worm,” he opined.
They turned the wagons down that track, and went on for several leagues, passing encampments, ration dumps, stables.
The track emptied into a wide meadow, with a pond at one end, and there they found the dragon flight.
Hal kept his face blank, but Farren, Feccia and some others gaped in shock.
