by E. E. Knight
The Copper looked from blighter to drake and back again. Dragons were a superior species in every physical respect. Their scale kept out arrows that felled the blighters, their crests could deflect a fall of stones such as rained down on the blighters at the ford, and their fire terrified even if it did not kill.
But the blighters would not abandon an injured fellow warrior to his fate.
Nivom threw down his captured weapon, a contraption of wood and metal, in some respects similar to a bow. “Curse them. They’re using dwarvish crossbows.”
A bleeding drake just made it to the top of the hill and collapsed. The Copper approached to see to his wounds, but the drake just snarled a warning: “Keep off!”
The wounded drake curled into a ball.
SiDrakkon flapped across the river and landed on the hilltop, somewhat bloodied about the griff and gums. A blighter ran up and tugged at an arrow projecting from his saa, and the dragon growled and struck him down.
On the other side of the river, the Ghi men sallied out of their fortress, teams of spearmen hunting about the riverbank. They flushed a wounded drake and put an end to him. Wounded blighters they beheaded, digging into the ground the warriors’ short stabbing spears and setting the taken heads atop, grisly flowers lining the road leading to the Ghi men’s fortress.
“Come, NoTannadon,” SiDrakkon said. If he noticed that the Copper had returned he gave no sign of it. “We’ll return to the Lavadome and there ask for more dragons to redeem this. Nivom, go back to the Mud City as best as you can. I’ll return with two-score dragons ready for war!”
With that he flapped into the air, the remaining duelist trailing behind.
“Rest a moment,” Nivom said to some of the Drakwatch who rose to begin the long journey south. “The Ghi men aren’t crossing the river just yet. Might as well eat the hanging meat; Spirits know when we’ll have full bellies again.”
He looked at the receding dots of the dragons flying south. The wounded duelist gave a groan.
“Two-score dragons,” Nivom said. “Three will come over footsore and give up before they’re out of the Lower World. Two will get into a duel, killing one and leaving the other too wounded to go on. Six will see all the game on the savanna here and decide to spend the season hunting instead of in warfare. One will see a village in the distance, immediately attack, and it will turn out that he just burned out some headman of the king’s and will have to be sent back in disgrace. Four will argue with SiDrakkon about the orders he gives, and return to the Lavadome rather than serve under one they consider inferior to themselves. Two more will quit the first time an arrow goes home; for having shed blood honorably, they will consider their bit in the war over. Of the half-score remaining one will always be too ill to fight, another too cowardly, and a third will fly into a rage and die atop the first tower he sees. Leaving SiDrakkon with three reliable dragons again.”
“You should have a mouthful yourself,” the Copper said. He’d never heard Nivom so discouraged. “Just as many lengths for you as the rest.”
“What I’d like is some wine. Have you ever had wine, Rugaard?”
“What about HeBellereth? And the wounded on the hillside?” the Copper asked.
“You think this is a training march? I won’t bleed victorious dragons looking after losers.”
“The blighters don’t feel that way.”
“Blighters!”
The Copper stared off across the river. Trails of smoke rose from the town.
“It’s that cursed wall that did it,” Nivom said. “See how the causeway runs along it? They could fire down on us, throw rocks. Rothor and NiHerrstrath tried climbing it, but they were picked off from the towers.”
Some of the Ghi men had ventured out beyond the broken gate and were crowded around the corpse of the dragon, cutting trophies of their victory.
The Copper suddenly noticed something about the wounded and the survivors. “What happened to the Firemaidens?”
“SiDrakkon grew desperate. After the first rush against the gate was thrown back, he sent the Firemaidens to lead the blighters. Some fell under the towers. I think that’s Agania there, being lifted by those rats.”
The Copper approached HeBellereth. The blighters had managed to get the horrible, hooked spear out, and the dragon lay on his side, panting. He rolled an anguished eye at the Copper.
Nivom shut his nostrils and walked over to the hanging meat.
“Can you walk, sir?” the Copper asked.
The dragon managed to right himself. He got his hindquarters up, but managed only a short, shaky rise on his sii before collapsing again. “No. I’m vanquished.”
“I’ve been vanquished too,” the Copper said.
“Yet…” the dragon said, “you wear laudi.”
The Copper inflated his lungs, looked down at the wounded drakes struggling up the slope. He couldn’t say who was talking or where the words were coming from, only that he was angry about the sacrifice of the Firemaidens, and the wretched humans across the river, pulling teeth and claws from the corpse of the dead dragon. “Not yet! Drakwatch of the Lavadome, you’re hurt but you’re not dead. Not yet!”
A drake pulled himself out from the rocks at the bank of the river.
“Up. Up, drakes,” the Copper said, rearing onto his hind legs, a strange clarity in his mind. “Climb. On three legs if you have to.” He waved his shriveled limb to emphasize his point.
One drake made it only a few paces before collapsing.
The Copper scrambled down the hill. The drake, a coppery color not much different from his own, was bled out, his gums and eye sockets almost white.
“Vanquished,” the drake said. “Cry vanquished for me. To what little glory I’ve earned I depart this—”
“Not yet! Climb on my back. I’ll get you up the hill. You’ll heal and get another chance at them.”
Six or seven blighter warriors were gathered nearby, resting and chewing on some kind of leaf. Some no longer had their spears or shields.
“Up the hill,” the Copper said.
They looked at him blankly as the drake climbed on his back. Luckily he was slender-framed. The Copper gestured with his snout. “To the top. Top.”
The Copper appreciated the hill’s difficulty more on the way up than on the trip down. Especially with the weight of a drake supported by only three limbs. The Ghi men would have a hard time coming up it, at least from the riverside.
The wounded drake’s claws relaxed and he slipped off. The drake’s tongue hung out as he breathed.
“Can you grip my tail?”
The drake didn’t answer; he just closed his teeth around the Copper’s tail, then shut his eyes. The climb was harder, not to mention painful, with the deadweight of the drake pulling at his tail, but he made it to the others.
The wounded drake breathed no more. The Copper pried the jaws loose.
He thought furiously. The drakes would lose heart, staring at that cooling body.
“I don’t know this drake. What was his name?”
“Nirolf,” another said.
“This is Nirolf’s hill, then. Let’s put him in those rocks, there, where he’ll have a good view of the fight.”
“Why name a hill after one who was vanquished?” a drake asked.
The Copper didn’t have an answer, so he just snarled and rattled his griff until the drake backed away.
Nivom returned to him, chewing, negotiating a course through the wounded drakes as though wishing to avoid droppings.
“What’s this about you remaining behind?” he asked.
“I’m not so sure this battle is over.”
“I am. I felt the rocks fall. I felt a dragon crash to the ground. Those stone houses of the Ghi men do not burn like some blighter village.”
“There’s still a fight in these drakes. The Ghi men will learn that if they try to come up this hill.”
“Your honor,” a drake said. “If there’re still fighting claws dug into this gro
und, I don’t want to leave it.” He sniffed at one of his wounded fellows with a scabby snout missing a few scales.
Nivom looked around. Enough of the unbled drakes had crept up to listen to the conversation, while still keeping their distance from the wounded, so he had an audience in two rings. The duelist dragon licking at the wound in his chest formed a little hill all his own.
“How do you propose this battle be fought? No wings, no mobility, and no hominid levees.”
The Copper lowered his head. “I’ll follow any order you wish to give, Commander. As long as it doesn’t involve my leaving this hill and the wounded.”
“You mean the vanquished.”
HeBellereth lifted his massive scarred head. “Not yet, drake.”
The Copper felt a thought break loose in his mind. “Yes! That’s the spirit. Not yet. That will be our battle cry. Not yet.”
Nivom took a deep breath. “It’ll be dark soon. We’ll post wind sentries on the adjoining hills. If we get everyone out of sight they might think we’ve left. Then I’ll slip back with a siisa to the ford….”
The Copper could almost feel the heat from the gathered and the filling fire bladders. He looked across the river. “Not yet, you milksops. Not yet.”
Chapter 17
A scent Nivom called “jasmine” hung in the night air. The flowing moonlit waters beckoned below, seeming to tickle the base of the hill with silver fingers. Night birds warbled amid the flooded trees, their soft calls denying the existence of blood-caked spears and war machines that sent rocks hurtling from the skies.
Even the fortress town on the opposite bank slumbered in peace, a few slivers of light showing from shuttered windows.
The night passed quietly. The remaining blighters, no more than a few score, clustered nervously behind the wounded HeBellereth. The Copper suspected they were too frightened to venture anywhere else.
A rather long-haired blighter with unusually large eyes closed the wound in HeBellereth, using bits of sharp wooden peg and leather to close the gash.
As the sun went down the Copper asked Fourfang to go among the blighters and see if they’d be willing to send messengers to seek help from the nearby tribes. He’d seen enough burned villages while following the guides to the river to suspect that the local blighters would be more willing to fight the Ghi men than would those from farther south. He dispatched his own guides back to the king to report that there’d been fighting but it was “inconclusive,” and that they were camped within sight of the Ghi men’s walls.
Then he loosed his trio of bats on HeBellereth to do what they could to soothe his wounds. HeBellereth protested. Being tended to by savage, unenthralled blighters was bad enough, but he didn’t want “vermin” nosing about his wound—until the first licks and the numbing tingle the bat saliva brought made his eyes widen in amazement.
“Those are the biggest bats I’ve ever seen. They’re like hunting dogs,” Nivom said.
“They were raised on dragonblood,” the Copper said. “Almost from birth. It appears to agree with them.”
“They’ll get their fill this night.”
Nivom told him what had transpired between his trip back to the Lavadome and his return. SiDrakkon sent NiThonius to the Mud City to press on the king the need for more forces—men or blighter—then he and his dragons caught a large force of Ghi cavalry in the open and scattered them. SiDrakkon concluded that with their main strength gone, it was time to strike at their largest settlement in Bant, the quarry city on the Black River.
But the Ghi men had prepared against the coming of the dragons. Poor iron spears, tin axes, and cowhide shields were met by steel broadswords, chain armor, and far-flying dwarvish crossbow bolts. As for the dragons, the war machines of the men struck as the dragons turned and dived, and every issue of flame was fought by bucketfuls of sand.
Leading to the debacle the Copper had partly witnessed.
“They’ll come in the morning to finish the wounded off,” Nivom predicted.
“They’ll have to cross the river to do that,” the Copper said. “Humans can’t swim like drakes. Not with their false-scale.”
“My father told me once that the best place to strike an upright is in the crotch, when they take a long step forward.”
“Wise dragon. Does he still live?”
“No. A Wyrr was he, like the Tyr himself, and distantly related. He lost his hill and his life to a Skotl-clan duelist. My mother, an Anklene, took her own in her despair.”
The Copper thought it best to switch subjects, as Nivom could become gloomy, and he wanted his old cavemate alert and active. Every time talk turned to clan friction it left him nonplussed. Had not dragons enemies enough? “So that’s where you get your cleverness. The Anklenes.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised if you had some Anklene blood in you too. Your eye ridge is like theirs, though that odd eye spoils the effect. You spout strange ideas. Why all the concern over a vanquished drake?”
“I’m not sure I can put it into words. How are you with mind-pictures?”
“Baby stories? I’m a drake, and you’re not my mother. Or some dragonelle angling to be flattered.”
“In my travels I came across the bodies of two demen sitting back-to-back in a cave, as though they were guarding each other as they died of their wounds. When I smelled the bodies, it was just two more bodies; I’d seen plenty before. But that…that…comradeship…”
“Did you just say comradeship? That’s a queer word. I think it’s taken from a hominid tongue.”
“Dragons could use a little of that, instead of always working out who’s above whom and adding to their own store of glory and gold.”
“You’re not one of these foamers who wants everyone to have the same rank and offer up metals to those who can’t be bothered to get it on their own, are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve had a sun-struck dragon or two before. Do your dreaming while you’re asleep.”
The Copper thought it best to change the course of the conversation. “So what do you propose to do about catching them in the crotch?”
“I’ll take a sissa of the healthy drakes to the river. Can you handle matters here on the hillside, with the better of the wounded?”
“Yes. I was thinking that trick they played, with their war machines hiding in the brush, could be played on them too. You grab them at the crotch and I’ll bite their arms off.”
“By the Earth Spirit, yes! Rugaard, I’d be proud to cry havoc with you at my side.”
“I was thinking. Some cooperation from the blighters might help. How are you with their tongue?”
“I know a little.”
The Copper thought. “I have a thrall who has a way of making himself agreeable. Maybe he can fill in the gaps.”
A very unlikely reinforcement arrived after a short rain squall—the weather at this time of year seemed to mandate a rain in the early afternoon and a second in the long hours of the night before dawn—a bashed and mud-splattered Firemaiden named Nilrasha.
According to Fourfang, the blighters now named her Ora, a word that in their tongue referred to some hunting season festival or other, during which one of every kind of game animal was sacrificed to their capricious deities. But the blighter shaman always chose one sacrifice at random—the Ora—to be released back into the wild to let the rest of the game know that though the herds might be thinned and a few jaguars brought down, enough would be left to ensure future hunting. According to Fourfang, Ora either meant lucky or redeemed, as the rather fatalistic dragon-tongue didn’t have many words for those blessed and guarded by the gods.
The Copper found her sucking rainwater off of leaves and eating some of the hung meat, and told her Fourfang’s tale. While he did this a pair of blighters toasted meat on sticks and gave the bits to her.
“So that’s why every muddy blighter on this hill’s been patting me,” Nilrasha said.
She had a lot of mud on her, and blades of
grass caught in her scale. Drakka who joined the Firemaidens didn’t shirk from dirt and muck, but they were usually cleaner than the drakes. This one either didn’t give a flame for her appearance or was too tired to care for herself. “What happened at the gate?”
“It was so quick. I just remember a hail of projectiles: Some were stones; some were those infernal crossbow bolts. Mivonia in front of me, four struck her, two in the neck, or I wouldn’t be speaking to you now. There was flame, and some of the blighters rushed into this sort of open space at the center of town. Then one of the dragons overhead was hit; I didn’t see it, but I heard his cry as he fell. Everything went wrong after that.”
“The blighters didn’t run, then?”
“No. Not the ones with us, by my maidenoath, though I can’t speak for those behind. But the dragons overhead vanished and the men lost their fear. They poured down their walls and out of their towers.
“Some of the Firemaidens loosed their flame to drive the humans away with heat and smoke, and I chased some through a burning building. Then a wall or a roof fell on me, and I was senseless for a time, though—this is very odd—I heard my mother singing. I distinctly remember it. When the singing stopped it was night, and I moved and some rubble shifted, and then I found myself in their town. I sneaked out through a drain hole that goes under the wall. I think there was meant to be water in it all the time, for the walls and ceiling were covered with dead shell creatures, but something must have gone wrong with the flow, for it was dry everywhere but the floor. It let out by the river, so I just swam across and smelled my way back to the hill. And so you see me.”
“We’re going to see if we can’t avenge your dead sisters tomorrow,” the Copper said.
Nilrasha looked across the river. “I should like that. By my maidenoath, I should like that very much.”
“You’ve had enough honors. Stay back with HeBellereth, please. That route into the Ghi men’s town may prove useful. I’d like your head to stay on your neck.”
She rose, and some bits of hardened mud rained off.
