The Dragon Round
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For my father
Contents
Map
Dramatis Personae
PART ONE
* * *
Jeryon
CHAPTER ONE: The Captain’s Chance
CHAPTER TWO: The Poth
CHAPTER THREE: The Beach
CHAPTER FOUR: The Gray
CHAPTER FIVE: The Cabin
PART TWO
* * *
The Mates
CHAPTER SIX: The Oarmaster
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Hunter
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Junior
CHAPTER NINE: The Generals
CHAPTER TEN: The Tower
Epilogue
About Stephen S. Power
Dramatis Personae
COMBER
Jeryon, the captain
Livion, the first mate
Solet, the second mate, an Ynessi
Tuse, the third mate and oarmaster
Everlyn, the apothecary, an Aydeni
Hume, a guilded rower
Bearclaw, a contract rower
Beale, a harpooner
Topp, a sailor
HOPPER
Press, the first mate
Edral, the second mate
Igen, an harpooner
Rowan, the ship’s boy
THE WOLF PACK
Jos, the first mate
Mylla and Barad, lamps
Bodger and Gibbery, harpooners
Mulcent and Sumpt, owners
Kley, an oarmaster
Blass, a shoveler
HANOSH
Chelson, an owner
Tristaban, his daughter
Holestar, Skite, and Derc, his guards
Felic, his office boy
Sivarts, one of his captains
Kathi, one of his remora
Ophardt, his footman
Asper, “the White Widow,” a fellow owner
Omer, a trade rider
Herse, the army’s general
Rego, his adjutant
Birming and Pashing, sergeants
Ject, the city guard’s general
Ravis, his first guard
Oftly, new guard of his retinue
Husting, a sergeant of the city guard
Chevron, sergeant of the Tower Guards
Isco and Bern, guards
Eles, an owner and leader of the City Council
Prieve, the sea general
Strig, a tanner
Almond, a proprietor
Fakkin Tawmy, a fixer
Mags, a customs official
Assorted sailors and rowers, prisoners and proprietors, traders and whores, workers and servants, guards, soldiers, and citizens.
And several dragons.
PART ONE
* * *
Jeryon
CHAPTER ONE
The Captain’s Chance
1
* * *
Just before dawn and still eight hours from Hanosh, the captain of the penteconter Comber feels the rowers start to flag. They’re pulling together, but behind the drummer’s beat, and if he lets them get away with it, they’ll fall apart. He can’t afford that. However exhausted they are, having rowed for seventeen hours, he brings his galleys in on time.
Jeryon’s about to leave his cabin and go below when a whip cracks and he hears his oarmaster, Tuse, call for twenty big ones. The galley lurches forward, and by the seventh heave the rowers are tight again.
Tuse has some promise. Jeryon likes that call. Not twenty for Hanosh. Not twenty to save the sick. Just twenty. Tuse focuses on the job he has, not the one he wants, unlike his other mates.
The first and second mates are on the stern deck above, two whispers through the wood. Jeryon closes his eyes to listen. So far they’ve only said what all mates say: to advance they have to earn another captain’s ship. They’re getting bolder, though. It’s a short trip from earn to take.
If Jeryon didn’t need them for the next eight hours, he’d put them off, maybe before they reached Hanosh. As it is, let them think he would sleep. Once the medicine’s unloaded, he’ll wake them to reality.
Livion, the first mate, soft-cheeked and slight, leans against the stern rail. Solet, the second, stands to starboard with the rudder trapped between his thick chest and hairy arm. They have the wind, which fills the galley’s sail and muffles the crack of Tuse’s whip.
“I wish she’d left the city,” Livion says over the wind.
“Why?” Solet says. “The flox was in the Harbor. It’d barely touched the Hill. Without some moon-eyed sailor to carry it all the way up to the Crest—”
“Plagues don’t care what lane you live on.”
“Apparently your woman doesn’t either.” Livion’s eyes narrow, but Solet ignores him and goes on. “And if her father cared before we set out, he won’t after we dock and save the city. A father might not want a sailor in his family, but what owner doesn’t want a hero in his business?”
“I’m not using her to get to him.”
Solet snorts, and Livion stiffens. Sometimes Solet oversteps himself. Hanoshi don’t discuss their private lives, which makes an Ynessi like Solet want to pry all the more. The first mate finds it easier to give in a bit and get it over with than to resist. It’s his fault, anyway, for trading a long look with Tristaban as they were casting off.
“I want him to find me worthy of command,” Livion says.
“Worthy?” Solet says. “You sound like the captain. You sound like my grandfather. There’s no worthy anymore, just worth.” Solet taps the rudder with the blade he wears in place of half his right forefinger. “Get your woman. Get your command. Get your fortune. That makes you worthy. Money is money to her father, to all the owners. You don’t want to end up like Jeryon, do you?” Solet taps the deck with his foot.
“I could do worse,” Livion says. “He’s been captain for years.”
“Decades,” Solet says, “which makes him—”
“Reliable?”
“Stalled. He doesn’t reach. He’s captain of a monoreme. Has been. Always will be. He might as well push a milk cart.”
“That milkman,” Livion says, “is the real person who’ll save the city.”
“And he’ll give the Trust all the credit for sending him. They’ll give him a pat on the head and a perk for being on time. There’s a whole city waiting to cheer us, the purest coin there is, and he won’t want any of it. Wouldn’t you want a taste of that? Wouldn’t your woman? She won’t settle for nothing, anyone can see that. You shouldn’t either.” He half closes his eyes. “We’ll have triremes.” His eyes shine. “What I could do with a trireme.”
Livion says, “I’m starting to understand the Ynessi reputation for piracy.”
“You wound me,” Solet says. “I’m no pirate. But I do need a ship to start, so once you have your woman, you could put a word in her father’s ear and see the captain rewarded with a desk while I get Comber. That I would settle for.”
Sunlight bubbles on the horizon, then erupts and flows along it. The sky is filled with blood and gold and the palest blue. The mates smile at each other.
“He’ll get all the wine he can drink,” Solet says.
The portholes glow, and the cabin has gone from dark to dim. Jeryon can’t disagree with Solet. I am a plodder. I’m also fairly rewarded and content. In a city like Hanosh, where one eats well, four eat poorly, and five don’t eat at all, it’s better to be hardtack than an empty plate dreaming of steak.
He feels sorry for Livion. The boy had promise before he started listening to Solet, and probably this woman. If she’s as manipulative as Jeryon thinks, Livion will count himself lucky after the Trust learns of his plotting. He won’t get another Hanoshi ship, but he’ll be rid of her.
Solet will have to return to Yness, likely a little bruised, where he’ll be welcomed with open arms and, knowing the Ynessi, open legs. Jeryon doesn’t understand why the Trust puts up with them. A wild people. A wasteful people. At least the Aydeni on board has proven trustworthy.
The door to the adjacent cabin opens. He hears the Aydeni enter, slam the door, rattle through a box of phials and slam out again. He can imagine why she’s rattling and slamming. As an apothecary, in addition to making medicine, she has to treat the rowers, and she doesn’t approve of the Trust’s new tonic. So be it. She was only contracted for this trip. In eight hours she’ll be gone too.
As the oarmaster cracks his whip again, Everlyn climbs the aft ladder from the rowers’ deck to her cabin. Dawn does its best to cheer her, but fails. The captain won’t light the lamps, worried about Aydeni privateers, as if there were any. This makes for a gloomy ship and a gloomier rowers’ deck, however much moonlight comes through the half deck above. Gloominess suits the Hanoshi, though.
Theirs is a seafaring city that has largely traded its fishing fleet for trading galleys and its nets for coin purses, whereas Ayden has always trusted the endless bounty of its mountains: the stone and ore, the trees and game. Even the ancient shadows long to be shaped into stories featuring wondrous beasts and secret caves. Hanoshi stories are about the joy of riches and the pain of their loss. They would only shape the shadows on Comber if they could be boxed for sale.
Everlyn looks around her cabin. The small room is packed with barrels of golden shield, a curative herb they bought across the Tallan Sea. She’s spent every spare moment of the last three days turning it into medicine. The Hanoshi council will give it away for free to employed citizens. The Trust, which owns Comber, is charging the city just a nominal coin for the voyage, but this is not a selfless act. The Trust wants to become a ruling company, and ruling companies realize that if the city perishes of the plague, there will be no one left to rule or employ.
Everlyn lifts the lid of a pot simmering on the small iron stove at one end of her spattered worktable. She has spent so much of the past three days in here reducing the shield to medicine, she hardly smells it anymore. This disturbs her. Fresh, the shield smells like liver. As medicine, it smells like rotten liver. Oh, what she must smell like.
It’s a small sacrifice, though, compared to the effects of the flox, which bubbles the skin as if boiled from within, then cools into a cracking black crust. The luckiest die, and most are that lucky.
Everlyn rattles through a wooden box under the table, pulls out a clear bottle of fine red powder and pockets it. From a different box she removes a larger green bottle with a skull painted on the label and takes a long pull. She swallows a belch, chases it with another, longer pull, then puts the bottle back and goes below, slamming the door behind her. Let the privateers hear that.
Tuse stalks the alley between the rowers’ benches, so tall he shifts from hunching to squatting to both beneath the overhead. He coils and uncoils a white whip. “Fifty-seven strokes that took.”
“I’ll say it again: They’ve had too much,” Everlyn says.
“I haven’t,” one rower says, grinning wildly. A bear-claw brand glistens on his shoulder. A cut from Tuse’s lash bloodies his cheek.
“Especially you,” she says.
“You’re worried about my health?” Bearclaw says. He shakes his leg shackle. “I’m not one of them. I’ll die down here. Might as well be fired up.”
“I won’t have it,” the rower behind him says. “None of us will.” Having no shackles, he looks around. Unlike Bearclaw and the other five prisoners leased from the jail in Hanosh, the rest of the rowers wear a sodden armband with the crest of their guild, the Brothers of the Oar. “Brothers don’t cheat. Look to Hume.”
Hume is a silent mountain. His eyes are closed. He may be asleep. Yet he pulls true. The brothers have looked at him in admiration before. They aren’t as inspired now.
“I need some,” a brother says. “To get the job done.”
“And me,” another says.
“Oarmaster,” Bearclaw says, “I asked first.”
“You’ll die,” Everlyn says. “And I won’t give you the means. Or let anyone else.”
“It’s not your choice,” Tuse says. “Should I tell the Trust an Aydeni tried to sabotage the trip? How many more would you be risking then?”
Everlyn chokes on her fury. The math is easy. She’s done it with every dose of powder she’s administered: How many will she save in Hanosh for each rower she might doom on the Comber?
She takes out the bottle of red powder and a spoon. Everlyn starts aft with a prisoner, who shakes his head. Some brothers cheer until one of their own takes a huge snort.
“I said it’s to get the job done,” the brother says and stares at his oar.
Tuse grunts. Bearclaw laughs. Hume pumps the oar. The drum beats on.
Once she’s done, Everlyn tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear, holds her chin up, and says, “I have pots to tend.” Tuse ignores her. She marches past him, climbs the aft ladder, and sees the other mates staring abaft. They look concerned. Maybe there are privateers out here.
Livion eclipses the sun with his hand and peers around it. “Do you see that? On top of the mist.”
“Too high for a sail,” Solet says. “Oh.” He squeezes the rudder tighter. “Could we outrun it?”
“It might not see us,” Livion says.
“It won’t have to. The stench of the shield will lead it right to us.” Solet curses. “Why couldn’t Comber be a trireme? We’d have marines. More weapons. Better defenses. The same speed.”
“At ten times the expense,” Livion says. “I’ll wake the captain.”
Jeryon rubs his face awake. The mates weary him, and he needs a shave too. As a man’s chin goes, so goes the man, and his will be impeccable. He puts a small towel and clay pot of soap on a shelf beneath a porthole and takes his razor, a circular copper blade, from its ivory case. It would be a ridiculous indulgence if not so useful.
Maybe Livion is worth saving, he thinks, if he could shave away the bad influences. It would also be indulgent, but he should give his mate that chance. Why should someone suffer for another man’s wrongs?
Jeryon hears Solet say, “Oh.” Through the porthole, he sees it: a tiny shadow creeping on the verge of dawn. He holds his hand at arm’s length. The shadow’s a quarter-thumb wide, no bigger than a fire ant. His stomach churns. The math is easy. If the shadow reaches the Comber, it’ll cover the entire ship.
As Livion runs overhead to the stern deck ladder, Jeryon fits the razor into its case and pockets it.
2
* * *
Everlyn dodges Livion as he slides down the ladder from the stern deck and bangs on the captain’s door. He sticks his head in briefly, then walks past her onto the causeway over the rowers’ deck. He says to Tuse below, “Silent drumming, double-time.”
Tuse glances up. “Aye.”
“And shutter the ports,” Livion says.
Tuse nods to the drummer stationed by the mast, who plays a little roll to signal the change, then taps his heavy sticks to keep the beat.
>
The relative silence is astounding. Everlyn is almost dizzied by the absence of pounding, as if someone had pulled her feet out from under her. She grabs Livion’s arm and says, “What is it?”
Before he can answer her, Jeryon emerges from his cabin. His black jacket emphasizes his bony frame, his red three-quarter pants reveal it, and his yellow cotton blouse, regardless of the rank its color designates, does nothing good for his pallor. His clothes have been fiercely brushed and pressed, though. His only informality is a pair of old sandals cut square in the back, Hanoshi-style. Boots are encouraged for officers on Hanoshi ships, but in his mind only Aydeni wear boots.
Jeryon tells Livion, “Break out the crossbows. Eight men to fire, two to load, and I want all sixteen loaded to start. And get the harpooners on their guns.”
Livion says, “We’re not going to run?”
“We’re running already,” Jeryon says. “It won’t make any difference if we’re seen.”
Livion knows better than to say they can’t possibly win. Jeryon admires his restraint. “I have a plan,” he says. “I hope we don’t have to use it.”
Everlyn says, “Will you tell me—”
“You’ll be told what you need to be told, when you need to be told,” Jeryon says.
She screws up her mouth and nods. He sounds like one of the Hanoshi ladies on the Crest, with their “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with me” and “I know what medicine’s best.”
“Livion, task two sailors with bringing an extra sailcloth to the poth’s cabin and a few casks of water. Now,” he turns to the poth, “cover the barrels and crates with the sailcloth and keep it drenched. If the Comber’s just a smoking hull when it reaches port, our cargo will still survive.”
“Might not be fire,” Livion says.
“Always prepare for the worst,” Jeryon says. “Makes all other outcomes seem less terrible.”
Jeryon climbs the stern deck ladder. When Everlyn turns to Livion, he’s already beyond the mast. Every word he says springs a sailor into action like a ball scattering skittles.