The Dragon Round

by Stephen S. Power

  “The modesty of a second mate who suddenly finds himself in command?”

  Livion shrugs. The modesty of one who lived.

  “You’re lucky those men spoke up for you,” Jeryon says. “They’re the ones who put you on the Comber. You’ll never get anywhere by leaving yourself out of your reports.” He adds, “I hope I can speak up for you in mine.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Livion says.

  Jeryon sees he means it. There’s a chance for him yet.

  The dragon’s now a hand long. “It’ll pass us to larboard,” Jeryon says. “Pipe Tuse: Larboard turn on my mark.”

  Livion blows the alert.

  Jeryon raises his fist to Solet, who’s little more than a thumb’s width tall at this distance. Solet says something to Beale and the crossbowmen, whom he’s spread across the front of the ship. Each has a weapon in hand, another loaded at his feet. They shout as one, “Aye!” Solet raises his fist too.

  The dragon blooms into enormity in what feels like seconds. Its shadow passes them first, a black mass wider on the water than the Comber is long. Its wings come next, the color of night wine and just as fluid, but strangely delicate. When the sun catches their membranes, they glow like polished rosewood.

  That was probably its original color, Jeryon thinks. Dragons blacken with age. This one’s getting on in years. It’ll know its business.

  It comes abeam of the stern deck, flying twice as high as the mast, tail gently whipping behind. The dragon turns its head to better appraise Jeryon and, chillingly, so Jeryon can appraise it: wide mouth, teeth longer and sharper than a whale’s, the acrid smell of phlogiston burning through the stench of the poth’s medicine. There’s something gray lodged between its teeth and gum. Half a shark.

  Its head is bigger than me, Jeryon thinks. Rain barrels could fit in its bulging eye sockets. The two skinny claws on its wing digits would make for decent short bows.

  His hands, hardened by decades at sea, would make for decent hammers, though. He pounds his fist on the rail and shouts, “Larboard!”

  Livion pipes the command and pushes the steering oar to starboard. The larboard oars freeze at the end of their pull, the rowers straining, the oar handles locked to their chest, as the starboard oars push forward. The Comber pivots beautifully, and the dragon lifts its wing in alarm. It drifts left to avoid them.

  The galley slashes through the dragon’s shadow, and the foredeck slides under its belly like an assassin’s blade. Solet cries, “Fire!” The crossbowmen don’t even have to aim. It’s tough to miss the sky.

  Eight bolts twang and thunk home at once. The dragon bucks and roars. Its tail flails down, seeking balance, and its tip, flared like a diamond, nearly flicks Topp off the boat. A thin rain of blood spatters the deck. The dragon flaps so hard that the wind from its wings presses the ship into the sea. Water convulses over the rails and washes the blood into the rowers’ deck. As the dragon passes over the starboard bow, Beale gets down on one knee, aims the cannon as high as it will go, and holds his firing rod over the touch hole.

  Beale mutters, “Up, down, up,” and on the next downstroke of the massive wings, when the dragon lifts its tail and he’s just about to lose the angle, he fires. The harpoon sinks deep into its groin. The dragon roars louder, and now it’s the one beating away double-time.

  The crossbowmen and sailors cheer. Topp would’ve jumped onto the foredeck to clasp Beale’s hand, but Solet orders, “Reload!”

  A furlong off the starboard quarter, the dragon starts to circle the Comber.

  4

  * * *

  As the dragon passes the sun and puts one wing to the southern horizon, Solet admires Livion’s oarwork. He didn’t think the first mate was that skilled. Steering and piping, Livion pivots the galley farther to larboard to point the prow at the dragon, then reverses the pivot to keep it dead ahead. Of course, Solet thinks, it’s in his best interests to keep the length of the Comber between himself and the dragon.

  He sees what the beast is doing. A pirate ship plays games like this with traders, wondering whether they’re worth attacking. Usually, they decide yes. Ynessi can’t stand not knowing what’s inside a chest. Unfortunately, dragons also have a reputation for curiosity.

  True to form, the dragon veers toward them, twice as high as the mast, its neck stretched out like a harpoon, rigid and determined.

  Solet hears Livion pipe, and the drummer beat double-time, and the rowers groan, reaching the outskirts of their endurance. The crossbowmen aim over his head, and he kneels to avoid taking a bolt in the nape of the neck.

  We’ve picked the lock, Solet thinks. Time to lift the lid. “No wasted shots,” he calls out.

  The rowers’ deck responds with a scream and another. They sound like pirates trying to terrify a prize.

  Solet counts off the yards: four hundred, three hundred . . . At two hundred the dragon drops to the height of the stern deck, wingtips skipping off the water. Its eyes slit. Solet avoids its gaze. He hears Livion piping. The galley swings to larboard. At fifty yards the dragon rears its head. It drops its jaw impossibly wide. Its teeth shimmer.

  “Fire!” Solet cries.

  The cannons boom. Bolts shriek. Beale’s harpoon only pricks the dragon’s thickly scaled right shoulder before spinning away. Solet’s rips through the membrane at its wingtip and keeps on going. All but one of the bolts misses the dragon’s head, glancing off its cheek or neck, but the one pins the dragon’s tongue to the floor of its mouth. The dragon half chokes on a gout of flame. Drops of fire spatter the deck and men as the dragon roars over the foredeck like an avalanche, scrambling for lift.

  Jeryon stands at the front of the stern deck as Solet calls out “No wasted shots.” He’s considering whether to put up the sail again to protect the deck from its breath—could they cut away the flaming sail and let the wind blow it overboard before the mast and yard were damaged?—when the dragon drops. Jeryon sees where its line of attack will take it and thinks, The rigging. “Livion!” he yells. “Larboard! Again. Now!”

  Livion sees the danger too and pipes insistently. He pushes the oar as far as it will go. The prow slides off the dragon’s line of attack. He watches Solet and Beale swivel their cannons to compensate, intent on their target. The oars don’t respond, then only Tuse is screaming and the Comber turns more sharply.

  The dragon’s jaw drops, and Solet cries, “Fire!”

  The dragon’s face jerks to the side, a bolt buried in its tongue. Flames spurt from the corners of its mouth. It blasts over the deck, and that’s when it sees the mast and yard. It bucks, trying to heave itself over them, but its shoulder strikes them where they meet, and catches. For half a heartbeat, the mast bends, lines groan, and the prow rears up as this great fly tries to escape the ship’s web, then the top of the mast snaps off and the dragon hurdles the stern deck. The wind from its wings crumples Jeryon and folds Livion over the steering oar, which levers its blade into the air.

  On the rowers’ deck, Tuse hears Solet call out, “No wasted shots!” and he calls out himself, “You hear that? Pull harder! Ram her down its throat!”

  Bearclaw screams, and the other prisoners take up the cry, an ululation born of exhaustion and blood fevered with powder. The brothers, as one, suck in a huge breath and let out their own barbaric yawp. Tuse, caught up in the moment, himself hollers. Somehow, through this, he hears Livion piping, and yells, “Quiet! Larboard! Hard! Hard!!” The rowers recover themselves and dig in. The Comber turns, then the dragon’s shadow swamps the rowers’ deck. When it smacks the mast, Tuse is flung over the drummer. The ship is wrenched to a stop.

  Half a heartbeat later Tuse hears a snapping as horrible as a skull being crushed. The top half of the mast crashes through the open deck onto the rowers in the larboard quarter. One man kicks as his legs refuse to admit his torso has been crushed.

  On the stern deck Jeryon look
s up as the top of the mast falls into the rowers’ deck, dragging the yard behind it and toward him like a cleaver. It slices into the stern deck, grinding to a stop just before it reaches his head. He spits splinters off his lips.

  The dragon is rising away. Jeryon gets up and yells to Solet, “Reload!” He looks down at the carnage in the rowers’ deck. He hears the moans of pain. “Tuse!” No answer.

  Bearclaw cranes his head from under the walkway and says, “Captain. Hey. Your whipper’s conked out on the deck.” A hand emerges from the shadows and slaps Bearclaw’s bloody face. Tuse follows, the top of his head sticking out of the deck.

  “We have to maneuver,” Jeryon says.

  Tuse makes a quick accounting. “We’ve lost a dozen oars. Don’t know how many men. I have at least another dozen, though, to larboard. We’ll make do.”

  The starboard quarter oars rise out of the water to keep the boat balanced. He’ll use them to make sharper turns when the time comes, Jeryon thinks. Smart.

  “It’s coming around,” Livion says.

  “Same as before,” Jeryon says. “To start.”

  He stamps on the stern deck and yells, “Poth! Poth!” Her cabin door rattles, wedged shut. Jeryon calls again. The door bursts open, and Everlyn tumbles out. Jeryon says, “The medicine?”

  “Good,” she says. “Me too.”

  “They need you below,” Jeryon says. He points to where the mast fell.

  She looks into the rowers’ deck. “I’ll get my supplies,” she says.

  “And the saw,” Jeryon says.

  The prow traces the dragon’s trail across the sky. It’s flying much higher now. Two hundred yards, three, four. It comes around west and heads north. Jeryon pulls in his gaze to look over the galley. “This is going to cost us another hour,” he says, “but we can make it up.”

  Livion pipes an accidental note of shock.

  “Never forget your schedule, Livion. Any idiot can captain a ship. It takes a real captain to bring her home on time.”

  The dragon turns toward the sun and tightens the circle. Jeryon signals to Solet. Solet nods and confers with Beale and the crossbowmen. Jeryon sees Solet laugh. He’s either very confident we’re going to win or very confident we’re going to die spectacularly. That’s Ynessi.

  The dragon curls in closer and closer until it’s nearly above the galley. The captain gives Livion alternate orders and has him keep the Comber in a slow larboard pivot. He watches Solet give up trying to raise the cannon high enough to target the dragon and grab a stray crossbow. That should even up the odds, Jeryon thinks.

  With that the dragon tips forward, stiffens its wings, and dives.

  5

  * * *

  The poth leaves her cabin with the crate of medicinal packets to find the dragon plunging directly at her. She clenches her butt to hold her pee, looks at the ladder, looks at the dragon, and jumps into the rowing deck.

  When the dragon is three hundred yards above the galley, Jeryon says, “Now.”

  Livion pipes. The galley backrows to starboard and out from under the dragon. The dragon adjusts, bearing down on the foredeck.

  The crossbowmen aim as best they can, bolt points bobbing with the ship and their racing hearts. “Steady,” Solet says. The dragon extends its claws. It’s going to snatch me, he thinks. Please don’t let it take me to its nest.

  Jeryon says, “Double-time.” Livion pipes. The ship jerks away again, leaving only blue water beneath the dragon.

  As Jeryon had hoped, the dragon pulls up, thirty yards dead ahead and thirty yards off the waves, flinging out its huge wings and blocking the sun. It hangs there a moment, beating the air with quick, short thrusts. Solet drops the crossbow and yanks the firing rod of his cannon out of its brazier. The dragon’s head rears. Its jaw drops.

  “Fire!” Solet yells. Steel rips toward the dragon’s right elbow. Liquid fire splashes behind Solet and washes three crossbowmen into the rowers’ deck on the larboard bow; the drumming stops again. Half the bolts fly high. The other half stick in the membrane of its wing. Beale’s harpoon clanks off its humerus, but Solet’s finds the mark, bearing into the joint. The dragon flinches and flaps, and the joint snaps. The outer half of the wing collapses, and the dragon falls toward the Comber. It breathes again, but the flames miss the galley, mixing a huge plume of steam with the smoke billowing from the ship. To Solet’s alarm, the fire floats, spreading around them.

  The dragon’s foot reaches for the foredeck. Beale leaps off it and lands on Topp. In a tangle, they crawl along the starboard rail as the foot crushes Beale’s cannon. The ship’s bow sinks sharply and Solet is knocked down by the waves coursing over the foredeck. His crossbow is pushed toward the edge of the foredeck. Solet dives for it, slides it around to point at the dragon, and fires while on his belly.

  The bolt deflects off a claw and under the cuticle, a tender spot for any creature, however immense. The dragon roars and springs from the boat, which forces the foredeck down again. Waves carry a scrabbling Solet into the sea. The dragon’s right wing flaps uselessly, and the creature lands with one foot on the forward walkway, which somehow doesn’t shatter, and the other on the starboard rail, splintering it. When it tries to grab the larboard rail with its right wing hand, the limb doesn’t respond, and the dragon topples onto the remains of the main mast and impales itself.

  Jeryon watches the whole ship get swamped by the dragon’s weight. Water surges over the gunwales and into the rowers’ deck, which smothers the fires, but pours salt over the wounds of the injured. The screams below achieve a higher pitch.

  The Comber bobs back up and bounces the dragon off the mast, an immense hole in its breast. It flaps once and flings itself off the galley, one wing full of air, the other full of sailors swept up by it. The dragon makes two more desperate flaps before collapsing into the sea to starboard and driving the Comber away with a huge wave. An umbilicus of blood stretches between them.

  Jeryon orders, “Backrow! Larboard.”

  Livion pipes. He doesn’t know what’s become of Tuse and all the larboard oars dangle lifeless from their oar holes, but there are enough brothers left on the starboard oars to respond. Unlike the inexperienced, untrained prisoners, they know the piping. The stroke is erratic to start, but after a few pulls the Comber moves farther away from the dragon—and the men in the water.

  The two men floating motionless closest to the dragon appear to be dead until it picks them up. Resurrected, they flail and cry as it bites through their torsos, dribbling their heads and lower legs from the sides of its mouth.

  Beale, Topp, and two others struggle to stay afloat. Like most sailors, they can’t swim. Like most drowning people, they can’t scream. Livion can’t spot Solet.

  Lest they circle around, Jeryon orders, “Oars up.” Livion pipes and the ship drifts to a stop, the dragon dead ahead again. “You have the ship,” Jeryon says. “Don’t get us any closer.” He slides to the deck.

  Livion sees the dragon breathe again. Flame arcs toward the captain as he runs forward. It bursts on the starboard bow an instant after he passes by, incinerating a sailor trying to throw a line to his fellows in the water. A pool of flame forms around the burning gunwale. Drops splatter Jeryon’s black coat and Livion watches him doff the smoldering garment before leaping onto the foredeck and reloading the remaining cannon.

  The poth clambers onto deck, drenched, her long black hair trailing from her ravaged bun, her gray streaks tinted with blood. She needs more bandages, but the flames creeping along the starboard rail and walk are a more pressing concern. As she reaches for a bucket of sand beside the rail to put them out, a hand grasps her wrist through the rail. She starts and pulls back. The hand won’t let her go. Another appears on the rail. She’s readying the bucket to hold off the boarder when the rest of Solet appears, standing atop the ladder on the hull.

  She says, “I thou
ght sailors couldn’t swim.”

  “I’m Ynessi,” he says, climbing over the rail. “We’re like tadpoles. Born in the water.” He spots the bucket and says, “That won’t work. Not for this fire.”

  She reconsiders the flames and says, “I know what we can use.”

  The Comber has no whale line on this voyage, so Jeryon takes up a coil of sail line and a block meant for the emergency rig. He ties the block onto the line like a fishing float then attaches the line to the harpoon through a hole near its head. He ties the other end of the line to the harpoon’s tripod.

  He aims the cannon at the dragon and considers what a prize it would make. There are enough men aboard who have rendered whales that they could dummy their way through a dragon. All that bone, teeth, and claw which can be flaked into peerless blades. All that skin, so tough it can be used for armor, but light enough to wear every day. And the phlogiston, the oil secreted from glands behind its jaw that fuels its fire. With Hanosh edging toward war with Ayden it would make a devastating weapon—or it could be sold for a fortune as lamp oil. The dragon rears its head and bares its neck. Then Beale manages to cry out. Jeryon changes his mind, swivels the cannon, and fires the harpoon and its line toward the men.

  The iron splashes into a wave beyond them. The block and line are just buoyant enough to keep the latter afloat despite the harpoon sinking. But the men don’t move toward it. They might not even see it. Their arms are out. They stare empty eyed at the sun, heads back, mouths open. Only Beale moves, treading water incidentally while trying to climb out of the sea. Jeryon, whose fisherman father taught him to swim before he could tie a bowline, kicks off his sandals, dives off the prow, and swims down the line.

  The dragon’s wings are spread across the water, keeping it afloat, but they won’t hold it up for long. It thrashes and finds that it can drag itself toward the ship. A meal’s a meal, especially a last one. Jeryon, seeing this, swims faster.