The Dragon Round

by Stephen S. Power

Everlyn stifles a laugh at his serious expression.

  He threads the needle and goes to work. “While I do this,” he says, “crawl to the bow and untie the painter.” Everlyn looks confused. “The line. The rope.” Landlubber, he thinks.

  She nods and slips past him. She doesn’t ask why he needs the rope and lets the mystery of it burnish the next five minutes of life adrift.

  The knot is hard as steel, hammered by a thousand waves. She wonders if this is a test of patience. Her fingers are powerful from yanking roots and nimble from untangling vines, but the knot gives only the tiniest bit with each tug. She develops a rhythm after a while, which lets her look into the water.

  The sea is lifeless compared to the lake at Ayden, whose shallows are covered in nests. She splashed and shrieked in summer, especially when a mother fish nipped at her for stepping on a nest, and she slid in winter until her friend went through the ice and drowned, then it wasn’t so much fun. The lake was huge to her as a child. It could fit in the dinghy compared to the sea.

  Everlyn gets the painter free. Having fixed his pants—all sailors can sew—Jeryon rewraps and pockets the needle, then trades her pins for the painter and cuts off a piece as long as his blade. This he slices longitudinally a third of the way through. He fits the straight edge into the rope and saws experimentally at the starboard gunwale forward of the oarlock. The rope guards his finger satisfactorily. He keeps sawing.

  “First, we’re going to remove the gunwales section by section,” Jeryon says.

  The poth says, “Won’t that make the boat fall apart?”

  “Were this a new dinghy, maybe,” he says. “Nowadays, every bit of wood is minimized to keep costs down. Boats don’t last more than a couple years. Some galleys don’t even carry them anymore. But this dinghy is pre-League and overdesigned. It’ll last.” He taps the gunwale with his blade. “Two boards. We’ll just take the top one.” He shakes his head. “I even got her cheap, for being ancient.”

  He cuts through the top board, pushes past the poth, and saws the end by the breasthook.

  “If it eases your mind,” he said, “the boat only has to stay afloat for three days. We’ll be dead of thirst after that. Actually we’ll probably be too weak for work after two.”

  “Once a child got lost in the woods around Ayden,” she says. “He lasted six days without water before he was found.”

  “He wasn’t in this sun. But you could be right. Maybe we could go a week. Let’s plan for three days, though.”

  He cuts through the board and wedges it up with the blade. “Take the pin,” he says, “and slide it underneath the gunwale so it doesn’t sit back down.” She does so. “Don’t lever it. You’ll bend the pin. Just slide it aft as I do the levering.”

  They work it free slowly and steadily until Jeryon can get his fingers under it and yank it up nails and all. His rope handle has been nearly worn through, so he makes an inch-long slice up one end of the piece of gunwale, cuts off the end to make two opposing pieces, makes a quarter-inch cut in their opposing faces, and clasps the pieces together tight around half the blade to create a handle. He folds the rest of his rope to make a new fingerguard. “Now, let’s take up the rest.”

  It doesn’t take her much longer to realize that he doesn’t really need her to help. “You’re just giving me something to do,” she says, “so I don’t panic.”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “I don’t panic,” she says.

  He gives her a long look and says, “Reduce the painter to its strands. I’ll need those soon.”

  After a while she says, “We could be found by another galley.”

  “We won’t be,” he says. “Galleys don’t often cross Tallan. They row north in the gutter between the coast and the river, where they can trade and stop ashore for water and game.” He yanks the larboard bow gunwale free. “Ships from the Dawn Lands ride the river north to Jolef to trade with us, then work their way home down the coast. There’s no profit in the sea itself. Besides, there were no other ships at Chorem planning to cross.” He gets to work on the starboard quarter gunwale.

  “What about whalers?” she says.

  “What about needles in haystacks?”

  “Pirates?”

  “Now pirates are more likely. Then we’d have the pleasure of being violated before we died.”

  “We?” she says.

  “The Ynessi don’t discriminate. Any Aydeni ships out here that you know of?”

  “That’s just propaganda,” she says. “Fear-mongering. Ayden has no navy, unless you count trade wagons. And if we did, we still wouldn’t attack Hanosh. Where’s the profit, as you say?”

  “We?” he says. “You can take the woman out of Ayden . . .”

  “I’m not ashamed of being Aydeni,” Everlyn says. “I’m ashamed of Ayden, at least when it comes to the golden shield.”

  “The luxury of principles is fading as quickly as that of good boat building,” he says. “That’s why I’m here.”

  As the sun falls toward the west and the small moon, Med, appears in the east, Jeryon pulls free the last piece of gunwale from the starboard transom. He surveys Everlyn’s neatly tied coils of painter strands. “Where did you learn that hitch?”

  “We have knots on land too, you know.”

  He shrugs and saws the gunwale pieces in half. Once this is done he flips them over, takes off a sandal and uses it to bang out a nail. A muffled clang follows each blow.

  “How can you hammer with leather?” she says.

  “It’s leather on the outside,” he says. “There’s a thick steel plate in each heel. They give me a heavy tread on deck. Sailors don’t like a sneaky captain. They like to know where he is, and he likes them to know where he is.”

  “And that’s not sneaky?” she says.

  “That’s command,” he says. “Collect the nails as I bang them out. We’ll need them.”

  The big moon, Ah, is up when he arranges the forward pieces of gunwale into a rough rectangle, the aft pieces into a smaller, neater one, and lays across each two pieces of transom gunwale. Then he nails them together.

  “There. Paddles,” he says. “Or something approaching paddles. And to make sure we don’t lose them . . .” He enlarges two nail holes in the end of each with a hair pin and threads a strand of painter through them. He ties the forward assemblage to his right wrist, motions for her to hold up her left wrist and ties the other to it. She doesn’t know the knot, and he makes it too quickly for her to follow.

  He kneels amidships, she kneels beside him, and facing the horizon they paddle in easy tandem for the League. The spare nails jingle pleasantly in her pocket.

  After a few dozen strokes he waits until the poth’s not looking and changes his grip to match hers. It’s more comfortable and efficient.

  3

  * * *

  Jeryon jerks awake: Where’s his paddle? His right arm dangles over the starboard gunwale. His fist is full of water. He digs into the sea with both hands until he remembers the strand of painter. He clasps his wrist and draws the paddle to him from where it had been drifting astern. He sits on his heels, catching his breath.

  The poth is slumped over her gunwale. Her arm and paddle aren’t in the boat either. Just looking for them makes him feel so dizzy he has to lean a hand on the bottom. He rolls his head slowly to match the spinning inside. He lays the back of his forefinger on her neck. It’s very dry. He fishes around beneath her hand, finds the strand from her wrist, and pulls her oar in. He leans it against the gunwale. This dislodges her and she stirs enough to slap some hair off her face. Her cheek would normally look gray in the moonlight. It’s grayer than it should be.

  It’s not long after midnight, and the small moon, Med, has a five-length lead on Ah. Their position is the first thing Jeryon’s father checked when they went to their boat a few hours before dawn. He had a th
eory about them. If Med beat Ah across the sky, the nets would be full that day. If Ah beat Med, they’d be empty. If they rose and set together, anything could happen. Jeryon used to check the theory. The nets were mostly empty wherever the moons happened to be, but telling his father this made no difference. He couldn’t be convinced.

  Jeryon was convinced, though, that steady work for a shipowner was more secure than rolling the dice with your own boat’s net.

  He paddles, however ineffectually, too tired to sleep. They couldn’t have made more than seven or eight miles, although the poth was steady and strong. Maybe she’s not as much of a landlubber as he thought.

  When Everlyn awakes it’s nearly dawn. Her paddle lies in the boat. He must have put it there. He’s slumped over the gunwale, his paddle still gripped in his hand. How long had he kept rowing before passing out? Jeryon’s flushed. She touches his neck. His pulse remains steady, and they’re both sweating. The cool night might have bought them a few more hours.

  A silver flicker kicks at the water. She thinks a wave reflected off the boat, then sees another one and another, like the stars swimming up to greet them. She pushes Jeryon’s shoulder and, as he rouses, points over the side. She tries to say, “Look,” but the word skids to a halt on her dry tongue.

  He says, “Some dragon meat must have caught on the hull.”

  The pearly-silver fish spill across the surface as they take a chance at the meat. Neither fish nor castaways can believe their good luck.

  Jeryon slams his paddle at a fish. He succeeds only in scattering the school. The fish come back, and he tries again. Same result.

  “Silly way to fish anyway,” he mutters.

  On the other side of the boat, the poth tries and clips one. It floats, stunned, a coin waiting to be plucked from the mud. She slams it again for good measure. It turns belly up and its schoolmates consider it for their own breakfast. She grabs its tail, lifts it up, and cries, “Aha!” Jeryon turns just in time to see a longtom as big as her arm jump out of the water and tear her prize from her hand with its needlelike jaws. She tucks her hand against her belly as the fish vanishes, the school evaporating in its wake.

  “We could eat the dragon meat,” Jeryon says, “but it’s probably too salty at this point.”

  The thought of eating makes her thirstier, which makes her hungrier. She had some rice and fish at midday yesterday, followed by a handful of figs. She doesn’t recall Jeryon eating at all. “Give me your blade,” she says.

  “Why?”

  She puts out her palm. “We shouldn’t speak too much,” she says. “Need to save our energy.”

  He takes the blade and handle from his pocket, assembles them, and gives her the knife. How long until we turn on each other? he thinks. A person could survive a long time on the sack of meat and water that is the poth.

  She undoes a tie in the brocade on her smock. It flops aside to reveal a panel with two bone buttons white as the moons. She cuts them off and hands him one along with the blade. “Put it beneath your tongue,” she says. “It’ll encourage spit.”

  He rubs it between his fingers then rubs it with a clean patch of shirt. She rolls her eyes and holds hers up. “To your health,” she says. He returns the toast, and they pop the buttons.

  Steak is rarely this wonderfully juicy. They savor and smack. As she pulls her smock closed, he swallows carefully and says, “Save that spare thread.”

  She plucks two tufts from where the buttons had been and puts them in his hand. He looks at them and laughs. She laughs too.

  “That’ll save us,” she says.

  “Two more,” he says, “and we could weave a sail.”

  When they stop laughing, they paddle on.

  Four hours after sunrise, Jeryon watches his hands shift his paddle to one side. He’s curious as to what they plan to do. There’s a silver flash in the water, and the hands bash it with the paddle. The school has returned. Once he realizes what his hands have done, he nearly leaps overboard to scoop the stunned fish into the boat.

  It’s as big as his sandal and twice as thick. It flops a few times on the bottom. Its gills yawn.

  Jeryon is beginning to think his father was on to something, although he’s so light-headed the thought keeps slipping away.

  “It’s a meagre,” he says.

  “Big enough for us,” she says.

  “No,” he says, “it’s a type of—never mind.” He cleans and fillets the fish. In the splashes pooled in the boat, threads of blood and stray gore wind around their knees. He combs up the guts with the fish’s skeleton and puts the remains on his paddle. He hands one fillet to her. They take out their buttons, toast, and bite.

  The fish’s juices make him gag. His eyes seep and burn. His mouth fills with acid. Swallowing feels like he’s sucking a cork down his throat. He takes a smaller bite. It’s barely more palatable. And he feels thirstier than ever.

  The poth slurps the fish, but she’s having the same problem. And her hands are shivering.

  His are too. Gripping the paddle disguised it.

  He swallows the acid then puts the button in his mouth again. When his tongue is glazed with spit, he trades the button for a tiny bite of fish. He still doesn’t want to swallow, but he can. His hands shiver a little less.

  She does the same thing. She smiles encouragingly. Then they eat in unison: button, bite, button, bite. When the fillets are done, he presents her with half the skin draped over the knife. They gnaw the flakes of meat remaining. He gives her the fish head to suck.

  Given the circumstances, Everlyn thinks it’s the nicest gift she’s ever received. She licks out the eyes with relish.

  They use the guts and tail as chum to attract more fish. With their paddles raised they watch for hours. It seems like weeks. The school is gone again. The chum dissipates.

  They return to paddling. After a few strokes, Jeryon pokes at his teeth with this tongue, then stops and picks at them with his finger. A scale is lodged there. He can’t get it out. He puts the blade between his teeth, but Everlyn grabs his hand before he can scrape. She pushes his hand down and holds it, tilts his head with her other hand so that his jaw drops wide, and works the scale free with her shield-stained nails. He lacks the will to resist.

  She shows it to him, a translucent gray blade, and flicks it overboard. He nods in appreciation, rubs his teeth with this tongue, and takes up his paddle.

  At dusk, he still feels the scale between his teeth. Or is that her nail? He can’t remember the last time he let a woman touch him. No sense in it.

  After star-rise he adjusts their course. It gives him something to do and gives her some hope. They don’t mention how thirsty they are. The first rule of thirst: don’t mention thirst. The buttons have long stopped working except as token comfort. Neither has mentioned a need to urinate or defecate, an alarming situation mitigated only slightly by their mutual relief at not having to do so before the other.

  They haven’t spoken since the fish, so Jeryon has to scrape the roof of his mouth and bite his tongue to work up the spit to say, “We made good time. Should be in the river tomorrow. Won’t have to row. Just steer. If we get two miles west for every six south, we’ll reach Yness.”

  She’ll be happy not to row. Her hands are blistered on both sides, the palms from the paddle, the backs from the sun. Blood is smeared across the rough-edged ends of the wood. Her hands are so numb she can barely hold her paddle, and her arms are so numb she can barely hold them out.

  She digs for the phial of lotion. “No sense in letting it go to waste,” she says. She puts a few dabs on her hands, then, after some initial reluctance, on his. Rubbing it into her fingers is like donning mittens in winter.

  He sniffs his hands. They smell like some flower. He flexes them and reaches for his paddle. “We still need to row now, though,” he says.

  “Let’s keep going then,
” Everlyn says and puts the phial away.

  She’s tough. If someone has to put fingers in his mouth, it might as well be her.

  4

  * * *

  The world is cellar black when the poth awakes. Thick clouds obliterate the sky. For a moment she thinks she’s dead. She can’t see him. She can’t see the boat. She can’t feel anything. She’s beyond pain. She’s not sweating. She would be sweating if she were alive. She’s happy the darkness is a floating, not a falling. The soft breeze, though, wafting across her face, suggests there’s little difference between the two when there is no ground, no up or down.

  Did she work herself to death? Did he coax her into it, playing on her willfulness? He wanted to keep paddling, even though they didn’t have to anymore. Or did he slit her throat after she collapsed? Has he already started to devour her?

  One winter a pair of trappers was lost for months above Ayden. They weren’t found until spring, holed up in a cave, one woman fat and happy, the other gnawed and cracked to release her marrow. Her rescuers, appalled, bludgeoned the survivor with her own walking stick. Everlyn still wonders if the devoured woman knew what was in store for her. Did she fight her partner? Or did she surrender herself with pleasure?

  Everlyn sees him crawling up her legs, gnashing with his scaly teeth. She kicks. She’ll fight. She slams her boot heel into his belly. He wheezes. How did he get over there? She kicks him again. She hears him roll onto his side. Her heart rate slows. She rubs her neck. No slits, no blood. She’s alive. She must be.

  She could kill him first. He wants her to testify. She could steer down the river like he said and race from Yness to Hanosh. It would be her tribute to him. She would carry him inside her belly. They would testify together with one voice and one mind.

  She’s skinned game. She’s a fair butcher. She doesn’t want to slaughter him, though. She wants him to keep. She has to savor him. She needs the knife. She’ll make a little prick in his wrist and suck his blood slowly. She doesn’t even need to kill him. She smiles. He doesn’t have to die. She’ll drink a little whenever he’s not looking. A sip here, a sip there. He’ll never know. He’s so exhausted. His hands are cut up like hers. What’s another cut?