The Dragon Round

by Stephen S. Power

  Her eyes adjust to the darkness. Everything glows green. She’s like a cat. She waves her paws around him. He’s slumped over the pocket with the knife. She can’t get to it. Wait. She should wash her hands. Always wash your hands before working with food, Everlyn.

  She pads on her knees to her side of the boat. The sea is licking it. It’s like a cat too. A thousand black cats in little white caps make little tiny laps. She pets the cats. So warm. So soft. Their fur is so deep. She smells them on her fingers. More like kitties than cats. She takes a little taste. Delicious! Why would she eat bony old him when she could eat these kitties? Don’t eat kitties, Everlyn. There’s so many, though. No one would miss a couple or six. She lifts one yowling to her lips.

  He yanks her backward with his claw. It slides beneath her smock. It burns her bare shoulder. She screams a trickle of bile. He falls on top of her. Her smock slides up. Where’s his other hand? Where’s the knife? She lets the kitty go, it flees to the bow, and she grabs at him.

  He locks her wrists in his fists and crushes them between their chests. His head falls on her shoulder. He sniffs at her ear. She tucks her chin against her chest and folds her head over so he can’t bite her neck.

  He whispers, “No. No water.”

  She says, “It’s kitties!”

  He doesn’t respond. He may have fainted. He doesn’t let go. His hands are tight as a painter knot. She can’t get him off her. Dawn comes as a surprise to her. She must have fainted too. He lifts his head. He says, “I want you—” and coughs. He lifts himself. He helps her sit up. He releases her hands, kicks her paddle at her, and says, “I want you alive. One more day.” His voice sounds like wind in a tunnel.

  She puts her paddle in the water. It bobs. It bobs. The strand has rubbed her wrist raw. “Which way?” she says.

  He looks at the sky. The cloud cover is so thick, he can’t tell where the sun rose. The uniform gray makes him strain his eyes. “Pin,” he says.

  She takes a pin from her bun, where he graciously lets her store them. His hands are shaking terribly. He stabs himself in the crotch twice before the stick finds its real target: a tiny catch on the back of his top pants button, a tacky golden globe. He holds the button and works the stick around until the front of the button opens like a locket. A yellow-green gem is set inside. He holds it against the sky.

  The gem gathers light from somewhere, and a line appears inside it. He turns the boat at a right angle to it.

  “Magic?” she says.

  “Yolite.”

  They paddle. The air leans on their shoulders until a following wind erupts from the night’s breeze. It’s cool and encouraging. They paddle faster, although each stroke is like pushing through an angry mob.

  At some point, the water changes color. “River,” Jeryon says.

  The sky darkens behind them. Night is still a long way ahead. “Storm,” she says. “Water.”

  “Too much.” He motions for her wrist. He cuts the cord with a jittery slash. He cuts his own strand in a way that nearly costs him his thumb. Then he tries to pull the crosspieces off her paddle. He can’t get the blade under them. His fingers refuse to obey. He hacks the wood uselessly. She reaches for the paddle. He pushes her away and tears at the crosspieces with his fingers. She reaches for the paddle again. He jabs at her with the knife. She returns his glare. His features slacken, and he pushes the paddle and knife at her. He hangs his head.

  It takes her awhile, but the poth finds the same rhythm she did with the painter and the paddle comes undone. His spirit returns. He nails two pieces of her paddle along either side of the top of his, his sandal hammer broad enough to accommodate his fluctuating aim. He wedges another piece between them to lengthen the extension, nails it in place securely, and ties it to his wrist.

  “Rudder,” he says.

  He puts the paddle portion behind the transom and slots the tiller in the sculling notch. It doesn’t fit.

  He shakes his head, unties the rudder, and drags the serrated edge of the knife across the transom’s gunwale to enlarge the notch. He barely scratches the wood at first. The sky grows darker. The sea grumbles. The blade catches. In a few minutes or hours he’s cut halfway through. He falls aside and the poth takes a turn.

  She squeezes the jury-rigged knife handle so hard her hands regain enough feeling to ache. The metal chips away the wood. She counts the flakes to keep her focused. The horizon collapses toward them. She cuts horizontally from the bottom of the notch, yanking the blade. The gunwale grips, the handle gives, and the blade flips free across the boat.

  Jeryon crawls on top of it then roots for it beneath his chest. He looks at her as if he really might eat her if he had the strength. She looks sadly at the well-worn handle. It wasn’t her fault. He puts the knife together again, considers the notch, and hands it to her. This cheers her.

  In a moment she pries free the bit of gunwale. Now the tiller fits and turns. He nails a former paddle crosspiece over it loosely as a guide.

  He sits against the transom and pulls the tiller across his chest. He puts his arms over it, spreads his knees, and points between them. Reluctantly, she sits. He spins his finger. She pivots until he can pull her back against his chest, anchoring the rudder in place. He flops his arms over her. She can remember the last time she let a man lie on top of her, but not the last time one put his arms around her. So be it. She pulls her smock down then holds his wrists with the opposite hands. They knot together and let the river take them.

  Jeryon whispers, “Swallowed my button” and passes out.

  Everlyn realizes she has the knife now. She strokes the veins in his wrists with her thumbnails.

  5

  * * *

  The Hanoshi harbor has two notable features. The most useful is its long, broad piers. At Yness, Jolef, and Meres, galleys beach themselves, making these cities no more than up-jumped versions of coastal towns. At Hanosh, the galleys tie up, shipowners come aboard on Tower-blue gangplanks, and cranes handle cargo day and night.

  Its more arresting feature is the line of gibbets, also painted blue, a hundred yards beyond the docks. Four consist of tall posts with single beams pointing at inbound ships as a warning. The Great Gibbet in the center, reserved for the most celebrated or vicious criminals, looks like a cross-staff. From its two transoms four prisoners can either swing in iron cages or, if banded, hang by chains directly.

  Jeryon stands at the end of Hanosh’s main pier with the leaders of the Trust arrayed behind him. They are silent. The wind picks up. Tuse sways in his cage, pleading for Jeryon to understand. He sticks one bare foot through the bars. It dangles well above the tide. In time flesh will drip beneath it to be eaten by crabs. Livion and Solet snap and sway in their bands like broken pendulums. They can’t speak with the bits in their mouths, but they can moan. Their spit has dried up. Thirst scrapes in their throats like mice in a wall.

  The wind gusts harder. A gale is moving in, strange for this season. The Great Gibbet twists, while the tide bursts over the pier. Its spray wails with the prisoners’ despair. Jeryon bathes in it, and he feels beautiful.

  He turns to ask the Trust where the poth is, and he finds himself staring at the gibbet again with the Trust behind him. He turns the other way. The world turns with him. He can’t face the Trust. He can’t see their faces. He can hear them laughing.

  Then he’s in the dinghy, filthy and contorted, clutching the tiller against a heaving sea. He closes his eyes again.

  Something smacks his face. His eyes grind open. The poth holds a heavy bulb of smock above his lips. A wave makes her fall, and the bulb dives into his mouth. He sucks. Rainwater flows into the cracks in his tongue. It’s warm and sweet, and he’s drowning in it. He spits out the cloth and water. She sops more water from the bottom of the boat with her hem, braces herself, and wrings the water into his mouth. His head droops over the transom so the rain can fall dow
n his throat while she sops up a third drink.

  This time he grabs the bulb and takes it into his mouth himself. She tugs the bulb free, touches it to his lips, and squeezes. “Slowly,” she says.

  As she resops, so slowly, a frenzy takes him. Shaking, he works free the crosspiece guide and hauls in the rudder. It splashes in nearly an inch of water. It can’t all be fresh, but enough is, and the rain is picking up. He wrenches his shirt off, mops it across the bottom, and squeezes the water over his face. Still too slow. He flings himself down and drinks directly from the dinghy. He slurps and waits for her to pull him away, except she’s beside him on all fours now, lapping and gagging, the frenzy in her too. Once the boat is empty, he will suck her long hair dry.

  The rain falls in great fans faster than they can drink it, and the sea rises high enough to stuff it back into the clouds. Only the drops lancing their skin let them know which way is up.

  A wave nearly jounces them from the boat. Jeryon yells in the poth’s ear, “Blade!” She stares at him. He yells again. She searches through her pockets for it. Did she lose it? Jeryon feels around in the boat. She finds it in the pocket behind her smock’s brocade and gives it to him. He saws through the strand attaching his wrist to the rudder, pockets the blade, and ties the strand to her left wrist with a child’s knot. “Float,” he says.

  He notices something odd on his left wrist. A tiny cut seeps blood. A bruise blooms around it. He wonders how it got there.

  A wave rolls the dinghy mere seconds from the righting moment, pushing her on top of him, before it settles back. She grabs his wrists. A wave flips them the other way. Another gushes over the gunwale, half filling the dinghy. Jeryon slips under the poth so she can keep her head above the water. The rudder floats beside them, clacking against the remaining pieces of her paddle.

  Something scrapes the hull, the dinghy shudders, and a strake cracks. Water spits through the hull then disappears as more waves fill the boat, and the poth lets go of his wrists. Splashing for purchase, she floats away from him. The rudder is tossed overboard, dragging her half over the gunwale. He grabs her collar and hauls her back in. She hooks her free arm around his neck. He folds her smock’s brocade into his fist and tucks her against his body. They’re more afloat than the dinghy. He wraps a leg around her thigh to weigh her down. A huge wave rises astern, dawning black above the transom.

  His eyes tell her what’s coming. Hers plead, Don’t die. His say, You can’t.

  A mat of fresh palm leaves sloshes by and vanishes. In disbelief they look around for it, and obligingly it returns to moor in the lagoon between their chests. A tiny white horned crab shakes its claws at them and scuttles off its raft into the dinghy. The wave crest bubbles white and reaches for them.

  The dinghy rises slowly, stern first. Jeryon throws out his feet to catch his sandals on the boat’s ribs. Water pours over the bow, pulling them forward toward the sea. The remains of the poth’s paddle slide past them and disappear into the sea. The toes of Jeryon’s sandals slip to the next rib, then the next.

  The crest curls over them like his father’s hand. It rises, strikes, holds them inside its fist, squeezes, and shoots the dinghy through its foamy fingers across the sea.

  Everlyn screams because she knows they’re going to live until the bow is stoved in. Water blasts through it like a gout of dragon flame. It slices her from Jeryon’s grasp, and the boat pitches over their heads. The last thing Everlyn sees is him reaching for her as they soar into a sky of water.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Beach

  1

  * * *

  Jeryon tumbles through the gray, getting nowhere. Sometimes his face is thrust into a huge bubble, and he gobbles air before he’s pulled out. He sees a flash of pale skin and kicks for it. His hands grab only sand.

  Jeryon pushes off the sandy ridge, his head breaks the surface, and he sees a beach before a wave drives him under again. When his feet hit the bottom, he springs forward with what strength he has. He bobs up. He flings his arms, trying to ride a wave in, but an undertow holds him in place. He can’t stay on the surface much longer. He drops under again and lunges to his right. There’s another ridge there. Rich sand. Jagged rocks. Coral.

  He grabs it and presses his knees beneath himself. That’s enough for him to poke his face above the waves before the next wave drives him again into the gray.

  Desire leaves his body: for food, for water, for breath. His will uncoils. His body relaxes. All sounds fade. His shoulder scrapes against the bottom. He’s pushed along it until he can’t rise anymore. One last roll and he’s on his back, anchored by his outstretched arms and legs, sucking air, drinking the rain. Waves flood his ear. The darkness just is.

  Then it’s not. The tide has receded, but not the rain. Where is the poth? A line of black rocks extends from the shore, ending at three skinny stacks, which the dinghy must have hit. Is that an arm waving? Something is floating beside them. Jeryon lifts his arm.

  He floats awake, engulfed in blue; a rich, unchanging, endless blue. Somehow that’s more terrifying than black. A gull flies overhead, and his weight returns. Sand skitters across his cheeks and pushes at his back. His lips are so parched he wants to chew them off. Something is touching his foot.

  A white horned crab a foot wide with legs three feet long and a split mouth as big as his face stands over his foot. It holds his big toe lightly with a broad, toothy claw. Its eyestalks sway around the toe, its split mouth ruminating, as if the crab is measuring his toe with calipers. The crab brings out its other, thinner claw, which has needlelike teeth. It taps the end of his toe here, there, then snips the pad. Jeryon jerks his foot, but his foot ignores him. The crab snips again. Blood appears.

  More crabs sidle over, curious, their claws clicking. The beach is covered with them. A few dart into the waves to drag fish onto shore. A dozen are stripping the skeleton of what looks like a dolphin thrown up by the storm. One crab, not two feet from Jeryon’s face, looks out to sea, claws upraised. Splatters of meat and bloody sand stain its shell.

  Snip. Jeryon stifles a cry. He tries to sit up, but he’s so stiff he has to grab his legs and fold himself into a sitting position. The crab doesn’t notice him until Jeryon grabs its claws and wrenches the large one off.

  All clicking ceases. The crabs scuttle back. One clicks tentatively.

  The toesnipper is appalled. It snips, its other legs flail and its eyestalks stare at him, daring him to do that again. Off comes the skinny claw. It joins the first in Jeryon’s lap. He presses the toesnipper against the sand with his foot, and makes it watch him suck the meat from its claws. Shards stick to his throat. He chokes them down.

  The other crabs develop a sudden interest in the dolphin. The ocean challenger charges the waves. The toesnipper waggles its eyes at them.

  Jeryon flips the toesnipper to pry up its bell-shaped apron with his fingers, but it would be easier to pry a brick from a wall. His father told him, “Never mallet a crab,” but his shaking fingers couldn’t lever the blade either. He looks for a rock. The only one he finds within crawling distance is a black boulder poking through the sand, so the crab becomes the mallet. After several blows, the apron shatters and its legs stop flailing. He peels it away, then its carapace, scrapes off the dead man’s fingers, and sucks the meat out. The butter helps him swallow.

  It’s gamier than Joslin crabs, but the mustard and roe are tasty, even if his father, who always put the roe in a soup, would mock him for eating it like an owner: raw off a blade.

  When the meat hits his stomach, it rebounds with a gush. His throat flames. He hopes the mustard didn’t poison him. He crawls away from the puddle in the sand, and eats the rest of the crab flake by flake.

  Refreshed, Jeryon manages to stand and cross the beach to a tree line of oak, bamboo, and pitcher trees. From the latter’s deep vessel-like leaves he drinks the collected rainwater, heeding the p
oth’s advice to drink slowly, however glorious the water tastes. Thinking of her leads him to look at the stacks. There’s nothing there, and no place for anyone to cling if there were. He doesn’t know what he saw during the storm. He spots bits of wood sticking out of the sand farther up the beach: the remnants of the dinghy. If he were kicked up here, where is the poth? He takes another drink and steadies himself to approach the dolphin carcass.

  The crabs battle for the choicest bits, but they won’t give up their meal to him. They envelop it to hide the bones. They’ll snip his hands off if he tries to move them, so Jeryon trudges a ways up the beach and returns with a pointed length of gunwale from his tiller, the broken painter strand still attached. With this he weakly bats the crabs off the bones. When one attacks him, he manages to whack it hard enough to change its mind. The last he flicks off so it lands upside down. Before it can roll over, he stakes it to the beach. While its legs kick at the sky, he examines the carcass.

  It’s half-buried in the sand; a rib cage, shoulder blades, and skull scratched and nearly free of flesh. It isn’t the poth’s. It might have been her, though, and Jeryon takes out his elation on the staked crab.

  Most of the crabs give him a wide berth now. The few that don’t seem resigned to whatever fate this terrible avenger has for them. One soon finds out.

  Jeryon stretches. He’s regaining strength and sensation, the latter mostly agony. He plots a survey of the island. It’s the first act of any prisoner: pacing one’s cell. And he has to find a better source of water. It’s approaching noon, and the water in the leaves of the pitcher trees won’t last much longer in this heat.

  As far as he can tell, he’s at the northwest corner of an island surrounded by low cliffs rising from the sea. Thick forest rambles uphill some five hundred feet to ring a flat-topped column of gray rock another two hundred feet high. This beach is the only place he can see where the land ramps up to the island’s interior. If the poth didn’t land here, she’ll have been in more trouble than not having landed at all.