Jeryon pushes himself from tree to tree until he finds a fallen branch he can use as a walking stick. He tosses aside the piece of gunwale.
After such a storm, it isn’t hard to find a stream. Grasses, bright flowers of every hue, and thick bushes race alongside it. It’s so loud it drowns out the constant buzz and whirr of insects, which also drowns out the thought that those insects would make a good source of nutrition should the crabs run out.
He follows the stream a few hundred yards southwest toward the column to where it cuts through a bamboo grove. Using the folds of his shirt to guard the straight edge of the blade, he saws through a wide culm just beneath a node with his blade, then through the internode just beneath the next node. He checks inside the hollow for bugs, rinses it a few times in the stream, fills it to the brink, and drinks heartily. The water is cold and rich and tastes like a new life just begun.
Beyond the bamboo the stream enters a meadow that ends to the north at a cliff overlooking the sea. A single tree in its center guards a broadening of the stream. Jeryon can’t believe his luck. It’s a shega tree. The fruit is his secret vice. He would treat himself to one at the end of every voyage when they were in season, and to a big slice of fresh bread with shega preserves when they weren’t. He figures he’s deserving now.
Most of the fruit aren’t ripe yet, shega won’t be in season for another month, but a few are close enough, and Jeryon picks the biggest he can reach. He slices it in half and sucks from the white pulp a purple jewel of flesh with a seed inside. It may be the best shega he’s ever eaten, and not just because the shega are reserved for shipowners back in Hanosh. He eats another jewel and admires the ocean’s beautiful nothing.
He has water. He has meat and fruit. He has all the materials to build a shelter. He could survive here, day after endless day, until the crabs enjoy their final triumph. There’s no point leaving without the poth. The Trust won’t believe his testimony alone.
He walks toward the cliff. Would it be worth giving the crabs their meal now? The cliff is high enough, fifty or sixty feet. He eats another jewel. Even shega will get boring in time. So will time on the island. Just sunrise and noontime, star-rise and midnight, being awake and being asleep, one after the other after the other. What kind of life is that? Waves pound the cliff. He could live a hundred years and the waves would pound the cliff and the cliff wouldn’t change. He spits the shega seed over the edge. It vanishes from sight long before it reaches the water.
I’ve already vanished from sight, he thinks. He eats another jewel. These are tasty, though. Maybe he’ll wait until the season ends.
To the east he spies a trail through the meadow from the stream to the cliff. It’s much wider than his own, the grasses and underbrush beaten down. He walks along the cliff’s edge to where it meets the trail. He stands as if thunderstruck by what he finds. There, in the dirt: a single footprint, massive, four-toed, and clawed.
2
* * *
Standing alone on the clifftop, Jeryon has never felt so exposed. He ducks behind a fragrant shrub and scans the surrounding forest. A landscape that had been almost welcoming a moment ago is now full of waving blades of underbrush and the shaking limbs of trees. Every boulder resolves into a head, and the shadows of clouds become those of wings. He listens. He hears nothing. He takes a longer look at the track.
The print is worn around the edges. The lowest points are puddled. It was made before the storm, but what made it may still be on the island. He has to know. Jeryon follows the creature’s trail to the stream then upstream into the forest again, where it fades away.
The stream widens into a pond full of fat black frogs. He’ll gig some when he gets the chance and hope they’re edible. He eats more shega. The sweetness is intoxicating. As he chews he considers the trees: a variety of oaks, a few ulmus and chinkapins with their spiky nuts, amid the ubiquitous bamboo and many stands of palm. He could make a good raft from this forest. He strips some threads from a fallen palm leaf. How long would it take him to weave a sail?
Beyond the frog pond the forest opens into another meadow. The land is rising more noticeably, and he’s high enough to see more of the island. It could be eight or ten miles around. He doesn’t see any other approaches besides his beach, and it’s guarded for hundreds of yards by sandbars, coral, and jagged rocks. It’s remarkable that the dinghy made it as close to the island as it did.
He sees no smoke, no fire, no movement, no sign of the poth. I should blaze my trails, he thinks, to lead her to me. He’ll light a fire too. He needs to find her, and no longer just to testify. However rich the island is, he’s just one infection or injury away from death, and she can heal. The endless leaves and weeds, roots and blooms that surround him: He can’t understand their language.
On the high side of the meadow end he finds more tracks, older, barely visible in the underbrush, the toes lost in the stream. Whatever made them must drink here often. He fills his own cup and washes down the last of the jewels.
Again in the woods, he makes a blaze every thirty paces. After twenty blazes, the stream turns south between two steep rises. On one the trees are blackened from fire and the underbrush has barely returned. In the ashen dirt Jeryon sees another footprint, heading over the crest. The earthy smell of dragon wafts toward him, deeper and uglier than the one he smelled on the Comber. He crouches behind a tree.
He sets the cup down and pulls himself up the rise. He lays on the edge of the crest. Beyond is a clearing not made by nature.
In a broad hollow scoured by fire, trees have been shattered and others toppled so their root mouths yawn at the world like wooden octopi reaching for prey. Sunlight fingers great furrows in the earth. Blood stains exposed wood and tattered leaves. Jeryon sees in the midst of the destruction a line of short jagged spines atop an enormous black back.
This isn’t the maturing black of the Comber dragon, but the abysmal black of a very old one. Its wings are folded neatly, soft and floppy. Jeryon feels the urge to touch them until he thinks that each is probably bigger than the Comber. The dragon is withered with age. Its ribs and spine show through its skin, which rises in strange bursts like the chest of a person struggling for breath.
Jeryon inches over the crest. He’s moving as silently as possible, but sounds, he thinks, like a sword on a grindstone. Before he peeks over the edge he pictures himself staring straight down the creature’s throat. He hopes it’s sleeping. Its head must be the size of the dinghy. Its back alone looks nearly as long as the Comber dragon.
What he finds is carnage. The dragon’s neck is ripped in half. Its empty eye sockets bloom with nerve tendrils. Half its rotting tongue is clamped between its teeth; the other half has been chewed away. Its sides are rent, its tail, thicker than a man, is broken like a carpenter’s square, and the neck left on the body, wide enough to push a barrow down, has been cored of meat and bone. The remaining skin partially drapes it.
Jeryon sighs with relief. He could render the dragon for himself. A dragon bone blade is better than steel, and mounted in a bamboo culm it would make a spear or a knife far easier to wield than his tiny blade and far sharper than a bamboo blade. The skin would be too heavy for a sail, but it would be a great tarp. If the phlogiston hasn’t leaked away, he would have a precious source of fuel for light and fire.
If he could bring the renderings to Hanosh, he would have the wealth to ruin his mates, their families, and everyone they ever knew. He could go in disguise under an assumed name so they wouldn’t suspect anything. He could befriend them so they would also feel betrayed when he finally revealed his identity. And being close to them would make his revenge more exquisite. Such a complex plan, though, would have too many potential pitfalls. Better to trust the Trust and the law.
It occurs to him: How can the dragon be breathing?
Its skin doesn’t rise so much as it bulges in places. And the bulges are moving. The skin dr
aping the neck billows out. Something is inside. The skin flips up. A broad blue claw, leaf-shaped and smiling with sharp white teeth, emerges. A thinner claw, as long and as toothy, tests the air, followed by two eyes the size of shegas on stalks. They peer in every direction before settling on Jeryon. He doesn’t move. The front legs come next, a darker blue and as long as hand-and-a-half swords, followed by the body, blue with white smears and big as a buckler. Whereas the crabs on the beach had stubby white horns, this crab has a crown of them.
It scuttles out of the neck toward Jeryon. He dares to slide an inch down the rise. The crab takes a few more steps forward. Jeryon snakes away until he can barely see over the crest. The crab’s eyes bend from side to side, as if it can’t see him anymore, and it clicks its claws. Jeryon smiles at the crab’s frustration. He’ll return with a bamboo spear, he will kill and eat that crab, and he will take this dragon for his own.
A few answering clicks come from inside the neck. Then a few more. Another claw appears. And another. The watch crab clacks once decisively, and Jeryon would swear it’s pointing its skinny claw at him. A chorus of clicks erupts from the neck, followed by dozens of the huge blue crabs, which charge across the hollow, claws raised.
Jeryon slides down the rise and flees downstream.
The crabs spread across the water and the banks. They leap from tree trunk to tree trunk. A few get into the canopy and leap along the branches like spiders until they dive at him, but miss and crack open on the rocks in the stream.
He counts the blazes. When he gets to the grassland, he thinks he’ll be able to lose them in the brush. This is their island, though, and as he veers into the underbrush it trips him up. Ship life makes for strong bodies, but not fleet runners. He returns to the stream and hurtles downhill.
His salvation is the pond, where the fat black frogs prove a more tempting meal than the bounding brown man. The frogs dive deep, the crabs plunge in, the frogs hop out, and soon his pursuers are scattering through the forest while he races past the shega tree. That’s enough exploring for one day.
For the rest of the afternoon he weaves bamboo and vines into a lean-to, periodically feasting on the increasingly fatalistic white crabs. He also makes himself three spears, a bamboo handle for his blade, and a set of cups to replace the one he left at the dragon hollow. He sets the lean-to against a spur of cliff at the edge of the beach and puts the spears inside. Then he makes a bow drill out of vine and bamboo, gathers firewood, scrapes himself a pile of tinder, and gets a blaze going in pits on either side of the lean-to. If a ship sees his fire, if the poth sees its smoke, so be it. They’re meant to keep the white crabs at bay. The spears are for the blue ones, although he doubts they stray far from the dragon.
A few more crab claws and legs grilled on bamboo skewers, several more cups of water, and the shega, then Jeryon lets himself fall asleep long before star-rise.
Nevertheless he bolts up in the middle of the night. The pits glow red. Shadows seethe in the lean-to. The sand is skillet hard. The sea will not stop sizzling on the beach. Knowing that no one can hear him, that no one might ever hear him again, Jeryon screams and screams and sobs and screams.
3
* * *
Four days later, Jeryon jiggles a blue crab’s shell above a fire, using two wet palm leaves folded into squares as pot holders. The crab’s body meat falls off skewers too easily, so he begins frying a mix of blue and white with the paste of crushed olives. The bitterness is worth the oil. With his other hand he pours water from a broad bamboo culm into a cup. As someone who lives from berth to berth, port to port, he knows that wherever your plate and cup are, that’s your home.
Having a detailed schedule is as good as having oars tick his way through the day, so he plans his next assault on the blue crabs. His system is simple: get them to chase him, run to the frog pond, and once they scatter spear them one by one.
With a bamboo spatula he transfers the cooked meat to another blue crab shell, his plate. He wishes he had a pot to make soup. His sister made an excellent one, but after she left, Jeryon couldn’t stomach crab for a long time. Then he ate it to remind himself of her. At some point it lost the quality of remembrance and became just another bland seafood. His taste for it is returning, he’s surprised to find.
He banks the fire, no longer trying to maintain a steady stream of smoke to attract ships or the poth. It breaks up too quickly in the ever-present breeze, barely reaching the tops of the trees, let alone the tops of the adjoining cliffs. As for the light attracting ships, there’s little point in bothering. His second night on the island he built a cross-staff to confirm what he already suspected from the star’s positions: the island is deep in the ocean, well south of any route a ship from the League might take to the Dawn Lands. The dinghy must have reached the river a day or two after they were set adrift. All the time he was telling the poth he could get them to Yness, they were probably passing it, heading into oblivion.
He thinks he might be on Gladsend, an island that shows up on few maps because few are sure where it is and fewer believe it exists. It was supposedly a pirate refuge long ago, but why refuge here when prey is so far away and Yness so accommodating?
He cleans his pan and dish, making a weak soap of some ash, water, and the hot olive oil, and rests them against the lean-to to dry. He overturns the cup and pitcher on little posts. He rakes his house with a leafy frond. When all is in order, he tucks in his shirt and rubs his chin. He hates his stubble. His knife isn’t up to the task of shaving, preferring to slice instead. Hopefully a dragonbone blade will do a better job. He picks up a spear and his knife and sets out.
Along the stream he’s erected stakes to hold bamboo cups. There are also supplies of spears in case the blue crabs decide they’re sick of frogs.
When he reaches the dragon hollow, the crabs are swarming over the hill beyond it and heading toward the gray column of rock to the south. Have they given up on the dragon? Are they chasing something? If the poth found the stakes and blazes along the path, he realizes, they might not lead her to the beach. They might lead her here.
Jeryon slides down the hill and shadows the crabs up the wooded slopes surrounding the column, a wide green collar around a headless stone neck. The crabs climb at an angle and Jeryon moves to their side so he can see what they’re pursuing. He hears it bounding and breaking through the brush, sounds drowned in the furious clacking of crab claws, but he can’t see what it is.
The crabs slow. Do they have their quarry trapped? Did they catch it and kill it? If so, it didn’t put up much of a struggle. With a spear in each hand he edges closer. Just a glimpse is all he needs. He hopes it’s not her, as much as he wants it to be her. The crabs eddy in a pool of shell and claw, several clicks responding to each interrogative clack, as if they’re discussing what to do. Some are looking his way. Jeryon hides behind an oak. If he climbed it, he might be able to see, but if they saw him, he would be trapped. He has to chance it.
He leans his spears against the tree, pulls himself onto a low branch, and it snaps. He falls on his face. The spears clatter over him.
Dozens of eyestalks waggle as one in his direction.
Jeryon jumps up, grabs the spears, and leaps away like a fat black frog.
Halfway to the next hill he realizes he won’t be able to climb the slope quickly enough to stay ahead of the crabs, so he veers north. The trees grow thicker. All he has to do is pace the crabs and eventually they’ll forget about him, just as they’ve forgotten about their original quarry. He might even be able to spear a few in the end.
They’re catching up, though. The crabs, large as they are, can slip between the trees more easily than him, and a few are jumping over branches and bushes he has to avoid. Three leap at him just as he bursts between two trees into a meadow—except there is no meadow. The sky he saw through the trees heralds a fifty-foot drop where the wind has stripped the hill down to its rock
, a cliff above the cliffs.
Jeryon grabs a branch, swinging it aside like a door on a hinge as two crabs fly past him. They and his spear plummet to the scree below. One foot follows them while the other scrambles for purchase. His hand slips down the branch. His knee finds the edge, he finds his balance on it, and his other spear comes up just in time to find the belly of a third leaping crab, catapulting it over his head. It slides off the spear, scrabbles at his shirt, caroms off his heel and falls.
The rest of the crabs spread out as he stands so he can’t escape. Their split mouths ruminate. One in the center darts at him. He jabs. It scuttles back. Two dart from either side. He swings the spear in an arc. They scuttle back. When three come, he has no good response. He jabs at the middle one, which lets the outside two get close enough to snip before he swings and they retreat. They missed, but hitting him wasn’t the point. Now four edge closer. The others click to goad them. One scrapes a pointed blue foot against the dirt. Then Jeryon hears something much larger crashing through the woods. He pictures the Crab King coming to finish him off.
A half-dozen crabs investigate. They disappear beyond a bamboo grove, where they’re met with cries of fury and steel clanking through shell. The bamboo waves. Only one returns to tell the tale. It scuttles toward the swarm, clicking frantically, the poth in pursuit, swinging a rusty broad sword with a cat’s head pommel. She cries again and hacks the crab in half, the creature running all the way to its comrades before it realizes that it’s dead, and its legs topple in opposite directions.
The blue crabs scatter. She starts to sheathe her sword in a steel sheath before thinking better of it.
Jeryon says, “How are you?”
The Dragon Round Page 8
