The Dragon Round

by Stephen S. Power

  The waste bamboo they use to light a fire for dinner and, to the wyrmling’s delight, to warm some rocks for her pen. Energized by sitting on one, she runs along the walls so fervently they threaten to topple. Seeing this, Jeryon starts weaving slats for a lid.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” the poth says. “Make pens and all?”

  “You pick things up,” Jeryon says. “How much did she eat?”

  “Two whole whites,” she says. “As much as me. I don’t know where it went, especially after all she ate earlier.”

  The wyrmling stops, looks up at them, and takes an enormous dump. It has to waddle forward to let it all out, as if the dump were having her. The gentle breezes by the pond suddenly become a liability, too weak to carry off such a heavy stench.

  “I’ll get some leaves to pick it up,” she says.

  “I can make a trowel,” he says.

  “No, that’s all right.” Her altruism is undermined by how quickly she runs from the pen and how slowly she returns.

  While waiting, Jeryon parses the smell. Lye, with a hint of old stable and older man.

  After the poth disposes of the scat downwind west of the pond, they watch the wyrmling mount a rock and wrap her wings around it. Her head flops to the side and slowly rolls over, twisting her neck nearly all the way around.

  “Is that normal?” Jeryon says.

  “She may be part cat,” the poth says.

  The wyrmling falls asleep. Everlyn strokes between her wings. The wyrmling’s mouth flops open. The poth plucks a firefly out of the air and feeds it to her.

  “Don’t do that,” he says. “She has to ask.”

  “It’s just a little bedtime snack.” The wyrmling chews herself back to sleep, the firefly’s glowing posterior sticking out of her mouth.

  “She doesn’t get to snack,” he says. “You can’t just let her have every beetle that falls into your pocket.”

  “That was an accident,” she says.

  “She has to do something for it,” he says. “She has to learn that we control her food. Otherwise, she’ll never obey, and we’ll never get off this island.”

  “What, by riding her?” she says. “I was just kidding earlier. It’ll take years for her to be big enough to ride, if she even could be. We’ll be found long before then.”

  The wyrmling wakes up, chokes on the firefly, swallows it, and falls asleep again with a sigh.

  “We should let her sleep,” Jeryon says. “Big day and all. First day.”

  The poth grabs his wrist. “We will be found before then, right? How far south could we be? We weren’t in the river that long.”

  He sits back. “Remember when you asked how big the Xs would have to be?”

  “Yes.” Her nails bite into his wrist.

  “Half a mile,” he says. “A mile would be better.”

  She throws his wrist away. “How far south are we?”

  “We really should be thinking about—”

  “Plotting a course?” she says. “How far?”

  “More than a hundred miles,” he whispers. “Maybe two. My cross-staff isn’t precise.”

  She nods. “Your failed experiment.” She nods some more. “You knew. And you lied to me. No one is coming.”

  “We’re too far south,” he says, “which is why I can’t let you inhibit her training.”

  “Don’t turn this around on me.” She stands up. Her plate falls off her lap. “I never should have trusted you. This is what Hanoshi do: You lie to get what you want. Your mates did. Your whole crew did. You did in Chorem, not telling them there was plague in Hanosh. How many sailors went to Hanosh and risked catching the flox so you could keep the price of shield down?”

  “I wanted to give you hope.”

  “While you hoped I wouldn’t notice we’re still here?” She snorts. “I see what you meant by desperation.”

  He stands up and takes her arm. “I didn’t lie. It’ll just take longer than I thought to get you home.”

  “Not me.” She pulls away. “My testimony. And for what? Justice?”

  “Yes. The Trust will make things right.”

  “Years from now? They’ve got their share of the dragon. They’ve probably forgotten you already.” She mimics washing her hands.

  “Never,” he says. “I’ve given them everything. They must be searching. If they can’t find me, it’s my fault. I got our position wrong. I got us lost. It’s my fault, not theirs.”

  He grabs at her arm again. She steps back. He nearly falls like a man whose cane has slipped.

  “Believe with me,” he says.

  She steps forward. She lets him clutch her sleeve.

  “I can’t,” she says.

  He steadies himself. He lets go. “I won’t lie to you again.”

  “I won’t forget that.”

  Gray wakes and opens her mouth. Everlyn reaches out and grabs another firefly. She holds it in front of the wyrmling. When she sits, the poth lets it go. The wyrmling snaps it out of the air.

  “At least you’re not Ynessi,” she says. “They’d want to butcher your mates in their beds. I didn’t refuse a part in your murder to take one in theirs.” She looks at him. “That’s not justice. I’d sooner stay here than help you do that.”

  “I do things by the book,” Jeryon says. “I trust the book. I trust the people who wrote the book.”

  Everlyn goes to her orange moss bed, lies down facing away from him, and wraps herself around her sword. Gray climbs atop a corner post to watch her before turning to Jeryon.

  He finishes assembling the lid. It’s a difficult task with shaking hands. What would he do if he found his mates helpless in bed? What if the book is wrong again? Jeryon flicks Gray into the pen, sits the lid, and weighs it down with rocks.

  For a long while Gray squeals inside while he stirs the fire. He can’t get it to burn exactly as he would like it.

  Jeryon wakes before dawn to a crunching near camp. He grabs a spear and crouches, but doesn’t see anyone. He peers through the screen of branches. The poth is asleep.

  The lid is on the pen, but he checks anyway. The wyrmling is gone, as is the bottom of a slat, chewed to flinders. Why, Jeryon thinks, do I permit myself to sleep?

  More crunching draws him to the pond, where a long line of beetles troops across dead leaves. He follows.

  Where the poth buried Gray’s scat, the wyrmling’s created more, a formidable mound of it, drawing the beetles. The wyrmling stands beside it, plucking the beetles as they approach the mound, twisting them in two, then popping the halves into her mouth. When she sees Jeryon, Gray sits and looks at him. He’s hardly placated, especially when the poth appears behind him.

  “Apparently she wants to control her own food,” the poth says.

  “She’ll have to learn,” he says, picks the wyrmling up by its scruff, and carries it kicking to camp. He puts her in the pen and piles stones around it to prevent any more breakouts.

  The next night Jeryon sleeps beside the pen. He’s worn out from spending the day killing blue crabs, gathering with the poth, and constructing a box to keep beetles as training treats. When he wakes up, he finds a hole scratched through the lid of the pen and another through the beetle box. Fortunately, the wyrmling has created enough dung in the beetle box that more training treats are already crawling toward it.

  “I think she’s mocking you,” the poth says.

  “You were a willful child, weren’t you?”

  “And you didn’t get anything you wanted,” she says. “Don’t treat her the same way. A leash only reminds a dog that it could run away.”

  Some like a leash, he’s not foolish enough to say.

  For lunch Gray eats two crabs. The wyrmling sits and looks at him before receiving each one, Jeryon’s relieved to see.

  The wyrmling’s fill
ed out so much her legs barely keep her belly off the ground. The poth suggests they track its growth with a culm. Jeryon cuts a ten-foot-long piece and scores a line around it to act as a base. She stretches out the dragon, and he makes a mark at its snout before scoring a connecting line. The poth also measures her wingspan and, with a piece of palm leaf fiber, her girth. She records these on the culm, and he notes the day: day nine. They’ll measure again in three days, rotating the culm to create comparison lines.

  That night Jeryon puts the dragon down and lays heavy brown bamboo logs atop the lid of its pen. He hangs the repaired beetle box from a tree.

  Jeryon prods the poth awake with the butt of his spear. “She’s gone again. I don’t know where.”

  His trying not to look concerned is very disconcerting.

  “The beetle box hasn’t been rummaged,” he says. “I don’t smell new scat.”

  “Have you—”

  “I’ve walked all around the pond.”

  She notes that the slat that replaced the one the wyrmling had chewed earlier has also been chewed to flinders, and the surrounding rocks have been moved. She kneels and puts her cheek to the ground to see if the dragon left a trail.

  “You can track?” he says.

  “You have waves. I have leaves.”

  She was never good at tracking, but a few leaves have been overturned nearby, bits of beetle lie beyond them, and tail carvings and footprints mark the soft dirt beyond the fire.

  “She’s left the camp,” the poth says.

  They hurry beyond the oaks. Gray crouches in the trail between the stream and the beach. Her head is down, her butt raised, her tail poised.

  “Don’t spook her,” Jeryon says. He takes a slow step toward the wyrmling, flexing the fingers of his free hand.

  The poth blocks him. “She’s hunting something,” she says.

  “I hope it’s not a blue crab,” Jeryon says. Now he readies his spear.

  The wind is stiffer here, and when it gusts the wyrmling lifts her snout to smell it, shakes her hindquarters, flings out her wings like wispy sails, and catches it. She’s picked up and flung with a high-pitched “Eeee!” over their heads.

  “She can fly!” the poth says.

  “But can she land?” Jeryon says.

  They watch the wyrmling float like a kite all the way to the center of the pond, where the wind gives out. It squeals and falls, flapping frantically, and disappears.

  They run to the edge and wait for Gray to emerge. She doesn’t. They wade in tentatively then push toward where she went under. The bottom is soft, and their steps quickly muddy the water.

  Jeryon crouches down and slides forward, dragging the bottom with his fingers.

  “Don’t!” the poth says. “You might step on her.”

  “You have a better idea?”

  She shakes her head, stands an arm’s length away, and searches in a parallel line. They reach the other side. Nothing.

  Jeryon turns to her. “I hate losing things,” he says.

  “We’ll find her,” she says.

  A gust of wind cuts through the oaks, and they hear “Eeee!” again. Jeryon drops his spear and catches Gray with a smack just as the wind gives out. He hands her to the poth.

  “It’s the pocket for you,” she says.

  “If she won’t stay,” Jeryon says, “we can at least work on ‘Come.’ ”

  The poth spends much of the next week gathering with Gray poking out of her pocket. She finds spreads of oyster grass, whose roots and greens make a good salad; patches of haveet, whose purple taproot is sweet, if woody, and whose seeds and greens can be made into an anti-poison; and a pulse bush, whose beans will make a fine soup if she can make a pot. She’s also delighted to find some golden shield, which she replants around the camp.

  The abundance and diversity of plants surprise her. If she didn’t know better, Everlyn would think they were the vestiges of a once great garden.

  Meanwhile, Jeryon spends hours reinforcing the pen, standing guard, rebuilding the pen, standing guard, and redesigning the pen’s elements. All he succeeds in doing is driving the poth away from camp.

  Finally, Everlyn says, “She could just sleep in my pocket. I’d feel her trying to escape. For one night, let’s try it.”

  Jeryon throws down his tools. “Fine. I could use the sleep.”

  When the poth holds up a beetle in the morning as a reward, and Gray sits and looks at the poth just as the wyrmling looks at him, Jeryon is surprised at how upset he is that she was right. The crabs will suffer for this, and, he thinks for the first time, so will his mates.

  3

  * * *

  In two weeks the wyrmling doubles in size to more than a foot, and her wingspan stretches to eighteen inches. She looks like the most ungainly of butterflies.

  Although she still plays Wind Catcher, her new favorite game is Beetle Pole, which has enabled Jeryon to teach her some commands. He lances a beetle with a bamboo needle to which he’s tied a long thread of palm leaf fibers, wraps the beetle a few times, and lances it again to hold the beetle tight. He whistles twice for Gray to come to him and sit, then he casts the beetle like a lure. She can’t attack, however, until he whistles three times quickly; otherwise, he pulls the beetle away.

  Gray digs her little claws into the ground in anticipation of the whistles, and she digs them into him when she wants to play.

  She’s a ferocious pouncer, spreading her wings to cover a wide area should the beetle try to escape, and she’s getting the hang of flying and striking while in the air, though her aim needs work. Jeryon is now on his fourth pole.

  He’s impressed by the thread, which the poth has been hand-spinning around bamboo spindles. Early versions frayed or snapped at the slightest tug, but she’s continually improving her design. The poth says she’d be much better at spinning had she paid any attention to her lessons as a girl. Nonetheless, the wyrmling can chew off the beetle and the thread remains usable.

  Her goal is to spin a thread thin enough for use with Jeryon’s needle, and still strong enough to fix the rips in her smock and underclothes. At least they’re clean. She made a crude olive press out of mats woven from thin strips of bamboo and a large stone, then turned some of the resulting oil into a stronger version of Jeryon’s campfire soap. Another pond nearby has become their washbasin. There’s even a nice flat rock for each of them to sit on while their clothes lie around them drying.

  She made a flower out of palm fronds that, when mounted on a bamboo post, indicates a desire for privacy. Sometimes it’s her freedom rock. Sometimes it’s her weeping one.

  Jeryon doesn’t waste much time bathing and less time drying. He spends more time agonizing over his stubble, which he has, on several occasions, attacked nearly fatally with his blade.

  One night, when it’s her turn to cook, she sits him down while her meal sizzles to check his latest shaving wounds. “You could just grow out your beard,” she says. “It would look nice.”

  “I like a clean face,” he says.

  “By ‘clean’ you must mean ‘laced with scars.’ ” She dabs his cheek with a medicinal lotion she’s made. “I’ll trim it for you, if you’d like. I used to do my father’s.”

  “Will you take away the lotion if I don’t?”

  “No,” she says. “Who would do such a thing?”

  Anyone in Hanosh. If a game’s going against you, take the ball. “Fine,” he says and turns away.

  “Good,” she says. She fills a plate and holds it out. When he looks at her, she hands it to him.

  A bite later he thinks, Hey, wait a minute.

  After a month, Jeryon says Gray is big enough to learn a new game, Crab Fight. The pen is too small for what he has in mind, so he builds a six-foot-wide, three-foot-high bamboo arena out of logs piled between stakes. Into it will go a white crab and the w
yrmling. Jeryon calls it the Hanoshi Sandbox.

  “She’ll be so small in there,” the poth says.

  “She’ll be fine,” Jeryon says. “Toss a kid off the dock, he learns how to swim.”

  “Is that how you learned?” she says.

  “Actually, I was thrown over the transom,” he says. “If it makes you feel better, you can stand in one corner and I’ll stand in the other and we’ll pull the combatants apart at the first sign of trouble.”

  This placates her. They get into the arena.

  Jeryon sets a crab in the pit. The poth hauls the wyrmling from her pocket. Gray struggles, but she isn’t scared. She smells her opponent. She knows what crab is for. The poth sets her down and whistles twice. She sits, staring at the crab.

  The crab raises its claws and clacks once.

  Jeryon whistles three times: Fight!

  Gray crawls forward cautiously on her wing hands, assessing the crab, which circles sideways around the wyrmling. She turns, following its waggling eyes. The crab opens its claws as wide as they can go, then snaps them shut. Each is bigger than the wyrmling’s head. They could easily break her neck. She stands and stretches her wings and flaps a few times. The crab snips at them. Her head rears, her jaw drops, and she squeals at the crab. It snips at her face, gauging the distance between them.

  The poth holds her sword, sheathed, ready to bat the crab away. Jeryon makes little feints with his fists.

  Gray readies a pounce. The crab raises a claw to discourage her. She isn’t and springs into flight. She floats around the crab in tight circles, the crab scuttling around to follow her eyes. She darts at its back. She makes a grab for its claws to lift it up and drop it. She snaps at its face. The crab won’t let her get close. Its claws are a waving, clicking wall. Finally, frustrated, the wyrmling lands in a neutral corner and sits with her tail swishing at the crab.

  “What’s she doing?” Jeryon says.

  The crabs wonders too. It edges closer. Swish. Closer still. Swish. The crab reaches for her tail. The poth bites her lip. The wyrmling flicks its tail and snaps the crab right in the eye. It bows in pain as the wyrmling spins, slides her wing under the crab’s left legs, then lifts. The crab’s broad claw clamps down on the wing. Gray hisses. The crab’s legs come off the ground. It readies its other claw to strike. Gray heaves the crab over.