“What would the tides be like if there were only one moon?” she asks.
“Boring,” he says. “A high and low tide a day maybe. The world would feel slack.”
She spits a seed into a leaf and sets it aside. “My forest warden said there used to be only one moon,” she says. “Ages and ages ago.”
“How could she know then? And where does a moon just come from?”
“She was told by her warden and her warden was told by hers and so on. She said the moons were sisters who had lost their home and were forced to wander among the stars.”
“More make-believe?” he says.
“You told me about the tides.”
He lays back. “Tell me about the sisters.”
She crosses her legs and draws herself up. “One day they lost each other. The oldest, Ah, searched everywhere for Med. She asked this star and that. She asked the Abyss and the White Bridge that crosses it. She asked the Crab and the Dragon.”
Gray sees something. She bolts upright and flares her wings. She peers off the cliff, neck outstretched, tail slowly rising.
Jeryon says, “I could see asking a single star, but constellations—”
“Quiet,” the poth says. “When Ah reached the sun, the sun said it hadn’t seen Med either. So she asked the worlds. Ours said, ‘What if you stayed in one place? It might be easy to find each other if one of you isn’t moving. Besides, you look tired.’ Ah agreed and the world put out its arm and hugged her tight.”
“What if Med had—”
She pokes him with a skewer. “And the world was right. Med flew by, and the sisters didn’t think they could be any happier until the world said, ‘Please don’t leave me. All the other worlds have sisters except me. I can be your new home.’ And she put out her other arm. Med remembered the ages she’d spent wandering alone and fell into the world’s embrace. And the tides are the sisters hugging and releasing the world, who’s still so happy.”
“Huh,” he says, rolling onto an elbow. “That fits with something I heard from an old rower.”
“What?” She leans forward.
“I don’t know where he was from,” Jeryon says, “but he claimed that once he’d been a stargazer, and he could prove that dragons first came from Med. Maybe she picked them up during her wandering.”
The poth’s eyes get big then shrink to a squint. “You made that up.”
“Yep. Dragons are giant newts with arm flaps.”
She pokes him again, looks at the waves, then closer at hand. “Where’s Gray?” she says.
“I bet she went to the crabs,” Jeryon says.
“No.” The poth points north over the ocean. “There.”
The wyrmling is barely discernible, a gray nick in the blue. Jeryon stands beside her and whistles; Gray doesn’t respond. The poth puts two fingers in her mouth and whistles loud enough to make the bushes tremble. Either the wyrmling can’t hear her or she’s ignoring her.
“We weren’t paying enough attention to her,” Jeryon says.
“She’ll come back,” the poth says.
“Birds don’t,” Jeryon says.
The dragon shrinks to a point and vanishes.
They stand for a while then they sit. The wind shifts, and the birdcalls come more clearly, as does the smell of the crab rotting. The tide goes slack.
“How far could she go?” Jeryon says. “If she rested in the water, could she take off again?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “She was bound to do this, stretch her wings. She’s not a bird. We couldn’t put her in a cage.”
“I tried.”
The poth doesn’t rise to the bait. “She has to come back. This is her home. You have to trust her.”
“Having to trust isn’t trust,” he says.
Her face wrinkles around her eyes.
“And everyone runs off eventually,” Jeryon says. “I’m going to the hollow. I might as well start rendering.” He gets up and grabs his spears. He scatters the wood in the ring they made, but the fire’s long out. He doesn’t ask if she wants to help.
“What about us?” she calls to him. Her voice is thick. “What if she doesn’t return?”
“They win.”
Dinner is a somber affair: nuts, berries, greens, plus an herb tea the poth brews in an exceptionally concave blue crab carapace. The birds ate the rest of the crab, and what was left wouldn’t have been worth eating anyway. They sit on logs around the fire and pick at their food.
The poth waited in the meadow until Jeryon came down from the hollow. He carried a ragged, uneven strip of dragon skin and a few vertebrae whose spikes he planned to knap into cutting tools.
He would have walked right past their picnic site, but couldn’t, not the way she sat there with her arms around her knees just as she’d done when they were first put in the dinghy. He waited for her to catch up to him, and they left the meadow side by side.
After they eat he works on the vertebrae while she spins palm thread, her best spool yet. The bone’s harder than he expected. He tries a variety of hammerstones, none of which works well. Then he snaps off a spike entirely. He flings the vertebrae into the pond, followed by the spike.
As he rears back to throw the hammerstone, the poth takes one of the other vertebrae and lobs it into the pond. He stares at her. She stares at the hammerstone. When he doesn’t drop it, she palms her spool and brings her arm back. He drops the rock and grabs her wrist. She glares at him. He sucks his lips, nods, and releases her. They sit, and he goes back to work on his last vertebrae.
After a while he says, “Can you fish?”
“Ayden’s on a lake,” she said. “I caught sixteen silver carp the first time I touched a pole. I was three.”
“I’ll make us both hooks then,” he says, running his finger along the curve where the spike meets the backbone. “Your thread will make a fine line. I’ve also been thinking about a cabin we can build.” She touches his leg. “And a raft.”
There’s a rustling in the treetops, and something huge drops in front of them, scattering the edge of the fire and sending up a plume of sparks. They fall backward off the log and scramble away on their knees. The attacker doesn’t move. It’s not a blue crab. It’s long, thick, and silver with a band of white. It slowly arches its face and tail, slaps the ground with both and does it again.
The poth says, “It’s a fish! A huge fish!”
“A robalo,” Jeryon says. “Not known for flight.”
There’s more rustling in the canopy. They cover their heads, and the wyrmling dives through the treetops to stand over the fish. She squeals and noses it toward them.
“I guess she’s sick of crab too,” the poth says.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Cabin
1
* * *
Jeryon gets out of bed and a creak works itself from his bed to the cabin’s wall, where his tools sway faintly on their pegs. The poth decorated her room with flowers, ink drawings on bamboo slats, and little bamboo sculptures, many of which also hold plants. Her room smells like their garden; his, like its dirt. She calls his room the storehouse, but he likes being surrounded by useful things, and tools, if they’re properly crafted, are an artwork all their own. He’s proud of his hoe, made from the dragon’s complex shoulder blade and sinew; his axe, made from its other shoulder blade; as well as his razor, made from a flake of the dragon’s tooth so sharp he wouldn’t need soap to shave if she tired of his beard.
He opens his shutters, then uses a dragonbone stylus to mark a skinny bamboo tube hanging beneath the window. It’s the fourteenth tube for their fourteenth month, not counting the shorter tube for the five days of Jubilee at the turn of the year. When he drops it, the tubes rattle like bones.
He puts on his dragonskin trousers and tunic over his uniform. They’re hot, the material doesn’t bre
athe at all, but the skin is remarkably resilient. It won’t wear or tear easily, even though he didn’t tan it. However crudely made his outfit—all sailors can sew, but few can design—it would be the richest in Hanosh. A mere captain wouldn’t be allowed to wear dragonskin, except by special dispensation from the City Council.
In the common room he loads a woven plate with vegetables and fruit picked yesterday. He’s never felt better. Still, what he wouldn’t give for a yank of bread.
He listens at the poth’s door. She snorts and rolls over. He grabs the bridle from a peg by the front door and leaves to work with Gray. He’s glad she’s comfortable. It was worth it, building the cabin, then building it again.
Everlyn hears him listen at her door. He always does before leaving, as if she might have disappeared in the night. She rolls over to let him know she’s awake. The fresh straw beneath its dragonskin cover crunches as she does, and the skin and bed squeak. She means to yawn, but accidentally snorts. When she hears him close the cabin door, she decides to go back to sleep. She’ll get up when he and Gray take a break, and she’ll make them some tea. What she wouldn’t give for toast with butter and honey.
Outside Gray suns her wings, which are as wide as Jeryon is tall. Like the larger squaluses, the wyrm’s turned a cool blue-gray on top, and will probably get darker, while her underside remains platinum. When she hears him, she furls her wings, rolls on her side, and lifts her leg for a morning scratch. He lays the bridle quietly on the porch where she can’t see it and jumps down. He would use his hand, but her hide’s so tough it’s no longer effective. He pulls a bamboo rake from underneath the porch and goes to work on her belly. She falls asleep. He stops. She heaves as if stabbed. More rake. She falls asleep again.
Jeryon retrieves the bridle and steps behind her head. He rakes her neck, which arches, and she yawns. With a practiced swoop, he slips the dragonbone bit past her teeth, catches the rising neck between his thighs, and sets the dragonskin strap in the bamboo buckle beneath her throat.
He holds her in place, getting her used to being straddled. It makes her skittish. Lots of things do. She’s constantly charging at things that aren’t there or chomping the air. He figures she’s just at an age for dragons. Gray’s four feet long, much of that neck and tail. As broad as her body is, riding her would still be like riding a racing hound or snap dog. They have a long way to go. If you don’t want to ride a horse until it’s at least two, how old would a dragon have to be?
Gray relaxes. He steps aside and whistles her to sit. She does, gnashing at the bit. She chewed straight through rope and bamboo, but in dragonbone she’s met her match. He unbars a woven crate lined with a dragonwing membrane pouch and filled with water, and he pulls out a white crab. It shakes its bound claws. He tosses it to the wyrm, who swallows it in a few bites. He takes a coil of rope from a peg on a stilt and ties it to the bit. For letting him, she gets another crab.
Jeryon releases Gray to lead her around the pond so she can get further used to the bridle. She smells more dragony than usual, which reminds him of the Comber. Jeryon realizes he hasn’t thought about his mates in a while, unlike during their first rainy season.
At first the cabin withstood the season well, then the pond overflowed and flooded it. As he and the poth scrambled to save their possessions, Jeryon pictured his mates dry in his quarters on the Comber, laughing at him and the Trust amid their render. When the rain became a torrent that battered the walls, and the wind chewed away the roof thatch, he wanted to tear the Comber’s stern deck open to get at his mates before they could reach Hanosh. Whenever he saw the poth drowning in her own hair and trying to keep a fire lit, Jeryon’s hands would jerk as if reaching out and flinging his mates into the sea.
Soon he would have the power to do that, he thought. Unfortunately, Gray had little interest in learning a new training game, Snatch the Mutineers.
One day as she was coming down the trail to the beach the poth caught Jeryon yelling a mate’s name while hacking a crab.
She looked at the slaughter on the beach and asked, “What are you doing?”
“I’m hungry.”
“What a waste,” she said. “I’ve made us lunch already. Let’s talk about rebuilding.” She held out her hand.
He followed her back to camp. As they made plans for the spring over oyster grass salad, the crab corpses washed away along with thoughts of his mates. He took to eating more fish to keep them out of mind.
After the rainy season ended, they put the cabin on stilts. They reinforced it with timber columns and thatched the roof more thickly. To keep the rain out, they fitted the bamboo in the walls more tightly together, and made the windows smaller and higher in the walls. They also built shutters and planned to daub the walls before the next rainy season if they were still there.
Meanwhile the island yielded a bounty of fruit and vegetables that they struggled to eat before it rotted. For a month, they didn’t need Gray to fish for them. They even gained weight. And the camp turned gold as the shield the poth had replanted ran rampant. It was like living in a field of treasure.
Jeryon sniffs. For some reason the shield doesn’t smell so terrible anymore. He could stay here forever, he thinks. No one in Hanosh except the shipowners eats so well. The cabin is more sturdy than most of the places he lived in as a boy. And he has a schedule to keep, one set by the land and the needs of the day without the worry of living hand to mouth. He could almost thank his mates for it.
The poth, though, would want to go home. She talks about touring the League again from Jolef to Yness. As for Hanosh, she’s likely had her fill of their people. She gets antsy when they’re on the porch together for more than an hour. Then again, she’d be the ideal partner for a captain. She wouldn’t mind him being gone for six months at a time, and they’d get along fine for the month before he left again. They wouldn’t even have to live in any one place. They could catch up with each other at various cities.
It’s a clever arrangement, but not worth considering now. He pats Gray on the head. The wyrm’s still puny as dragons go. He and the poth, they have a long way to go too.
2
* * *
Everlyn can’t lie in bed anymore. She opens the shutters in her room and the common room and watches Jeryon lead the wyrm around the pond. They wave to each other. For the first time, it strikes her: He’ll really be able to ride Gray. They’re so easy together.
He looks ridiculous in his new clothes, of course, like someone going to a masquerade as a dragon. She shouldn’t mock, though. She’s shortened her smock considerably and taken off much of the sleeves to use the fabric to fix the rest. Her undergarments are a ruin. Going without them, though, even if he didn’t know, is entirely out of the question. Beetles get everywhere.
She joins them as they pass the cabin and walks with them to the pond’s outlet stream.
“Tea?” he says.
“Shouldn’t be more than a moment,” she says.
He loves her tea, especially when she puts a shega jewel in it. Who would have thought that tea would be what could please him? He once told her he didn’t think he deserved cooked water.
The wyrm flaps and screeches, “Eeee!”
“None for you,” the poth says.
A bird flies by, and the wyrm leaps toward it. Jeryon checks her, and they watch it disappear into the canopy. He gets a look in his eye and says to Gray, “I know a game we could play, but we’ll need more crab.”
“What is it?” Everlyn says. She relishes that too rare look in his eye. The dragon has a rambunctious effect.
“You’ll see,” he says and hands her the lead. “Back in a minute.” He retrieves an empty crate and hurries downstream to the flats.
Everlyn gets a look in her eye. She waits until he disappears, then whistles twice. Gray sits and licks her. Slowly she straddles the wyrm and puts a little weight on Gray’s shoulders. He
r tiny dorsal spikes are blunted by her smock. She’s like a rocking horse, the poth thinks. She settles herself. Gray pushes up. So much poise, the poth thinks, as if she’s already in flight. Everlyn lifts her heels off the ground. She lifts her toes. Gray flips out her wings and takes a step. Everlyn smiles and rolls with her. She always had a good seat. Then the dragon flaps, lifts, and topples the poth. She lands hard on her back, and Gray licks her face.
They have a long way to go.
When Jeryon returns to the cabin, the poth is steeping and Gray is sitting on the roof. He can’t decide if he loves her tea because of the steeping or in spite of it. It’s a whole operation, putting leaves in hot water and staring at them, as complex as refitting a galley. First the water has to be boiling, not a bit below or it’s ruined. Then you have to pour the water in slowly. Too fast, and it’s ruined. Then you have to wait a precise number of seconds. Too few or too many, ruined. Pouring the tea out is a whole other operation. That precision appeals to him tremendously. It’s not the type of attitude he’d have expected of her. Trouble is, he wants the tea now.
He whistles twice and Gray glides down to sit beside the crate. He grabs a crab between its back legs, extends his arm twice slowly, her eyes following the crab, then he flings it, spinning, high in the air. He whistles three times.
The wyrm leaps into the air after it. The crab tips off her snout and falls to the ground. Before it can get away, Gray picks it up with her mouth. And before she can chomp it, Jeryon whistles twice. She brings it to him for another throw. The crab is completely uninterested in flight. The next time, Gray relieves it of all interests.
He doesn’t know what it is about her, but the poth makes him puckish sometimes. It’s probably the tea.
Everlyn hears the wyrm whoosh and bang into the cabin. After a particularly solid strike, she leaves her tea, but not her count of how long it’s been steeping, to find out what they’re doing.
The Dragon Round Page 13
