Dragon Book, The

by Gardner Dozois

  “I suppose so.” Sunila spoke with the air of someone granting a sizable concession. But then the other man brightened. “I’ve improved the translation cantrip a lot since we got here. It’s bumped up against really foreign languages, the way it can’t in the Empire anymore. Almost everyone there speaks Mussalmian along with his birthspeech—instead of it, these days, more often than not.”

  “I doubt my great-grandparents knew it very well,” Kyosti said. “But I can’t speak a word of their clan’s jibber-jabber. Don’t want to, either. Things are simpler when there’s only one language, and we all use it.”

  “You’re a sensible fellow,” Sunila said, by which he meant that Kyosti’s opinion here was the same as his own.

  “I wonder what we will come across next,” Kyosti said in musing tones.

  “If the moon were full, I’d guess werewolves,” Sunila replied.

  “Some of the bone-crunching scavengers that howl in the grass sound as if they ought to be werewolves, or else madmen raving,” Kyosti said. “I don’t think anyone described them before, or the big striped cats.”

  “For Antti’s sake, I hope there are gods in the heavens.” Sunila wasn’t going off on a tangent; Antti was the savant the great cat had slain. With a sigh, the linguist sorcerer went on, “But I know the difference between what I hope and what I believe. I hope we find dragons, too.” He spread his hands. Sorcerers back in the Empire lived soft, but his palms, like Kyosti’s, were ridged with callus. “No matter what I hope, though, I know what I believe there, too.”

  UP in the foothills, soil covered green-gray stone only sparsely. Grass and shrubs grew where they could. Little beasts something like rabbits and something like tiny deer scurried through the undergrowth, what there was of it. On high ground they kept lookouts who chirruped whenever they saw danger.

  They didn’t always see it. Snakes ate the little beasts. So did hawks. A dragon swooping down on them … Kyosti shook his head. One of those furry scurriers would have been no more than a gooseberry to a hungry dragon, even if dragons were on the small side of what the tales claimed for them.

  Suddenly, all the lookouts chirruped at once and tumbled down off their perches. Seeing nothing out of the ordinary, Kyosti wondered why—but only for an instant. He let out his own shout of alarm as the ground shuddered under his feet. He might have been embarrassed if half the other explorers hadn’t also cried out at the same time.

  How long did the earthquake last? Probably not very long, as those things went—it was just a small one. But it seemed to go on forever. A few rocks fell over. Off to the west, a bigger rumble spoke of a landslide. Birds sprang screeching into the air. Dust rose with them, in a thick, choking cloud.

  By the time Kyosti quit coughing and rubbing at his grit-filled eyes, most of the expedition’s native bearers had set down their burdens and were making for lower, flatter ground as fast as they could go. It wasn’t that he didn’t sympathize with them—he did. But he didn’t think the Mussalmians could recruit replacements in this harsh, stony country.

  Along with Sunila and Baron Toivo, he tried to talk the bearers out of leaving. They didn’t want to listen to him. Toivo was more direct. He told the natives, “Remember what we did to the tribe that attacked us. If you run away, you show you are also our enemies, and we will do the same to you.”

  Some of the skinny little blond men sullenly started back toward the bales and bundles they’d put down. Not even Baron Toivo had an easy time intimidating the rest. A scarfaced fellow named Galvanauskas led that group of locals. He said something in his incomprehensible language. “When the pranys stirs in its sleep, what difference does it make what people do?” was how Sunila’s cantrip rendered it into Mussalmian. That clarified matters only so far.

  “What’s a pranys?” Kyosti asked, with what he though was exaggerated patience.

  You stupid foreigner, the look Galvanauskas gave him said. Kyosti was much more used to giving those looks to the natives than to getting them. Pranys turned out to be the scarfaced man’s word for dragon. To make matters perfectly clear, he pointed ahead, toward the volcanic crater that kept sending up a thin rill of smoke. “That is the pranys’s nostril,” he declared.

  Kyosti, Sunila, and Baron Toivo all burst out laughing together. Galvanauskas looked highly affronted, not that any of the imperials cared. And I thought our talespinners told whoppers! Kyosti thought. Not quite a god’s breath, but close enough!

  Baron Toivo was more direct, as he commonly was. “Listen here,” he snapped. “If you gutless, lazy lugs don’t get back to work, you’ll wish a dragon was all you had to worry about. Have you got that?”

  Thanks to Sunila’s cantrip, Galvanauskas and the knot of his stubborn fellow tribesmen couldn’t very well not get it. Even so, they made a show of arguing among themselves before they gave in.

  “Use your charm one more time for me, will you?” Kyosti asked Sunila. His colleague nodded. The preservationist fell in alongside Galvanauskas, who trudged along with his head down, the very picture of dejection. Catching his eye at last, Kyosti pointed toward the other smoking mountain in the range, now a quarter of the way across the horizon from the one the native had picked. “I suppose you’ll tell me that’s the dragon’s other nostril?” Kyosti jeered.

  This time, the look the scarfaced man sent him said he might not be an imbecile after all. Maybe he was only a moron. “Well, of course,” Galvanauskas answered.

  AS the Mussalmians and their reluctant bearers climbed higher, they spied white beasts gracefully skipping from crag to crag ahead of them. Mountain goats, Kyosti thought, and up in the Empire’s mountains, they would have been. But these creatures didn’t have two horns near their ears. Each one carried a single horn in the center of its forehead. Their tails were long and flowing, not short and stubby. What else to call them but unicorns?

  Like dragons, unicorns were more often imagined than seen in the Empire of Mussalmi. Unlike dragons, at least thus far, unicorns didn’t seem shy about showing themselves on the tropical continent. A savant named Uluots brought Kyosti a lumpy—something—wrapped in cloth. “Would you do me the kindness of preserving this so I can study it at my leisure, in a place where I have better tools to use?” he asked.

  “Of course—that’s what I’m here for,” Kyosti said. But he couldn’t help coming out with a question of his own: “Er, what is it?”

  “Unicorn scat,” Uluots answered, not without pride. “Still warm, too,” he added.

  “How nice,” Kyosti murmured.

  “Oh, it is,” Uluots said. “This way, I can be sure I’m working with a fresh specimen. I brought it back to you quick as I could.”

  “How nice,” Kyosti said again. He did not presume to judge other men’s enthusiasms. That way, if he was lucky, no one else would presume to judge his. He cast the spell Uluots wanted. The other savant went away happy.

  Collecting unicorn droppings was easy enough. Collecting one of the unicorns that produced the droppings proved harder. They were wary beasts, and let neither Mussalmians nor natives come close. “Miserable blonds must hunt them whenever they get the chance—the creatures wouldn’t be so leery of us otherwise.” Baron Toivo sounded aggrieved that the locals might seek to slake their hunger with unicorn meat. And why would he not, when that made it difficult for the more important (at least to themselves) imperials to gather a specimen?

  “Maybe we need a virgin to lure them out,” Sunila said—that was part of unicorn lore back in the Empire.

  “How about the baron’s right ear?” Kyosti suggested. Toivo wasn’t standing close by, and had his back turned. He wouldn’t be able to tell who was poking fun at him. By the way the back of his neck turned red, it was a good thing for Kyosti that he couldn’t.

  But then the rest of the Mussalmians took up the game. Another savant suggested Baron Toivo’s left ear instead of the right. Yet another, no doubt thinking of the kind of specimens Uluots gathered, proposed a different part of that worth
y’s anatomy. Someone else demurred, doubting Uluots’s virginity there. Things went downhill in a hurry after that. The learned Mussalmians giggled like naughty schoolgirls.

  Understanding much less than half of what was going on, Galvanauskas and the rest of the native bearers gaped at their paymasters. They knew more about the unicorns than the Mussalmians did: they would have had trouble knowing less. They didn’t have a lot of useless lore to unlearn, either.

  That occurred to Kyosti while he and his countrymen were still making bad bawdy jokes. What it might mean took longer to sink in. It wasn’t till the next day that Kyosti went over to Sunila, and said, “Help me get something across to Galvanauskas, would you?”

  “I can use the translation cantrip for you,” the other wizard answered. “But gods only know if we’ll get anything across to him.”

  “Mm, yes. There is that,” Kyosti agreed. “Well, do what you can.” They went over to the natives’ headman. “If you were hunting a unicorn, how would you go about it?”

  Galvanauskas considered. Kyosti thought so, anyhow; the native’s eyes were as blue and blank and unreadable as a cloudless sky. At last, Galvanauskas said, “I would set some hunters in an ambush and frighten a unicorn so that it ran past them and gave them an easy shot at it.”

  “Not bad,” Kyosti said after some reflection of his own. He took from his belt pouch a broad copper coin bearing the double-chinned profile of the last Emperor but one and handed it to Galvanauskas. “Thanks.”

  Galvanauskas had no belt pouch—he had no belt. He tucked the copper into his loincloth. Kyosti thought it was likely to fall out, but that didn’t seem to worry the native. Galvanauskas said something the cantrip rendered as “So generous.” Not till sometime later did Kyosti wonder whether that was intended as irony.

  Sarcasm or not, Galvanauskas’s scheme struck him as better than any the Mussalmians had come up with for themselves. It struck Baron Toivo the same way when Kyosti put it to him. “These blond fellas, they’re sneaky enough and then some,” the leader of the expedition declared.

  The scheme might be better, but it illustrated the difference between better and good. Spooking a unicorn was easy. Spooking a unicorn so that it ran past the place where a couple of Mussalmians hid waiting to kill it proved anything but. Unicorns ran and jumped where they pleased, not where the hunters wanted them to go.

  “We’re supposed to be hunting dragons, not wasting so much time with unicorns,” Baron Toivo said stiffly.

  “But the unicorns are here, sir,” Kyosti said. “The dragons …” He pointed toward the smoking mountaintop ahead. It climbed far higher into the sky now than it had when he first spied it from the jungle. “That’s the nose on one of them. Excuse me—part of the nose.”

  “You really don’t believe we’ll find anything, do you?” Disapproval stuck out on Toivo like a porcupine’s quills.

  “It’s the seeking that counts,” Kyosti insisted, and quoted the poet from ancient days once more. “Look at all the things we’ve found because we came looking for dragons: the tropical vampire, the striped cats, the ‘sparrows,’ and now these unicorns. For the rest of their lives, people who didn’t come on this expedition will be sorry they missed it.”

  “We’ve come seeking dragons. Do you see any dragons here?” Baron Toivo said.

  “No, sir. But I’ve seen all kinds of interesting things, important things, I wouldn’t have seen if we hadn’t come after the dragons,” Kyosti answered. “Any excuse to find things I didn’t know before is a good one, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “I want a dragon.” Baron Toivo peered up the mountain’s flanks in the direction of the smoking crater. “A real dragon, curse it, not some stupid pipe dream from natives who don’t know better than to call a half-asleep volcano a dragon’s nostril.”

  Kyosti wanted a real dragon, too, but he would take what he could get. So would Baron Toivo, of course. The difference between them was that Toivo would complain if what he got wasn’t what he already wanted. As long as Kyosti got things he hadn’t seen before—whether that included dragons or not—he was happy. As far as Kyosti was concerned, Baron Toivo’s insistence that reality should match his desires was as foolish as the natives’ maunderings about dragon nostrils.

  AFTER most of a week in which the unicorns ran the wrong way time after frustrating time, the Mussalmians killed four of them in the space of a day and a half. That let the savants argue about them even more than they’d already been doing. Were unicorns of the horse kind or of the goat kind? The males had a single hoof on each foot, the females two on each, which confused things instead of clarifying them. When a savant cut open a unicorn carcass to see how it was made, what he found sparked more arguments yet.

  “Maybe unicorns aren’t horses or goats,” Kyosti suggested to Sunila. “Maybe they’re something different: unicorns, for instance.”

  The linguistic wizard rolled his eyes. “What a ridiculous notion!” he said. “If you put it to the people who are actually supposed to know such things, both sides will tear you to pieces.”

  “Now tell me something I hadn’t figured out for myself,” Kyosti answered. It wasn’t as if his own specialty were free from feuds. It wasn’t, and neither was Sunila’s. But watching savants in a different discipline go at one another like a pailful of crabs made him chuckle.

  He also stayed busy. Savants on both sides of the unicorns-are-horses, unicorns-are-goats quarrel had him sorcerously preserve bits of dead unicorn so that they could take them back to the Empire for further study. Each of them seemed convinced further study would prove him right and the people deluded enough to disagree with him a pack of cretins.

  And Kyosti got acquainted with unicorn another way. Not all the internal bits got preserved—some of them got stewed instead. He’d eaten both horse and goat. To him, hunger made the best sauce for both. Despite having been hungry when he ate of them, he had fond memories of neither. He thought unicorn outdid both when it came to flavor. Something like veal, something like lamb … Yes, he liked it. Liking food you ate on an expedition was a happy accident, like living through a vampire attack.

  As the explorers climbed toward the smoking peak, they kept killing unicorns. Kyosti’s sorcerous skills got used less and less often; eventually, savants on both sides of the argument had all the specimens they thought they needed. But unicorn—stewed, baked, and roasted—stayed on the explorers’ menu.

  Picking his teeth after gnawing the last of the meat off a roasted unicorn rib, Kyosti asked Uluots, “What do you suppose eats them when no Mussalmian expedition’s in the neighborhood?”

  “What do you mean?” Uluots asked.

  Kyosti waved. “Well, there aren’t many natives in these mountains, and the ones who do live here are a sorry lot. The gang we brought up from the savanna puts them to shame. You can’t tell me that the local savages kill a lot of unicorns. Something must, though, or the unicorns would have eaten up all the scrub; and then they would have starved.”

  “Ah. Now I see where you’re riding. Clever.” The other savant nodded. After a moment’s thought, he brightened. “Maybe dragons eat them!”

  “Well, maybe they do,” Kyosti admitted. To say he hadn’t thought of that would have been an understatement. “We haven’t seen any dragons swooping down on them, though.”

  “Not yet,” Uluots said. “My guess is, we need to go higher.”

  Kyosti’s guess was that Uluots was talking through his hat. If dragons swooped down on unicorns from the sky, the explorers would already have spotted them flying across it. He was as sure of that as he was of his own name. But who said dragons had to fly? Maybe they were too big and heavy to get off the ground. Sunila had thought of overgrown snakes and lizards, after all. If that was what they were, they might still linger in caves or valleys somewhere in these barely explored, almost uninhabited mountains.

  They might. After all, if dragons didn’t eat unicorns, what did? Something had to. If nothing did, this country w
ould be hip deep in them or without them altogether. It was neither.

  So maybe dragons did prowl farther up the slopes. Maybe. But Kyosti still had a demon of a time believing it.

  ULUOTS delivered another cloth-wrapped package to Kyosti a couple of days later. “Now I know what eats unicorns,” the savant announced.

  “What?” Kyosti asked, wrinkling his nose. This package was smellier than the one Uluots had had him preserve before.

  “Whatever makes these.” With more of a sense of drama than Kyosti thought scat deserved, Uluots whipped back the cloth. Kyosti eyed the formidably large, formidably odorous turd with distaste. Not noticing, Uluots went on, “I’ve found unicorn teeth and crunched-up unicorn bones in here. No possible doubt about it.”

  “Happy day,” Kyosti said. “You want me to preserve it?”

  “That’s right,” the savant affirmed.

  “Well, I will, then.” Kyosti both was and wasn’t enthusiastic about the task. He was because sorcerously preserving the turd would make it stop stinking. He wasn’t because … because here he was, using his sorcerous talent to preserve a big, smelly turd. As soon as the job was done, he asked, “What does make scat like that? Something like the big striped cats we saw down on the savanna?”

  “Not if the tracks I found mean anything,” Uluots answered. “They aren’t cat tracks—not even huge cat tracks. Whatever the thing is, it’s got long, skinny feet with three toes, and they all have claws, big claws, especially the middle toes. And I think—I think, mind you—the beast goes on two legs, not four.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Kyosti said.

  “Neither had I.” Uluots proved his enthusiasm could stretch to other things besides scat. “They could be the kind of tracks dragons leave!”

  “That’s—” Kyosti stopped. How could he be sure it was nonsense? People had dug up what they called dragon bones in the Empire of Mussalmi. Some of the skeletons they assembled from them looked to be of two-legged creatures. And, now that he thought of it, didn’t some of those creatures have long, skinny feet with clawed toes? He wasn’t sure if they had three toes on each foot, but he also wasn’t sure that they didn’t. With a barely perceptible pause, he finished, “—very interesting.”