Dragon Champion

by E. E. Knight

  “Ugly elf-witch,” one of the sailors muttered to the other as they picked Auron up. They attached a line to his cage and lowered him into the dark of the hold. Musty-smelling netting lay everywhere: bound around cargo, piled on the floor, hanging limp from the ceiling. They ensnared Auron in another layer of it, securing his cage to the ship’s side, as if the leather bands and cage weren’t enough to keep him captive. Auron smelled rat urine.

  He waited a day, a night, and another day in the stuffy hold. Rats nibbled at the sore spots the leather had made on his hide. Hazeleye fed him, and cleaned him by spraying seawater into his cage. The water disappeared into some kind of gutter at the wall of the ship.

  “I’d give you some chicken if I dared take your bands off,” she said, pouring a little blood-mixture into the nasal tube. He still hated the tube. He felt as though he were starving anyway, so he might as well starve without having a piece of leather threaded through his snout twice daily. No matter how much he struggled and glared, she persisted in her feedings.

  Two other hatchlings arrived, caged as he was. One was hardly out of the shell, a young silver dragon with a barely healed wound where its egg tooth had been. It was wan and looked at him miserably. The other was green, a dragonelle.

  Auron made mind contact with the young male, and got such a wave of confused anguish that he had to break off the conversation before it even started. He read all its history in a flash. The dragon had been hatched in captivity, had never known the smell of its mother or the proud eye of its father. Just some brute of a blighter who had cared for it, and poorly at that. It was harder to know the mind of the female; she must have been a more distant relation. If they could only speak!

  He tried again, simplifying his thoughts to her, trying to remove emotions, mind-pictures, ideas, anything but bare words.

  “You . . . name?”

  “Not . . . as . . . such.”

  Not as such? What did that mean?

  “I Auron. I gray. Father AuRel. Father bronze. Your name?”

  “Not . . . as . . . such.”

  Auron thumped his tail against the deck. Wasn’t she paying attention? “What?”

  “Not as such.”

  Auron broke it off and rotated his neck so his eyes faced the wall. But for some reason, he felt better. Just the smell of other dragons, the feel of their minds, comforted him. In some ways, wretched as he was, he had it better than they. The dragonelle didn’t have the knack of mind-speech, and as for the poor young male, fresh from the egg, he was utterly lost. At least Auron had known his mother and father, his sisters. He had seen dragons and knew what he was.

  Hazeleye and another elf came into the hold, two ship men trailing behind. The male bore a box. He set it carefully on deck and opened it. Sawdust spilled out onto the floor, Auron sniffed the distinctive dry odor. The ivory tip of a dragon egg could be seen within.

  The elves spoke for a moment; Hazeleye squatted and put her ear to the egg, before shutting and locking it again. They talked as the sailors secured the chest among sacks half-filled with more sawdust. The male spoke sharply to one of the men in Parl.

  “Watch it there, that’s not a cask of pork. Humans! You never take the time to do aught properly, do you?”

  The sea-men ignored the comment. Perhaps they were inured to that kind of speech from elves. Another sailor descended with a pair of lanterns, and put them next to the chest. Auron smelled the almost dragonlike scent of burning oil. The elves spoke some more, and Hazeleye pointed to netting in the corner of the hold.

  Later that day, the ship’s motion altered. Auron felt it change directions, and rock harder side to side. Was it beginning its flight above the water?

  Auron submitted to a feeding from Hazeleye and watched her do the same to the female and the hatchling. It was almost as bad to watch it as it was to go through it. He tried to keep out the other dragons’ pain as best he could.

  With the ordeal over, the elf filled the oil in the always-burning lanterns and climbed into some smaller netting strung between two square-carved tree trunks holding up the ceiling above like stalagmites in a cave. Auron watched her rock and think with the eye facing her, and she looked back at him. With one eye.

  A man in clothing so bright, it reminded Auron of a dragon’s hide stepped down into the hold the next morning. “So, how is our floating garbleup?” the man said, using an unknown word.

  “Well enough, Captain. It’s not my first passage.”

  “To the Isle of Ice? Truly?”

  “A long voyage, I know.”

  “Then you should also know better than to claim you could hire another ship.”

  “It got your mate to do what I wanted.”

  “This is my third trip in three years. Each time with dragons.” He looked at the cages. “This one won’t live much longer,” he said, eyeing the little one. “The female seems a fine strong one—you’ll get your price for her. But what is this?” he said, coming to Auron’s enclosure.

  “A male.”

  “Of no color? His Sagacity’ll no more take him than he’d buy a basilisk. He’ll be cut up for fish bait by sunset the day we land.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “I know the pointy-head will laugh in your face if you try to sell him a birth defect.”

  “Then he doesn’t know as much as he claims about dragons. Rumor is he has an idea to breed them. A gray can have any color offspring.”

  The captain shook his head. “I think not.”

  “Captain, these cages aren’t doing them any good. Can your armorer fix it so they’re chained to the wall?”

  “If you’re willing to pay for the damages to my ship.”

  Auron saw the elf clamp her jaw shut as tightly as his. “Yes,” she finally said. Funny that hominids could show emotion now and again. It made them almost dragonlike.

  “Then I’ll arrange it, kind heart. I might have a goosedown pillow in one of my sea chests, if you’d like that for their precious heads, as well.” He walked back up the entry hatchway, chuckling. The elf said something to herself in her own tongue to the gaily colored back.

  She walked over to Auron’s netting. “Were you listening? Were you?” she asked, absently patting him as she looked up the hatchway the other had used. Auron didn’t understand her language, but at her touch, he knew her feelings. They were warm and caring, similar to Mother’s, and lifted some of his misery. She paused in her stroking, drawing her hand away as if he were burning. Her eyebrows came together like head-butting hatchlings. “You were listening,” she said, switching to the Parl she employed with the captain. “I saw your eye. You looked at me; you looked at the captain. Are you one of the dragons who know our tongues? Nod if you understand.”

  Auron wondered if he could turn her sympathy to his advantage. He had watched hominids enough to know that for some reason they shook their heads side-to-side to indicate negation, up-and-down for agreement. Dragons sensibly closed or opened their nostrils. He shook his head up-and-down.

  Her eye widened, and then she laughed. It was a pleasant sound; he liked it despite himself. “I wonder if you’d speak,” she mused. “I don’t think I’d better give you the chance. I’m childish-foolish, but I’m no fool.

  “I know something of dragons, little one. I used to be as fresh and little as you, when I had flowers in my spring hair. Our . . . what would the word be in Parl . . . elders, our frost-haired elders thought me bright, so I was apprenticed to a great . . . student-nature, no, student of nature. Her name was Ilsebreadth. She knew everything there was to know about wild creatures. She could tell what kind of winter we’d have by where the squirrels would hide their acorns, or tell if a pine tree was healthy by smelling the sap. She spoke to bears and owls about their hunts.”

  At the mention of hunting, Auron perked up a little. Then he remembered his hunts with Wistala, and his hearts ached at the loss.

  “The frost filled her hair as I grew up, but there was still one great mystery: dragon
s. She became obsessed with finding an ancient dragon before she had to put down roots for the last age. She sought one of the first sons lingering from the days of your kind’s dominance. Yes, I know, dragons were here before the paran, the blighters, or their descendants, the naran—the speaking-people.”

  Auron wished he’d been born into a time before the naran. Why did the Great Sprits have to curse the earth with them? Squabbling fools.

  “Dragons make art, dragons tell stories, all without the written word. Your kind’s history goes far before and beyond that, into the mists of time. What secrets you must know!”

  Auron followed her story with no small amount of difficulty; she had to pause to form words, as if she was used to thinking of her tale but not speaking it. Especially not in Parl. There were no mind-pictures, either, but that could not be expected from an elf. Even—and Auron admitted this only with his hatchling teeth rubbing against each other in displeasure—a kindly elf.

  The elf tucked her long lower limbs under herself to sit beside him. Again Auron found the gesture almost dragonlike.

  “She decided to hunt NooMoahk, the black. Not hunt to kill, but hunt to meet. It was a long hunt, and we picked up enough dragon lore for a shelf of books. After much travel, we came upon a caravan trader who had sold a warrior black dragon scales for a shield and armor. After a good deal of bargaining, he agreed to take us to the dragon’s hold. We had to cross a desert, the hardest journey of my life. Ilsebreadth sickened and died on the trip, but I pressed on after; I didn’t want her dream to die with her.

  “I found him, but was betrayed by the trader. He wanted to use me, then hand me over to the dragon—for more scales, I suppose. I got away only after an ugly fight with his men, which left me with this memento,” she said, turning the corner of her mouth up on the scarred side of her face and revealing hair the fiery colors of a fall forest. The leaves growing in her locks had a dry smell, like bark peeling from a birch.

  “I found NooMoahk, easy as berry picking. Would you believe I came face-to-face with the greatest of all blacks? A slender twig of a youth before a dark hurricane? He would have eaten me, I’m sure, but I’d picked up a strange tidbit while writing Ilsebreadth’s words for her records. I knew you dragons love music. I had a poor voice for an elf, but I sang him a sea song:

  Agone, away, abreast the endless sea

  To circle in my journeys,

  And then come home to thee.

  “That was one of the verses. A silly song that rose and fell like the waves. But he liked it. He cocked his head, like a dog hearing a whistle—”

  How Father would snort if he heard that, Auron thought.

  “—and said a word to me. In my own tongue, the sea tongue, even: more. And I gave him more. He was old, isolated, lonely. I think he liked having someone to talk to, even if it wasn’t another dragon. In his turn, he told me some fine stories. Kings forgotten even by their worn-down coin, empires turned to dust, terrible battles that would live forever, if only someone could remember who fought or why.”

  Auron flexed his claws inside the leather mittens. Did elves always talk this much? Hazeleye was worse than his sisters.

  “Perhaps he was too old, for I read to him some of our inscriptions of dragon lore. He corrected the work of Ilsebreadth, filled in gaps. He had a dream of understanding between dragons and people. He said it had been so, once. But he let slip the great weakness of dragons without even knowing it.”

  Hmmpfh, Auron thought. Dragons have many weaknesses, but no great one. Wouldn’t Mother have mentioned it so he could be on his guard?

  Wait, another part of him said. The patient part, that had been memorizing her story, in case he could glean some advantage from the rows of words. Father had said that the dragons were dwindling in number. Had some flaw been discovered in the masterwork of the Great Spirits? A fatal flaw?

  She leaned closer. “Would you like to know the great weakness, little one? The chink in the armor? I put it in the book, but it was burned by those barbarian fools years ago.”

  The cargo hatch came open, and the ship’s armorer descended with chain wrapped across his shoulders and tools. Hazeleye stood, as if ashamed to be caught next to him.

  “You want the beasts chained?” the armorer said. Auron felt himself demoted from being someone to be talked to, to just a beast.

  “Well chained,” Hazeleye said. “They’ll be healthier if they can move a little. I want my investment to pay off.”

  Being chained was better than being bound and caged. The bands were taken from his snout, the little brass emblem no longer waved at him from the other side of his nose. The collars around his neck and under his arms weighed on him. But he could move.

  At first it was excruciating. When he first moved his foreleg after the armorer unhooked it, his sii and saa in chain-and-leather bags fixed by a bracelet, the agony of it brought a squeal from his still-closed mouth. He rolled on his back and over again at the pain. It blinded, it ran along his skeleton like a bolt of lighting. As it faded, he felt himself at the end of the chain he had thrashed to its limit, just a leg-length from the wall.

  “Secure enough,” the armorer said. “Watch his claws—I don’t think he can get through the mail in there, but there’s no telling what a dragon can do in time. You’d be better off killing him and feeding him to the others, though. A gray’s worthless.”

  Hazeleye said nothing.

  Auron watched him fix the other two hatchlings. The littlest one hardly put up a fight; it just lay limp in its bonds after one wiggle. The green must not have been as long confined. She struggled to her feet before crashing to the deck.

  The armorer returned to Auron, and jerked the eyebolts attaching the twin collars to the wall. He nodded in satisfaction and picked up his tools.

  Alone again with Hazeleye, Auron stared at her, moving his limbs in their sockets. He stretched and it felt good. He used his other eye to look at the eyebolts, remembering how the armorer had used a tool like a blunt knife to drive the claw-thick screws into the wood. Man and his ingenious tools! He’d driven metal claws into wood with no more effort than a mother dragon would use to roll an egg in the nest.

  The fixture was worth a closer look.

  Little enough light came into the hold, but Auron could tell it was night. Hazeleye slumbered in the reek of the oil lamps warming the egg chest. Her hair had transformed to a dried mass of seaweeds. A few bulbs hung amid the tresses.

  Auron’s nose hurt, but this time it wasn’t from a feeding. After two false starts, he learned how to use his egg horn to turn the screws holding the eyebolts in the wood. He unscrewed one too far, and it clattered to the floor. The elf moved in her sleep, but she did not open her eyes.

  He had the rest almost out of the wood. One good pull, and he would be free!

  The hatchling female watched him. She strained against her bonds once, rattling the chains. He glared at her, trying his best to think “Keep quiet!” to her incommunicative mind.

  “You are clever, little one,” the elf said from her hanging bed.

  Auron spun, ready to throw himself against her. He wouldn’t be caged again; he’d impale himself on whatever weapon she drew before they could do that to him. She made no move to rise. She lay there, spinning a golden coin between thumb and forefinger. On it Auron saw the insignia of the faceless man spread-eagled in his circle.

  She tossed the coin into a bucket holding some plates and remains of dinner. “Go on. I won’t stop you. One thing, though, when you jump off the ship, be sure to head east. We’re out of sight of shore. Do you know how to find east?”

  Auron sniffed the air about her, searching for a fear-smell but finding only elf and bilge, then nodded his head hominid fashion, up-and-down.

  “Remember, little gray dragon, that I let you go, and told you where to swim. If there’s any honor in you, someday you’ll repay the favor.”

  Ever so slowly, she got up.

  “Trust,” she said, using Drakine.
Badly, but he understood the world.

  “Trust,” she repeated, moving toward him. She went down on her hands and knees, and put her head below his.

  “Trust,” she said, reaching out ever so gently to tickle him under the chin. He stifled an involuntary prrum. She turned something beneath his snout, and drew out a long metal pin. His muzzle fell away, and he opened his aching mouth.

  “Will you remember this night, I wonder,” she said, backing away from his young sharp teeth. He smelled her fear now—no, it was just tension.

  “Trust,” he said in Parl, as badly as she spoke Drakine. He must find out the weakness of dragons she’d mentioned. But first, there was something just as important—

  He flung himself against his bonds, not at her, but at the green. He broke free of the wall, trailing chain and eyebolt. He clawed at the chains with his bagged sii, then reached an arm up and chewed the bag off his foreleg, losing a hatchling tooth in the thick leather. He tasted his own blood.

  “Run! You have no time,” Hazeleye hissed, her ear cocked towards sounds of alarm from above.

  Auron tick-thump-thumped across the deck to the green, his claw and three bagged feet making it a strange waddle. He touched his nose to hers, and her eyes opened in surprise. She had bright white-gold eyes, brighter than his mother’s or his sister’s.

  “What is your name?” Auron thought.

  “Natasatch, you blockhead,” she thought back.

  Auron broke contact and scrambled up the wooden steps to the hatchway. He thumped it open with a head-butt. Once it gave way, he heard Hazeleye scream “Ware! A dragon’s loose!”

  Auron climbed onto the tilted deck, found sailors of the night-watch running to gather sailcloth and rope. He opened his mouth to threaten them and smelled the clean sea coming in over the side of the ship on a welcome breeze. The air smelled like freedom—he ran toward it.

  A skinny sailor, braver or less experienced than the rest, grabbed at the iron links dragging behind him as he neared the rail. Auron lashed with his tail, catching him on the temple, then turned and snapped his teeth shut, just missing the young man’s face. The youth released the chain, sat upright, and scuttled backwards with a speed that gave Auron more satisfaction than anything since he had been captured. He heard water foaming against the side of the ship somewhere below in the darkness, and shot under the rail and over the ship’s side.