Dragon Champion

by E. E. Knight

  They found a westward-flowing river and followed it along its twisted course. They came across ruins, both of ancient stone construction and more recent wood, before reaching a human settlement set behind a wide earth-and-wood loop. The woodsmoke and man smell reached even across the river. Canoes and fishing floats were pulled up to the riverbank, and timber bundles stood ready to be floated downstream.

  They swam together through the cold water and emerged on the settlement side of the bank. The sound of axes could be heard from the woods, and they could see part of the stockade through the trees. There were stubbled fields lying fallow in the clearings. Near enough. Auron tried to find the right words, but their special shared language wasn’t up to the task.

  “Hieba, now you join ones like you. They take care of you.”

  She looked doubtful. “Strangers. Not know.”

  “We talked this through before. You’re human. You must grow up with humans.”

  “No. Me with you.” Troubled, she’d reverted to childish pidgin, “Find food, find shelter, me get wood, you make fire. Like same before.”

  “I go NooMoahk. Maybe danger. Blighters. Not safe for you.”

  “Me safe with you.”

  “Safer here, Berrysweet.” Auron put down his shield-spike, dug the point in the dirt. “Here, you keep this. A present.”

  “No!”

  “Yes,” Auron said, turning away. He was unable to look into her face anymore.

  She picked up Djer’s tail-cap and followed.

  Auron wheeled. “No. You go. You human. Not good with dragon.”

  She planted her legs and set the shield between them, gripping it in wiry young muscles. “I strong. I smart. I come.”

  Auron’s tail lashed. He dropped his fans from his crest and growled. “No. Go.” His stomach writhed with unhappiness. The last thing he wanted to do was scare her into running, but if he had to . . .

  “Hieba stay with Auron,” she said, eyes running with water and her dark tangle of hair streaming in the fresh wind.

  “No!” Auron roared. Pheasants took to the air, and the sound of axes chopping ceased. Auron snarled. “You stay. I go.”

  Tears flowed down her face, creating streaks through the dirt. She took a step toward him, dropping her weapon and opening her arms to put them around his neck.

  Auron spat fire at his feet, creating a wall of flame between them. He looked at her face, distorted by the heat between them, and felt a pain like a knife enter his heart. He saw the forms of men with spears and axes running through the trees. He jumped through the curtain of flame, roaring and snapping.

  “Go! Run from me, Hieba!”

  She screamed and fled, all brown limbs and hair disappearing through the brush. Toward the men.

  Chapter 17

  The moldering city echoed even emptier without Hieba’s chickadee chatter. Auron had fewer worries on his trip back, but he had grown so used to the child’s presence in their months together, he found the void she left impossible to fill.

  He hoped he could replace her by becoming engrossed in the dragon’s library. NooMoahk hardly knew he had been gone. The black sniffed at the bighorn sheep Auron bore as an offering and settled down to the meal without question or comment. Auron returned to his studies and NooMoahk’s on-again, off-again tutelage.

  Auron’s tenacious memory made the best of his time and studies. He learned living alphabets and dead tongues, the epic poetry of Gwer and antithetical prose couplets of Doong. The library had many old, well-preserved works. All of NooMoahk’s writings hardly had a smudge of dust or a scent of mildew, whatever their age.

  “Something in those wizard lights,” NooMoahk said. “They preserve the paper. They don’t stop the ink from fading. I have scrolls that are illegible now, but they keep the damp out and the dust off.”

  “I’d like to know more about how they do these things, my lord. Are there books on magics here?”

  NooMoahk pulled back his lips in disgust. “Don’t dabble in magic, Auron. There’s always a price. Spellcasting takes its toll from the wizard, the subject, and the world at large. That desert north of these mountains, the earth died there because of wizardry. When you crossed it, did you see a place where there were pits and holes of different sizes in the earth?”

  Auron remembered the refuge of the waste elves. “Yes. That had something to do with a wizard?”

  “Yes, his name was Anklamere. Those craters are from a fire-hail he called down on his enemies. Anklamere’s tower stood farther east. He withered a land greater than some nations with his magics. Tidairuss had once counted him an ally, but they grew estranged, and in the end, Anklamere allied himself with that murdering Bloodyhooves fellow. The woman whose head I singed was an assistant of his.”

  “What ever happened to him?”

  “Tindairuss slew him like the mad dog he was in the end. I didn’t see it myself; I was occupied with Anklamere’s gargoyles at the time. But he had once been a great man and a good friend. Tindairuss seemed years older afterwards. He died soon after, in battle. Life hasn’t been the same since we parted. I can’t see an army on the march without thinking of him, and it pains me like a spear. We were good friends. It was a friendship such as two dragons cannot have, for we worked as a team. With dragons, there can only be mating, if female, or challenge, if male. There was none of that with him.”

  NooMoahk faded into sleep, and Auron unrolled a map, trying to associate some of the names and places the old dragon had mentioned. NooMoahk often spoke of great events, which as far as he knew weren’t even legends by this time. Other empires had grown and faded in the interim; the deeds of NooMoahk’s prime were forgotten.

  None of which helped him learn the weakness of dragons.

  He learned Elvish. It was a subtle tongue more of rhyme than reason, with the most expansive alphabet of the tongues—to get the sound of the words right. He recited their songs and poetry, but found little of magic, history, or the ordering of the natural world. The dwarves and men were better sources for such matters.

  His studies slowed as the seasons passed, for he was more and more occupied with feeding NooMoahk. The black hardly left the cavern except on summer days, when he would drowse away the hours at the mouth of the cave with his bare patches of skin absorbing the sun. Otherwise he slept. When he was awake, though he no longer treated Auron as a challenger, he sometimes took him as his own kin. Auron received a wealth of mind-pictures of NooMoahk’s youth, when the blighters still ruled the heart of the continent. He saw men, dwarves, and elves unite to overthrow the blighters’ power, with dragons in the middle. Some ruled blighter kingdoms as feudal lords, others helped the allies, more remained neutral, and a few profited like vultures from the dead strewn across battlefields without count.

  Seasons turned to years, and Auron grew. Soon he was carrying back two sheep, or three goats, or the biggest of deer in his mouth. His tail began to regrow. Long blisterlike swellings grew across his back, and NooMoahk, when awake in his lucid moments, sniffed at them approvingly.

  “Your wings are starting to rise. One day they’ll pop. The skin on your back will be almost clear, and it’ll itch like you’ve got fire-bugs. I should think you’ll be a fine flier, Auron. You’re not weighed down with scale.”

  “That’s what Mother said.”

  “She was right. It’ll be time for you to mate, once you can fly. There’s no young dragonelles in these mountains, as far as I know. You may have to do some flying before you can sing your song. By the way, I don’t think I’ve heard your lifesong.”

  Auron snorted. “I’ve had other things to think about than composing hymns to myself.”

  “You’ll wish you had worked on it when some flash of green catches your eye,” NooMoahk said. “Though you may have to do a lot of flying to find one. When I first fledged, I had my choice, but those were different times. I haven’t seen a female in . . . well . . . long enough so I can’t remember when exactly.”

  Auron gav
e voice to an old worry. “Even if I do find one—I don’t impress. Nothing to shine.”

  “A good song will cover for your lack of scales, and more. Take some hints from those elven poems. You’ll want a song to impress. After your mating flight, she’ll expect you to help find a prime spot for your clutch. There’s no pride in this world like what you’ll feel when you hear your first eggs tapping.”

  Auron thought back to his bitter entry into the world.

  “Funny thing about hatchlings. First being they see, well, it’s mother as far as they’re concerned. I heard an old story once about a clutch on a mountainside. The parents were killed one way or another, and the hatchlings took to this old turkey-vulture that came to eat the dead male. The turkey-vulture ended up raising three dragons until they were old enough to climb down from the heights.”

  “Really, my lord?” Auron said.

  “There were a couple of other occurrences, but I can’t think of them now. That elf Hazeleyes might have some notes in her papers. There’s a leather folio with some of her scribblings on the shelves somewhere. She was very interested in the subject.”

  “Hazeleye?” Auron didn’t want to press the matter. NooMoahk’s mind worked best when left to wander at its own pace. Auron had learned that too many questions could confuse him out of his recollective mood.

  “Yes, a scarred-up she-elf. My last visitor before you.”

  Auron felt a thrill flutter up his spine between his still-cased wings.

  “Maybe some of the stories are in her notes. Could I see them?”

  “You’ll get a chance to practice your Elvish. She made herself a little table here somewhere. Her notes might still be around. I made her write down some of her sea-chants for me.”

  The table had been upended in one of NooMoahk’s addled rampages through his library. Auron righted it, and found papers and scrolls folded in a leather blotter. Hazeleye had evidently run short of writing material and used other scrolls for her note-taking, writing between lines and in margins. She used ink, charcoal, and even blood in a hand that varied from spidery to minuscule. Auron concentrated and tried to follow her thoughts crammed in between the more flowing script of the author.

  NOOMOAHK KNOWS . . . TONGUES . . . ELVISH IN THREE DIALECTS, THE TRADE SPEECH OF DWARVES, BLIGHTER . . . APPARENTLY EVEN THE MOST SCATTER- BRAINED SPARROW HAS . . . MEN DEVELOPED PARL, FAST BECOMING A TONGUE COMMON BETWEEN THE TOOL- MAKING RACES. THIS INTEREST OF THE DRAGON IS UNCOMMON, BUT HARDLY RARE. LITERATE DRAGONS COME DOWN TO US IN LEGENDS OUT OF THE EAST . . .

  It was heavy going.

  It took months and innumerable trips back and forth to the crystal at the altar-dais where the light was better, but he fought his way through her notes, first organizing them and then reading them as NooMoahk dozed. It was obvious that she was putting together a book on dragons, everything from their birth, maturation, mating, and aging. Much of it made little sense to Auron; she spent a good deal of time disproving beliefs of the hominids that had sprung up around dragons. At times he couldn’t determine what she was trying to disprove, though some she outlined. He thumped his tail in amusement when she spent pages describing the fire bladder. Hominids thought dragons were like the earth, with a mysterious center of fire that they brought forth like a volcano erupting in limitless quantities. Even with her conversations with NooMoahk, she got a few things wrong. Her descriptions of mind-pictures made it seem like a mental conversation between dragons, rather than the sharing of pure experience from one dragon’s memory to another.

  She filled any number of pages with stories of dragons out of the egg attaching themselves to their mother and the few cases, some of which she considered apocryphal, of hatchlings “fixing” to other species because their mothers were not present when they hatched. She supposed with time dragons could be domesticated like any other species the hominids chose to husband. Auron ground his teeth and felt his fire bladder pulse at that thought: Imagine dragons raised like chickens. Of course, the fault in her theory, to Auron, was the acquisition of the first generation of eggs. He wouldn’t care to be the elf, dwarf, or man who tried to wrest a clutch away from a mated pair.

  He surreptitiously studied sorcery, but found the endless formulae, recitations, hand movements, and minutiae of magic dreary. He preferred the tales told by the scrolls of civilizations, where he learned that combing a list of their rulers’ edicts revealed more than histories, though they made for interesting reading, as well: stories of brooding tyrants and fiery revolutionaries, statesmen who plotted behind the scenes and women who intervened behind the bed-curtains.

  Years waxed and waned. The blighters quit leaving offerings of food. NooMoahk’s appetite had diminished, but Auron’s increased. He was growing, and no matter how much he ate of a kill, he was hungry before the sun made a quarter of its journey across the sky. He remembered his father’s advice about overhunting his territory and made sweeps through the forests of the south lasting for weeks. He was grateful for the mild winters on the south side of the mountains: there was always game to be had. He never had to resort to eating blighters. The blighters had built a few mud-and-wood communities in the foothills, surrounding them with palisades of sharpened tree trunks Auron didn’t care to challenge, for spears were plunged into the soil before every hut.

  The change happened on one of his long hunting trips out, eleven winters after saying good-bye to Hieba. He was resting high on the vine-laden head of an elephant statue dominating a forest ruin, watching the grassy square before the statue. A seep of water still came up through a shattered fountain, pooling among the broken paving-stones. He had found fresh deer droppings in the grass, and decided to wait for the herbivores to reemerge. If he was quick, he might get two before the others bounded off into the forest.

  An annoying itch across the stretched skin of his wing cases drove him to distraction. He was trying to remain motionless, a mottled green-and-gray atop the elephant god, fighting a battle against the urge to scratch himself against the cracks in the stone statue.

  Antlers emerged from the forest gloom; a black nose sniffed the air of the ruined city-square. A buck stepped forward to stand as still as the elephant god while he took in the land with deep brown eyes.

  Auron tensed.

  The buck crossed toward the fountain, taking three steps, then standing. Three steps, then standing. His harem followed him out of the forest, immature males to either side, heads swiveling at every birdcall.

  Auron shifted his rear legs, ready to leap down among them with claws splayed. He gathered himself for a spring.

  A burning sensation shot up his back, followed by an all-consuming itch. He fought a brief battle against raking need. Though he was hungry, he lost his concentration and gave in to instinct, rolling on his side. He found a crack atop the statue and drove his back across it in pained ecstasy.

  The deer sprang for the woods, but he hardly noticed. He pushed his burning back across the statue, making for a jagged ear. He felt his grip go, and he was falling through the air, vexed not at the plunge down the side of the statue but at the loss of his scratching surface. He pivoted his long torso and landed with a thud that sent dead leaves flying and mud splattering against the pinkish stone. Auron took a pained breath and backed against the statue, sawing his spine against it. He felt something burst and wet his back. The relief was indescribable. He writhed and sawed the other side of his back against the edge of the statue, with a like result. The side of the statue was coated with blood, pus, and a clear liquid. Auron reversed his neck and looked at his back; his skin hung in shreds on either side of his spine. Knobby projections stood just behind his forelimbs.

  Auron went to work with his teeth, rending flesh and working the hole in his skin wider. The clear liquid was hot and bitter on his tongue. He chewed a long furrow down his left side, then his right, along a bony limb working itself out of the wounds.

  A bloody wing unfolded, without Auron willing it. It had two joints beyond where it joine
d his shoulder, one midway along its length and the second near the tip. It rather reminded him of the wings from the bats in his parents’ cave: the skin stretching from his back to the pointed tip had the same leathery, veined look. He lifted it above his head. The skin was thin enough for him to see the sun through it. But there was another to free. Auron savaged the other side until his right wing unfolded. He began to lick his wings clean, despising and at the same time greedy for the taste of the slimy fluid still clinging to the membrane surface. With that done, he returned to the top of the elephant in a quick climb. He wanted wind on his wings to dry them.

  He extended them to the sky, feeling newly freed muscles work along his back. He turned himself so the sun shone better on the glistening wings. The gaping wounds at the base of his fleshy fans hardened—the sunshine or the air turned the liquid into a clear extrusion. Pain throbbed along his back, but the relief from the nagging pressure and itch compensated for it.

  He flapped his wings experimentally. They made a creaking sound as unused joints aligned themselves. He extended his span as far as he could. Judging from the shadows they cast atop the elephant, his wings were as wide as he was long, though the shadow of his frame seemed tiny compared with the expanse of wing.

  It occurred to him that he had seen a dragon fly only once, and that was Father rising in battle from the cave. He flapped again, more vigorously, his wings curving as they went up and down like a skilled oarsman rowing. As dead vegetation flew from the vines, his front feet rose from the surface.