Dragon Champion

by E. E. Knight

  He saw a grand tent, its entrance arched with elephant tusks, on his second pass, and wheeled with wing-tips cutting tent ropes to set it alight—along with the man standing before it shouting to his comrades.

  AuRon flapped into the air, ruin in his wake, and noticed an arrow through his arm and a dull ache in his neck. He rolled over in the air and felt a second arrow buried where his neck joined his shoulder. Fighting fury pulsed hot, and he began a stoop to dive and smash and kill—no, he’d just take more arrows that way. He turned and came in low over the burning war-machines, keeping clear of the well-disciplined array of archers ready with another volley. He grabbed a burning war-machine in his saa and, flapping his wings madly, managed to pull it into the air with him. He ignored the painful licks of flame until he hovered high over the archers.

  The bowmen dropped their arms and scattered as the burning ballista fell among them.

  AuRon arced up and folded his wings, turning in the air as he plunged to earth. Just before impact, he opened his wings and beat them so hard a windstorm beneath him tore tents from their moorings. He grabbed up a man and flung him shrieking toward the burning commander’s campsite.

  The turbaned men, helms now fastened above their head-wrappings, gathering in knots of spear-wielding hunters, advancing on AuRon from behind tightly locked shields.

  “Now, Umazheh, to me!” AuRon called.

  The blighters swept out of the morning fog. Their blades, axes, and stone hammers could be seen dull against the pinkening sky as they poured up and over the barricades, dispersed ranks coming together as the circle closed. A few still carried torches, holding them high as they went so smoke masked their coming.

  The men of the south died well. They gathered in little clusters, standing back to back and meeting the blighters on the tips of their spears. In this bitter chapter of the history of hominid warfare, quarter was not asked or expected. AuRon did what he could with his tail—hammering down a shield wall here, knocking aside a phalanx of spears there. By the time the sun was what the blighters called “two hands” above the horizon, it was over. Dead blighters lay piled around little mounds of white rags red with blood.

  The blighters formed a ring around AuRon and sang their song of Deathrage, thanking the fighting fury that carried them through their losses to victory. Then the skull-taking began.

  For a moment in that misty dawn, with the heavy air thick with blood, AuRon thought of leading the blighters south. With so many men dead in the jungle, there would be villages, even towns to the south awaiting spear and flame. Men tried to drive the blighters from the mountains; it would only be just to dispossess the would-be conquerors of their lands and lives. He could, in time, rule a land from the mountains to the southern ocean, that blue ribbon that he had seen on his farthest flights. If he had done this with a few thousand blighters, what could he do with ten times ten the number in a few score of years?

  This would require some thought.

  He saw a blighter turn over a writhing comrade whose gut had been opened by a scimitar sweep. The blighter mumbled something to the pain-racked warrior, then thrust a knife into the cripple’s armpit. The wounded one died with a whimper, answered with equal sadness by the one who ended the pain. AuRon watched tears run down the face of the blighter as he took a ring from the dead warrior’s ear and slipped it over the thin, semi-opposable finger opposite the true-thumb before dragging the body to the hero’s pyre.

  One such victory was enough—even for a dragon’s lifetime.

  There were dead to be burned, families, herds, and possessions to be distributed, leaders to be replaced. Unrush lived through the battle, but all his chieftains had fallen before their men. The bravest of their warriors rose to take their places at the sitting-mats of council meetings. Unrush found a charred sword with a dragon’s head on the pommel in the wreckage of the battlefield, and named his seat the dragon-throne to honor AuRon’s role in preserving his mountains from the encroachment of men. But AuRon took little pleasure in the ceremony.

  He could still enjoy his library. In it were thoughts and ideas far richer than the bickering and chafing between blighter clans that required his occasional attention. AuRon almost wished that Unrush ruled as the kind of blighter-king the men’s tales described: a blood-thirsty warlord who lopped the heads off of any malcontents. Instead, when Unrush’s chieftains could not compromise on the parenting of a family of orphans or watering rights at a mountain pool, they came to AuRon with their petitions. Criminals sometimes appealed Unrush’s judgments. If they were backed by any kind of numbers in the community in the case of crimes of property rather than blood, AuRon told the blighters that exile would be sufficient punishment.

  They were a greedy, quarrelsome race, so AuRon found himself holding audience more frequently than he wished.

  It wasn’t all irritation. The blighters offered him animals every time they came before his dais. AuRon rearranged the crystal-centered cavern to make use of its glowing light: his favorite books and scrolls stood on long tables circling his dais, the wizard-stones that preserved the books ringing the shelves. A tradition grew that only certain favored blighters were admitted past the tables; those lower on the pecking order had to address the dragon from beyond the ring of books. AuRon heard the blighters coin a new title, Uthvhe-Rinsrick, appended to their names, which he translated as “of the Lord’s Inner Circle.”

  But one spring, even the blood of knowledge began to stick in his throat. Driven by an urge only half-understood, he sought escape in flying, circling far out over forest, mountain, and desert. He searched the sky more than he searched the ground, and it occurred to him that he was looking for other dragons.

  The taunts of his sisters came back to him at those moments. Even if he were to fly across a female, “bright of scale, long of tail, and free of male,” as Father used to say, he was not the sort of dragon who made an impression to a potential mate. Nor did he have a rich hoard of coin and gems to tempt her appetite, or a litany of burned towns and hosts scattered to prove him a dragon of fearsome reputation able to guard their young. He looked at his reflection at times in NooMoahk’s fishing pool. He had two horns on his crest already longer than even his rear spur-claws, and two more nubs were coming in. All his battle scars proved was that he was a thin-skinned gray, ruler of a few villages of goat-herding blighters hiding among the ruins of a broken empire.

  Hardly the sort of dragon who would attract a mate.

  But flying, exploring, patrolling could keep the thoughts away for a time. He had just finished a hunt in the forests of the southern borderlands on foot, snapping up two-legged flightless birds that ran from him with bobbing heads, when he came across the washer-women. While taking a drink from a stream, he smelled humans in the water. Something about the smell made him want to investigate. He followed the flow, creeping along the riverbank as low to the ground as a snake. He traced the tantalizing smell to its source: a village built up off the ground on poles. Pigs and chickens lived under the stilted huts, with humans above. Women washed clothes at the river. It was their rich female smell that had attracted him.

  His appetite, which he thought sated just minutes ago by a bellyful of flesh and feathers, got the better of him, and he rose from the riverbank reeds.

  The women left their laundry, screaming as they ran to the huts. AuRon dashed after them, flattening reeds and scattering piles of wet cloth, but they had too much of a head start. Men poured from the village, snatching up arms and shields. He had no desire for battle in the middle of a man village with foes on every side. AuRon snapped impotently at the hindmost female. Frustrated, he turned his chase into flight and rose to the sky, strange lust-hunger forgotten.

  AuRon flew north, wondering if he had learned a lesson. He had heard tales of young mateless dragons chasing down hominid females, even pursuing them into castle towers or taking them prisoner to toy with before eating. According to Mother, it meant the end of many a dragon. Hominids avenged the loss o
f their women, whereas a dragon could sometimes make off with half a herd in the belly and get away with it.

  Perhaps he’d become that sort of dragon, pursuing the smell of human females instead of his own kind. He saw himself as a nightstalker, twisting natural desires down a desperate path that would lead to his death. Sickened at the thought, he resolved never to chase down that particular smell again.

  But that night, he dreamt of screaming womanflesh.

  “A prize, a gift for you we bring, O AuRon-vhe,” Unrush Uth-Rinsrick said some months later. “Today the Feast of the Deathrage among my people is marked. We remember! We give! We revel! Join us, we ask. The fireblades gather.”

  The blighters had probably dug up a jade bauble in one of the ruins to the south. AuRon had a collection of statues in his library. The statues were better company than blighters: quieter and certainly more aesthetic.

  “In what manner am I to join?”

  “Accept our offering. We bring you a prisoner.”

  AuRon nodded. So that was it. The blighters occasionally brought him some wretched hunter who had wandered too far in the forest. Rather than just kill him, they presented him to AuRon and watched while he made a meal of the trespasser. The half-starved prey never made much of a dinner; he would have preferred a bullock.

  The blighters filed in and formed a circle. AuRon cast a wary eye over them; he had set down a law that said no weapon larger than a dagger was to be brought into his cavern. A blighter witch-doctor had stirred up a few malcontents against him once; while they perished in fiery battle, he never did find the witch-doctor. AuRon didn’t trust any but Unrush. A dragon couldn’t afford to trust if he was to live long.

  They dragged the captive in. He was small and dirty, pinioned by a pole thrust across the small of his back and bracketed by his elbows. His hands were bound before him. One of the keepers pulled him along, and another lashed him from behind with a leather switch.

  AuRon unwrapped himself from the dais—wanting to put the captive out of his misery and be done with it—and the blighters fell back to form a ring around dragon and prey.

  “Day of death! Rage of death!” the blighters chanted.

  “Take your sacrifice, sacred spirit of the fireblades,” Unrush howled, rolling his eyes in barbaric ecstasy.

  AuRon sniffed the captive, and startled. The woman smell. The hunger that was not all hunger rose in him, wetting his mouth and quickening his heartbeat. AuRon trembled like a hatchling out of the egg.

  The sacrifice raised her bruised face. “Bite. May you choke on me, if you’ve forgotten your daughter, Auron,” Hieba said in dragon tongue.

  Chapter 19

  AuRon’s mind flashed back to his good-bye in the woods outside the lumbermen’s stockade. He saw Hieba again as a scared little girl, running from her guardian through the wildflowers.

  When the first shock faded and he saw the ring of confused blighters again, he snorted.

  “Berrysweet!” It felt good to say the word again. He stepped around her, putting his body between Hieba and her captors.

  “I can’t believe I’m here again,” she said quietly, perhaps more to herself than AuRon. “It feels like this was a dream-life.”

  The blighters grumbled to each other. The one who had beaten her shifted to the back of the crowd.

  AuRon turned his head toward the blighters. “The Umazheh may go,” he said. “By a trick of fate, I know this human. There’ll be no ceremony with her. Go with my profound thanks—you’ve given me five herds’ worth of satisfaction in bringing this human here.”

  Unrush scratched the gray bristles at his temples and talked to his fellow chieftains.

  “Bring her to the dragon-throne tomorrow night, my lord. We will have oxen and swine, and wine in the year of our bargain first casked. What is your answer?”

  “I will be there. Tomorrow night.”

  Hieba touched her dirty, scratched hand to the crystal statue.

  “I remember this from when I was little,” Hieba said, speaking the tongue of the sons of Tindairuss. AuRon had to ask her to repeat words at times, but it was a version of a language NooMoahk knew well and had passed on to him. “I believed this was my mother and you were my father, Auron. The stone was light and warm and constant, and you were strong and brave and wise. I wonder what it is? I suspect it’s worth a principality of Hypat.” She sagged against the pillar and sank to her knees.

  “You need sleep and food,” AuRon said. “A bath perhaps? There’s still the trickle at the back of the cave. It’s bigger than you remember. I added rocks to give the water more notes to play on its journey.”

  But she was asleep.

  AuRon sniffed around the cavern. There were a few joints lodged high up in the pillars carved from the rock, but he suspected the meat was past edibility—at least to a human—even in the cool of the cave. He did not want to leave Hieba alone in the room, though it would be a suicidal blighter who would return to do her harm after he had dismissed them. He went into the outer city and burned out a rockchuck nest. The hare-size rodents would at least make a mouthful or two for Hieba when she awakened. He hurried back to the cave with his scorched prizes to find her comfortably asleep in the warm light of the statue.

  It was a testament to her exhaustion that she did not awaken at the smell of cooked food, or for hours afterwards. AuRon curled his long body below the dais and looked at her. There was still something of the little girl he knew in the concentrated expression on her face: Hieba had always slept as if she were putting her mind into it. Her bronzed skin and jet-black hair, slender limbs and supple bosom marked her as a human of some beauty, as he was able to judge it.

  She arose and let out a squeak of excitement at the food, tearing into it with nail and tooth with a ferocity that would do a hatchling credit.

  “I’m so happy to find you, still here, still yourself, Auron-who-was-a-father,” Hieba said.

  AuRon sniffed at her; beneath the dirt and sweat he could smell a grown woman. “It’s pronounced AuRon now that I’m a full-fledged dragon,” he said. “Though you may call me pony as you first did and I’d be glad just for the sound of your voice.”

  Hieba put her arms about his neck and he felt her squeeze, a prrum came from deep within him.

  “AuRon,” she said, trying it out. “AuRon. The name pounces like those golden cats in the mountains. Suits you.” She broke off the embrace, walked along his side, and squatted to look at the folds of his wings.

  AuRon had a thousand questions. “Have you traveled far?”

  “Yes. Though I was on horse until my blighter guide played me false.”

  “I’m sorry,” AuRon said. But hominid treachery was hardly a new story. He had scrolls—and a lifetime of experience with it.

  “Not from the tribe that brought me here; this was a different group. They trade with the Dairussan. Perhaps they took me for a long-lost Bant on her way home.”

  “The sons of Tindairuss?” AuRon translated. “You grew up with them?”

  “Yes. My childhood was over as soon as I went into that camp. They put me to work doing laundry and sewing, always sewing. I think I could sew in my sleep. I was there for years, and I even ran away once to find you again. But I came back hungry and cold.”

  “So you’ve run away again?” AuRon asked.

  “No. When I was perhaps fifteen, a group of soldiers rode into camp, under a captain. He was a man of great renown. A man named Naf Touraq.”

  AuRon snorted. “Did he once travel with dwarves, working for a man named Hross?”

  Hieba laughed. “Yes. The same Naf who found me, who gave me to you in the desert. All the other soldiers threw their filthy rags at me and pinched whatever they could reach, but not him. Naf saw something that made him call to the others to bring me to him. He had that shield-point thing you wore on your tail in his lap. I was trembling. I was of age, and I knew it would happen sooner or later. But it wasn’t what I feared. Or maybe hoped. He wanted to talk. He told
me the story from his eyes, and gave me back the shield. He said it was made by dwarves and given to you as a present. When I heard the story of how he found me, it brought back memories of my parents. I had actually forgotten them until I started talking to him. I went to sleep remembering that night of fire and screams.”

  “He is a good man. How many others in some nest of thieves would take such risks to preserve a child?”

  “I know.”

  It felt good so see Hieba’s smile, to hear her oddly mature voice—yet he felt a tinge of jealousy at the longing expression on her face. AuRon waited for her to continue.

  “He never left my thoughts after that, ugly though he is. I . . . I rode off with him. He and his riders were patrolling the borderlands. There were rumors of blighters up the river from the timbermen’s settlements. Naf and his Red Guard were to take care of the danger. He took care of it by riding with one other man into their camp and making a treaty. It turned out that the blighters were happy with the timbermen; there was more game in the clearings they made. They came to a just arrangement and even began trading. I could see why his men loved him. He’s a warrior who would rather talk than fight. He claims it’s not by natural desire, but by experience.”

  “There are no winners in battle. Just survivors,” AuRon agreed.

  “The blighters on the river told of a dragon who had made an alliance with the blighters of these mountains. These were the families of some who did not want a dragon as their liege lord.”

  “They offered to guide you to me?”

  “No, that came later. Naf and the Red Guards had other business south, and I traveled with them. I learned to ride, to pull a small bow from horseback, even to swim my mount across rivers. Naf modified your shield so I could wear it on my arm. I practiced with it and a dagger in the hand opposite. The men laughed until I used it in a fight. But something happened while Naf was rigging it to fit over my forearm. I don’t know if I kissed him or he kissed me . . . it doesn’t matter. Naf and I are in love, AuRon, and we’ll be married now that he’s taken a position with the Silver Guard at the Dome. He’s popular with the men, and he’s made himself indispensable to the Ghioz—they’re a foreign people with their own tongue who rule Naf’s. He’s risen higher in the ranks than any other of the Dairuss.”