Battledragon (21 page)

In those strange waters, so the stories went, dwelled creatures long since lost in the rest of the world. Among these were animals like dragons, except that they lived their lives almost exclusively in the waters.

As the fleet drew closer to the coast of Eigo, so they heard more and more of these stories from both sailors and legionaries. Dragonboys had passed on many tidbits.

All of this had sparked a lot of discussion. In fact, it was what the 109th were talking about at that very moment.

Vlok had heard that the sea dragons of the Nub of Eigo had enormously extended necks and four flippers rather than limbs.

"How can these be the ancestors?" Vlok wanted to know.

"I don't think they are," said Alsebra. "I was told long ago that we came from a short-necked kind that lived in northern oceans."

"Can wyvern dragon interbreed with these long necks of the inland sea?" Roquil, the young leatherback, wanted to know.

"Ah, Roquil thinks of fertilizing the eggs of the ancestors," said Vlok with a chuckle.

"We all know that Vlok would rather eat their eggs," snorted the Purple Green in a crushing tone.

"In answer to the leatherback's question," said Alsebra, "probably not."

"But our kind can interbreed with the wild dragons; there are living examples."

Everyone knew that Roquil was talking about Bazil and the wild green dragoness known as High Wings. The young ones, Braner and Grener, had been winged and much like their mother. They now lived in the uttermost north where they haunted the migration trails of caribou and mammoths.

"True, but wild dragon and wyvern dragon share common ancestors. We are two kinds but of one blood."

"Yes, yes, of course.." There was a lot of nodding and several dragons shifted position around the pool.

"We are too different, then?"

"Yes."

A pity, but there it was: there'd be no point in fertilizing the eggs of these monsters of the sea.

Bazil listened with one part of his mind while with the other he thought fondly of his "family." They would be swooping down on polar bears no doubt. Wild dragons were immeasurably fierce.

Possibly too fierce, he mused. His own little ones had evinced very little affection for their male parent. Indeed, they had berated him for lacking wings. He chuckled, indulgently. They were wild and beautiful, just like their mother, but they were also his. Someday he would like to lie with the green dragoness again.

He felt a prod in the shoulder.

He rolled over. An alarmed man in the dress of the islanders, simple white tunic and scarlet headband, jumped back. Behind him were two others and a cart loaded with small barrels.

"Beg pardon, great and noble dragon, but we wish to honor you with this barrel of
pulji
. We have several more for your fellows."

"What is
pulji
?

They rolled the little barrel toward him, broached it, poured out a cup, and held it up to him.

Bazil sniffed it cautiously. He was aware of other interested eyes.

"You try it," said Bazil. Vlok spilled it with his sniff. Another taste was poured for Alsebra.

"Some kind of beer?" said Vlok with hope in his heart.

"Yes, it is made in a similar way," said the men in the white tunics.

"That is good, very kind of you islander men." Vlok picked up a barrel and crushed one end to open it. He took long pulls at it while the others watched.

"Yes, very good," he said.

"Vlok has never been much of a judge of beer, if you ask this dragon," carped the Purple Green.

"What does a wild dragon know about beer? You drink polar bear blood instead."

Alsebra grunted with amusement.

All the dragons communed for a moment with small guilty voices of conscience, which they quickly overcame.

There were no dragonboys to say no. Dragon Leader

Wiliger was away visiting a native village. Soon they were all drinking the
pulji
.

It was peculiar stuff, not really beer at all and more like wine. It was sweet, and there was a smell both fruity and slightly rotten to it. Still it was wet and cool, and they made the best of it.

They lay back on the coral sands or splashed in the pool. An hour passed, and all of them were lost in dreams. The effect was subtle, but it mounted, and in time they all fell silent and just stared about themselves in an extremely self-absorbed and reflective mood.

The native men in white tunics had returned. Bazil found a pair standing beside him.

"Great monster, we have an offer for you." The Verio was accented but comprehensible.

Bazil blinked.

"We think you should stay on our island. We will feed you and give you much
pulji
and you will live here in the pool by the lagoon."

It sounded kind of nice.

"Yes, you will be good monsters, and we will keep you and send away the other men, and you will tell them that they cannot keep you against your will. You will be ours instead."

"We will be good masters," said another.

Masters? Bazil blinked again. He worked for no "masters" and that very name reeked of the Great Enemy that he fought as did all wyvern dragons.

"No," he said firmly. "I work for no masters, ever." He pulled himself to his feet.

"Oh, but you will, great dragon. Because we will give you
pulji
and you will want
pulji
."

Bazil blinked again. He did not actually care for the effects of
pulji
. It was hard to think clearly. It would be impossible to sing.

"Dragons could be very useful in building things for us," murmured one of the men.

The men were smiling. Bazil did not like their smiles.

"No. I am a fighting dragon, legion dragon. Too busy. Good day to you." He stepped away from them and headed for a stand of palm trees that marked a nearby farm midden. That farmer was getting a heroic addition to his manure pile from the presence of so many dragons. He trod down the muddy track still muttering to himself about the men who wanted to be "masters." He recalled the face of the Mesomaster by the Pit beneath the dread city of Dzu. That was the way this dragon would deal with any men who wished to be masters of dragons. Dragons were volunteers in the legions.

He was on his way back to the pool, thoughts returned to a fond anticipation of dinner, and was negotiating a place where the path widened and crossed a little hidden stream making the surface boggy, when he felt something brush his head and then a net fell across his upper body. A rope was pulled up from the mud across the front of his legs and he was struck hard in the middle of the back.

With a startled cry, Bazil toppled forward and fell heavily. An excited screaming went up, and he looked up to see a dozen or more of the native men in their white tunics gathered around him. Several of them threw more nets over his head, others had ropes and poles in their hands.

Bazil saw red. He lost control of his temper quite completely. Perhaps the effects of the
pulji
even magnified the rage.

With an awesome roar, he surged up from the mud. The men gave a collective shriek but held on to their ropes. He fairly howled as he tore at the netting and ripped it to shreds. Ropes snapped as he kicked his huge legs, and men, still clinging to their ends, were tossed headlong into the undergrowth. Bazil seized hold of the long pole that had been used to topple him. When two men tried to pull it back, he lifted them bodily and flipped them into a tree.

Some fool jumped on his back and struck him with a club on the back of the head. He reached around, seized the man by the scruff of his neck, and tossed him into the center of the bog.

Now he swept the pole around him like a club and battered trees, men, rocks, and a small shepherd's hut, which succumbed entirely.

The remaining men broke and ran with an enraged wyvern dragon in hot pursuit, still flailing with that long pole. So much for a leisurely afternoon by the pool!

Yet the dragons were not the only members of the 109th fighting Marneri who were in desperate trouble.

Relkin had gone for a walk, scaling the slopes of the smaller and older volcano called Rudwa until he reached a spectacular viewing spot. From there he could see the fleet laid out in a line on the lagoon and the offshore reef beaten by the surf. There was a wonderful tropical quality to the light that fascinated him for a while. Then he'd gone on down into the saddle between the volcanoes to the fertile heart of the island. He wandered past farmland where com and pineapples grew, and ambled through groves of fruit trees.

The air was warm and soft, redolent with spicy aromas. He felt relaxed and quite at peace for once with only an occasional pang of wishing for Eilsa.

Crossing a little stone bridge over a stream, he found to his great surprise, Swane squatting by a far pool of water. Swane ducked his head into the pool and shook the water off with a gasp.

Swane looked up. Relkin saw that his upper lip was thickened and bloodied. There was a bump on his forehead and a scratch on his cheek that was still bleeding.

"Relkin, you gave me a start. Where'd you come from?"

"What happened?"

"We're in trouble, me and Jak."

"Yeah?"

"Especially me."

"What happened?"

Swane stood up and set off through a grove of trees. Relkin followed him to a glade and found little Jak sitting beside the prone form of Birjit, Swane's hefty admirer from the
Barley
. A pool of blood had stained the ground beneath her.

Jak was green in the face.

Relkin groaned softly, understanding at once what must have happened.

"She followed you?"

Jak nodded in numb agreement.

"Never saw her," said Swane. "Never thought to look really."

"And?"

"She attacked me when I went for a swim."

"What?"

"She told me I had to make love to her or she was gonna cut me. She had a big knife out, too."

Relkin cursed and spat on the ground.

"She wouldn't stop, Relkin, even when I got my own knife out."

Relkin had dropped beside the sailor. Poor woman with her crazy fixation on Swane, why couldn't she have left him alone? Why did it have to end like this?

She didn't seem to be breathing. He felt for her pulse.

Nothing. He cursed bitterly, they were really in for it now. Then he felt it, still coming, but weak.

"She's alive, you dolts! What are you standing there for? We've got to stop the bleeding."

Awakened from their shock, Swane and Jak helped Relkin to turn Birjit over. Swane's blade had gone deep, below the ribs, above the liver.

"I didn't want to do it, I kept telling her to stop."

"That's true, I was there," said Jak.

Relkin worked quickly and methodically to clean the wound with freshwater and to staunch the bleeding with a bandage made by tearing up Swane's shirt.

"You stabbed her, you lose your shirt," said Relkin with no attempt at humor.

"What are you acting so high and mighty for, Quoshite?"

"She's alive, so you two are probably not going to hang, but you think Wiliger will let you go without thirty lashes apiece? I don't."

"By the Hand, I don't think I could take that," whined Jak.

"I don't see that you've got much choice. They might hang you anyway. I'm sure the ship captains will ask for it."

"I didn't do anything," said Jak, appalled.

"I couldn't help it, Relkin," Swane chimed in. "It ain't fair to blame me.
She
attacked
me
."

"Help lift her, get this bandage around her chest and tie it tight. We have to stop the bleeding right now and carry her back. Jak, we need a couple of long pieces of wood as poles, and we need something to string between the wood to act as a stretcher. You understand me?"

Jak headed into the grove and shortly returned, accompanied by a native with a donkey and a small cart. The man had poor Verio, but Jak had managed to convince him to come by the simple expedient of giving him a silver coin and showing him another one and then walking in the direction he wished to go.

The dragonboys pointed to the wounded sailor and then pointed in the direction leading to the lagoon. The farmer understood soon enough, and they carefully lifted Birjit into the cart and walked beside it as it rumbled down the dusty road toward the sea. They trudged in silence, each wrapped up in gloomy thoughts of the near future.

Aboard the
Barley
the catastrophe proceeded to unfold in just as dreadful a fashion as Relkin's worst imaginings.

Dragon Leader Wiliger took one look at them, daubed with blood, Swane puffed and cut, and immediately decided that they were lying and had conspired to attack Birjit. He ordered all three dragonboys arrested and conveyed to the brig in chains. When he reported to Commander Voolward, he demanded field punishment of the third grade. That meant fifty lashes apiece, followed by castration and life imprisonment.

Voolward was stunned. Not only by the crime committed, but by Wiliger's passion over the matter and his determination to see the three youths destroyed.

Voolward decided to interview the dragonboys. The accused were entitled to some kind of trial, after all. And there was something not quite right in the dragon leader's voice, something that hinted of malice and even hysteria.

The dragonboys told another story altogether. It sounded preposterous. The sailor jumping on a dragonboy and demanding sexual favors? Women just didn't do such things. Yet there was something open and honest in these young men and their vehemence when they insisted that they had not tried to rape the woman.

The surgeon's report gave their story a shade of corroboration. Only one boy had evidence of a fight. The others merely had the sailor's blood on them. There was no evidence of a sexual attack on the sailor.

They'd brought her back themselves and admitted to having stabbed her. Wiliger hadn't mentioned this, and the omission chilled Commander Voolward. Surely if these boys had tried to rape her, they would have killed her and tried to blame the islanders. Voolward was deeply troubled. Dragons that lost their dragonboys would be difficult to work with, and in the coming campaign the dragons would have a vital role.