Dragonfriend (6 page)

Flicker nipped down to alight on the trunk beside her.
Lia do good,
he said.

“Lia feels as useful as a spade without a handle.”

The dragonet looked quizzically at her.

“Look, you’ve got two wings. Why don’t you just lend them to me?” She made a fluttering motion with her hands. “I’ve always wanted to fly. I never dreamed about much else, nothing that’s worth telling, but I dream about Dragons all the time. Aye, it’s stupid. I had a flying lesson last week and look where it landed me. Now I’m too weak to climb this stupid cliff.”

To her surprise, the dragonet put his paw on her knee. “Lia brave.”

She knew that Flicker set great store in bravery, but that was the very quality which seemed to have deserted her just now. Despondently, Lia said, “Let’s say we climb this cliff all the way up to the Human world, Flicker. By some miracle, I make it back to Fra’anior Island. What then? Captain Ra’aba will be King, and I’ll be the girl he threw off a Dragonship. I can’t fight him, Flicker. He’s stronger and faster with a blade than any man has a right to be.”

“Lia kill bad-bad man.”

“Lia has two small, clumsy hands, and …” Suddenly, words exploded from her in a scream, “I’m too little and I just can’t do it, you brainless, stupid animal! Can’t you understand? Oh …”

Her outburst had driven him away. Shaking, Lia watched the dragonet disappear above an overhang. She was alone. Too bitter, too furious and ashamed even to cry, Hualiama stared at her fingers. Fingers that became clumsy, blade in hand. Slender arms that would never have the muscle to beat a man like Ra’aba. Not a drop of magic pulsed in her veins. No, the not-quite Princess of Fra’anior was no-one special.

“I’m not enough,” she whispered. “All I ever wanted was to be a Dragon, and here I am, trapped in this pathetic body. I’ve had a chance many people would kill for, being adopted by a King. Even that has slipped away. I just wish I could be …
more.
”

Were these just childhood dreams, a fantasy which should have evaporated like the mists of a Fra’aniorian dawn as she grew up?

She was who she was.

Growing up was a favourite mantra of her father’s. Lately, it seemed to her that Shyana’s influence had tempered his rage, but the King daily trod the cliff edge between political machinations and open hostility with the Dragons. Hualiama had long ago learned to placate him, or she faced being beaten by fist, belt or boot, and once even with a heavily jewelled sceptre. His moods could change at the snap of a finger. Unfairly often, it seemed, she was the target. Lia knew why. Being the royal ward simply meant having to enjoy less love than her royal siblings.

Why should she always strive to prove herself to King Chalcion?

Was this why she yearned to know the Dragons? A soul-deep cry for Dragonish love? Lia winced as this forbidden notion slipped into her mind. Beat it out–immoral, deceitful girl! On that Island lay a fate worse than being dumped off a Dragonship.

As the twin suns wheeled overhead, shortening Ha’athior’s westward-facing shadow until she was no longer protected from the direct glare, Hualiama tied the pitiful scrap of material she had cut off her dress-hem atop her head. Oh, horror of the deepest Cloudlands, she was showing her knees to these lemurs! She giggled manically. No point in dying of exposure, least of all for decency’s sake. Moisture steamed off the vegetation trailing down the cliff. Somewhere nearby she heard the trickle of a waterfall, which would likely evaporate before ever reaching the Cloudlands, adding to the day’s haze. Lia picked a likely route, and wormed her way upward.

Hmm. Those linger-vines …

The tough, fibrous vines grew hundreds of feet long, and formed the staple of the ropes used around the Isles to tie Dragonship cabins beneath the bulging hydrogen sacks, to haul goods and to make nets for fishing the terrace lakes of several of the Islands, not to mention many other uses. Experimentally, she looped one beneath her leather belt. Aye, that could work. Tie herself to one vine in case she fell, while climbing another? One-handed?

Lia looped a section of vine around her legs. Now she could hold it with her feet, while she stretched for the next handhold.

Aye. It took her half an hour of slithering up vines to crest the overhang, but Lia was rewarded with the discovery of what appeared to be an ascending animal-trail leading southward around the Island.

“Ha,” she said, “I don’t need a dragonet, I just need Human brains and ingenuity.”

Her scowl, however, told the truth. She missed Flicker, despite all his silly posturing. Endless chatter, silly witticisms … no mind. Whistling a jaunty tune to pick up her spirits, Lia scrambled over the rocks, following a trail clearly never meant for the tread of a Human foot.

The jagged volcanic rocks made short work of her pretty royal slippers. Lia hurled the remnants over the edge with a frustrated shriek, before biting her lip. She could have used those. For firelighters? A smile curved her lips as she peered out at the Island-World through veils of trailing ferns and vanilla-scented flowering vines, and between trees growing horizontally out of the cliff side, bowing their boughs as if in worship of the great, uncrossable ocean of Cloudlands. Briefly, a cloud of luminous orange giant monarch butterflies swirled out of the foliage, the hand-sized insects wreathing her body as though intending to clothe her in a most splendid raiment.

That was when she spied a slit reptilian eye peering at her from the greenery just beside her head.

“Unholy windrocs!” she gasped, throwing herself backward.

The python struck, but missed by inches as Lia scrambled along in full retreat, trying somehow to keep one eye on her footing and the other on the reptile’s advance. Now she knew what type of trail this was–a trail frequented by pythons large enough to make a tidy meal of undersized royal wards. The trail skirted the cliff edge beneath an overhang in this part. No climbing here. She needed to pass the snake.

Right. May her courage swell from the size of a mouse’s meal to Dragonish proportions.

Hualiama eyed the golden-backed python as balefully as it eyed her. “Come here! I’ll give you this dagger to eat.” She felt for a stone near her foot. Swoop, strike! “Get out of here! Go on!”

Snakes as large as pythons were uncommon on her Island, but Lia knew that in theory, noise and vibration should chase them off. They were ambush predators, not fighters. See, father? All that scroll-worming in the royal library, mostly in search of Dragon lore were she honest, could come in useful in situations like these. Shouting, dancing like an excitable spider monkey and pelting the snake with rocks, Lia chased it off into the undergrowth.

“Come near my family again, Ra’aba, and I’ll do the same to you.”

Lia strutted down the trail, and promptly sliced her toe open on a sharp sliver of basalt.

Midday and early afternoon saw her taking shelter beneath a dead chagga tree, which bore a type of hard-shelled, bitter fruit good for throwing at windrocs or chasing off pestiferous monkeys, of which there seemed to be an endless supply. Hualiama peeled a poor-man’s-apple and ate it without great relish, despite the hunger snapping in her lean belly. The day’s sultry heat robbed her of appetite. Her tan limbs gleamed. Sweat trickled down her neck as her lungs laboured to expel the syrupy air. Oh for a cool breeze, or another waterfall!

Dangling her feet over the cliff edge, Lia gazed out over the pristine Cloudlands, imagining she had Dragon eyes and could see all the way to the Western Isles, hundreds and hundreds of leagues away, to places with evocative names like Naphtha and Ur-Tagga and Xorniss. Where would Ra’aba have sent her family? Would that her soul could have winged across that great void, the unknown, depthless expanse of deceptively puffy ochre clouds, to be with them. Did Shyana gaze to the horizon, mourning her daughter’s death? Did she feel how the beauty of infinite solitude engulfed Lia in waves of aching so intense, that each heartbeat threatened to become her last? Did the Island-World’s majesty both crush and elevate her spirit to exultation?

Here she crawled, an insignificant ant on the wall of the world.

Late that afternoon, when Hualiama crawled beneath a gnarled tree trunk so massive it stood four times her height, almost entirely blocking the trail, she found her waterfall. Thirty feet wide, it was utterly impassable.

A problem for tomorrow. Lia moved forward to lean into the spray, whispering, “Mercy, that’s delightful.” Extending her hands palms-up, she cupped handfuls of water and tossed them over her head and upper body, shivering at the chill pleasure. The suns lowering in the west beat pleasantly on her back.

Lia!
Flicker dropped onto her shoulder.

Surprise almost pitched her into the hissing white flow. Lia wobbled; Flicker snatched at her hair and tore a good chunk out trying to pull her to safety.

Her face seemed stuck between a smile and a frown as she regarded the irrepressible dragonet, slowing her panting deliberately. Finally, Lia settled on, “You lovely little pest. Where’ve you been all day?”

I see your straw is useful for something,
said Flicker, cleaning the strands off his paws.
I was visiting my egg-mother and warren, thank you very much. They were worried about me, unlike your parents … ah, do you have any lemur intestines?

The dragonet looked so cute and contrite, Hualiama had to forgive him, even though she understood only one word in three. “Thanks for coming back, you little scamp. I missed you like I’d miss a mosquito in my ear. Where shall we roost tonight?”
Cave here?

Flicker nodded.
Through the water-that-thunders, flat-face. Follow me if you dare.

And he plunged into the flow with the facility of a trout fleeing the snap of a windroc’s beak.

F
Ive days of
fighting with monkeys, snakes, a nest of black wasps, thorn-ferns and more vines than Hualiama ever wanted to see in a lifetime, garnished with Flicker’s inimitable blend of witty commentary and ingenious insults at her lack of progress, brought her to a place Flicker deemed ‘good’–a protruding ledge with an unparalleled view over the Cloudlands. Putting her hands on her knees, Lia decided she’d smack the snarky dragonet just as soon as she had the energy to do so. She was cut, bruised, abraded and covered in blotchy red spots from the wasp stings. Never had she looked less like a member of the royal household. Never had she looked more like a Dragon’s breakfast, chewed up and spat out.

Then, she punched her left arm to the sky and shouted, “Yes! We’ve done it! We’re less than a third of the way up.”

At that instant, Flicker nipped her ankle-bone.

“Blast it, you overgrown dragonfly,” she gasped, clutching the spot.

Swoooosh!
Lia’s semi-collapse turned into a headlong dive as a massive pair of wings pummelled the air above her body. Windroc! Flicker screeched and flared his neck-ruff as he raced to take on the windroc. Lia scrabbled for her dagger, palmed it, and watched without daring to breathe as the bird gyrated casually on its wingtip, returning for another pass.

She had to find shelter. Vines, bushes, anything would do as opposed to standing in the open while a red-eyed, feral windroc lined her up for a snack. Close up, the bird looked as big as a Dragon–sixteen feet in wingspan, talons which could clasp her head like a fruit, and a cruel, hooked beak which opened now to express its fury in a long, ear-splitting shriek. A five-foot girl and a two-foot dragonet faced the Island-World’s most fearsome avian predator.

It struck Lia that any self-respecting Dragon would have this windroc for a snack. It was only the size of a several months-old Dragon hatchling, after all–a thought which offered as much comfort as a seat atop an active volcano.

Her world seemed to narrow to those talons. Lia crouched, balanced on the balls of her feet. Flicker! The dragonet tangled repeatedly with the windroc, aiming for the eyes. The girl swayed, aiming a dagger-strike at the feathered body. The bird passed overhead again, snapping at her, and Lia had a new cut on her left forearm, five inches long, down to the bone. Great Islands, she had not even seen its strike. Instead of cutting the body, her blade had torn a gash in its wing.

A strategy popped into her mind.

As Flicker and the windroc looped away, scrapping and screeching at each other, Lia snatched up the length of vine she had been using. Cut it off the belt, fool! She secured the vine to the base of a shabis-berry bush, deep-rooted and tough. Her shaking fingers failed to form a slipknot. No time for that. She threw together an overhand knot and braced her trembling knees, trying to calculate the angles as the windroc swooped for a third pass. Mercy, that creature was lethal. One snap of its beak would slice Flicker in half, but the dragonet dodged with great agility … he was hurt! His right wing hung at a poor angle.

Quicker than thought, Hualiama switched hands to hurl her dagger, burying it in the bird’s skull just behind the eye. The windroc barely flinched. Then she tossed her loop of vine at the onrushing bird and dived again, skidding across the bare rock. Talons plucked the material of her skirt and scored fiery pain across the back of her left thigh. From the corner of her eye, she saw the loop catch on the windroc’s neck. The rope jerked taut. The bird crash-landed on its beak.

Rolling, groaning, knocking her broken arm about … Lia was searching for a way back into the fray when Flicker broke free of the dazed predator.

Shelter!
he squeaked, trying to take to the air.

She caught his tail. Dragging the hapless dragonet behind her, Lia ducked beneath a dense thicket. More harsh caws came from the sky as a half-dozen windrocs fell upon their luckless fellow-creature and within a couple of minutes, reduced it to a pile of bones and feathers.

* * * *

My tail, if you please!
Flicker grumbled.

“Sorry.”

I’ll make you sorry, you straw-headed … here’s your dagger.
With a fine, Human-like bow, Flicker presented the dagger to Lia.
My compliments.