Prairie Fire (10 page)

“I am Lieutenant Commander Declan Porter,” he said, his British accent showing through. Also, he said “lieutenant” properly, which I liked, even though it was still a beast of a word to rhyme. “It is my job to tell you all about the local dragons of our fine locale, though the irony of lecturing a bunch of Canadians on their own dragons does not escape me. We will have two additional dragon slayers joining us, one American and one from Japan. They will arrive tomorrow and shadow other mentors. It's our busy season, however, so all the classwork falls to me.”

He waited, but as he had not asked a question, we weren't sure how to reply. He sighed, and I wondered if we'd just passed a test or failed it.

“Right,” he said, and threw a blue beret with a tan and red stripe on it to Owen. “Follow the crowd, and you'll find your billets. I expect to see you at breakfast tomorrow, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”

We started to move out.

“Thorskard,” he said again, and we all stopped. “Owen, you and McQuaid stay here.”

I fell out of line, and came to stand beside Owen as the rest of our troop filed off in search of their beds. I considered my options. English dragon slayers were usually progressives and had a tendency to be a bit wild when stationed away from home, though they had nothing on the Australians.

“Let me see your hands,” he said when the others had gone. I appreciated his directness and held them out for him to look at. Owen chewed on the inside of his cheek.

“Not as bad as I was led to believe,” Porter said. “You'll be slower than the rest, of course, but you've managed to get this far. I don't see what the problem is, so long as you don't get anyone hurt in the field.”

“Siobhan, sir—McQuaid—is as good in the field as a dragon slayer,” Owen said. It was kind of the truth, and I appreciated it. Unlike most non-professionals, I excelled at knowing when it was time to run away. Except, of course, for that one time when I hadn't.

“Noted, Thorskard,” Porter said. He did not quite smile. “Now go and make sure your squad isn't wandering around somewhere, hopelessly lost without you.”

We both stood at attention again, and then headed off after the others. We found them already claiming beds in the barracks. The guys only had two spare cots in their room, but ours was more than half empty because we were the first squad to arrive. It looked like, once again, the women would be mixed and the men would be separated by squad. I looked forward to meeting squads from other countries. On every pillow there was a new UN-blue beret, striped with the red and tan colors Canadians wore in the Oil Watch, and decorated in accordance with our rank as official, if very new, members. It felt the same as my old one when I put it on, digging in above my ears and scratching against my shaved head, but when I looked at the others, I thought maybe it wasn't the same at all. Alberta or not, we were for real now. The melody had shifted again.

WITH OUR BARE HANDS

When Lieutenant Porter said “it's our busy season,” what he'd really meant was “Shit, there are dragons everywhere. Duck.” I know this, because that's what he said the next morning, as he was hustling us out of the mess hall while the sound of alarms filled the air. That last part was directed at Annie, who was about as tall as Owen and had walked under the short part of the arched doorway into the dragon shelter without realizing she was about to knock her head.

This shelter was quite different from any I had ever been in before. For starters, it was above-ground, which I knew because there were also windows, presumably dragon-proofed, as much as that was possible. When I looked out of them, I could see the grey-washed cityscape of Fort Calgary, punctuated by the totem poles. We hadn't been able to see much of it the night before. I knew that Calgary had a strict building code: no wood, no green, no exposed lines or wires—nothing that burned—but seeing it in daylight was something else entirely. Fort Calgary was a military base, with very few non-essential personnel. Even most of the practice courts were covered. When people talk about the “concrete jungle,” they usually imagine cities with interestingly-shaped buildings and telephone poles. This was more of a concrete wasteland. Said wasteland was currently under attack by a brilliant purple dragon, similar in size to a
lakus
, but apparently much faster.

“Can anyone besides Josephson tell me what kind of dragon that is?” Porter asked. Laura looked a bit put out.

“It's a Wapiti,” Annie volunteered.

“Red or Blue?” Porter pushed.

“Sir, it's purple,” Ilko said timidly, just as plume after plume of red fire poured out of the dragon's maw, bathing the uncaring concrete in colour. “Um, Red?”

“Very good, Ilko.” Porter didn't even sound sarcastic, but that might have just been his accent. “You can't tell a Wapiti Red from a Wapiti Blue until they are breathing fire on you, but they're not shy, so it's usually pretty easy to determine which one you've got. Why are the fires different, Josephson?”

“Do you mean from each other, or from other dragons' fire?” she asked, without looking away from the window. A dragon slayer had appeared in one of the plazas and was trying to entice the Red into landing while her fire crew hung behind.

“Both, if you don't mind,” Porter said.

“Wapitis get their name from the Wapiti River,” Laura said. “The eggs hatch on the river banks, and the soil acidity is what determines the colour of their fire.”

Everyone in the room flinched back from the windows as the Red tried to go for the dragon slayer head first, only to snag its wing on a totem pole at the last moment and pull up screaming with rage. The dragon slayer brandished her sword in a familiar challenge.

“However,” Laura continued, “fire isn't exactly what they breathe. It's more of a superheated acid, which will burn whatever it touches. The blue is more acidic, but the red'll still kill you.”

“Thank you,” Porter said. “Speed, please tell us what you know about the totem poles.”

And so it went. While Courtney outlined the practicalities of the totem pole system, including an explanation of why it was not feasible in regular towns, we watched the dragon slayer succeed in goading the Red onto the ground in front of her. From there, it was fairly straightforward and nothing I hadn't seen dozens of times, except for the colour of the flames and the part where the fire crew only had to worry about the acid eating away at the concrete, and not any trees or grass the dragon might have scorched.

When the dragon was finally slayed, Porter led us out to have a look at it. Our fire crew mixed with the more experienced one, learning what chemicals were best, and Porter showed Owen the dragon's hearts. They looked the same as any other to me, and they were located in approximately the same place. Owen, who had been his usual antsy self while we were in the shelter, calmed down a bit when he saw them, though. This was something he knew how to do.

“It's not always quite so hands on,” one of the medics was telling Davis, his Texan accent so thick I could barely understand him. “But Porter likes to break you in, so to speak.”

“Owen slayed a dragon during Basic,” Davis said, rather proudly.

“It's ‘we,' Davis,” Porter told him. “‘
We
slayed a dragon during Basic.'”

“Yes, sir,” Davis replied, though he snuck a glance at Owen, who smiled.

While we were waiting for the cleanup crew to arrive, I related the story of the Singe'n'burn we had slayed at Gagetown. I'd told the story enough times now that it was starting to develop a rhythm of its own, and I knew that a song would show up sooner or later, if I wanted to write it down. I probably should, even if I had to lump the whole fire crew into the same theme instead of giving them their own parts. It was the first thing we had done together, anyway, so maybe I could get away with writing it in clumps and no one would realize it was because I still couldn't musically separate the fire crew.

The cleanup crew surprised me. They were not Oil Watch, as I had been suspecting, but wore civilian fireproof coveralls. Even more oddly, all of them were Filipino, or at least I was reasonably sure they were. Owen caught my confused glance, questioning, but this wasn't the time for it. Instead, we followed Porter back to the mess, grabbed whatever was still edible off our trays, and went into the training room. We didn't cover very much, because the other dragon slayers hadn't arrived yet, and since both of them were internationals, they needed the instruction more than we did. Instead, Porter told us about the dragons he'd grown up fighting in England, though I was reasonably sure he was exaggerating when he told us about the Cornish Game Hen.

“They're about the size of a Great Dane,” he told us. “We SAS lads entertain ourselves by sneaking up behind them and snapping their necks, barehanded.”

“Sir,” said Wilkinson, “don't Cornish Game Hens have really strong fire projection?”

“They do,” Porter admitted. “That's why you have to come up behind them. It's a bit messy if the dragon gets its head turned around. I don't recommend it. But it's the smallest dragon in the UK, so you can't really blame us for using it to experiment on.”

“What about a Welsh Rabbit?” Dorsey asked. “It's smaller, even though it's meaner.”

“The Welsh Rabbit is not a dragon,” Porter said, starting the sentence as Eliza Doolittle and finishing it as Mary Poppins. Annie covered a snicker.

It was something of a sore point with British dragon experts because no one had ever been able to get close enough to a Welsh Rabbit to find out what it was. Well, close enough and
live
anyway. Popular theory was divided between those who thought the Rabbit was some kind of evolutionary hiccough, and those who thought it more likely that the Rabbit was the result of some crossbreeding between the Common Welsh Green and a local raptor species called Montagu's Harrier, which had presumably ended rather badly for the bird.

“Do you name all of your dragons after food?” Courtney asked.

“Only the ones we can kill with our bare hands,” Porter told her.

It's possible that she was about to say something vaguely inappropriate, but there was a knock on the door and a messenger came into the room.

“Are they arrived, then?” Porter said, looking slightly less relaxed now that there was another officer in the room.

“They have, sir,” said the messenger, a second lieutenant, now that I could see his insignia. Technically, both Owen and Annie outranked him, but while we were in training, the usual military hierarchy got a bit murky.

“All right, you lot, back to your barracks,” Porter said. “The others will be arriving, and I want you to be there while they are settling in. Thorskard, the dragon slayers are Crawford and Yamamoto. Introduce yourself.”

“Yes, sir,” Owen said, and we were on our way out the door.

For the first couple of days, at Gagetown, walking everywhere with thirteen other people had felt ridiculous, but now it seemed quite normal. Maybe the halls were wider. I fell in beside a couple of the firefighters I hadn't spent a lot of time with yet, and they both smiled at me.

“Never a dull moment, I guess,” Mikitka said.

“Only enough to sleep, if we're lucky,” I replied.

Crawford turned out to be Nick Crawford, of New York City. This was of interest to me, because New York was one of the few urban areas in the world that had been able to incorporate aerial combat into their dragon slaying, and I was eager to hear about how that worked. I had imagined it with violins and piccolos, and I hoped that the reality was as intriguing as what I'd pictured. Yamamoto was Kaori Yamamoto, a powerfully-built Japanese girl from Sapporo who spoke uncertain but very good English.

“She's had a lot of training with mountains and snow, which will be handy,” Owen said to me privately on the way to lunch. “And hey, we won't always be last alphabetically.”

So here we were: forty new members of the Oil Watch, as international as Pearson might have dreamed. The Japanese fire crew had middling English skills, but the medics were proficient, and both their engineer and their smith had been trained in England, which Porter enjoyed when he found out about it. The Americans were from the south, mostly, though there were a couple of Californians. We met their mentors at dinner. Kaori's mentor was the Texan dragon slayer we'd seen in action that morning, a broad-shouldered woman several years younger than Porter, with hair in tight braids across her scalp. Nick's was a Maori woman who might have actually stood a chance against Aodhan in an arm-wrestling match.

An aerialist, a mountaineer, and a protector of farmlands. That wasn't how I thought of Owen, but it was how he thought of himself, so it's what I tried to convey. After three seconds talking with Crawford, I knew that he was as violin as they come: born to play the featured part and with the range to deserve it, though still skittish and playful if caught unawares. Kaori's bass clarinet rounded out the trio quite nicely, providing a calm stability that not even Owen's horn could match. It might sound strange at first, all these parts together against such a harsh backdrop as Fort Calgary. But I could listen harder, more closely, and I knew that these were people we could work with and, more importantly, live with.