The Dragon Book (7 page)

“There is
now
,” the magistrate said. He looked down at his papers. “There is plainly no question of guilt in this case; it only remains what is to be done with the creature. The priests of the temple of Jupiter suggest that the beast would be most highly regarded as a sacrifice, if you can arrange the mechanics—”

“I’ll set her loose in the Forum first!” Antony snarled. “—No. No, wait, I didn’t mean that.” He took a deep breath and summoned up a smile and leaned across the table. “I’m sure we can come to some arrangement.”

“You don’t have enough money for that even now,” the magistrate said.

“Look,” Antony said, “I’ll take her to my villa at Stabiae—” Seeing the eyebrow rising, he amended, “—or I’ll buy an estate near Arminium. Plenty of room, she won’t be a bother to anyone—”

“Until you run out or money or drink yourself to death,” the magistrate said. “You do realize that the creatures live a hundred years?”

“They do?” Antony said blankly.

“The evidence also informs me,” the magistrate added, “that she is already longer than the dragon of Brundisium, which killed nearly half the company of the fourteenth legion.”

“She’s as quiet as a lamb?” Antony tried.

The magistrate just looked at him.

“Gaul?” Antony said.

“Gaul,” the magistrate said.

“I hope you’re happy,” he said bitterly to Vincitatus as his servants, except for the few very unhappy ones he was taking along, joyfully packed his things.

“Yes,” she said, eating another goat.

He’d been ordered to leave at night, under guard, but when the escort showed up, wary soldiers in full armor and holding their spears, they discovered a new difficulty: she couldn’t fit into the street anymore.

“All right, all right, no need to make a fuss,” Antony said, waving her back into the courtyard. The house on the other side had only leaned over a little. “So she’ll fly out to the Porta Aurelia and meet us on the other side.”

“We’re not letting the beast go spreading itself over the city,” the centurion said. “It’ll grab some lady off the street, or an honorable merchant.”

He was for killing her right there and then, instead. Antony was for knocking him down, and did so. The soldiers pulled him off and shoved him up against the wall of the house, swords out.

Then Vincitatus put her head out, over the wall, and said, “I think I have worked out how to breathe fire, Antony. Would you like to see?”

The soldiers all let go and backed away hastily in horror.

“I thought you said you couldn’t,” Antony hissed, looking up at her; it had been a source of much disappointment to him.

“I can’t,” she said. “But I thought it would make them let you go.” She reached down and scooped him up off the street in one curled forehand, reached with the other and picked up one of the squealing, baggage-loaded pack mules. And then she leaped into the air.

“Oh, Jupiter eat your liver, you mad beast,” Antony said, and clutched at her talons as the ground fell away, whirling.

“See, is this not much nicer than trudging around on the ground?” she asked.

“Look out!” he yelled, as the Temple of Saturn loomed up unexpectedly.

“Oh!” She said, and dodged. There was a faint crunch of breaking masonry behind them.

“I’m sure that was a little loose anyway,” she said, flapping hurriedly higher.

He had to admit it made for quicker traveling, and at least she’d taken the mule loaded with the gold. She hated to let him spend any of it, though, and in any case, he had to land her half a mile off and walk if he wanted there to be anyone left to buy things from. Finally, he lost patience and started setting her down with as much noise as she could manage right outside the nicest villa or farmhouse in sight, when they felt like a rest. Then he let her eat the cattle and made himself at home in the completely abandoned house for the night.

That first night, sitting outside with a bowl of wine and a loaf of bread, he considered whether he should even bother going on to Gaul. He hadn’t quite realized how damned
fast
it would be, traveling by air. “I suppose we could just keep on like this,” he said to her idly. “They could chase us with one company after another for the rest of our days and never catch us.”

“That doesn’t sound right to me at all,” she said. “One could never have eggs, always flying around madly from one place to another. And I want to see the war.”

Antony shrugged cheerfully and drank the rest of the wine. He was half looking forward to it himself. He thought he’d enjoy seeing the look on the general’s face when he set down with a dragon in the yard and sent all the soldiers running like mice. Anyway, it would be a damned sight harder to get laid if he were an outlaw with a dragon.

Two weeks later, they cleared the last alpine foothills and came into Gaul at last. And that was when Antony realized that he didn’t know the first damn thing about where the army even was.

He didn’t expect some Gallic wife to tell him, either, so they flew around the countryside aimlessly for two weeks, raiding more farmhouses—inedible food, no decent wine, and once some crazy old woman hadn’t left her home and nearly gutted him with a cooking knife. Antony fled hastily back out to Vincitatus, ducking hurled pots and imprecations, and they went back aloft in a rush.

“This is not a very nice country,” Vincitatus said, critically examining the scrawny pig she had snatched. She ate it anyway and added, crunching, “And that is a strange cloud over there.”

It was smoke, nine or ten pillars of it, and Antony had never expected to be glad to see a battlefield in all his life. His stepfather had threatened to send him to the borders often enough, and he’d run away from home as much to avoid that fate as anything else, nearly. He didn’t mind a good fight, or bleeding a little in a good cause, but as far as he was concerned, that limited the occasions to whenever it might benefit him.

The fighting was still going on, and the unmusical clanging reached them soon. Vincitatus picked up speed as she flew on toward it, then picked up still more, until Antony was squinting his eyes to slits against the tearing wind, and he only belatedly realized that she wasn’t going toward the camp or the rear of the lines; she was headed straight for the enemy.

“Wait, what are you—” he started, too late, as her sudden stooping dive ripped the breath out of his lungs. He clung to the rope he’d tied around her neck, which now felt completely inadequate, and tried to plaster himself to her hide.

She roared furiously, and Antony had a small moment of satisfaction as he saw the shocked and horrified faces turning up toward them from the ground, on either side of the battle, and then she was ripping into the Gauls, claws tearing up furrows through the tightly packed horde of them.

She came to ground at the end of a run and whipped around, which sent him flying around to the underside of her neck, still clinging to the rope for a moment as he swung suspended. Then his numb fingers gave way and dumped him down to the ground, as she took off for another go. He staggered up, wobbling from one leg to the other, dizzy, and when he managed to get his feet under him, he stopped and stared: the entire Gaulish army was staring right back.

“Hades
me fellat
,” Antony said. There were ten dead men lying down around him, where Vincitatus had shaken them off her claws. He grabbed a sword and a shield that was only a little cracked, and yelled after her, “Come back and get me out of here, you damned daughter of Etna!”

Vincitatus was rampaging through the army again and didn’t give any sign she’d heard, or even that she’d noticed she’d lost him. Antony looked over his shoulder and put his back to a thick old tree and braced himself.

The Gauls weren’t really what you’d call an army, more like a street gang taken to the woods, but their swords were damned sharp, and five of the barbarians came at him in a rush, howling at the top of their lungs. Antony kicked a broken helmet at one of them, another bit of flotsam from the dead, and as the others drew in, he dropped into a crouch and stabbed his sword at their legs, keeping his own shield drawn up over his head.

Axes, of course they’d have bloody axes, he thought bitterly, as they thumped into the shield, but he managed to get one of them in the thigh and another in the gut, and then he heaved himself up off the ground and pushed the three survivors back for a moment with a couple of wide swings, and grinned at them as he caught his breath. “Just like playing at soldiers on the Campus Martius, eh, fellows?” They just scowled at him, humorless
colei
, and they came on again.

He lost track of the time a little: his eyes were stinging with sweat, and his arm and his leg where they were bleeding. Then one of the men staggered and fell forward, an arrow sprouting out of his back. The other two looked around; Antony lunged forward and put his sword into the neck of one of them, and another arrow took down the last. Then another one thumped into Antony’s shield.

“Watch your blasted aim!” Antony yelled, and ducked behind the shelter of his tree as the Gauls went pounding away to either side of him, chased with arrows and dragon-roaring.

“Antony!” Vincitatus landed beside him and batted away another couple of Gauls who were running by too closely. “There you are!”

He stood a moment, panting, then he let his sword and shield drop and collapsed against her side.

“Why did you climb down without telling me?” she said reproachfully, peering down at him. “You might have been hurt!”

He was too out of breath to do more than feebly wave his fist at her.

“I don’t care if Jupiter himself wants to see me,” Antony said. “First I’m going to eat half a cow—yes, sweetness, you shall have the other half—and then I’m going to have a bath, and
then
I’ll consider receiving visitors. If any of them are willing to come to me.” He smiled pleasantly and leaned back against Vincitatus’s foreleg and patted one of her talons. The legionary looked uncertain, and backed even farther away.

One thing to say for a battlefield, the slaves were cheap and a sight more cowed, and even if they were untrained and mostly useless, it didn’t take that much skill to carry and fill a bath. Antony scrubbed under deluges of cold water and sank with relief into the deep trough they’d found somewhere. “I could sleep for a week,” he said, letting his eyes close.

“Mm,” Vincitatus said drowsily, and belched behind him, a sound like a thundercloud. She’d gorged on two cavalry horses.

“You there, more wine,” Antony said, vaguely snapping his fingers into the air.

“Allow me,” a cool patrician voice said, and Antony opened his eyes and sat up when he saw the general’s cloak.

“No, no.” The man pushed him back down gently with a hand on his shoulder. “You look entirely too comfortable to be disturbed.” The general was sitting on a chair his slaves had brought him, by the side of the tub; he poured wine for both of them and waved the slaves off. “Now, then. I admired your very dramatic entrance, but it lacked something in the way of introduction.”

Antony took the wine cup and raised it. “Marcus Antonius, at your command.”

“Mm,” the general said. He was not very well-favored: a narrow face, skinny neck, hairline in full retreat and headed for a rout. At least he had a good voice. “Grandson of the consul?”

“You have me,” Antony said.

“Caius Julius, called Caesar,” the general said, and tilted his head. Then he added, thoughtfully, “So we are cousins of a sort, on your mother’s side.”

“Oh, yes, warm family relations all around,” Antony said, raising his eyebrows, aside from how Caesar’s uncle had put that consul grandfather to death in the last round of civil war but one.

But Caesar met his dismissive look with an amused curl of his own mouth that said plainly he knew how absurd it was. “Why not?”

Antony gave a bark of laughter. “Why not, indeed,” he said. “I had a letter for you, I believe, but unfortunately I left it in Rome. They’ve shipped us out to”—he waved a hand—“be of some use to you.”

“Oh, you will be,” Caesar said softly. “Tell me, have you ever thought of putting archers on her back?”