The Dragon Round (15 page)

“You can track?” he says.

“You have waves. I have leaves.”

She was never good at tracking, but a few leaves have been overturned nearby, bits of beetle lie beyond them, and tail carvings and footprints mark the soft dirt beyond the fire.

“She's left the camp,” the poth says.

They hurry beyond the oaks. Gray crouches in the trail between the stream and the beach. Her head is down, her butt raised, her tail poised.

“Don't spook her,” Jeryon says. He takes a slow step toward the wyrmling, flexing the fingers of his free hand.

The poth blocks him. “She's hunting something,” she says.

“I hope it's not a blue crab,” Jeryon says. Now he readies his spear.

The wind is stiffer here, and when it gusts the wyrmling lifts her snout to smell it, shakes her hindquarters, flings out her wings like wispy sails, and catches it. She's picked up and flung with a high-pitched “Eeee!” over their heads.

“She can fly!” the poth says.

“But can she land?” Jeryon says.

They watch the wyrmling float like a kite all the way to the center of the pond, where the wind gives out. It squeals and falls, flapping frantically, and disappears.

They run to the edge and wait for Gray to emerge. She doesn't. They wade in tentatively then push toward where she went under. The bottom is soft, and their steps quickly muddy the water.

Jeryon crouches down and slides forward, dragging the bottom with his fingers.

“Don't!” the poth says. “You might step on her.”

“You have a better idea?”

She shakes her head, stands an arm's length away, and searches in a parallel line. They reach the other side. Nothing.

Jeryon turns to her. “I hate losing things,” he says.

“We'll find her,” she says.

A gust of wind cuts through the oaks, and they hear “Eeee!” again. Jeryon drops his spear and catches Gray with a smack just as the wind gives out. He hands her to the poth.

“It's the pocket for you,” she says.

“If she won't stay,” Jeryon says, “we can at least work on ‘Come.' ”

The poth spends much of the
next week gathering with Gray poking out of her pocket. She finds spreads of oyster grass, whose roots and greens make a good salad; patches of haveet, whose purple taproot is sweet, if woody, and whose seeds and greens can be made into an anti-poison; and a pulse bush, whose beans will make a fine soup if she can make a pot. She's also delighted to find some golden shield, which she replants around the camp.

The abundance and diversity of plants surprise her. If she didn't know better, Everlyn would think they were the vestiges of a once great garden.

Meanwhile, Jeryon spends hours reinforcing the pen, standing guard, rebuilding the pen, standing guard, and redesigning the pen's elements. All he succeeds in doing is driving the poth away from camp.

Finally, Everlyn says, “She could just sleep in my pocket. I'd feel her trying to escape. For one night, let's try it.”

Jeryon throws down his tools. “Fine. I could use the sleep.”

When the poth holds up a beetle in the morning as a reward, and Gray sits and looks at the poth just as the wyrmling looks at him, Jeryon is surprised at how upset he is that she was right. The crabs will suffer for this, and, he thinks for the first time, so will his mates.

3

In two weeks the wyrmling doubles in size to more than a foot, and her wingspan stretches to eighteen inches. She looks like the most ungainly of butterflies.

Although she still plays Wind Catcher, her new favorite game is
Beetle Pole, which has enabled Jeryon to teach her some commands. He lances a beetle with a bamboo needle to which he's tied a long thread of palm leaf fibers, wraps the beetle a few times, and lances it again to hold the beetle tight. He whistles twice for Gray to come to him and sit, then he casts the beetle like a lure. She can't attack, however, until he whistles three times quickly; otherwise, he pulls the beetle away.

Gray digs her little claws into the ground in anticipation of the whistles, and she digs them into him when she wants to play.

She's a ferocious pouncer, spreading her wings to cover a wide area should the beetle try to escape, and she's getting the hang of flying and striking while in the air, though her aim needs work. Jeryon is now on his fourth pole.

He's impressed by the thread, which the poth has been hand-spinning around bamboo spindles. Early versions frayed or snapped at the slightest tug, but she's continually improving her design. The poth says she'd be much better at spinning had she paid any attention to her lessons as a girl. Nonetheless, the wyrmling can chew off the beetle and the thread remains usable.

Her goal is to spin a thread thin enough for use with Jeryon's needle, and still strong enough to fix the rips in her smock and underclothes. At least they're clean. She made a crude olive press out of mats woven from thin strips of bamboo and a large stone, then turned some of the resulting oil into a stronger version of Jeryon's campfire soap. Another pond nearby has become their washbasin. There's even a nice flat rock for each of them to sit on while their clothes lie around them drying.

She made a flower out of palm fronds that, when mounted on a bamboo post, indicates a desire for privacy. Sometimes it's her freedom rock. Sometimes it's her weeping one.

Jeryon doesn't waste much time bathing and less time drying. He spends more time agonizing over his stubble, which he has, on several occasions, attacked nearly fatally with his blade.

One night, when it's her turn to cook, she sits him down while her
meal sizzles to check his latest shaving wounds. “You could just grow out your beard,” she says. “It would look nice.”

“I like a clean face,” he says.

“By ‘clean' you must mean ‘laced with scars.' ” She dabs his cheek with a medicinal lotion she's made. “I'll trim it for you, if you'd like. I used to do my father's.”

“Will you take away the lotion if I don't?”

“No,” she says. “Who would do such a thing?”

Anyone in Hanosh. If a game's going against you, take the ball. “Fine,” he says and turns away.

“Good,” she says. She fills a plate and holds it out. When he looks at her, she hands it to him.

A bite later he thinks,
Hey, wait a minute
.

After a month, Jeryon says Gray
is big enough to learn a new game, Crab Fight. The pen is too small for what he has in mind, so he builds a six-foot-wide, three-foot-high bamboo arena out of logs piled between stakes. Into it will go a white crab and the wyrmling. Jeryon calls it the Hanoshi Sandbox.

“She'll be so small in there,” the poth says.

“She'll be fine,” Jeryon says. “Toss a kid off the dock, he learns how to swim.”

“Is that how you learned?” she says.

“Actually, I was thrown over the transom,” he says. “If it makes you feel better, you can stand in one corner and I'll stand in the other and we'll pull the combatants apart at the first sign of trouble.”

This placates her. They get into the arena.

Jeryon sets a crab in the pit. The poth hauls the wyrmling from her pocket. Gray struggles, but she isn't scared. She smells her opponent. She knows what crab is for. The poth sets her down and whistles twice. She sits, staring at the crab.

The crab raises its claws and clacks once.

Jeryon whistles three times: Fight!

Gray crawls forward cautiously on her wing hands, assessing the crab, which circles sideways around the wyrmling. She turns, following its waggling eyes. The crab opens its claws as wide as they can go, then snaps them shut. Each is bigger than the wyrmling's head. They could easily break her neck. She stands and stretches her wings and flaps a few times. The crab snips at them. Her head rears, her jaw drops, and she squeals at the crab. It snips at her face, gauging the distance between them.

The poth holds her sword, sheathed, ready to bat the crab away. Jeryon makes little feints with his fists.

Gray readies a pounce. The crab raises a claw to discourage her. She isn't and springs into flight. She floats around the crab in tight circles, the crab scuttling around to follow her eyes. She darts at its back. She makes a grab for its claws to lift it up and drop it. She snaps at its face. The crab won't let her get close. Its claws are a waving, clicking wall. Finally, frustrated, the wyrmling lands in a neutral corner and sits with her tail swishing at the crab.

“What's she doing?” Jeryon says.

The crabs wonders too. It edges closer.
Swish
. Closer still.
Swish
. The crab reaches for her tail. The poth bites her lip. The wyrmling flicks its tail and snaps the crab right in the eye. It bows in pain as the wyrmling spins, slides her wing under the crab's left legs, then lifts. The crab's broad claw clamps down on the wing. Gray hisses. The crab's legs come off the ground. It readies its other claw to strike. Gray heaves the crab over.

The crab lets go of the wyrmling's bleeding wing and flings out its claws to press off the ground and right itself. Gray stands on one claw and bites off the other, then gnashes off the first. The crab waggles its stumps and legs, trying to rock itself right-side up. Gray studies the crab a moment before sitting on its apron and biting off its legs, one by one. The crab's split mouth shouts silently.

Jeryon and Everlyn cheer.

Gray drags the body to Everlyn, who's touched.

Before she can pick Gray up to tend her wing, the wyrmling pounces on the broad claw and tries to crack it open with her mouth. Jeryon whistles twice. She doesn't come, so he yanks the wyrmling away from the claw by her scruff. She hisses at him, flaps her wings, and breaks free. Jeryon grabs the claw, and she dives on his hand, biting him. He flings her off and shakes the blood from his hand.

The poth yells and steps toward the wyrmling. Jeryon says, “No!”

“You'll hurt her,” the poth says. “She earned that claw. Let her have it.”

He steps between her and Gray. “On my terms,” he says. Then he drops the claw and puts his foot in front of it.

The wyrmling hisses, she squeals, she snaps at his foot, but he won't let her have it. Finally, she sits and looks at him. He moves his foot. Gray attacks the claw.

“Now you may,” Jeryon says and steps aside so the poth can reach the wyrmling. He kicks the crab's body out of the arena and stalks off, clutching his hand.

Everlyn finds him on the rock
at the washbasin, probably the last place he thought she'd look for him. She has a packet of aloe leaves and one of his sleeves, now clean, to tie them on.

“I put the flower up,” he says.

“You could get a disease,” she says. “Do you want to be the first person to die from dragon spit?” She takes the ointment from the
Comber
out of her pocket. “Give me your hand.” He grudgingly sticks it out. She dabs some ointment on his wound, two matching semicircles of needle-thin punctures.

“You're scaring me,” she says. She scores an aloe leaf with a bamboo splinter and wraps the leaf over his wound. “I know angry. I understand angry. That's why I spend so much time on this rock. Not just to get away from you. I have to get away from me. Hold that there.” He does. “So I can live with angry. What I can't live with is controlling. And I have to live with you if we're going to survive.”

“I will not be undermined,” he says. “She's bad enough.”

The wyrmling has poked out of her pocket. There's a little bandage on its wing. It ducks into the depths.

“I've been around enough shipowners—and their wives—to understand that attitude,” she says. She puts one end of the sleeve on the leaf, he holds it with his finger, and she neatly wraps his hand. “What you misunderstand is, you're not in charge. Flex your fingers.” He does. She knots the sleeve end to the last round. “And I will not obey. I'm not your mate. Those are my terms.”

He doesn't know what to say. The captain commands. The rowers row. That's the Hanoshi way. There is no middle ground. There isn't even a term for middle ground, except perhaps “at crossed oars.”

She surveys his hand. “I used more bandage than the wound calls for, but I don't want to cut the sleeve down in case we need a longer bandage at some point—or a tourniquet.” She stows the rest of the leaves and the ointment.

She wouldn't deny him medical care, Jeryon thinks. She didn't bring her sword. She can't leave the island. What does she have to bargain with? “Then who controls the wyrmling?” he says.

“She does,” the poth says. “It's clear she'll do what we want, but only if she also wants to do it.”

“What about when we get back?”

“Let's worry about that when we get back.”

He doesn't see that he has a choice. He rubs his chin. He should cut off his beard to spite her, but he's starting to like it.

4

Another month passes. The wyrmling is nearly two feet long now, and it's getting perceptibly longer and broader each day. They have to start a new measuring culm to keep track of its growth, and they're at
risk of running out of white crabs to fuel it. Only a handful are left on the beach and flats where the poth washed up, while those at the base of cliffs elsewhere are largely inaccessible. Jeryon's worried that if they kill any more the population in those areas won't recover, so he says they need to attack the blue crabs. He and the poth can only kill a few a day, given the effort it takes, and that'd be barely enough to feed them. The wyrmling will have to hold up her end.

Also, it's getting cooler. Winter, however mild, is coming, and the rainy season after that. They need the dead dragon's renderings to make it through. The wyrmling's molt has proven a terrible cloth, even for patches, and Jeryon's attempts at making a net out of the poth's thread were failures. The skin will serve for coats and tarps, and Jeryon can make fishhooks out of the bone. He can also make adzes, axes, and knives. The poth's sword is becoming blunt from its use as a universal blade, and they're concerned it will break.