“Just a stray, sir?” the watch officer ventured.
“Very likely, Mr. Rawls. But it seems far from land for so small a creature to merely be entertaining itself. Set the course east by south, if you please, and we will beat to quarters,” Laurence said.
He kept the ship on alert as they followed the small dragon’s last course. Laurence studied the charts in his cabin; the Great Caicos and the Turks Islands were in the general direction, and had no settlements: a hospitable home for a pirate band.
They did not have to sight land to find the pirates, however. By mid-morning another shout went up from the look-out, and Laurence went back on deck to find every man staring silently into the distance at the crowd of dragons approaching, small as a flock of birds except for the enormous shadow in their midst, its wings wider than the full length of the Reliant’s deck.
Laurence stared also, in astonishment more than horror: it was certainly a heavy-weight, as big a dragon as he had ever seen. How had it ever fallen into the hands of pirates? But that question immediately faded in importance. “Launch the ship’s boats with three pepper-men aboard to either side, and let us elevate all the guns. Reef sails.”
When the dragons were close enough to hear it, Laurence ordered the starboard bow-chaser fired as a warning shot. It did not halt the beasts, and as they drew closer, Laurence swept the ocean behind them with his glass again and still saw no sign of any ship, no matter how humble: the day was clear and he had a clear view of the ocean’s wide and empty expanse in every direction. Still more baffling, when the dragons drew closer, none of them had a stitch of harness anywhere to be seen, even the gigantic black one.
“Mr. Riley, let the pepper-men stand ready. The gun crews shall aim for that beast in the center whenever it should come on their side,” Laurence said. “Hold fire until I give the word, and afterwards each crew is to fire independently until the order to halt is given.”
“Very good, sir,” Riley said, with commendable steadiness.
Laurence went to the front of the ship and turned round to face the men. “You were at the Battle of Vigo Bay, Collins, I believe,” he said, addressing the chief of the first gun-crew.
“Aye, sir.”
Laurence nodded. “The beasts do make an astonishing noise: not quite a broadside, but enough indeed to shake any man’s spirits, if he had not heard them before.”
“I’ll take their bark over their breath, sir, begging your pardon,” Collins said readily enough, to suppressed and nervous mirth.
“Indeed,” Laurence said. “Fortunately, by all report none of our visitors have fire or vitriol to alarm us. I am sure mere roaring will not unman the crew of this ship.”
“No, sir!” and “Hear, hear,” were his satisfactory answer, and Laurence nodded and turned back to face the oncoming wave, his hands clasped loosely behind his back. A handful of the smaller dragons had now outdistanced their enormous companion and come darting towards them, circling them at a range which should have put them beyond the reach of carronades such as the merchantmen might have carried: a piece of strategy which gave Laurence fresh cause to be surprised and also wary. Their own long guns would have reached further, but Laurence was not tempted to give the order: he did not mean to give away the extent of their range only to strike a few featherweights. Behind him he heard the officers saying,
“Steady there, steady, men; no firing until the captain gives the word.”
The huge dragon came on for the head of the ship, and then abruptly checked his way, also just past carronade range, and hovering there announced in clear and carrying French, “Hello; you may begin firing now, or just get into your boats and go away, as you like.”
Laurence stared doubtfully. It had never occurred to him to hold a conversation with a dragon; he had the vague understanding that it required some particular training, unique to the Aerial Corps. But the beast was perfectly intelligible, and there was certainly no officer or crewman aboard the dragon to speak to otherwise.
After a moment’s hesitation, he borrowed the master’s speaking-trumpet, and put it to his lips. “I am Captain Laurence of His Majesty’s Ship Reliant,” he called back, clearly, in his best French. “If you are the pirates who have been molesting the shipping in this region—” Here he hesitated, puzzled briefly how to proceed: it was nonsensical to threaten to hang a dragon. “—then I am charged to bring you to face the King’s justice. If you surrender at once, you and your company shall face a fair trial for your crimes.”
“Oh!” the dragon said, indignantly. “Our crimes, as though you did not always begin firing your guns at us straightaway.” Then the dragon paused and said in suddenly uncertain tones, “Are not you going to fire upon us?”
Laurence began to wonder whether perhaps some clever and unscrupulous French officer had hit upon a scheme to set feral dragons upon enemy shipping without involving his own ship in any risk. “If you do not mean to surrender, I will certainly take whatever measures are required to halt your thievery.
Who has instructed you to attack passing ships?”
“No one instructed us,” the dragon answered. “I only tried to say hello, because I was curious, and they fired on us at once.”
“And that welcome, I gather, induced you to return again and again, to other ships?” Laurence said dryly.
“Well, if you should choose to challenge someone, by firing guns at them,” the dragon said, with what Laurence could only describe as a guilty air, “it is only your own fault, if you lose your treasure. I am sure it is not our fault if we are better at fighting.”
A few of the other dragons, flying in their circles, jabbered at the big one loudly; he answered them in their own tongue, with as much fluency as the French he spoke. Laurence took the chance to consider the situation. He had never seen a dragon so close before, nor imagined that they could converse so intelligently, nor that they should offer quarter, or care to make excuses for their rapacity. Riley had come to his side; Laurence said to him quietly, “Have you ever heard it said that dragons are moral beings?”
Riley shook his head helplessly. Laurence himself would not have previously imagined it, but the dragon seemed eager to defend the justice of its behavior.
“And why are you not firing your guns?” the large dragon pressed. “None of the other ships behaved so.”
Laurence regarded the beast. He could not say that he was at all sanguine about the prospects of defeating a heavy-weight on this scale with a single frigate of forty-eight guns. At best, they might bring the beast down and themselves be brought by the lee in its vengeful death throes. But entirely aside from such considerations, he found something distasteful in firing to destroy so magnificent a creature, without the necessity of self-defense to impel it. As peculiar as he found the notion, if the dragon had enough idea of justice to wish to excuse itself, perhaps it had enough to be persuaded it had done wrong, and must stop.
“This is a fighting ship of the Royal Navy,” Laurence said after a moment. “You have been making your assaults on helpless smaller merchantmen, whose crews are not trained to do battle. Naturally those men were frightened by your approach: you can scarcely deny that you present a warlike appearance, and you alone likely outweigh any vessel you have come upon, before this. You ought to be ashamed to have frightened them, and still more to have taken their panic as an excuse to rob them.”
Some of the men had enough French to follow him, and most of the officers; a titter went round the ship when he had made this speech. “I’ve heard of men as would talk the birds from the trees, but not before dragons from the air,” he overheard O’Dea muttering, on one of the nearer gun-crews, subsiding when reprimanded for insolence by Lieutenant Davies. Laurence himself hardly knew what to expect in
> answer to such an argument.
But the large dragon drew his head back as if he had been struck, putting his large frilled ruff—
Laurence could not remember ever seeing a similar decoration on any breed—almost flat against his neck, rather like a horse putting back its ears. He did not immediately answer. He seemed dismayed more than angry, however, and Laurence entertained the notion that perhaps his persuasion had made some good effect.
But the small dragons yammered at him again; the big dragon answered them with a preoccupied air, his head bowed on his neck. Evidently growing impatient, one of the smaller beasts turned its head and hissed to the others, and five of them swarmed round and came diving in towards the ship. “Mikli!” the black dragon cried out, but the smaller beasts paid him no attention.
“Pepper away!” Laurence called, and heard the order go down the ship. The pepper-men in the tops immediately began to heave their large sacks high into the air above the sails, letting the corners billow open as they reached the top of their arcs, filling the air with such a cloud that Laurence presently had the peculiar fragrance of the spice in his nostrils. In the boats, the pepper-men took aim with their crossbows, launching smaller sacks into the air to either side. They went to their work with such alacrity that a greenish cloud filled the air before the first beasts stooping reached the masts, and no sooner had their heads come into the pepper than they began wincing away, shrilling unhappily and fouling one another in a frantic attempt to get away.
Even after they had retreated, however, the effects continued to make themselves felt: the dragon pepper was meant to act even upon much larger beasts than these, and Laurence had purchased freshly milled stock with his own funds, rather than rely upon the more dubious supplies provided by the Royal Navy. He was rewarded amply now by seeing the rest of the small dragons highly dismayed by the cries of their fellows, the leader of whom even plunged towards the ocean to thrust her head beneath the water, trying to wash away the contamination.
“What have you done to them!” the black dragon cried.
Laurence turned back and said dryly, “If they choose to fly themselves into a pepper-cloud, it is surely no fault of ours; do you disagree?”
As though abashed, the dragon did not argue, and abruptly he stooped—with astonishing swiftness, seeming even quicker than the little dragons though so far beyond them in size—and snatched up the still-crying small beast from the water where she was still trying to duck her head, and turning tail flew away at so rapid a clip that he left Laurence and the rest of the dragons equally startled. The rest of the dragons
—there were not more than a dozen—looked down at the ship, as Laurence looked up, and then as if noticing they were out of their weight class flung themselves hastily after the black one, who was shrinking rapidly into the distance, heedless of their calling after him.
TWO WEEKS hunting through the nearby islands had not produced any sign of the dragon pirates, though Laurence had put in at every likely beach and cove which came in their way. At last Riley returned from another unsuccessful visit to one of the Caicos to report something of interest, and took Laurence ashore in a strikingly shallow bay: even the boat grounded nearly forty yards from shore, and they had to wade the rest of the distance to the disgust of several stingrays.
Laurence knelt at the side of the disintegrating corpse: very little left of the poor fellow but a skull collapsed into the hollow of his own ribs, and a few bones of the arms and legs scattered beside the hips.
What might once have been a stout rope lay frayed into pieces round him and the weatherbeaten remnants of a crate lying upon its side, with the lid missing and several gouges of nails to show where it had been forced off. Inside a lining of waterlogged and ragged silk partly still covered a mass of thin and rotting straw, and upon the silk lay several large fragments of a thick, white eggshell.
“Yes, I fancy we have found the origin of our beast,” Laurence said. “Have you anything else?”
“Only this, sir,” Riley said, and showed him a weathered piece of a barrel they had dug up from the far side of the shore, marked Amitié.
“But where should they have been bringing the egg?” Laurence asked, half of himself; it was absurd.
No dragon so extraordinary would be shipped to the colonies, and where else had any French ship in this part of the world any business to be going? “Let us have this crate over, I think,” he added, and found his answer on its underside, where wind and sun had not faded away the elaborate paint and the markings which he recognized as Chinese script.
“They must have paid a fortune for it,” Laurence said, blankly, and then looked up as a vast dark shadow fell upon the beach. Half the men cried out and fled crashing away into the underbrush, in a pardonable panic, and Riley drew his sword—uselessly, of course, as the black dragon settled directly into the shallow waters of the bay, clouding them with immense gouts of sand, and lowered his head towards them.
Laurence was not too proud to admit his back required stiffening, but it got the dose it required; he did not mean to meet death cowering, if it were at hand. He said quietly, “Mr. Riley, you will be so good as to take the rest of the men into the brush, and get under cover.”
“Sir,” Riley said, hesitating, but Laurence waved him back, and stepped towards the enormous head himself.
“It is you again,” the dragon said in oddly wary tones, drawing back. “What are you doing here?”
“We have been pursuing you,” Laurence said, and gestured to the crate and the shell. “Were you hatched here all alone?”
The dragon looked over at the crate. “Yes, but I did not mind it so very much, once I caught a turtle, and then I met my friends. I do not understand, why have you come after us? I left you alone and did not attack you at all.”
“You have given no sign you mean to stop pillaging other ships. I cannot hold you so guilty for your piracy as I would, if you had been raised by civilized people and taught to know better. But you cannot be permitted to carry on in this fashion.”
“I am sure I do not know why not,” the dragon objected, in pragmatic tones. “Who is to stop me?”
“If your conscience will not do it, I will try myself,” Laurence said, despite the patent absurdity of such a threat, “and if I am slain in the attempt and my ship sunk after me, a larger will be sent, with British fighting-dragons aboard it: there are some who outweigh even you. Sooner or late you will end as has every pirate chief whose rapacity grew so large as to make them infamous.”
“Oh!” the dragon said, but then hesitated and a little diffidently asked, “Have you seen other dragons like me, then?”
“I have never seen your like,” Laurence said. “I suppose,” he gestured to the crate, “that you are Chinese; they are by repute very fine dragon breeders. But I have seen Parnassians, and Longwings, and a Flamme de Gloire—which are like to you in size, at least, and trained for battle.”
“Well, I am sure I could learn anything they know, and I do not think I have done so poorly, considering there was no one to teach me anything at all, but Galant and the others,” the dragon said. “But what do you mean by Chinese? ”
Laurence hesitated, and then taking up a stick made a rough attempt at sketching for the dragon a map of the world, carved into the sandy shore, although he was unable to satisfy himself with his outline of China: he had only the slightest notion of that country’s extent, beyond its coast. “How clever that is,” the dragon said, meaning the map; he almost immediately understood the intent, which was not wonderful when one considered he must have been used to see the land from far above. “But I do not recognize the shapes of any of those islands. Where is this one, pray tel
l?”
He seemed rather staggered to understand that they were at present upon an atoll so small as to represent not a single pebble upon the sketch, and in a position halfway round the world from his origin; but he did not express disbelief at the scale, only rather plaintively asked, “But how did I come to be so far away?”
Laurence could not satisfy him on this point, and it evidently disquieted the dragon; he sat with head bowed in silence and then as abruptly as he had come launched himself with a terrific spring into the air and flew away, setting the bay sloshing so that a wave of near six feet managed to heave itself out of the shallows and swamped Laurence head to feet, drenching him entirely.
THEY SAILED round the island cautiously, the next day, and by afternoon the lookout made the band of dragons at last at their home, a truly grand sweep of sand the color of pale cream, many miles long, and the immense black dragon curled round himself halfway down. Behind him, heaped untidily upon the shore, an almost equally immense heap of dazzling gold and silver mingled here or there with some chest or barrel, a fairy-tale hoard with a heap of cannon stacked round it in what seemed a decorative spirit, and the wreck of what looked a dozen ships or more littered the beach at either end—their holds had evidently been broken open by banging them on rocks, rather like an otter with a clam.
The small dragons set up a tremendous alarum on catching sight of the ship in turn, and the black dragon raised his head from the sand. He leapt aloft and flew towards them, halting a good distance away, evidently grown wary of the pepper guns; a crowd of the littler ones followed him, although they made their limit at an even better distance.
“I am not letting you take our treasure,” the dragon said defiantly, hovering.
Laurence, equally appalled and staggered by the scale of the plunder, found this a point not worth the argument; he could not have carried it all away if he had five ships the size of the Reliant. “The treasure is the least of it!” he said. “Can you look upon the wreck you have made of so many seaworthy vessels, and take any pride in what you have stolen from them? I do not suppose all the treasure you have amassed could pay for the damage you have done.”