Can’t just lie around all day.
Things need doing on a farm.
But breathing was quite the challenge.
She pushed against the wall, or the floor, or the ceiling, and the world spun right over, everything whirling like a leaf on a flood.
Was she standing? No. On her back. One arm dangling. Dangling over the edge of the drop, blackness and fire, tiny in the distant depth. That didn’t seem a good idea. She rolled the other way. Managed to find her knees, everything swaying, trying to shake the fog from her skull.
People were shouting, voices vague, muffled. Something knocked against her and she nearly fell again.
A tangle of men, shuffling, wrestling. Lamb was in the midst, face wild as an animal’s, red wet from a long cut right across it, squealing and gurgling sounds that weren’t even halfway to swearing.
Cosca’s big sergeant, Friendly, was behind him with one arm around his neck, sweat standing from his forehead with the effort but his face just faintly frowning like he was teasing out a troubling sum.
Sweet was trying to keep a grip on Lamb’s left arm, getting dragged about like a man who’d roped a crazy horse. Savian had Lamb’s right and he was croaking, ‘Stop! Stop, you mad fucker!’ Shy saw he had a knife drawn and didn’t think she could stop him using it. Didn’t even know if she wanted to.
Lamb had tried to kill Ro. All they’d gone through to find her and he’d tried to kill her. He would’ve killed Shy, too, whatever he’d promised her mother. He would’ve killed all of them. She couldn’t make sense of it. Didn’t want to.
Then Lamb went rigid, near dragging Sweet off the edge of the cliff, whites of his eyes showing under flickering lids. Then he sagged, gasping, whimpering, and he put his bloody three-fingered hand over his face, all the fight suddenly put out.
And Savian patted Lamb on the chest, drawn knife still held behind his back and said, ‘Easy, easy.’
Shy tottered up, the world more or less settled but her head throbbing, blood tickling at the back of her skull.
‘Easy, easy.’
Right arm hard to move and her ribs aching so it hurt to breathe but she started shuffling for the archway. Behind her she could hear Lamb sobbing.
‘Easy… easy…’
A narrow passageway, hot as a forge, black but for a flaring glow up ahead and glimmering spots across the floor. Waerdinur’s blood. Shy limped after, remembered her sword, managed to get it drawn but could hardly grip the thing in her numb right hand, fumbled it across to her left and went on, getting steadier, halfway to jogging now, the tunnel getting brighter, hotter still, and an opening ahead, a golden light spilling across the stones. She burst through and slid to a sudden stop, went over on her arse and lay still, propped on her elbows, gaping.
‘Fuck,’ she breathed.
They were called Dragon People, that much she knew. But she’d never guessed they actually had a dragon.
It lay there in the centre of a vast domed chamber like the big scene from a storybook–beautiful, terrible, strange, its thousand thousand metal scales dull-glistered with the light of fires.
It was hard to judge its size, coiled about and about as it was, but its tapered head might’ve been long as a man was tall. Its teeth were dagger-blades. No claws. Each of its many legs ended in a hand, golden rings upon the graceful metal fingers. Beneath its folded paper wings gears gently clicked and clattered, wheels slowly, slowly turned, and the faintest breath of steam issued from its vented nostrils, the tip of a tongue like a forked chain softly rattling, a tiny slit of emerald eye showing under each of its four metal eyelids.
‘Fuck,’ she whispered again, eyes drifting down to the dragon’s bed, no less of a child’s daydream than the monster itself. A hill of money. Of ancient gold and silver plate. Of chains and chalices, coins and coronets. Of gilded arms and armour. Of gem-encrusted everythings. The silver standard of some long-lost legion thrust up at a jaunty angle. A throne of rare woods adorned with gold leaf stuck upside down from the mass. There was so much it became absurd. Priceless treasures rendered to gaudy trash by sheer quantity.
‘Fuck,’ she muttered one last time, waiting for the metal beast to wake and fall in blazing rage upon this tiny trespasser. But it didn’t stir, and Shy’s eyes crept down to the ground. The dotted tracks of blood became a smear, then a trickle, and now she saw Waerdinur, lying back against the dragon’s foreleg, and Ro beside him, staring, face streaked with blood from a cut on her scalp.
Shy struggled up, and crept down the bowl-shaped floor of the chamber, the stone underfoot all etched with writing, gripping tight to her sword, as though that feeble splinter of steel was anything more than a petty reassurance.
She saw other things among the hoard as she came closer. Papers with heavy seals. Miners’ claims. Bankers’ drafts. Deeds to buildings long ago fallen. Wills to estates long ago divided. Shares in Fellowships, and companies, and enterprises long deceased. Keys to who knew what forgotten locks. Skulls, too. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Coins and gemstones cut and raw spilling from their empty eye sockets. What things more valued than the dead?
Waerdinur’s breath came shallow, robe blood-soaked, shattered arm limp beside him and Ro clutching at the other, Shy’s broken arrow still lodged near the shoulder.
‘It’s me,’ Shy whispered, scared to raise her voice, edging forward, stretching out her hand. ‘Ro. It’s me.’
She wouldn’t let go of the old man’s arm. It took him reaching up and gently peeling her hand away. He nudged her towards Shy, spoke some soft words in his language and pushed again, more firmly. More words and Ro hung her shaved head, tears in her eyes, and started to shuffle away.
Waerdinur looked at Shy with pain-bright eyes. ‘We only wanted what was best for them.’
Shy knelt and gathered the girl up in her arms. She felt thin, and stiff, and reluctant, nothinga left of the sister she’d had so long ago. Scarcely the reunion Shy had dreamed of. But it was a reunion.
‘Fuck!’ Nicomo Cosca stood in the entrance of the chamber, staring at the dragon and its bed.
Sergeant Friendly walked towards it, sliding a heavy cleaver from inside his coat, took one crunching step onto the bed of gold and bones and papers, coins sliding in a little landslip behind his boot-heel and, reaching forward, tapped the dragon on the snout.
His cleaver made a solid clank, as if he’d tapped an anvil.
‘It is a machine,’ he said, frowning down.
‘Most sacred of the Maker’s works,’ croaked Waerdinur. ‘A thing of wonder, of power, of—’
‘Doubtless.’ Cosca smiled wide as he walked into the chamber, fanning himself with his hat. But it wasn’t the dragon that held his eye. It was its bed. ‘How great a sum, do you think, Friendly?’
The sergeant raised his brows and took a long breath through his nose. ‘Very great. Shall I count it?’
‘Perhaps later.’
Friendly looked faintly disappointed.
‘Listen to me…’ Waerdinur tried to prop himself up, blood oozing from around the shaft in his shoulder, smearing the bright gold behind him. ‘We are close to waking the dragon. So close! The work of centuries. This year… perhaps next. You cannot imagine its power. We could… we could share it between us!’
Cosca grimaced. ‘Experience has taught me I’m no good at sharing.’
‘We will drive the Outsiders from the mountains and the world will be right again, as it was in the Old Time. And you… whatever you want is yours!’
Cosca smiled up at the dragon, hands on hips. ‘It certainly is a remarkable curiosity. A magnificent relic. But against what is already boiling across the plains? The legion of the dumb? The merchants and farmers and makers of trifles and filers of papers? The infinite tide of greedy little people?’ He waved his hat towards the dragon. ‘Such things as this are worthless as a cow against a swarm of ants. There will be no place in the world to come for the magical, the mysterious, the strange. They will come to your sacred places and
build… tailors’ shops. And dry-goods emporia. And lawyers’ offices. They will make of them bland copies of everywhere else.’ The old mercenary scratched thoughtfully at his rashy neck. ‘You can wish it were not so. I wish it were not so. But it is so. I tire of lost causes. The time of men like me is passing. The time of men like you?’ He wiped a little blood from under his fingernails. ‘So long passed it might as well have never been.’
Waerdinur tried to reach out, his hand dangling from the broken forearm, skin stretched around the splintered bones. ‘You do not understand what I am offering you!’
‘But I do.’ And Cosca set one boot upon a gilded helmet wedged into the hoard and smiled down upon the Maker’s Right Hand. ‘You may be surprised to learn this, but I have been made many outlandish offers. Hidden fortunes, places of honour, lucrative trading rights along the Kadiri coast, an entire city once, would you believe, though admittedly in poor condition. I have come to realise…’ and he peered discerningly up at the dragon’s steaming snout, ‘a painful realisation, because I enjoy a fantastic dream just as much as the next man…’ and he fished up a single golden coin and held it to the light. ‘That one mark is worth a great deal more than a thousand promises.’
Waerdinur slowly let his broken arm drop. ‘I tried to do… what was best.’
‘Of course.’ Cosca gave him a reassuring nod, and flicked the coin back onto the heap. ‘Believe it or not, so do we all. Friendly?’
The sergeant leaned down and neatly split Waerdinur’s head with his cleaver.
‘No!’ shrieked Ro, and Shy could hardly hold on to her, she started thrashing so much.
Cosca looked mildly annoyed at the interruption. ‘It might be best if you removed her. This really is no place for a child.’
Greed
They set off in a happy crowd, smiling, laughing, congratulating one another on their work, comparing the trophies of gold and flesh they had stolen from the dead. Ro had not thought ever in her life to look upon a man worse than Grega Cantliss. Now they were everywhere she turned. One had Akarin’s pipe and he tooted a mindless three-noted jig and some danced and capered down the valley, their clothes made motley by the blood of Ro’s family.
They left Ashranc in ruins, the carvings smashed and the Heart-woods smoking charcoal and the bronze panels gouged up and the Long House burned with the blessed coals from its fire-pit, all forever stained with death. They despoiled even the most sacred caves and tipped the Dragon over so they could steal the coins that made its bed, then they sealed it in its cavern and brought down the bridge with a burning powder that made the very earth shake in horror at the heresy.
‘Better to be safe,’ the murderer Cosca had said, then leaned towards the old man called Savian and asked, ‘Did you find your boy? My notary salvaged several children. He’s discovered quite the talent for it.’
Savian shook his head.
‘A shame. Will you keep searching?’
‘Told myself I’d go this far. No further.’
‘Well. Every man has his limit, eh?’ And Cosca gave him a friendly slap on the arm then chucked Ro under the chin and said, ‘Cheer up, your hair will grow back in no time!’
And Ro watched him go, wishing she had had the courage, or the presence of mind, or the anger in her to find a knife and stab him, or rip him with her nails, or bite his face.
They set off briskly but soon slowed, tired and sore and gorged on destruction. Bent and sweating under the weight of their plunder, packs and pockets bulging with coins. Soon they were jostling and cursing each other and arguing over fallen trinkets. One man tore the pipe away and smashed it on a rock and the one who had been playing it struck him and the great black man had to drag the two of them apart and spoke about God, as if He was watching, and Ro thought, if God can see anything, why would He watch this?
Shy talked, talked, different than she had been. Pared down and pale and tired as a candle burned to the stub, bruised as a beaten dog so Ro hardly recognised her. Like a woman she saw in a dream once. A nightmare. She blathered, nervous and foolish with a mask of a smile. She asked the nine children to tell their names and some gave their old names and some their new, hardly knowing who they were any more.
Shy squatted in front of Evin when he told his name, and said, ‘Your brother Leef was with us, for a bit.’ She put the back of her hand to her mouth and Ro saw it was trembling. ‘He died out on the plains. We buried him in a good spot, I reckon. Good as you get out there.’ And she put her hand on Ro’s shoulder then and said, ‘I wanted to bring you a book or something, but… didn’t work out.’ And the world in which there were books was a half-remembered thing, and the faces of the dead so real and new about her, Ro could not understand it. ‘I’m sorry… we took so long.’ Shy looked at her with wet in the corners of her pink rimmed eyes and said, ‘Say something, can’t you?’
‘I hate you,’ said Ro, in the language of the Dragon People so she would not understand.
The dark-skinned man called Temple looked sadly at her and said, in the same tongue, ‘Your sister came a long way to find you. For months you have been all she has wanted.’
Ro said, ‘I have no sister. Tell her that.’
Temple shook his head. ‘You tell her.’
All the while the old Northman watched them, eyes wide but looking through her, as if he had seen an awful thing far-off, and Ro thought of him standing over her with that devil smile and her father giving his life for hers and wondered who this silent killer was who looked so much like Lamb. When his cut face started bleeding, Savian knelt near him to stitch it and said, ‘Hardly seemed like demons, in the end, these Dragon Folk.’
The man who looked like Lamb didn’t flinch as the needle pierced his skin. ‘The real demons you bring with you.’
When Ro lay in the darkness, even with fingers stuck in her ears all she could hear was Hirfac screaming and screaming as they burned her on the cooking-slab, the air sweet with the smell of meat. Even with her hands over her eyes, all she could see was Ulstal’s face, sad and dignified, as they pushed him off the cliff with their spears and he fell without a cry, the bodies left broken at the foot, good people she had laughed with, each with their own wisdom, made useless meat and she could not understand the waste of it. She felt she should have hated all these Outsiders beyond hating but somehow she was only numb and withered inside, as dead a thing as her family herded off the cliff, as her father with his head split, as Gully swinging from his tree.
The next morning, men were missing and gold and food missing with them. Some said they had deserted and some that they had been lured by spirits in the night and some that the Dragon People were following, vengeful. While they argued, Ro looked back towards Ashranc, a pall of smoke still hanging over the mountainside in the pale blue, and felt she was stolen from her home once again, and she reached inside her robe and clutched the dragon scale her father had given her, cool against her skin. Beside her on a rock, the old Ghost Woman stood frowning.
‘Bad luck to look back too long, girl,’ said the white-bearded one called Sweet, though Ro reckoned the Ghost fifty years old at the least, only a few yellow hairs left among the grey she had bound up with a rag.
‘It does not feel so fine as I thought it would.’
‘When you spend half your life dreaming of a thing, its coming to pass rarely measures up.’
Ro saw Shy look at her, then down at the ground, and she curled her lip back and spat through the gap in her teeth. A memory came up then all unbidden of Shy and Gully having a contest at spitting in a pot and Ro laughing, and Pit laughing, and Lamb watching and smiling, and Ro felt a pain in her chest and looked away, not knowing why.
‘Maybe the money’ll make it feel finer,’ Sweet was saying.
The old Ghost woman shook her head. ‘A rich fool is still a fool. You will see.’
Sick of waiting for their missing friends, the men went on. Bottles were opened and they got drunk and slowed under the weight of their booty, toiling in
the heat over broken rocks, straining and cursing with mighty burdens as though gold was worth more than their own flesh, more than their own breath. Even so they left discarded baubles scattered in their wake, sparkling like a slug’s trail, some picked up by those behind only to be dropped a mile further on. More food had gone in the night and more water and they squabbled over what was left, a haunch of bread worth its weight in gold, then ten times its weight, jewels given over for half a flask of spirits. A man killed another for an apple and Cosca ordered him hanged. They left him swinging behind them, still with the silver chains rattling around his neck.
‘Discipline must be maintained!’ Cosca told everyone, wobbling with drunkenness in the saddle of his unfortunate horse, and up on Lamb’s shoulders Pit smiled, and Ro realised she had not seen him smile in a long time.
They left the sacred places behind and passed into the forest, and the snow began to fall, and then to settle, and the Dragon’s warmth faded from the earth and it grew bitter chill. Temple and Shy handed out furs to the children as the trees reared taller and taller around. Some of the mercenaries had thrown their coats away so as to carry more gold, and now shivered where they had sweated before, curses smoking on the chill, cold mist catching at their heels.
Two men were found dead in the trees, shot in the back with arrows while they were shitting. Arrows that the mercenaries had themselves abandoned in Ashranc so they could stuff their quivers with loot.
They sent out other men to find and kill whoever had done the shooting but they did not come back and after a while the rest pressed on, but with a panic on them now, weapons drawn, staring into the trees, starting at shadows. Men kept vanishing, one by one, and one man took another who had strayed for an enemy and shot him down, and Cosca spread his hands and said, ‘In war, there are no straight lines.’ They argued over how they might carry the wounded man or whether they should leave him, but before they decided he died anyway and they picked things from his body and kicked it into a crevasse.
Some of the children gave each other grins because they knew their own family must be following, the bodies left as a message to them, and Evin walked close beside her and said in the Dragon People’s tongue, ‘Tonight we run,’ and Ro nodded.