“I most thoroughly hope so,” Lewin said. “There’s not much we can do with hand weapons.”
We sat and stared as the thing came down. The lower it got, the more Renick’s bent-up shape was in my way. I kept wishing Lewin would do something about him, but nobody seemed to be able to think of anything but that huge descending ship. I saw why they call them hedgehogs. It was rounded above and flat beneath, with bits and pieces sticking out all over like bristles. Hideous somehow. And it came and hung squatting over the roofs of the houses below. There it let out a ramp like a long black tongue, right down into the Market Square. Then another into High Street, between the rows of trees, breaking a tree as it passed.
As soon as the ramps touched ground, Lewin started the van and drove down toward Wormstow.
“No, stop!” I said, even though I knew he couldn’t. The compulsion those Slavers put out is really strong. Some of it shouts inside your head, like your own conscience through an amplifier, and some of it is gentle and creeping and insidious, like Mother telling you gently to come along now and be sensible. I found I was thinking, Oh well, I’m sure Lewin’s right. Tears rolled down Alectis’s face, and Neal was sniffing. We had to go to the ship, which was now hanging a little above us. I could see people hurrying out of houses and racing to crowd up the ramp in the Market Square. People I knew. So it must be all right, I thought. The van was having to weave past loose horses that people had been riding or driving. That was how I got a glimpse of the other ramp, through trees and the legs of a horse. Soldiers were pouring down it, running like a muddy river, in waves. Each wave had a little group of kings, walking behind it, directing the soldiers. They had shining crowns and shining Vs on their chests and walked mighty, like gods.
That brought me to my senses. “Lewin,” I said. “Those are Thrallers and you’re not to do what they say, do you hear?” Lewin just drove round a driverless cart, toward the Market Square. He was going to be driving up that ramp in a second. I was so frightened then that I lammed Lewin—not like I lammed the dragon, but in a different way. Again it’s hard to describe, except that this time I was giving orders. Lewin was to obey me, not the Thrallers, and my orders were to drive away at once. When nothing seemed to happen, I got so scared that I seemed to be filling the whole van with my orders.
“Thank you,” Lewin said, in a croaking sort of voice. He jerked the van around into Worm Parade and roared down it, away from the ship and the terrible ramps. The swerve sent the van door open with a slam and, to my relief, the body of poor Renick tumbled out into the road.
But everyone else screamed out, “No! What are you doing?” and clutched their heads. The compulsion was far, far worse if you disobeyed. I felt as if layers of my brain were being peeled off with hot pincers. Neal was crying, like Alectis. Terens was moaning. It hurt so much that I filled the van frantically with more and more orders. Lewin made grinding sounds, deep in his throat, and kept on driving away, with the door flapping and banging.
Palino took his straps undone and yelled, “You’re going the wrong way, you damn cariarder!” I couldn’t stop him at all. He started to climb into the front seat to take the controls away from Lewin. Alectis and Neal both rose up too and shoved him off Lewin. So Palino gave that up and scrambled for the open flapping door instead. Nobody could do a thing. He just jumped out and went rolling in the road. I didn’t see what he did then, because I was too busy giving orders, but Neal says he simply scrambled up and staggered back toward the ship and the ramp.
We drove for another horrible half-mile, and then we must have got out of range. Everything suddenly went easy. It was like when somebody lets go the other end of a rope you’re both pulling, and you go over backward. Wham. And I felt too dim and stunned to move.
“Thank the gods!” I heard Terens more or less howl.
“It’s Siglin you should be thanking,” Lewin said. “Alectis, climb over to the front and shut that door. Then try and raise Holmstad again.”
Neal says the door was too battered to shut. Alectis had to hold it with one hand while he worked the broadcaster with the other. I heard him saying that Holmstad still didn’t answer through the roaring and rattling the van made when Lewin put on speed up the long looping gradient of Wormjiot. We hadn’t nearly got up to the Saddle, when Terens said, “It’s going! Aren’t they quick!” I looked back, still feeling dim and horrible, in time to see the squatting hedgehog rise up inside the clouds again.
“Now you can thank the gods,” Lewin said. “They didn’t think we were worth chasing. Try medium wave, Alectis.” There is an outcrop of ragged rock near the head of Wormjiot. Lewin drove off the road and stopped behind it while Alectis fiddled with knobs.
Instead of getting dance music and cookery hints, Alectis got a voice that fizzed and crackled. “This is Dragonate Fanejiot, Sveridge South, with an emergency message for all Dragonate units still in action. You are required to make your way to Fanejiot and report there soonest.” It said that about seven times, then it said, “We can now confirm earlier reports that Home Nine is in Slaver hands. Here is a list of bases on Home Eight that have been taken by Slavers.” It was a long list. Holmstad came quite early on it, and Ranefell about ten names after that.
Lewin reached across and turned it off. “Did someone say we slipped up?” he said. “That was an understatement.”
“Fanejiot is two thousand flaming miles from here!” Terens said. “With an ocean and who knows how many Slavers in between!”
“Well put,” said Lewin. “Did Palino’s memo block go to the Slavers with him?”
It was lying on the backseat beside Neal. Neal tried to pretend it wasn’t, but Alectis turned around and grabbed it as Neal tried to shove it on the floor. I was lying back in my straps, feeling gray and thinking, We could get away now. I’d better lam them all again. But all I did was lie there and watch Neal and Alectis having an angry tug-of-war. Then watch Lewin turn around and pluck the block away from the pair of them.
“Don’t be a fool,” he said to Neal. “I’ve already erased the recorder. And if I hadn’t had Renick and Palino breathing righteously down our necks, I’d never have recorded anything. It goes against the grain to take in children.”
Lewin pressed the erase on the memo block and it gave out a satisfied sort of gobble. Neither of the other two said anything, but I could feel Alectis thinking how much he had always hated Palino. Terens was looking down at Wormstow through a fieldglass and trying not remember a boy in Cadets with him who had turned heg and given himself up. I felt I wanted to say thank you. But I was too shy to do anything but sit up and look at Wormstow too, between the jags of the rock. Even without a fieldglass, I could see the place throbbing like a broken anthill with all the Slaver troops.
“Getting ready to move out and mop up the countryside,” Terens said.
“Yes, and that’s where most people live,” Lewin said. “Farms and holdings in the hills. What’s the quickest way to the Dragon Reserve?”
“There’s a track on the right around the next bend,” said Neal. “Why?”
“Because it’s the safest place I can think of,” Lewin said.
Neal and I looked at one another. You didn’t need to be heg to tell that Neal was thinking, just as I was, that this was a bit much. They were supposed to help all those people in the holdings. Instead, they thought of the safest place and ran there! So neither of us said that the track was only a bridle path, and we didn’t try to warn them not to take the van into the Reserve. We just sat there while Lewin drove it uphill, and then lumping and bumping and rattling up the path. The path gave out in the marshy patch below the Saddle, but Lewin kept grinding and roaring on, throwing up peat in squirts, until we tipped downhill again and bounced down a yellow fellside. We were in the Reserve by then. The ling was growing in lurid green patches, black at the roots, where dragons had burned it in the mating season. They fight a lot then.
We got some way into the Reserve. The van gave out clanging sounds and s
melled bad, but Lewin kept it going by driving on the most level parts. We were in a wide stony scoop, with yellow hills all round, when the smell got worse and the van just stopped. Alectis let go of the door. “Worms—dragons,” he said, “don’t like machines, I’ve heard.”
“Now he tells us!” said Terens, and we all got out. We all looked as if we had been in an accident—I mean, I know we had in a way, but we looked worse than I’d expected: sort of ragged and pale and shivery. Lewin turned his foot on a stone, which made him clutch his chest and swear. Neither of the other two even asked if he was all right. That is the Dragonate way. They just set out walking. Neal and I went with them, thinking of the best place to dodge off up a kyle, so that we could run home and try and warn Mother about the Slavers.
“Where that bog turns into a stream—I’ll say when,” Neal was whispering, when a dragon came over the hill into the valley and made straight for us.
“Stand still!” said Alectis. Lewin and Terens each had a gun in their hand without seeming to have moved. Alectis didn’t, and he was white.
“They only eat moving prey,” Neal said, because he was sorry for him. “Make sure not to panic and run and you’re fine.”
I was sorry for Alectis too, so I added, “It’s probably only after the van. They love metal.”
Lewin crumpled his face at me and said “Ah!” for some reason.
The dragon came quite slowly, helping itself with its spread wings and hanging its head rather. It was a bad color, sort of creamy through the brown-green. I thought it might be one of the sick ones that turn man-eater, and I tried to brace myself and stop feeling so tired and shaky so that I could lam it. But Neal said, “That’s Orm’s dragon! You didn’t kill it after all!”
It was Orm’s dragon. By this time, it was near enough for me to see the heat off it quivering the air, and I recognized the gamesome, shrewd look in its eye. But since it had every reason to hate me, that didn’t make me feel much better. It came straight for me too. We all stood like statues. And it came right up to me and bent its neck, and laid its huge brown head on the ling in front of my feet, where it puffed out a sigh that made Lewin cough and gasp another swearword. It had felt me coming, the dragon said, and it was here to say sorry. It hadn’t meant to upset me. It had thought it was a game.
That made me feel terrible. “I’m sorry too,” I said. “I lost my head. I didn’t mean to hurt you. That was Orm’s fault.”
Orm was only playing too, the dragon said. Orm called him Huffle, and I could too if I liked. Was he forgiven? He was ashamed.
“Of course I forgive you, Huffle,” I said. “Do you forgive me?”
Yes. Huffle lifted his head up and went a proper color at once. Dragons are like people that way.
“Ask him to fetch Orm here,” Lewin said urgently.
I didn’t want to see Orm, and Lewin was a coward. “Ask him yourself,” I said. “He understands.”
“Yes, but I don’t think he’d do it for me,” Lewin said.
“Then, will you fetch Orm for Lewin?” I asked Huffle.
He gave me a cheeky look. Maybe. Presently. He sauntered away past Terens, who moved his head back from Huffle’s rattling right wing, looking as if he thought his last hour had come, and went to have a look at the van. He put out a great clawed foot, in a thoughtful sort of way, and tore the loose door off it. Then he tucked the door under his right front foreleg and departed, deliberately slowly, on three legs, helping himself with his wings, so that rocks rattled and flapped all along the valley.
Alectis sat down rather suddenly. But Lewin made him leap up again and help Terens get the broadcaster out of the van before any more dragons found it. They never did get it out. They were still working and waggling at it to get it loose, and Lewin was standing over Neal and me, so that we couldn’t sneak off, when we heard that humming kind of whistle that you get from a dragon in flight. We whirled around. This dragon was a big black one, coasting low over the hill opposite and gliding down the valley. They don’t often fly high. It came to ground with that grinding of stones and leathery slap of wings closing that always tells you a dragon is landing. It arched its black neck and looked at us disdainfully.
Orm was sitting on its back looking equally disdainful. It was one of those times when Orm looks grave and grand. He sat very upright, with his hair and beard combed straight by the wind of flying, and his big pale eyes hardly looked mad at all. Neal was the only one of us he deigned to notice. “Good afternoon, Neal Sigridsson,” he said. “You keep bad company. Dragonate are not human.”
Neal was very angry with Orm. He put my heart in my mouth by saying, quite calmly, “Then in that case, I’m the only human here.” With that dragon standing glaring! I’ve been brought up to despise boys, but I think that is a mistake.
To my relief, Orm just grinned. “That’s the way, boy,” he said. “Not a booby after all, are you?”
Then Lewin took my breath away by going right up to the dragon. He had his gun, of course, but that wouldn’t have been much use against a dragon. He went so near that the dragon had to turn its head out of his way. “We’ve dropped the charges,” he said. “And you should never have brought them.”
Orm looked down at him. “You,” he said, “know a thing or two.”
“I know dragons don’t willingly attack humans,” Lewin said. “I always read up on a case before I hear it.” At this, Orm put on his crazy look and made his mad cackle. “Stop that!” said Lewin. “The Slavers have invaded. Wormstow’s full of Slaver troops and we need your help. I want to get everyone from the outlying farms into the Reserve and persuade the dragons to protect them. Can you help us do that?”
That took my breath away again, and Neal’s too. We did a quick goggle at one another. Perhaps the Dragonate was like it was supposed to be after all!
Orm said, “Then we’d better get busy,” and slid down from the dragon. He still towered over Lewin. Orm is huge. As soon as he was down, the black dragon lumbered across to the van and started taking it to bits. That brought other dragons coasting whistling in from all sides of the valley, to crunch to earth and hurry to the van too. In seconds, it was surrounded in black and green-brown shapes the size of hay barns. And Orm talked, at the top of his voice, through the sound of metal tearing, and big claws screaming on iron, and wings clapping, and angry grunts when two dragons happened to get hold of the same piece of van. Orm always talks a lot. But this time, he was being particularly garrulous, to give the dragons time to lumber away with their pieces of van, hide them and come back. “They won’t even do what Orm says until they’ve got their metal,” I whispered to Terens, who got rather impatient with Orm.
Orm said the best place to put people was the high valley at the center of the Reserve. “There’s an old she-drake with a litter just hatched,” he said. “No one will get past her when she’s feared for her young. I’ll speak to her. But the rest are to promise me she’s not disturbed.” As for telling everyone at the farms where to come, Orm said, the dragons could do that, provided Lewin could think of a way of sending a message by them. “You see, most folk can’t hear a dragon when it speaks,” he said. “And some who can hear”—with a nasty look at me—“speak back to wound.” He was still very angry with me. I kept on the other side of Terens and Alectis when the dragons all came swooping back.
Terens set the memo block to repeat and tapped out an official message from Lewin. Then he tore off page after page with the same thing on it. Orm handed each page to a dragon, saying things like, “Take this to the fat cow up at Hillfoot.” Or, “Drop this on young vinegar lady at Crowtop—hard.” Or, “This is for Dopey at High Jiot, but don’t give it her, give it to her youngest husband or they’ll never get moving.”
Some of the things he said made me laugh a lot. But it was only when Alectis asked what was so funny and Neal kicked my ankle, that I realized I was the only one who could hear the things Orm said. Each dragon, as it got its page, ran down the valley and took off, shower
ing us with stones from the jump they gave to get higher in the air than usual. Their wings boom when they fly high. Orm took off on the black dragon last of all, saying he would go and warn the she-drake.
Lewin crumpled his face ruefully at the few bits of van remaining, and we set off to walk to the valley ourselves. It was a long way. Over ling slopes and up among boulders in the kyles we trudged, looking up nervously every so often when fat bluish Slaver fliers screamed through the clouds overhead. After a while, our dragons began booming overhead too, seawards to roost. Terens counted them and said every one we had sent seemed to have come back now. He said he wished he had wings. It was sunset by the time we reached the valley. By that time, Lewin was bent over, holding his chest and swearing every other step. But everyone was still pretending, in that stupid Dragonate way, that he was all right. We came up on the cliffs, where the kyle winds down to the she-drake’s valley, and there was the sunset lighting the sea and the towers of rock out there, and the waves crashing around the rocks, where the young dragons were flying to roost—and Lewin actually pretended to admire the view. “I knew a place like this on Seven,” he said. “Except there were trees instead of dragons. I can’t get used to the way Eight doesn’t have trees.”
He was going to sit down to rest, I think, but Orm came up the kyle just then. Huffle was hulking behind him. “So you got here at last!” Orm said in his rudest way.
“We have,” said Lewin. “Now would you mind telling me what you were playing at bringing those charges against Siglin?”
“You should be glad I did. You’d all be in a slaveship now if I hadn’t,” Orm said.
“But you weren’t to know that, were you?” Terens said.
“Not to speak of risking being charged yourself,” added Lewin.
Orm leaned on his hand against Huffle, like you might against a wall. “She half killed this dragon!” he said. “That’s why! All I did was ask her for a kiss and she screams and lays into poor Huffle. My own daughter, and she tries to kill a dragon! And I thought, Right, my lady, then you’re no daughter of mine any more! And I flew Huffle’s mother straight into Holmstad and laid charges. I was that angry! My own father tended dragons, and his mother before him. And my daughter tried to kill one! You wonder I was angry?”