She’d seen one war; one war was enough for her temperament. But the idea of all these irreplaceable old books being torn up and used to start campfires or finish a bowel evacuation pained her. She could almost hear Rainfall weeping when she thought of its destruction by ignorant blighters or a heedless invading army.
That night, she fell asleep among them, counting old scrolls the way some dragons counted tasty, jumping sheep.
A deputation of the Fireblades with Vank at its head roused her the next morning with a snarling drum that made her think of desert snakes and their rattle-tails. Irritated, she was tempted to knock the whole lot of them down with her tail.
“Greenscale goddess,” Vank said, as she smacked her lips to bring moisture to her dry mouth. “The Ghioz have crossed the river. They cut down trees for a stockade in our western woods, rich with wild boar and redmonkey.”
She wasn’t surprised that he named her two favorite blighter preparations. Vank was full of himself, not stupid. He’d acquired a new belt of gold and silver rings.
“I hope you don’t want me to fight them.”
“No, keeper, no. Horblikklak, the Fireblades’ Marchchief, intends only to make a show of force and ask them to talk.”
Wistala dredged her memory. The Fireblades had a three-headed leadership. Their Marchchief saw to the day-to-day organization and training of the warriors. The Battlechief, a bent oldster who used a captured battle-standard for a staff, would direct them in fighting. The Youngchief picked likely male blighters, saw to their supply, and learned from the other two. It was an old system from the ancient blighter glory, when a Battlechief might command tens of thousands represented as bits of skulls on three-dimensional maps in boxes of dried sugared sand instead of the few hundreds squatting in their storied ruins.
Horblikklak, whose name meant “Mountain Lightning” in the blighter tongue, stepped forward, quick and flashy as a warty mountain toad—which is to say not at all.
“Tell the dragon—” he began.
“I’ve improved my understanding of your tongue,” Wistala said. The language had come fast, as though she’d learned it in the egg. “You may speak to me directly.”
Some of the blighters made coughing sounds at her pronunciation, but she’d made herself understood.
“We talk to Stone-men, to Ghioz,” Horblikklak said. “You fly in distance, watching. When we signal with banner, you fly to us and circle, so they see we speak truth about presence of dragon.”
“Will you speak truth about willingness of the dragon to go into battle?”
“Some truths best left unsaid, mayhap,” Vank said, digging in his oily ear as he examined her cavern’s ceiling.
“Just don’t start a fight and expect me to rescue you. I’ve no quarrel with these men.”
Vank made a digging motion with one long arm, but the gesture was lost on Wistala. “The sight of a dragon will make them wary. The runaway, Harf, said the Ghioz fear dragons. Dragons knock down stone cities.”
Scales and tales! Evidently the blighters here liked a good liar. Well, she could do with a little exercise. For eye as well as wing, she’d been reading too much.
“I agree. Show me the signal and so on.”
It took a few days to set up the meeting with the Ghioz, then a spring storm delayed it still further. The two sides arranged for it to be held at an old rockpile that the blighters claimed was a quarry from Krag’s old glory. The Ghioz insisted it was an old stoneworks of theirs, and even dug up old tools bearing Ghioz marks that old Horblikklak thought suspiciously free of rust and rot.
Vank told her the history of meetings with the Ghioz. Their first meeting generations ago had been deep in the woods beyond the great river that, if her maps were correct, flowed all the way to Hypatia and the Inland Ocean. In those days the woods were the halfway point between the blighters and the Ghioz. At that time they arranged to take lumber from the forests across the river. After a bloody incident between human woodsmen and blighter hunters, they held a second peace council on the “Ghioz” riverbank, the new border, two generations ago. The next one after that was on the blighter side, once the Ghioz claimed rights to use the river to float their lumber down to their province on the east side of the Red Mountains. When that had happened, most of the Fireblades were running naked chasing beetles. Now it seemed the Ghioz claimed a vast swath of territory on this side of the river, and the new “halfway” point was practically on the doorstep of Great Krag.
She saw the Fireblades’ banner, a tall wooden construct that reminded her of a small boatmast. It took four blighters to carry it from base point to base point, plus two more to roll the heavy wheel base it rested in when traveling. Assorted skulls, broken shields and sword hilts, black dragonscale etched with chalky pictographs, and long strings of vertebrae like Rainfall’s old Winter Solstice decorations of whitebell blossoms rattled against each other or chimed in the wind. It had lines to the top where the blighters could run up signal flags for those too far away to hear orders. Vank pointed out a bronzed bit of dragonclaw, some sheath AuRon must have shed and given to them, when they told the story (again!) of their great victory when they burned the war machines in the southern jungles.
Wistala’s throat tightened as she touched the bronzed memento of her brother.
Horblikklak showed her how they would rock the banner back and forth like a tree in a heavy wind when they wanted her to fly up and circle.
Wistala couldn’t resist a predawn flight over the Ghioz encampment the day of the meeting. She knew enough Ghioz history to wonder if the Fireblades weren’t walking into some kind of trap. The Ghioz stockade was impressive, sensibly sited against a looping, swampy stream on a low rise. She drifted on the fresh spring breeze as she passed over the camp, not daring to flap, and smelled coal-smoke. Even at night there was the sound of wood being chopped and hammers at work. The Ghioz had cut down trees and fitted the trunks with sharpened stakes and set up war machines—nothing like the juggernauts of the dwarves, of course, but she suspected they were lethal enough. And there was fresh earth everywhere; they’d dug pits or trenches to confound a blighter charge.
The Ghioz fought like dwarves, it seemed.
She returned to the Fireblade camp and fortified herself with a blood pudding the blighters made for her and some crisped bits of hide from the evening’s feast. They had a pile of bones and joints, but if she had to spend much time aloft a bellyful of rattling offal wouldn’t be a welcome companion.
“If you have to vent something on an enemy, better fire than what comes out the other end,” Mother used to say.
She climbed a pile of rocks with a good view of the land between the Fireblade camp and the meeting site half a horizon away. Treetops bubbled across the valley leading to the distant ridge of the Ghioz camp. The old quarry made a chalky scar in the greenery.
She settled down for a one-eye-open nap. She’d perfected the art in her travels across the endless expanses of the east. Hunting horns, faint in the distance as the birdcalls from the adjoining woods, indicated that the two sides were approaching each other. Then relay signalmen took up the call, long sonorous swan-honks relaying the news of a peaceful meeting.
With that, she launched herself aloft.
Good thing she hadn’t eaten all those joints. Her stomach writhed in anxiety. She hoped the blighters wouldn’t get riled up and start a battle in the expectation that she would come to their aid. Or suppose the Ghioz decided to launch a quick strike—according to the Fireblades they had some tough riders called the Red Guard who patrolled their eastern borders.
What kind of dragon was she, to dread battle so? She’d once been fierce enough in avenging her family’s destruction, dared the dwarves to fire their weighted harpoons at her. Now her griff twitched at the thought of a few arrows flying in a far-off forest.
Well, the appearance of bravery and bravery itself were identical to all but one, and she’d never had difficulty keeping secrets.
She didn’t mind surveying the forest. The trees looked tall, straight, and sturdy on this well-watered ground west of the mountains. She dipped and looked down tumbling streambeds choked into pools like blue jewels on a string by beaver dams. The blighters, or lightning in a dry season, had burned open meadows in between stands of older timber, and these were thick with ground birds and game on hoof. Herds of deer hurried, a brown-backed flood, for tight-laced branches as she passed over. She smelled sweet berries and saw the muddy smears of wild pigs tossing ground cover for nuts and sweet roots.
No wonder the blighters wanted the forest.
She promised herself a pig hunt in these woods before too many days passed. She’d probably have to examine the game-trails closely and then find a place to lie in wait, making use of wind and dew to hide her scent. Pigs weren’t easy to catch, but their ample, tasty flesh more than made up for the effort.
More blighter horns!
She flapped higher, alarmed that they’d joined battle, but the encounter seemed to be ending peacefully. The Fireblades sang as they marched away from the meeting place, shaking their standards until the battle-banners seemed like dancing giants accompanying them on the march.
