Into the Darkness (28 page)

“Black people!” a granny said scornfully. “Save your lies for folks who believe them, Herpo. Next thing you know, you’ll tell us we’re at war with the blue people over there or the green people over
there.”
Laughing at her own wit, she pointed first to the east and then to the west.

But a gray-haired man said, “Nay, Uote, these black men are real.

There were a couple of’em in my company in the Six Years’ War. Brave enough, they were, but would you believe it, they had to learn to wear clothes. Their country is so hot, they said, that everybody there goes bare naked all the time, even the women.” He smiled, as at the memory of something pleasant he hadn’t thought of in a while.

Uote’s face looked like curdled milk. “You shut up, Agen! The very idea!” she said. Garivald wasn’t sure whether she disapproved of Agen’s having the nerve to tell her she was wrong or of people—especially women—running around naked.
Probably both,
he thought.

Herpo said, “I don’t know about this naked business myself, but I know we’re fighting ‘em. I expect we’ll lick ‘em pretty cursed quick, too, just like we did the Forthwegians.” He looked at Uote out of the corner of his eye. “You going to tell me the Forthwegians ain’t real, too?”

She looked as if she wished he weren’t real. Instead of answering him, though, she showered more abuse on Agen. He was the one who’d embarrassed her in front of her fellow villagers. He bent his head and let her curses run off him like the rain. Under the wide brim of his hat, he was grinning.

“Along with the news,” Herpo said, “I’ve got cinnamon, I’ve got cloves, I’ve got ginger, I’ve got dried pepper that’ll make your tongue think it’s on fire, and all for cheaper than you’d ever guess.”

Garivald had tasted fire peppers a couple of times, and didn’t fancy them. He bought a couple of quills of cinnamon and some powdered ginger and slogged back to his house. Herpo was still doing a brisk business when he left.

“Those will perk up the winter baking,” Annore said when he showed her what he’d bought. Leuba had calmed down by then, and was after the hens again. His wife went on, “What was this great news? I was making the baby shut up, so I didn’t get to hear it.”

“Nothing very important.” Garivald gave another shrug. “We’re at war again, that’s all.”

Istvan walked along the beach on the island of Obuda. Scavengers had taken most of the meat from the skeleton of the Kuusaman dragon that had fallen. It skull stared at him out of empty eye sockets. He bared his teeth in a fierce grin; a Gyongyosian might feel fear, but he wasn’t supposed to show it.

A lot of the dragon’s fangs were missing. Some of Istvan’s comrades wore one or more as souvenirs of having thrown back the Kuusamans. More, though, had sold them to the Obudans. Since the islanders did not know the art of dragonflying, they had an exaggerated notion of how much magic it required and how potent a talisman a dragon’s tooth was.

Chuckling, Istvan scaled a flat stone into the sea. Anyone who’d ever shoveled dragon shit would know better. He had. He did. The Obudans, in their ignorance, didn’t.

He wondered if he should have used the stone to knock out a couple of the remaining fangs for himself. After a moment, he shrugged and kept on walking down the beach. Money mattered little to him here on Obuda; he couldn’t buy much with it. And the women, he’d heard, wouldn’t put out for dragon’s teeth: it was their menfolk who wanted them.

A wave ran farther up the gently sloping sand than most of its fellows. He had to skip aside to keep it from splashing his boots. It still wasn’t very big. Out on the sea, Obudan fishing boats bobbed. Their sails were dyed in bright colors to make them visible from a long way off. Watching the wind push them along bemused Istvan. He’d never imagined such a thing, not while he was growing up in a mountain valley.

The Bothnian Ocean was calm now, but he’d never imagined what it could be like in a storm, either. Then the waves leapt like wild things and went down the beach only sullenly, as if they wanted to drag Obuda down under the water with them. They seemed to have teeth then, great white teeth of foam that sought to tear chunks out of the land.

He shook his head—he was getting as foolish as the Obudans. Their language had endless words to name and describe different kinds of waves. Gyongyosian, like any sensible speech, made do with one. Snow, now, Istvan thought, snow was something worth describing in detail. But the Obudans seldom saw snow.

A red and yellow and black shell caught Istvan’s eye. He stooped and picked it up. Obuda boasted any number of colorful snail shells, all with different patterns. He didn’t think he’d seen this one before. Back in his valley, snails had plain brown shells. The only good thing he had to say about those snails was that they made fine eating when fried with garlic and wild mushrooms.

Coming down from the barracks on the slopes of Mt. Sorong had been easy. Going back up took more work, even though the climb wasn’t too steep. Leaving the beach and returning to the barracks also transformed Istvan from tourist back into soldier, a transformation he would just as soon not have made.

Sergeant Jokai descended on him like a mountain avalanche. “Good to have you back with us, your splendiferous magnificence,” the veteran sergeant growled. “Now you can go fix your bunk the way the army taught you, not the way your mama taught you—if she was the one who taught you, and not some goat in a pen.”

Istvan fought to keep his face expressionless. By main force of will, he succeeded. Gyongyosians did not keep goats, reckoning them unclean because of their eating habits and their lasciviousness. Had Jokai offered Istvan such an insult in civilian life, it would have started a brawl if not a clan feud. But the sergeant was Istvan’s superior—thus his effective clan senior—and so he had to endure.

“I am very sorry, Sergeant,” he said in a voice as empty as his features. “I thought I left everything in good order before I went on my morning’s leave.”

Jokai rolled his eyes. “Sorry doesn’t get the cart out of the mud. Thinking doesn’t get the cart out of the mud, either, especially when you’re not good at it—and you’re not. A week’s labor policing up the dragon pens might do a better job of keeping your tiny little mind on what it’s supposed to be doing. If it doesn’t, we’ll find something really interesting for you.”

“Sergeant!” Istvan said piteously. Jokai had come down on him before, but never like this. Something else had to be irking the sergeant, Istvan thought. Whatever it was, Jokai was taking it out on him. He could, too, because he had the rank.

“You heard me,” he said now. “A week, and thank the stars it isn’t more. A mountain ape could have done a neater job here than you did.”

Arguing more would only have got Istvan in deeper. With a sigh, he went into the barracks to inspect and repair the damage. None of his comrades wanted to look at him. He understood that. If they showed him any sympathy, Sergeant Jokai might land on them with both feet, too.

As Istvan had expected, pulling straight a tiny crease in his blanket took but an instant. Had Jokai been in a decent humor, he wouldn’t even have noticed it. Maybe his emerods were bothering him. He was likely to have big emerods, because he was certainly a big …

Istvan sighed. He could think Sergeant Jokai as much of a billy goat as he liked, and it wouldn’t change a thing. All that mattered was that Jokai was a sergeant and he wasn’t.

Jokai inspected the repairs, then grudgingly nodded. “Now report to Turul. He’d better give you a good character at the end of the week, too, or you’ll wish you’d never been born.” Istvan was already inclining in that direction. Jokai added, “And I’ll have my eye on you, too—don’t think I won’t. Do you understand what I’m telling you, soldier?”

“Aye, Sergeant.” Istvan said the only thing he possibly could. Jokai stomped off. Istvan hoped he would find someone else with whom to be furious. Misery loved company. Besides, he might get stuck with less work that way.

Turul cackled like a laying hen when Istvan came slouching up to him. “I was waiting for Jokai to find somebody to give me a hand with the beasts,” the old dragonkeeper said. “How’d he happen to choose you this time?”

“I was there,” Istvan answered bitterly.

“That’ll do, that’ll do,” Turul said. “Now you’re here. The world won’t end, even if it will stink for a while. And after you’ve been on this duty for a bit, you won’t hardly even notice that.”

“Maybe
you
don’t,” Istvan said, at which the dragonkeeper laughed again. Istvan didn’t think he’d been joking; after so much time around quicksilver and brimstone, dragon fire and dragon dung, how could Turul have any sense of smell left at all?

At the moment, Istvan’s own sense of smell was working altogether too well to suit him. He and Turul stood down-wind of the pens of the dragon farm. Along with the brimstone reek of their fodder and droppings, he also inhaled the strong reptilian musk that was their own distinctive scent.

Two of the beasts, both big males, began hissing and then shrieking at each other. They reared up and spread their wings, each trying to look as enormous and impressive as he could. The chains that secured them to their iron tethering posts rattled and clanked.

Other dragons started hissing, too. Through the growing commotion, Istvan asked, “Can they break loose? Will they start flaming?” He knew he sounded anxious. He couldn’t help it. From everything he could see, anxiety made perfect sense.

“They’d better not,” Turul said indignantly. He picked up an iron-shod goad, similar to the ones dragonfliers used but with a longer handle, and advanced on the closer male. The dragon swiveled its unlovely head on its snaky neck and stared at him out of cold golden eyes. In spite of his protective clothing, it could have flamed him to a cinder.

It did nothing of the sort. He shouted at it, a shout without words but with strong overtones of the shrieks dragons aimed at one another. The male hissed and flapped its wings; Istvan wondered why the blast of wind from them didn’t knock Turul over.

The old dragonkeeper shouted again. He whacked the dragon on the end of its scaly nose with the goad. And, as a big fierce hound will yield to a pampered lapdog that learned to dominate it when it was a puppy, so the dragon, trained from hatchlinghood to obey puny men, subsided now.

Istvan admired Turul’s nerve without wanting to imitate it. The dragonkeeper picked his way between pens and walloped the other contentious dragon, too. A tiny puff of smoke burst from its mouth. Turul hit it again, harder this time. “Don’t you do that!” he yelled. “Don’t you even think of doing that! You do that when your flier tells you, not any other time. Do you hear me?”
Whack!

Evidently, the dragon did hear him. It crouched down, almost like a puppy that knew it had made a mess in the house. Istvan watched in fascination. Turul sent a few more yells at it, these wordless. Only after he was sure he’d established his mastery did he stamp back towards Istvan.

“I didn’t think they were smart enough to obey like that,” Istvan said. “You really made them behave themselves.”

“Smart hasn’t got a whole lot to do with it,” Turul answered. “Dragon’s
aren’t
very smart. They never were. They never will be. What these bastards are is
trained.
They’re almost too stupid to be trained, too. If they were, we couldn’t fly ‘em at all. We’d have to hunt ‘em down and kill ‘em, same as we do with any other vermin. Curse me if I don’t sometimes think that’d be for the best.”

“But you’re one of the people who do train them,” Istvan exclaimed. “Would you want to be out of a job?”

“Sometimes,” Turul said, surprising Istvan again. “You put in so much work training dragons, and what do you get back? Shit and fire and screeches, that’s all. If you didn’t train ‘em so hard, the cursed things’d eat you. Oh, I’m good at what I do, and I make no bones about it. But when you get right down to it, lad, so what? Even a horse, which isn’t the smartest beast that ever came down the pike, will make friends with you. A dragon? Never. Dragons know about food and they know about the goad, and that’s about it. It wears thin now and again, that it does.”

“What would you do if you weren’t a dragonkeeper?” Istvan asked.

Now Turul stared at him. “Been a while since I thought about that. I don’t rightly know, not now. I expect I’d have ended up a potter or a carpenter or some such thing. I’d be settled down in some little town with a fat wife getting old like me, and children, and maybe—likely—grandchildren by now, too. Don’t have any get I know of, not unless my seed caught in one of the easy women I’ve had down through the years.”

Again, Istvan had got more answer than he’d bargained for. Turul liked to talk, and didn’t look to have had anyone to listen to him for a while. Istvan asked another question: “Would that have been better or worse than what you have now?”

“Blaze, how do I know?” the old dragonkeeper said. “It would have been different, that’s all I can tell you.” The net of wrinkles around his eyes shifted as they narrowed. “No, it’s not all I can tell you. The other thing I can tell you is, there’s lots and lots of dragon dung out there, and it won’t go away by itself. Put on your leathers and get to it.”

“Oh, aye,” Istvan said. “I was just waiting for you to finish up here.” That was close enough to true to keep Turul from calling him on it. With a stifled sigh, he went to work.

Hajjaj stood in front of the royal palace in Bishah, watching a parade of Unkerlanter captives shambling past. The Unkerlanters still wore their rock-gray tunics. They looked astonished that the Zuwayzin had captured them instead of the other way round. Being herded by naked Zuwayzi soldiers seemed as demoralizing to them as being jeered by naked Zuwayzi civilians.

Following the captives came Zuwayzi soldiers marching in neat ranks. The civilians cheered them, a great roar of noise in which Hajjaj delightedly joined. It picked him up and swept him along, as if it were the surf coming up the beach at Cape Hadh Fans, the northernmost spit of land in all Derlavai.

A woman turned to him and said, “They’re pretty ugly, these Unkerlanters. Do they wear clothes because they’re so ugly: to make sure no one can see?”