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Past the ridges the land became more hospitable. Moss gave way to pines and grass, which in turn fell into little meadows, forests, and lakes in the steep-sided valleys between the mountains. Glaciers like dirty walls hung between the mountain ranges, emptying into lakes and streams of white water rushing down the slopes. There were forests and long stretches of bush, depending on whether the trees could find footing. On the rolling hills at the feet of the mountains bighorn sheep and mountain goats moved in herds. There was no sign of human habitation.
AuRon flew south, to the widening in the valley. The craggy plateau gave way to steep fells coated in green. He spotted another mass of brown grazers beneath, and flew lower to take a look. A herd of some kind of cattle with a high ridge of muscle atop their forelegs had their noses buried in the mountain pasturage. They had shaggy faces and curved horns, tougher and wilder looking than the cattle AuRon had seen elsewhere. He saw a shepherd, marking the fact that the herdsman just scratched a dog and watched him fly overhead. Were the dragons on this island under orders not to hunt cattle?
There were glaciers everywhere between the mountain peaks, looking like white floods that had been halted by some magic as they poured out of the mountains. The base of every glacier was soggy, alive with birds poking amongst clumps of plantains and wild buckwheat. AuRon saw a few houses, thick-walled constructs with only a door under a thick roof alive with wildflowers and ivy.
A distant speck caught his eye, framed against the steely sky. It was a dragon. His kindred rose into the sky with lusty wingstrokes. AuRon changed his direction a little more eastward, catching a whiff of the sea.
He swung behind a rainsquall and came upon the castle. It was nothing much to look at, just a roofless tower atop an overhanging cliff, with a circle of buildings behind a wall at the base of the tower. Someone had used the tower to erect a wooden platform atop it, three ladders with intermediate platforms climbed up to the final level. A low wall, not even shoulder-height on a man, threw a wide loop over the lands on the grassy slope leading to the tower, where a herd of sheep grazed. A man stood up among them, a cloak tight around his shoulder and hood turned against the wind, bearing a silver-tipped bugle made out of one of the twisted horns of the cattle he had seen in the highlands.
Below the watchtower, a cave yawned in the cliffside. AuRon saw another dragon within, leather and steel clamped tight around its mouth. It had only recently uncased its wings; AuRon could still see scar-tissue among the scales on its back. Two more men, thick girdles holding tufted cloaks shut against the cold and furred boots on their feet, held the young dragon with ropes while another sat on its back. He tapped the dragon with a steel-hooked staff and pulled on reins looped through rings in the youngster’s ears. More men with cords threaded through holes punched in the dragon’s wing-edge pulled at the thin bones of its wing, raising and lowering the limb. The dragon’s tail hardly twitched when the man rapped it beneath the armpit in the delicate, unscaled flesh.
The work proceeded until one of the men noticed AuRon drifting outside the cavern. The cliff faced into the wind, creating an updraft that AuRon could ride, hardly flapping his wings. One of the men on the wing-ropes glanced at AuRon, then took a second look. He called to his fellows, and they stopped what they were doing to look at AuRon.
AuRon looked farther into the cave. It narrowed, but not by much. There was an older dragon in a tunnel branching off from the main tunnel. Men crawled across its back adjusting some kind of harness. The dragon looked to be offering advice to the men. It raised its head to look at AuRon, and its armored fans flicked out briefly.
Bold action was usually preferable to looking indecisive, so AuRon caught a favorable slant of wind and dropped into the cave. He didn’t even have to fold his wings to land.
The cave was even rougher than the ruins of Kraglad. The floor sloped, the walls were of uneven height; no chimneys or chutes provided ventilation that AuRon could detect. It smelled of male dragons; a thick, sharp smell like lye permeated the air. The two other males in the cavern ignored AuRon, though AuRon twitched and shook as he passed, every muscle alive and ready to jump.
A warrior with an elaborately wrought girdle approached. Blue eyes peered out at AuRon from a tangle of hair and beard. It was hard to tell where the man’s eyebrows ended and his beard began.
“What brings you, high-flyer?” the man said, in glottal Parl. “Are you a messenger out of the East? I don’t know you.”
“I’m a stranger here,” AuRon admitted. “My business is my own. I’ve flown from a land where even the stars are strange. My name is NooShoahk, of the line of NooMoahk.”
“You’re a civilized dragon. You speak well.”
“I read and speak the four hominid tongues, and dialects besides. I’ve heard you need dragons who can fight, and flew far to join.”
“Join? Join? We’ve had men join, but never dragons.”
“A wise man knows that just because something hasn’t happened, doesn’t mean it can’t happen.”
“I leave wisdom to the Wyrmmaster. I’m but a servant of his Supremacy.”
“Wyrmmaster? I’ll obey a just lord as liege, but I’ll call no man my master.”
“He has a way with your kind. Wait here.” The man turned, muttered something to one of the men at the ropes, and moved off into the cavern until he disappeared into the shadows left by tallow dips set into the walls. The other men continued with their duties, watching AuRon out of their eye-corners and drooping lids. AuRon smelled bloody meat somewhere within the cave.
The older dragon, wearing a harness that reminded AuRon of the baskets he had seen men and blighters put on mules, approached. It had scales of muted red, like laterite. There were no challenging bellows, no display of armored fans. Its crest bore six goodly-size horns.
“You I not know,” it said, golden eyes blinking at him in confusion. “You fly with men other side mountains?” Its speech was harder to interpret than the hairy man’s Parl.
“The mountains to the east?”
“That way,” the dragon said, pointing with its snout toward the Red Mountains.
AuRon marked new men entering the landing-cavern. Men in dragon-scale armor. “Yes, I come from the other side of them.”
“Is good hunting there?”
“Very good.”
“Fighting stock or breeding stock?”
“Neither. I’ve only just arrived.”
The dragon looked him up and down for a minute. “You not fighting stock, no scales. Not breeding stock, no scales—old man not want soft hatchlings. I think you laughingstock.”
