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“They’ll have to cross the river to do that,” the Copper said. “Humans can’t swim like drakes. Not with their false-scale.”
“My father told me once that the best place to strike an upright is in the crotch, when they take a long step forward.”
“Wise dragon. Does he still live?”
“No. A Wyrr was he, like the Tyr himself, and distantly related. He lost his hill and his life to a Skotl-clan duelist. My mother, an Anklene, took her own in her despair.”
The Copper thought it best to switch subjects, as Nivom could become gloomy, and he wanted his old cavemate alert and active. Every time talk turned to clan friction it left him nonplussed. Had not dragons enemies enough? “So that’s where you get your cleverness. The Anklenes.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised if you had some Anklene blood in you too. Your eye ridge is like theirs, though that odd eye spoils the effect. You spout strange ideas. Why all the concern over a vanquished drake?”
“I’m not sure I can put it into words. How are you with mind-pictures?”
“Baby stories? I’m a drake, and you’re not my mother. Or some dragonelle angling to be flattered.”
“In my travels I came across the bodies of two demen sitting back-to-back in a cave, as though they were guarding each other as they died of their wounds. When I smelled the bodies, it was just two more bodies; I’d seen plenty before. But that…that…comradeship…”
“Did you just say comradeship? That’s a queer word. I think it’s taken from a hominid tongue.”
“Dragons could use a little of that, instead of always working out who’s above whom and adding to their own store of glory and gold.”
“You’re not one of these foamers who wants everyone to have the same rank and offer up metals to those who can’t be bothered to get it on their own, are you?”
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve had a sun-struck dragon or two before. Do your dreaming while you’re asleep.”
The Copper thought it best to change the course of the conversation. “So what do you propose to do about catching them in the crotch?”
“I’ll take a sissa of the healthy drakes to the river. Can you handle matters here on the hillside, with the better of the wounded?”
“Yes. I was thinking that trick they played, with their war machines hiding in the brush, could be played on them too. You grab them at the crotch and I’ll bite their arms off.”
“By the Earth Spirit, yes! Rugaard, I’d be proud to cry havoc with you at my side.”
“I was thinking. Some cooperation from the blighters might help. How are you with their tongue?”
“I know a little.”
The Copper thought. “I have a thrall who has a way of making himself agreeable. Maybe he can fill in the gaps.”
A very unlikely reinforcement arrived after a short rain squall—the weather at this time of year seemed to mandate a rain in the early afternoon and a second in the long hours of the night before dawn—a bashed and mud-splattered Firemaiden named Nilrasha.
According to Fourfang, the blighters now named her Ora, a word that in their tongue referred to some hunting season festival or other, during which one of every kind of game animal was sacrificed to their capricious deities. But the blighter shaman always chose one sacrifice at random—the Ora—to be released back into the wild to let the rest of the game know that though the herds might be thinned and a few jaguars brought down, enough would be left to ensure future hunting. According to Fourfang, Ora either meant lucky or redeemed, as the rather fatalistic dragon-tongue didn’t have many words for those blessed and guarded by the gods.
The Copper found her sucking rainwater off of leaves and eating some of the hung meat, and told her Fourfang’s tale. While he did this a pair of blighters toasted meat on sticks and gave the bits to her.
“So that’s why every muddy blighter on this hill’s been patting me,” Nilrasha said.
She had a lot of mud on her, and blades of grass caught in her scale. Drakka who joined the Firemaidens didn’t shirk from dirt and muck, but they were usually cleaner than the drakes. This one either didn’t give a flame for her appearance or was too tired to care for herself. “What happened at the gate?”
“It was so quick. I just remember a hail of projectiles: Some were stones; some were those infernal crossbow bolts. Mivonia in front of me, four struck her, two in the neck, or I wouldn’t be speaking to you now. There was flame, and some of the blighters rushed into this sort of open space at the center of town. Then one of the dragons overhead was hit; I didn’t see it, but I heard his cry as he fell. Everything went wrong after that.”
“The blighters didn’t run, then?”
“No. Not the ones with us, by my maidenoath, though I can’t speak for those behind. But the dragons overhead vanished and the men lost their fear. They poured down their walls and out of their towers.
“Some of the Firemaidens loosed their flame to drive the humans away with heat and smoke, and I chased some through a burning building. Then a wall or a roof fell on me, and I was senseless for a time, though—this is very odd—I heard my mother singing. I distinctly remember it. When the singing stopped it was night, and I moved and some rubble shifted, and then I found myself in their town. I sneaked out through a drain hole that goes under the wall. I think there was meant to be water in it all the time, for the walls and ceiling were covered with dead shell creatures, but something must have gone wrong with the flow, for it was dry everywhere but the floor. It let out by the river, so I just swam across and smelled my way back to the hill. And so you see me.”
