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“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.
The Fireblade mass exploded into various shades of green.
“As best as best can be,” Vank said, when she alighted to hear the news. “We told them to get back on their side of the river, or there would be bloodshed and unceasing war so long as man dared walk in our woods.”
“That’s the way to treat men,” a warrior interrupted, thumping fist against his small round shield, edged with swordcatchers. “Like dogs! Fierce enough until they meet a fight. Then they tuck tail and scuttle. Scuttle!”
“Aye!” another barked.
“And?” Wistala asked, ignoring the byplay.
Vank managed to dance without moving his feet, waving his arms first one way, then the other. “They agreed to withdraw. True! Their prospectors, who thought they found gold, were mistaken in any case. ‘Profitless mine,’ they said.” Vank had to use Parl to quote them accurately. “No profit! No profit! Ghioz never move but for profit. The men will be gone. They promised to withdraw their huntsmen and break camp. Tonight!”
