Fool's Gold (7 page)

“Well,” said Firkin, ruffling Will's hair, “in that case the dragons would have gone and eaten all the nobles, and if there's one thing the nobles like even less than dragons eating all the farmers, it's dragons eating all of
them
.”

Will had never truly considered what Mattrax ate before. Thinking about it now, he felt again some of the fear that he'd felt when he'd seen the dragon fly over him. And while he was mostly convinced Firkin was telling him a tall tale, given Mattrax's size, the dragon
could
eat a person. Will shuddered slightly.

“So pretty much the dragons ate the soldiers, and then they ate the nobles,” Firkin went on. “And somewhere along the way, the farmers started fighting too.”

“Why?” So far it seemed to Will that nobody had actually been threatening to eat the farmers and the whole thing still felt a lot like a giant misunderstanding.

“Because they were fucking idiots,” Firkin said, with a certain amount of feeling.

Something about the way he said it felt odd to Will, even at six years old. “Did you fight?” he asked.

Firkin shrugged. “Let me just figure out how to tell this, would you?”

Will mimed buttoning his lips. Firkin laughed. Buttoning his lips always made Firkin laugh. And that made Will laugh, though he did his best to keep his lips shut.

“So the farmers fought. And they did it because… Well, men and women get used to a certain way of living. And even if it's not a great way to live, they'll oftentimes fight to protect it. They get scared of a future they don't know. Like a room you've never been in before and there aren't any lights. So you stay in the room you know, where the lights are. You understand?”

Will nodded. He understood enough.

“And to be fair, when you know the next room has a dragon in it, then you're probably smart to stay where you are,” Firkin said with a strange, sad smile. “And I think that back when they started out, the farmers really thought they had a chance. Gods still manifested in Kondorra from time to time back in those days. And they seemed to think that the great father Lawl, or the protective mother Betra, or hardworking Toil, or someone would come and deliver them from their woes. Even if all a god normally did when it was manifested was whore around and break bits of the world.” He shook his head.

Will risked a question. “What's whoring around?”

Firkin looked at him and grimaced. “It's… it's a bit like running round all the farmhouses and sticking your finger in all the pies, and licking the finger in between without washing it. Except worse.”

Will imagined every mistress of every household in a rage at him, and wasn't entirely sure what could be worse than that. Still, he let the issue lie for now. Firkin's story was a good one.

“Did a god come?” he asked.

“The gods did jack and shit, Will,” Firkin said and threw away his apple core so hard it broke in two when it hit another tree. “Not a sight nor a sound of them. Not even hardworking Toil, who some said was patron of this place. Not protective mother Betra. Not law-obsessed Lawl. None of them. The farmers got eaten up along with everyone else.”

“All of the farmers,” Will asked incredulous.

“Not all of them, you dolt,” said Firkin with a roll of his eyes. “I'm still here, aren't I? Your ma and pa are still here. But enough.” His voice grew somber. “Enough got eaten up. Until we gave up, said enough, said we'd do whatever the dragons asked of us.”

“What do they ask of us?” Will was trying to imagine Mattrax swooping down off a mountain and landing in front of his mother's kitchen door, and demanding a pie from her.

Firkin smiled, big and broad, and absent of all mirth. “Little things, Will. Little things. They asked us to live in fear. They asked us to give up anything we held dear whenever they wanted it. They asked us to live in poverty. They asked us to scrape by in the dirt when once we used to walk… maybe not tall, but not stooped either.”

And Will thought again of the shadow in the sky, of the panic in the fields, and of his mother's scream. And he thought of other things too. He thought of the times he had gone to bed hungry. He thought of the hours his father spent repairing rusting farm tools. He thought of the uniformed men and women who came each year and took away the small coffer of coins his father kept in the corner of the kitchen.

And in his mind that shadow in the sky grew, and the sun didn't shine so bright above his head.

But above all, one thing troubled him. “Firkin,” he said, “why didn't you fight?”

Firkin gave another small sad smile. “Nobles aren't the only one who don't want to die,” he said.

And that did seem reasonable to Will. So he switched to a new line of thought. “We should kill Mattrax now,” he said. The job had clearly not been done right when the dragons first came; he supposed it was up to him now.

Firkin laughed out loud at that. Normally Will liked it when Firkin laughed. It meant something funny had just happened. But now he had an unpleasant feeling that the funny thing was him.

“What?” he said. “He's a bad guy. You said.”

“Aye.” Firkin nodded. “And I'm glad you listened and you figured that out. But a lot better than us have tried to kill the dragons and they haven't had much luck so far. And while I'm not so keen on being eaten up by a dragon, I'm even less keen on being flayed alive by your ma when I tell her how you've been eaten up.”

And that did seem like reasonable logic to Will. But it also led to an impasse. There was a bad guy, someone to be defeated. In all the stories his ma and pa had told him, all the fairy tales and religious fables, the bad guy was faced down and eventually slain.

“So what do we do?”

And then, all of a sudden, there truly was joy in Firkin's smile. Will felt his stomach swelling and getting light, and he felt the sun once more, as he leaned back against the apple tree.

“That's why I like you, Willett Fallows,” said Firkin. He pulled out the flask he always carried with him and took a quick tug from it. “Always thinking right. And, no, I don't think we can kill old Mattrax up in his fortress, but I know what I'd like to do.”

“What?” Will was all ears.

Firkin grinned as broad as the horizon. “Why, young Will, I'd like to steal from him.” He leaned in close. “And I know exactly how to do it.”

The whole memory flashed through Will in an instant. Balur spoke and a moment later he had the taste of fresh apple in his mouth. And then, a moment after that, he tasted all the ashes of the broken promises that had come on that moment's heels.

He looked over at Firkin, hunched over, staring at the fire, eyes and mind lost. And he felt anger, a clenched fist in his gut. It was another new experience, this rage that lurked inside him.

“Oh,” he said, turning to Balur, with a degree of aggression that the lizard man's size should have dissuaded. “It's that simple is it? Just take the gold from Mattrax. From a dragon in, wait… what did I say again? Oh yes, an entire fortress full of guards! Because that's the first time anyone in Kondorra has looked at their shitty life and said, ‘Wouldn't life be better if we just took all the gold from the dragons?' Because not one evening has been spent in a tavern fantasizing about just that thing. Because we've all had better things to do… Actually I take that back. We
have
had better things to do. We call them ‘not being killed by a dragon.' It's a fun way we like to spend our lives round here.”

Balur curled back his lips and revealed his teeth for a moment. Will felt his stomach try to bore into the ground beneath him. “Be being a touchy little fucker, aren't we?” the lizard man said.

Will swallowed, breathed, and looked at Lette in the faint hope of support. “It's been a rough day,” he managed to get out.

“Well,” said Lette, looking at Balur, “if we've lost the fucking purse, and no one here has the coin to hire us, then we'll have to find a mark or move on.”

Balur arched… Will wasn't quite sure what it was. The bony ridge that stood in for his eyebrow, he supposed. “There is being no more baking for you, then?” he said, equal parts arch and nonsensical as far as Will could tell.

“Oh shut up and give me the flask.” Lette reached out and Balur tossed the thing over to her. She took a swig, and smacked her lips. She was graceful, in a way, Will thought. Not the way that courtesan's were in the stories the tinkerman told down at old Cornwall's tavern. The grace in stories had less… brutality to it. Still, Lette's was a grace of sorts.

“You'd not be denying a man a wee sip of the nectar now, would you?” said Firkin, a wheedling edge sneaking into his voice, eyes large, round, and fixed on the flask. “Not just because he called all your mothers whores?” He smiled and showed the scattered remnants of his teeth.

“When did you…?” Will started.

“A man can mutter, can't he?” yelled Firkin. Then he turned to Lette, stretched out his hands. “Please,” he implored. “I need it to live.”

Lette seemed unconvinced and glanced at Will. “Noisy drunk or quiet drunk?”

Will grimaced. He would like to give her good news at some point. “Pretty much just this all the time.”

Lette rolled her eyes and passed the flask.

“Hey,” Balur objected.

Lette waved him away. “There's plenty for everyone.”

A faint glugging sound came from Firkin as he upended the flask. They watched him pour. When the growl from Balur began to make the cave's rock floor vibrate, Will laid a hand on Firkin's arm.

“Maybe—”

“No!” Firkin screamed. Alcohol sprayed across Will's face, into the flames, where it hissed and spat. “The fire!” he went on screaming. “In my belly. My balls, man. I need it in my balls! I need the fire. I am the flame! I burn! In my balls!”

He hiccupped loudly, blinked twice at Will, went to take another swig, and collapsed backward. The only part of the performance that shocked Will was that he managed to keep the flask upright the whole way down.

Will plucked the drink out of the old farmhand's fingers. Firkin started to snore. Tentatively Will held it out to Balur, who snatched it back with a sour expression. Then he looked at Firkin. “Least he is being quiet. Probably is being worth the trade-off.”

Quirk was watching all of this with a look of slight confusion. This was, Will gathered, not exactly how things went in the halls of academia. She shifted her weight and he half-expected her to get up and leave, but she simply leaned forward, looking back and forth between Lette and Balur.

“You wouldn't seriously propose,” she said, “to steal from a dragon's lair?” She paused, seemed to consider the corpses spread around them. “Would you?”

Lette and Balur exchanged a glance.

“I am not knowing,” Balur said finally, voice grating out. “I have been doing stupider things.”

Lette snorted. “Speak for yourself.”

Will's brow furrowed. “Trust me, there's nothing you could have done that is stupider than trying to rob a dragon.”

Balur's mouth opened.

“Don't you fucking dare.” Lette's tongue lashed out as quick as one of her knives.

Balur rolled his shoulder in a tectonic shrug.

“It would be amazing to see a dragon actually guarding his hoard,” said Quirk with what Will could only call an inappropriately dreamy tone. “It's very rarely been seen.” She smiled ruefully. “I suppose it's because you're eaten almost immediately after you see it.” She nodded to herself. “That does seem far more likely now that I know how big they are. Even if flight doesn't.” She looked up at Will. “You're absolutely sure they fly?”

Will looked to the others for support. “You study dragons for a living and you're not entirely sure if they fly?” he asked.

“Dragons don't live in Tamathia any more.” Quirk sounded distinctly huffy at this point. “The last one was killed before the Thirsk uprising ten generations back.”

“Killed?” At first Will thought he must have misheard her. But then she nodded.

Will reeled. That simple up-down movement of Quirk's head was like a slap in the face. For all his life the impossibility of killing a dragon had been a given. Dragons were as much a part of the landscape as the mountains, as the earth beneath his feet. They were everlasting, immovable. The idea of one dying from old age was almost beyond his comprehension. But killed? That was even more insane than the idea of robbing one.

“How?” he asked. “Where?” Even the idea of dragons beyond Kondorra's borders was lunatic.

“Oh,” said Quirk, without any acknowledgment of the violence she was doing to his worldview. “This was back in Tamathia around two hundred fifty years ago. You see, according to the records I've found, dragons used to be far more common in Avarra. Clashes between human settlements and dragons were quite common. But with our advancing technology we apparently got quite good at killing them. The assumption was we'd killed them off, up until the Kondorran incursion thirty years ago.”

Will was reduced to blinking.
Killed them off?
How come no one had ever mentioned this to him growing up?

“We still have accounts of the battles,” she went on. “They would go out with…” She trailed off, stared into space. “Gods, I always thought they had the numbers wrong. But groups of about fifteen hundred or so. A small army, I suppose. A thousand archers—five hundred for each wing. Arrows couldn't penetrate the scales on the body, but the leather of the wings was vulnerable to them. Then there would be two hundred pikemen positioned to swipe at its guts when it came in to attack. They would just have to stand in front of the fire and hope they weren't too savagely burned when it was their turn to finally poke at the dragon's guts. Horrific losses, of course. But they went mad for that sort of thing back then. Anyway, once they finally got the dragon on the ground, there were three hundred axe men to finish the job.” She shook her head. “They called it sport. A massacre isn't a sport in my opinion.” She hung her head sadly.

“I think,” Will said, “that I would like to live in Tamathia.” He spoke with the same half-dreaming tone as Quirk had when she talked about live dragons.

Lette grunted. “You've got dragons. They've got gods manifesting. That's why uprisings are so common. Knole and Cois showed up a decade or so ago, and there was a civil war. Took them years to build back up. Made them very insular.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “You have to buy your way in.”

“Another reason to rob that dragon,” Balur rumbled.

Having one more dream kicked out from under him was not what Will needed right at that moment. He landed back in reality, hard. “It's impossible to steal from a dragon,” he snapped. Then he rounded on Quirk. “Or kill one. They're like shit. No one wants it but everyone's stuck with it.”

Balur regarded him coldly. “Can steal from anyone.”

Will's bitter laugh was back. “Really?” he said. “Really?” He suddenly wanted to strip Balur of his arrogant ignorance. “All right then. Mattrax lives in a cave up in the mountains. And around the whole cave… I mentioned the fortress full of guards didn't I? So the gold is in the cave. And so is Mattrax. All day. All night. Guarding it. Along with the guards. He leaves only once each day, to go and stretch for an hour and perform his ablutions on some poor unsuspecting bastard like me.”

Balur looked amused. “So—” he started.

“No.” Will cut him off. “You don't. Because the cave's entrance has a massive portcullis over it. An ironmonger's wet dream. The whole thing operates on a pressure plate. And about the only thing big enough to trip the mechanism is the gods-hexed dragon you're trying to steal from.”

Lette's eyes were narrowed. Will could see the gears working behind them. Some sort of professional pride was at stake. “Wait,” she said, “it's built on a castle. The guards must…” She trailed off looking at Will expectantly.

“Sure.” Will nodded, the bitter bite of his words still souring his mouth. “The guards have an entrance to the cave beyond just the portcullis. They use it to go into the cave once a day with a great big juicy oxen for Mattrax to snack on. But where is that entrance? Or do you people honestly keep forgetting about this giant, guard-filled fortress I keep mentioning? Because I keep on mentioning it.”

Balur was looking at him, a considering expression on his face. “How are you knowing so much about this cave and this fortress? Have you been casing it?”

Will's eyes slipped to Firkin again. He tasted a mouthful of apples and ash… Suddenly he just wanted the conversation to be over.

“Casing it?” Will laughed awkwardly. “I'm a farmer. I told you, everybody around here wants to steal from Mattrax. Everybody talks about it. Everybody knows. Mattrax doesn't care who knows these sorts of things. Because it doesn't matter. He's impregnable.” He spat at the fire. The phlegm—suffering the same fate as any hopes of robbing Mattrax—evaporated on impact.

Balur was still considering him. “You are telling me,” he said, “that everybody in this part of the land could be telling me that Mattrax is having a pressure plate to be operating his portcullis that is being keyed specifically to his weight? Every last one?”

He'd done it now. He'd let his anger—and, just maybe, his desire to impress Lette with his knowledge—get the better of him.

“Well,” he hedged. “Maybe not
everyone
.”

“Anyone?” Lette pressed.

“Well,” said Will again, trying to find a way to sidle out of the specifics. “I was told,” he managed. ”So, yes, someone else knew.”

“Who?”

This,
Will thought,
is why I can't outsmart a pig. I never consider the next step in the chain of events.

Will chewed his bottom lip, then looked at the hairy, stinking man sleeping next to him. “Firkin,” he said finally.

Universally around the cave, eyes were narrowed.

“Him?” asked Lette and Quirk in harmony.

“Barph's syphilitic ball sack,” said Balur.

“Yes, him,” said Will, defensive despite himself. “It was when I was a child. Before he”—he gestured vaguely with his hand—“took to drinking, I suppose.”

They all just stared at him. He sighed. He was going to have to go through it with them. Or at least some version of it. “This was back when I was a kid. We used to talk about it. Just a game or…” He shrugged, trying to shed the bitterness and the disappointment. “I don't know what he thought it was. But it was all shit.” He looked down at Firkin. And still couldn't quite manage with hate. Not quite with sorrow either. There was still too much nostalgia mixed in there with it all.

Another memory. This one with sharper edges than before. Sitting on his mattress, the curtain that gave him privacy from his parents pulled tightly closed. The paraphernalia of rebellion was laid out on the cot before him, scavenged from the farm and his mother's kitchen. He examined his treasures with intensity: a rusty old butter knife, the stub of a charcoal pencil, a scrap of wax paper, a fistful of sticks sharpened to points, a trowel—

Rustling behind him made him sweep up his sheets to hide everything, but when he turned around and saw his father peeking around the edge of the curtain he knew it was already too late. He'd been caught.

“Hey there, young'un,” said his father. “What have you got there?”

His father had a round, open face, sun-bleached hair, and hard, tan skin. To Will he seemed more enduring than the rocks in the hills, more powerful than any of the gods. Only his mother seemed to know more about the world.

Resistance was futile.

He explained slowly, in stops and starts. What it was. What it was for. “Firkin has a plan, Da,” he said finally. “A way to fight back. 'Cept not fighting like with fists. Like you told me not to. But like a way that'll hurt the dragons without us getting hurt. He's figured it all out. He has.” He tried to get his da to understand with the intensity of his emotion.

But his da smiled, that indulgent smile of a parent amused at his son's foolishness. And Will seized up his trowel and wielded it defiantly, uncertain of what he could actually do with it, but desperate for a totem of his certainty, his defiance.