The Dragon Round (10 page)

CHAPTER THREE

The Beach

1

Jeryon tumbles through the gray, getting nowhere. Sometimes his face is thrust into a huge bubble, and he gobbles air before he's pulled out. He sees a flash of pale skin and kicks for it. His hands grab only sand.

Jeryon pushes off the sandy ridge, his head breaks the surface, and he sees a beach before a wave drives him under again. When his feet hit the bottom, he springs forward with what strength he has. He bobs up. He flings his arms, trying to ride a wave in, but an undertow holds him in place. He can't stay on the surface much longer. He drops under again and lunges to his right. There's another ridge there. Rich sand. Jagged rocks. Coral.

He grabs it and presses his knees beneath himself. That's enough for him to poke his face above the waves before the next wave drives him again into the gray.

Desire leaves his body: for food, for water, for breath. His will uncoils. His body relaxes. All sounds fade. His shoulder scrapes against
the bottom. He's pushed along it until he can't rise anymore. One last roll and he's on his back, anchored by his outstretched arms and legs, sucking air, drinking the rain. Waves flood his ear. The darkness just is.

Then it's not. The tide has receded, but not the rain. Where is the poth? A line of black rocks extends from the shore, ending at three skinny stacks, which the dinghy must have hit. Is that an arm waving? Something is floating beside them. Jeryon lifts his arm.

He floats awake, engulfed in blue;
a rich, unchanging, endless blue. Somehow that's more terrifying than black. A gull flies overhead, and his weight returns. Sand skitters across his cheeks and pushes at his back. His lips are so parched he wants to chew them off. Something is touching his foot.

A white horned crab a foot wide with legs three feet long and a split mouth as big as his face stands over his foot. It holds his big toe lightly with a broad, toothy claw. Its eyestalks sway around the toe, its split mouth ruminating, as if the crab is measuring his toe with calipers. The crab brings out its other, thinner claw, which has needlelike teeth. It taps the end of his toe here, there, then snips the pad. Jeryon jerks his foot, but his foot ignores him. The crab snips again. Blood appears.

More crabs sidle over, curious, their claws clicking. The beach is covered with them. A few dart into the waves to drag fish onto shore. A dozen are stripping the skeleton of what looks like a dolphin thrown up by the storm. One crab, not two feet from Jeryon's face, looks out to sea, claws upraised. Splatters of meat and bloody sand stain its shell.

Snip
. Jeryon stifles a cry. He tries to sit up, but he's so stiff he has to grab his legs and fold himself into a sitting position. The crab doesn't notice him until Jeryon grabs its claws and wrenches the large one off.

All clicking ceases. The crabs scuttle back. One clicks tentatively.

The toesnipper is appalled. It snips, its other legs flail and its
eyestalks stare at him, daring him to do that again. Off comes the skinny claw. It joins the first in Jeryon's lap. He presses the toesnipper against the sand with his foot, and makes it watch him suck the meat from its claws. Shards stick to his throat. He chokes them down.

The other crabs develop a sudden interest in the dolphin. The ocean challenger charges the waves. The toesnipper waggles its eyes at them.

Jeryon flips the toesnipper to pry up its bell-shaped apron with his fingers, but it would be easier to pry a brick from a wall. His father told him, “Never mallet a crab,” but his shaking fingers couldn't lever the blade either. He looks for a rock. The only one he finds within crawling distance is a black boulder poking through the sand, so the crab becomes the mallet. After several blows, the apron shatters and its legs stop flailing. He peels it away, then its carapace, scrapes off the dead man's fingers, and sucks the meat out. The butter helps him swallow.

It's gamier than Joslin crabs, but the mustard and roe are tasty, even if his father, who always put the roe in a soup, would mock him for eating it like an owner: raw off a blade.

When the meat hits his stomach, it rebounds with a gush. His throat flames. He hopes the mustard didn't poison him. He crawls away from the puddle in the sand, and eats the rest of the crab flake by flake.

Refreshed, Jeryon manages to stand and cross the beach to a tree line of oak, bamboo, and pitcher trees. From the latter's deep vessel-like leaves he drinks the collected rainwater, heeding the poth's advice to drink slowly, however glorious the water tastes. Thinking of her leads him to look at the stacks. There's nothing there, and no place for anyone to cling if there were. He doesn't know what he saw during the storm. He spots bits of wood sticking out of the sand farther up the beach: the remnants of the dinghy. If he were kicked up here, where is the poth? He takes another drink and steadies himself to approach the dolphin carcass.

The crabs battle for the choicest bits, but they won't give up their meal to him. They envelop it to hide the bones. They'll snip his hands off if he tries to move them, so Jeryon trudges a ways up the beach and returns with a pointed length of gunwale from his tiller, the broken painter strand still attached. With this he weakly bats the crabs off the bones. When one attacks him, he manages to whack it hard enough to change its mind. The last he flicks off so it lands upside down. Before it can roll over, he stakes it to the beach. While its legs kick at the sky, he examines the carcass.

It's half-buried in the sand; a rib cage, shoulder blades, and skull scratched and nearly free of flesh. It isn't the poth's. It might have been her, though, and Jeryon takes out his elation on the staked crab.

Most of the crabs give him a wide berth now. The few that don't seem resigned to whatever fate this terrible avenger has for them. One soon finds out.

Jeryon stretches. He's regaining strength and sensation, the latter mostly agony. He plots a survey of the island. It's the first act of any prisoner: pacing one's cell. And he has to find a better source of water. It's approaching noon, and the water in the leaves of the pitcher trees won't last much longer in this heat.

As far as he can tell, he's at the northwest corner of an island surrounded by low cliffs rising from the sea. Thick forest rambles uphill some five hundred feet to ring a flat-topped column of gray rock another two hundred feet high. This beach is the only place he can see where the land ramps up to the island's interior. If the poth didn't land here, she'll have been in more trouble than not having landed at all.

Jeryon pushes himself from tree to tree until he finds a fallen branch he can use as a walking stick. He tosses aside the piece of gunwale.

After such a storm, it isn't hard to find a stream. Grasses, bright flowers of every hue, and thick bushes race alongside it. It's so loud it drowns out the constant buzz and whirr of insects, which also drowns out the thought that those insects would make a good source of nutrition should the crabs run out.

He follows the stream a few hundred yards southwest toward the column to where it cuts through a bamboo grove. Using the folds of his shirt to guard the straight edge of the blade, he saws through a wide culm just beneath a node with his blade, then through the internode just beneath the next node. He checks inside the hollow for bugs, rinses it a few times in the stream, fills it to the brink, and drinks heartily. The water is cold and rich and tastes like a new life just begun.

Beyond the bamboo the stream enters a meadow that ends to the north at a cliff overlooking the sea. A single tree in its center guards a broadening of the stream. Jeryon can't believe his luck. It's a shega tree. The fruit is his secret vice. He would treat himself to one at the end of every voyage when they were in season, and to a big slice of fresh bread with shega preserves when they weren't. He figures he's deserving now.

Most of the fruit aren't ripe yet, shega won't be in season for another month, but a few are close enough, and Jeryon picks the biggest he can reach. He slices it in half and sucks from the white pulp a purple jewel of flesh with a seed inside. It may be the best shega he's ever eaten, and not just because the shega are reserved for shipowners back in Hanosh. He eats another jewel and admires the ocean's beautiful nothing.

He has water. He has meat and fruit. He has all the materials to build a shelter. He could survive here, day after endless day, until the crabs enjoy their final triumph. There's no point leaving without the poth. The Trust won't believe his testimony alone.

He walks toward the cliff. Would it be worth giving the crabs their meal now? The cliff is high enough, fifty or sixty feet. He eats another jewel. Even shega will get boring in time. So will time on the island. Just sunrise and noontime, star-rise and midnight, being awake and being asleep, one after the other after the other. What kind of life is that? Waves pound the cliff. He could live a hundred years and the waves would pound the cliff and the cliff wouldn't change. He spits the shega seed over the edge. It vanishes from sight long before it reaches the water.

I've already vanished from sight
, he thinks. He eats another jewel.
These are tasty, though
. Maybe he'll wait until the season ends.

To the east he spies a trail through the meadow from the stream to the cliff. It's much wider than his own, the grasses and underbrush beaten down. He walks along the cliff's edge to where it meets the trail. He stands as if thunderstruck by what he finds. There, in the dirt: a single footprint, massive, four-toed, and clawed.

2

Standing alone on the clifftop, Jeryon has never felt so exposed. He ducks behind a fragrant shrub and scans the surrounding forest. A landscape that had been almost welcoming a moment ago is now full of waving blades of underbrush and the shaking limbs of trees. Every boulder resolves into a head, and the shadows of clouds become those of wings. He listens. He hears nothing. He takes a longer look at the track.

The print is worn around the edges. The lowest points are puddled. It was made before the storm, but what made it may still be on the island. He has to know. Jeryon follows the creature's trail to the stream then upstream into the forest again, where it fades away.

The stream widens into a pond full of fat black frogs. He'll gig some when he gets the chance and hope they're edible. He eats more shega. The sweetness is intoxicating. As he chews he considers the trees: a variety of oaks, a few ulmus and chinkapins with their spiky nuts, amid the ubiquitous bamboo and many stands of palm. He could make a good raft from this forest. He strips some threads from a fallen palm leaf. How long would it take him to weave a sail?

Beyond the frog pond the forest opens into another meadow. The land is rising more noticeably, and he's high enough to see more of the island. It could be eight or ten miles around. He doesn't see any other
approaches besides his beach, and it's guarded for hundreds of yards by sandbars, coral, and jagged rocks. It's remarkable that the dinghy made it as close to the island as it did.

He sees no smoke, no fire, no movement, no sign of the poth.
I should blaze my trails
, he thinks,
to lead her to me
. He'll light a fire too. He needs to find her, and no longer just to testify. However rich the island is, he's just one infection or injury away from death, and she can heal. The endless leaves and weeds, roots and blooms that surround him: He can't understand their language.

On the high side of the meadow end he finds more tracks, older, barely visible in the underbrush, the toes lost in the stream. Whatever made them must drink here often. He fills his own cup and washes down the last of the jewels.

Again in the woods, he makes a blaze every thirty paces. After twenty blazes, the stream turns south between two steep rises. On one the trees are blackened from fire and the underbrush has barely returned. In the ashen dirt Jeryon sees another footprint, heading over the crest. The earthy smell of dragon wafts toward him, deeper and uglier than the one he smelled on the
Comber
. He crouches behind a tree.

He sets the cup down and pulls himself up the rise. He lays on the edge of the crest. Beyond is a clearing not made by nature.

In a broad hollow scoured by fire, trees have been shattered and others toppled so their root mouths yawn at the world like wooden octopi reaching for prey. Sunlight fingers great furrows in the earth. Blood stains exposed wood and tattered leaves. Jeryon sees in the midst of the destruction a line of short jagged spines atop an enormous black back.

This isn't the maturing black of the
Comber
dragon, but the abysmal black of a very old one. Its wings are folded neatly, soft and floppy. Jeryon feels the urge to touch them until he thinks that each is probably bigger than the
Comber
. The dragon is withered with age. Its ribs and spine show through its skin, which rises in strange bursts like the chest of a person struggling for breath.

Jeryon inches over the crest. He's moving as silently as possible, but sounds, he thinks, like a sword on a grindstone. Before he peeks over the edge he pictures himself staring straight down the creature's throat. He hopes it's sleeping. Its head must be the size of the dinghy. Its back alone looks nearly as long as the
Comber
dragon.

What he finds is carnage. The dragon's neck is ripped in half. Its empty eye sockets bloom with nerve tendrils. Half its rotting tongue is clamped between its teeth; the other half has been chewed away. Its sides are rent, its tail, thicker than a man, is broken like a carpenter's square, and the neck left on the body, wide enough to push a barrow down, has been cored of meat and bone. The remaining skin partially drapes it.

Jeryon sighs with relief. He could render the dragon for himself. A dragon bone blade is better than steel, and mounted in a bamboo culm it would make a spear or a knife far easier to wield than his tiny blade and far sharper than a bamboo blade. The skin would be too heavy for a sail, but it would be a great tarp. If the phlogiston hasn't leaked away, he would have a precious source of fuel for light and fire.