The Dragon Round (11 page)

If he could bring the renderings to Hanosh, he would have the wealth to ruin his mates, their families, and everyone they ever knew. He could go in disguise under an assumed name so they wouldn't suspect anything. He could befriend them so they would also feel betrayed when he finally revealed his identity. And being close to them would make his revenge more exquisite. Such a complex plan, though, would have too many potential pitfalls. Better to trust the Trust and the law.

It occurs to him: How can the dragon be breathing?

Its skin doesn't rise so much as it bulges in places. And the bulges are moving. The skin draping the neck billows out. Something is inside. The skin flips up. A broad blue claw, leaf-shaped and smiling with sharp white teeth, emerges. A thinner claw, as long and as toothy, tests the air, followed by two eyes the size of shegas on stalks. They peer in every direction before settling on Jeryon. He doesn't move. The front
legs come next, a darker blue and as long as hand-and-a-half swords, followed by the body, blue with white smears and big as a buckler. Whereas the crabs on the beach had stubby white horns, this crab has a crown of them.

It scuttles out of the neck toward Jeryon. He dares to slide an inch down the rise. The crab takes a few more steps forward. Jeryon snakes away until he can barely see over the crest. The crab's eyes bend from side to side, as if it can't see him anymore, and it clicks its claws. Jeryon smiles at the crab's frustration. He'll return with a bamboo spear, he will kill and eat that crab, and he will take this dragon for his own.

A few answering clicks come from inside the neck. Then a few more. Another claw appears. And another. The watch crab clacks once decisively, and Jeryon would swear it's pointing its skinny claw at him. A chorus of clicks erupts from the neck, followed by dozens of the huge blue crabs, which charge across the hollow, claws raised.

Jeryon slides down the rise and flees downstream.

The crabs spread across the water and the banks. They leap from tree trunk to tree trunk. A few get into the canopy and leap along the branches like spiders until they dive at him, but miss and crack open on the rocks in the stream.

He counts the blazes. When he gets to the grassland, he thinks he'll be able to lose them in the brush. This is their island, though, and as he veers into the underbrush it trips him up. Ship life makes for strong bodies, but not fleet runners. He returns to the stream and hurtles downhill.

His salvation is the pond, where the fat black frogs prove a more tempting meal than the bounding brown man. The frogs dive deep, the crabs plunge in, the frogs hop out, and soon his pursuers are scattering through the forest while he races past the shega tree. That's enough exploring for one day.

For the rest of the afternoon he weaves bamboo and vines into a lean-to, periodically feasting on the increasingly fatalistic white crabs. He also makes himself three spears, a bamboo handle for his blade,
and a set of cups to replace the one he left at the dragon hollow. He sets the lean-to against a spur of cliff at the edge of the beach and puts the spears inside. Then he makes a bow drill out of vine and bamboo, gathers firewood, scrapes himself a pile of tinder, and gets a blaze going in pits on either side of the lean-to. If a ship sees his fire, if the poth sees its smoke, so be it. They're meant to keep the white crabs at bay. The spears are for the blue ones, although he doubts they stray far from the dragon.

A few more crab claws and legs grilled on bamboo skewers, several more cups of water, and the shega, then Jeryon lets himself fall asleep long before star-rise.

Nevertheless he bolts up in the middle of the night. The pits glow red. Shadows seethe in the lean-to. The sand is skillet hard. The sea will not stop sizzling on the beach. Knowing that no one can hear him, that no one might ever hear him again, Jeryon screams and screams and sobs and screams.

3

Four days later, Jeryon jiggles a blue crab's shell above a fire, using two wet palm leaves folded into squares as pot holders. The crab's body meat falls off skewers too easily, so he begins frying a mix of blue and white with the paste of crushed olives. The bitterness is worth the oil. With his other hand he pours water from a broad bamboo culm into a cup. As someone who lives from berth to berth, port to port, he knows that wherever your plate and cup are, that's your home.

Having a detailed schedule is as good as having oars tick his way through the day, so he plans his next assault on the blue crabs. His system is simple: get them to chase him, run to the frog pond, and once they scatter spear them one by one.

With a bamboo spatula he transfers the cooked meat to another
blue crab shell, his plate. He wishes he had a pot to make soup. His sister made an excellent one, but after she left, Jeryon couldn't stomach crab for a long time. Then he ate it to remind himself of her. At some point it lost the quality of remembrance and became just another bland seafood. His taste for it is returning, he's surprised to find.

He banks the fire, no longer trying to maintain a steady stream of smoke to attract ships or the poth. It breaks up too quickly in the ever-present breeze, barely reaching the tops of the trees, let alone the tops of the adjoining cliffs. As for the light attracting ships, there's little point in bothering. His second night on the island he built a cross-staff to confirm what he already suspected from the star's positions: the island is deep in the ocean, well south of any route a ship from the League might take to the Dawn Lands. The dinghy must have reached the river a day or two after they were set adrift. All the time he was telling the poth he could get them to Yness, they were probably passing it, heading into oblivion.

He thinks he might be on Gladsend, an island that shows up on few maps because few are sure where it is and fewer believe it exists. It was supposedly a pirate refuge long ago, but why refuge here when prey is so far away and Yness so accommodating?

He cleans his pan and dish, making a weak soap of some ash, water, and the hot olive oil, and rests them against the lean-to to dry. He overturns the cup and pitcher on little posts. He rakes his house with a leafy frond. When all is in order, he tucks in his shirt and rubs his chin. He hates his stubble. His knife isn't up to the task of shaving, preferring to slice instead. Hopefully a dragonbone blade will do a better job. He picks up a spear and his knife and sets out.

Along the stream he's erected stakes to hold bamboo cups. There are also supplies of spears in case the blue crabs decide they're sick of frogs.

When he reaches the dragon hollow, the crabs are swarming over the hill beyond it and heading toward the gray column of rock to the south. Have they given up on the dragon? Are they chasing something?
If the poth found the stakes and blazes along the path, he realizes, they might not lead her to the beach. They might lead her here.

Jeryon slides down the hill and shadows the crabs up the wooded slopes surrounding the column, a wide green collar around a headless stone neck. The crabs climb at an angle and Jeryon moves to their side so he can see what they're pursuing. He hears it bounding and breaking through the brush, sounds drowned in the furious clacking of crab claws, but he can't see what it is.

The crabs slow. Do they have their quarry trapped? Did they catch it and kill it? If so, it didn't put up much of a struggle. With a spear in each hand he edges closer. Just a glimpse is all he needs. He hopes it's not her, as much as he wants it to be her. The crabs eddy in a pool of shell and claw, several clicks responding to each interrogative clack, as if they're discussing what to do. Some are looking his way. Jeryon hides behind an oak. If he climbed it, he might be able to see, but if they saw him, he would be trapped. He has to chance it.

He leans his spears against the tree, pulls himself onto a low branch, and it snaps. He falls on his face. The spears clatter over him.

Dozens of eyestalks waggle as one in his direction.

Jeryon jumps up, grabs the spears, and leaps away like a fat black frog.

Halfway to the next hill he realizes he won't be able to climb the slope quickly enough to stay ahead of the crabs, so he veers north. The trees grow thicker. All he has to do is pace the crabs and eventually they'll forget about him, just as they've forgotten about their original quarry. He might even be able to spear a few in the end.

They're catching up, though. The crabs, large as they are, can slip between the trees more easily than him, and a few are jumping over branches and bushes he has to avoid. Three leap at him just as he bursts between two trees into a meadow—except there is no meadow. The sky he saw through the trees heralds a fifty-foot drop where the wind has stripped the hill down to its rock, a cliff above the cliffs.

Jeryon grabs a branch, swinging it aside like a door on a hinge as
two crabs fly past him. They and his spear plummet to the scree below. One foot follows them while the other scrambles for purchase. His hand slips down the branch. His knee finds the edge, he finds his balance on it, and his other spear comes up just in time to find the belly of a third leaping crab, catapulting it over his head. It slides off the spear, scrabbles at his shirt, caroms off his heel and falls.

The rest of the crabs spread out as he stands so he can't escape. Their split mouths ruminate. One in the center darts at him. He jabs. It scuttles back. Two dart from either side. He swings the spear in an arc. They scuttle back. When three come, he has no good response. He jabs at the middle one, which lets the outside two get close enough to snip before he swings and they retreat. They missed, but hitting him wasn't the point. Now four edge closer. The others click to goad them. One scrapes a pointed blue foot against the dirt. Then Jeryon hears something much larger crashing through the woods. He pictures the Crab King coming to finish him off.

A half-dozen crabs investigate. They disappear beyond a bamboo grove, where they're met with cries of fury and steel clanking through shell. The bamboo waves. Only one returns to tell the tale. It scuttles toward the swarm, clicking frantically, the poth in pursuit, swinging a rusty broad sword with a cat's head pommel. She cries again and hacks the crab in half, the creature running all the way to its comrades before it realizes that it's dead, and its legs topple in opposite directions.

The blue crabs scatter. She starts to sheathe her sword in a steel sheath before thinking better of it.

Jeryon says, “How are you?”

“For one,” she says, “I'm sick of eating crab.”

Jeryon takes a step toward her, and a crab leaps from under the cliff's edge onto his shoulder. Its broad claw bites into his arm. Its split mouth gnashes his head. Jeryon hollers and twists to get it off and stumbles toward the cliff's edge.

Everlyn reaches out to him with the sword. He clutches the blade
as his heels tip over the edge, which jerks her forward. Her sword opens his palm as he slowly topples backward, the crab riding him over the edge with its skinny claw raised in victory.

She rushes to the edge. The cliff isn't perfectly vertical, and he slid for twenty feet before his sandals caught on a blade of rock. He's pressed against the cliff face, clinging to cracks, while the crab worries his right arm. Blood seeps through his tattering sleeves.

She lies on her belly and swings her sword at the crab. She misses by a wide margin. The crab comes at her again, she swings again, and it turns aside to skitter along the cliff face. It disappears behind an outcrop.

She leaps up and faces the woods; the other crabs might come back. She holds her sword before her, sturdy but flexible, moving without moving, the way her father taught her when she was a girl. A trader has to be a duelist, he said, in case his guards are absent or traitorous. And swordsmanship offered a profitable worldview. Although she deplored the taking of life, he was right. Knowing intimately that every thrust could be her last had taught her anticipation, poise, intimidation, and planning. Still, her lessons would have been more interesting had she been armed with a cleaver like this broad sword instead of a foil.

The crab doesn't appear, nor do the others. Is it waiting for her to reach for him and make herself vulnerable? Is it skulking through the bushes to flank her? Jeryon barks, “Poth.” She turns and flattens herself along the edge. He points to his right with his eyes. She swings. The sword sweeps the crab's legs out from under it, and it falls. It skips off the cliff face, breaking off its legs and pieces of its shell.

“Hold on,” she says. She gets up and sees exactly what she needs near the edge: a thick vine dangling from a chinkapin. It's lined with withering yellow flowers and small purple fruit like plums. She works it loose in stages and pushes it to Jeryon. He grabs hold and climbs it while she holds it over her shoulder, facing the roots to keep it from tearing out of the ground.

When he's nearly up, she hears clicking in the brush. She left her
sword by the chinkapin. Ten feet away, it feels like ten miles. “I have to drop the vine,” she says.

“No,” he says, “I'm almost there.”

The crabs come closer. “I'm going to try something,” she says. “Don't let go.”

Everlyn hugs the vine tight and charges toward her sword and the crabs, drawing him up behind her. The crabs rush her. The vine goes slack. She hopes he's on top of the cliff. She kneels to grab her sword and a crab flies at her. She comes up quickly to stab it between its eyes. Two more leap on her. Their claws have her hair and her smock, trying to find her arms. A third snips at her ankle, putting her into a fighting retreat, and she screams as she cuts through one claw, then the other.

She waves her sword in an arc to keep the rest at bay while Jeryon wrenches one crab off her back and tosses it over the cliff, then does the same to the other. Its broad claw comes off in his hand, and Jeryon shakes it at the other crabs.

That and the sword convince the crabs they've lost the day. They leave the field sideways, each with one eye curled over its shoulders like an upraised finger.