Collected Short Fiction, page 1032
“Bitter,” he said. “And a musty taste, but not entirely terrible. What’s the secret of its appeal?”
The Skandar patted his thighs. “Aphrodisiac!” he boomed. “Stirs the juices! Heats the blood! Prolongs the life!” He pointed jovially at Zalzan Gibor, who, unasked, had taken a robust swig of the stuff. “See? The Skandar knows! The man of Piliplok doesn’t need to be begged to drink it!”
Carabella said, “Dragon-milk? These are mammals?”
“Mammals, yes. The eggs are hatched within, so, and the young born alive, ten or twenty in a litter, rows of nipples all up and down the belly. You think it’s odd, milk from dragons?”
“I think of dragons as reptiles,” said Carabella, “and reptiles give no milk.”
“Think of dragons as dragons, better. You want to taste?”
“Thank you, no,” she replied. “My juices need no stirring.”
The meals in the captain’s cabin were the best part of the voyage, Valentine decided. Gorzval was good-natured and outgoing, as Skandars went, and he set a decent table, with wine and meats and fish of various sorts, including a good deal of dragon-flesh. But the ship itself was creaky and cramped, poorly designed and even more poorly maintained; and the crew, a dozen Skandars and an assortment of Hjorts and humans, was uncommunicative and often downright hostile. Obviously these dragon-hunters were a proud and insular lot, even the crew of a bedraggled vessel like the Brangalyn, and resented the presence of outsiders among them as they practiced their mysteries. Only Gorzval seemed at all hospitable, but he clearly felt grateful to them, for their fare was all that had allowed him to get his ship seaworthy.
They were far from land now, in a featureless realm where pale blue ocean met pale blue sky to obliterate all sense of place and direction. The course was a south-southeasterly one, and the farther they got from Piliplok the warmer grew the wind, hot now and dry as ever. “We call the wind our sending,” said Gorzval, because it comes straight from Suvrael. The little gift of the King of Dreams, it is, as delightful as all his others.” The sea was empty: no islands, no drifting logs, no sign of anything, hot even dragons. The dragons had gone far past the coast this year, as they sometimes did, and were basking in the tropical waters close by the fringes of the archipelago. Occasionally a gihoma-bird passed far overhead, making its autumn migration from the islands to the Zimr Marsh, which was not near the Zimr at all but on the coast five hundred miles south of Piliplok; these long-legged creatures must have made tempting targets, but no one took aim at them. Another tradition of the sea, it seemed.
The first dragons manifested themselves the second week out from Piliplok. Gorzval predicted their arrival a day in advance, having dreamed that they were near. “Every captain dreams dragons,” he explained. “Our minds are attuned to them: we feel their souls approaching us. There’s a captain, a woman with some teeth out, Guidrag’s her name, who can dream them a week away, sometimes more. Heads right to them and they’re always there. Me, I’m not that good, can’t do better than a day’s distance. But nobody’s as good as Guidrag, anyway. I do my best. We’ll have dragons off the bow in another ten, twelve hours, that’s a guarantee.”
Valentine had little confidence in the Skandar captain’s guarantees. But evidently Gorzval’s dreams were reliable ones, for in midmorning the lookout high in the mast sang out, “Hoy! Dragons ho!” and indeed there were.
A great many of them, forty, fifty, maybe more, swarmed just off the Brangalyns bow. They were big-bellied ungraceful beasts, broad in cross-section like the Brangalyn itself, with long thick necks, heavy triangular heads, short tails terminating in flat flaring flukes, and prominent ridges of bony projections running the length of their high-vaulted backs. Their wings were the strangest feature of all—fins, really, for it was inconceivable that these huge creatures should ever take to the air, but they looked far more like wings than fins, batwings, dark and leathery, sprouting from massive stumpy bases below the sea-dragons’ necks and sweeping down half the length of their bodies. Most of the dragons kept their wings folded like cloaks, but some had them fully outspread, fanning them out along the axes provided by long fragile-looking finger-bones, and with them they covered the water about them for astonishing spreads, unfurling them like black tarpaulins.
The dragons were of all sizes. Most were young, twenty to fifty feet in length, but there were many newborn ones, six-footers or thereabouts, swimming and splashing freely or else gripping the nipples of their mothers, who tended to be of midsize range. But among the school drifted a few monsters, half-submerged and somnolent, their spine-ridges rising high above the water like the central hills of some floating island. They were unimaginably bulky. It was hard to judge their full magnitude, for their hind-quarters tended to droop out of sight, but two or three of them looked at least as large as the ship. As Gorzval passed him on the deck, Valentine said, “We don’t have Lord Kinniken’s dragon out there, do we?”
The Skandar captain chuckled indulgently. “Nay, the Kinniken’s three times the size of those, at least. Three? More than three! Those are hardly hundred-fifty-footers. I’ve seen dozens bigger. So will you, friend, before long.”
Valentine tried to imagine dragons three times the size of the biggest out there. His mind rebelled. It was like trying to visualize the full scope of Castle Mount: one simply could not do it.
The ship moved in for the kill. It was a smoothly coordinated operation. Boats were lowered, with a lance-wielding Skandar strapped upright in the bow of each. Among the nursing dragons the boats quietly moved, the lancer spearing one here, one there, apportioning the kill among the mothers so that none was aroused by total loss of her young. These young dragons were lashed by their tails to the boats; and as the boats returned to the ship, nets were lowered to hoist the catch. Only when some dozen young dragons had been taken did the hunters go for bigger game. The boats were retracted, and the harpooner, a giant Skandar with a naked dull-blue swathe across his chest where the fur had long ago been ripped away, took his place in the cupola, unhurriedly he selected his weapon and nocked it into its catapult while Gorzval maneuvered the ship to give him a good shot at the chosen victim. The harpooner took aim; the dragons grazed on, heedless; Valentine discovered that he was holding his breath and intently squeezing Carabella’s hand. Then the gleaming somber shaft of the harpoon was released.
It buried itself to its haft in the blubbery shoulder of a dragon some ninety feet long, and instantly the sea came alive.
The wounded dragon lashed the surface with its tail and unfurled its wings, which beat against the water in titanic fury, as though the animal meant to burst into the air and soar off, dragging the dangling Brangalyn behind it. At that first frantic outburst of pain the mother-dragons opened their wings as well, gathering their nurslings into a protective shield, and with powerful strokes of their tails began to move away, while the largest of the herd, the utter monsters, simply sank from view, letting themselves glide into the depths with scarcely a ripple of energy. This left a dozen or so adolescent dragons, who knew that something disturbing was happening but were not sure how to react; they swam in wide circles around their wounded comrade, holding their wings tentatively half-spread and slapping lightly at the water with them. Meanwhile the harpooner, still choosing his weapons in absolute tranquility, put a second and a third into his prey, close by the first.
“Boats!” cried Gorzval. “Nets!”
Now began a strange proceeding. Once more the boats were lowered, and the hunters rowed forth. Toward the ring of excited dragons they headed and hurled into the water grenades of some sort that exploded with dull booming sounds, spreading a slick coating of bright yellow dye. The explosions and, it seemed, the dye, sent the remaining dragons into a frenzy of terror. With wild thrashings of wings’ and tails they swam swiftly out of sight. Only the victim remained, very much alive but held fast. It too was swimming, in a northerly direction, but it towed the entire mass of the Brangalyn along behind it, and it was visibly weakened moment by moment by the effort. The boatmen, with their dye-grenades, attempted to force the dragon closer to the ship; at the same time the team of netmen lowered a colossal webwork of fabric which by some interior mechanism opened and spread out over the water, and closed again when the dragon had entangled itself in its meshes.
“Winches!” Gorzval roared, and the net rose from the water. The dragon dangled, in midair its enormous weight causing the huge ship to list alarmingly. Far above, the harpooner rose in his cupola for the coup de grace. He gripped the catapult with all four hands and let fly. A ferocious grunt came from him as he released the weapon and an instant later came an answering sound, hollow, agonized, from the dragon. The harpoon penetrated the dragon’s skull at a point just behind the great saucer-like green eyes. The mighty wings raked the air in one last terrible convulsion.
The rest was mere butchery. The winches did their work, the dragon was hoisted to the slaughter-block, the stripping of the carcass began. Valentine watched awhile, until the gory spectacle palled: the flensing of the blubber, the securing of the valuable internal organs, the severing of the wings, and all the rest. When he had had enough he went below, and when he returned a few hours later the skeleton of the dragon rose like a museum exhibit over the deck, a great white arch topped by that bizarre spiny ridge, and the hunters were at work disassembling even that.
“You look grim,” Carabella said to him.
“I lack appreciation of this art,” he answered.
It seemed to Valentine that Gorzval could entirely have filled the hold of his vessel, large as it was, with the proceeds of this one school of dragons. But he had chosen a handful of young and only one adult, not by any means the largest, and had deliberately driven the others away. Zalzan Gibor explained that there were quotas, decreed by Coronals in centuries past, to prevent overfishing: herds were to be thinned, not exterminated, and a ship that returned too soon from its voyage would be called to account and subjected to severe penalties. Besides, it was essential to get the dragons quickly on board, before predators arrived, and to process the flesh swiftly; a crew that hunted too greedily would be unable to handle its own catch in an effective and profitable way.
The season’s first kill seemed to make Gorzval’s crew more mellow. They nodded occasionally at the passengers, even smiled now and then, and went about their own tasks in a relaxed and almost cheerful way. Their sullen silence melted; they laughed, joked, sang on deck:
Lord Malibor was fine and bold
And loved the heaving sea,
Lord Malibor came off the Mount,
A hunter for to be.Lord Malibor prepared his ship,
A gallant sight was she,
With sails all of beaten gold,
And masts of ivory.
Valentine and Carabella heard the singers—it was the squad barreling the blubber—and went aft to listen. Carabella, quickly picking up the simple robust melody, began to finger it on her pocket-harp, adding little fanciful cadenzas between the verses.
Lord Malibor stood at the helm
And faced the heaving wave,
And sailed in quest of the dragon free,
The dragon fierce and brave.
Lord Malibor a challenge called,
His voice did boom and ring.
“I wish to meet, I wish to fight,”
Quoth he, the dragon king.”
“I hear, my lord,” the dragon cried,
And came across the sea.
Twelve miles long and three miles wide
And two miles deep was he.
“Look,” Carabella said. “There’s Zalzan Gibor.”
Valentine glanced across the way. Yes, there was the Skandar, listening at the far side near the rail, all his arms folded, a deepening scowl on his face. He did not seem to be enjoying the song. What was the matter with him?
Lord Malibor stood on the deck
And fought both hard and well.
Thick was the blood that flowed that day
And great the blows that fell.
But dragon kings are old and sly,
And rarely are they beaten.
Lord Malibor, for all his strength
Eventually was eaten.
All sailors bold, who dragons hunt,
Of this grim tale take heed!
Despite all luck and skill, you may
End up as dragon-feed.
Valentine laughed and clapped his hands. That brought an immediate fierce glare from Zalzan Gibor, who strode toward them looking huffy with indignation.
“My lord!” he cried. “Will you tolerate such irreverent—”
“Not so loud on the my lord,” Valentine said crisply. “Irreverent, you say? What are you talking about?”
“No respect for a terrible tragedy! No respect for a fallen Coronal! No respect for—”
“Zalzan Gibor!” Valentine said slyly. “Are you such a lover of respectability, then?”
“I know what is right and what is wrong, my lord. To mock the death of Lord Malibor is—”
“Be more easy, my friend,” Valentine said gently, putting his hand on one of the Skandar’s gigantic forearms. “Where Lord Malibor has gone, he is far beyond matters of respect or disrespect. And I thought the song was a delight. If I take no offense, Zalzan Gibor, why should you?”
But Zalzan Gibor continued to grumble and bluster. “If I may say it, my Lord, you may not yet be returned to a full sense of the rightness of things. If I were you, I would go to those sailors now and order them never to sing such a thing again in your presence.”
“In my presence?” Valentine said, with a broad grin. “Why should they care dragon-spittle for my presence? Who am I but a passenger, barely tolerated at all. If I said any such thing, I’d be over the rail in a minute, and dragon-feed myself the next. Eh? Think about it, Zalzan Gibor! And calm yourself, fellow. It’s only a silly sailor-song.”
“Nevertheless,” the Skandar muttered, walking stiffly away.
Carabella giggled. “He takes himself so seriously.”
“Not so seriously, I hope, that he’d order them in my name to give up the song,” Valentine said. He began to hum, then to sing:
All sailors bold, who dragons hunt,
Of this—
Of this sad tale?—
Of this sad tale take heed!
“Yes, that’s it,” he said. “Love, will you do me a service? When those men are through with their work, draw one of them aside—the red-bearded one, I think, with the deep bass voice—and have him teach you the words. And then teach them to me. And I can sing it to Zalzan Gibor to make him smile, eh? How does it go? Let’s see—”
I hear, my lord,” the dragon cried,
And came across the sea.
Twelve miles long and three miles wide
And two miles deep was he—
A week or thereabouts passed before they sighted dragons again, and in that time not only Carabella and Valentine learned the ditty, but Lisamon Hultin as well, who took pleasure in bellowing it across the decks in her raucous baritone. But Zalzan Gibor continued to growl and snort whenever he heard it.
The second school of dragons was much larger than the first, and Gorzval allowed the taking of some two dozen small ones, one midsized one, and one titan at least a hundred thirty feet long. That kept all hands busy for the next few days. The deck ran purple with dragons’ blood, and bones and wings were stacked all over the ship as the crew labored to get everything down to storable size. At the captain’s table delicacies were offered, from the most mysterious inner parts of the creature, and Gorzval, ever more expansive, brought forth casks of fine wines, quite unsuspected from someone who had been at the edge of bankruptcy. “Piliplok golden,” he said, pouring with a lavish hand. “I have saved this wine for some special occasion, and doubtless this is it. You have brought us excellent luck.”
“Your fellow captains will not be joyed to hear that,” Valentine said. “We might easily have sailed with them, if they had only known how charmed we were.”
“Their loss, our gain. To your pilgrimage, my friends!” cried the Skandar captain.
They were moving now through ever more balmy waters. The hot wind out of Suvrael relented here at the edge of the tropics, and a kinder, moister breeze came to them out of the southwest, from the distant Stoienzar Peninsula of Alhanroel. The water was a deep green hue, sea-birds were numerous, algae grew so thick in places that navigation was sometimes complicated, and brightly colored fish could be seen darting just below the surface—the prey of the dragons, who were flesh-eaters and swam open-mouthed through swarms of lesser sea-creatures. The Rodamaund Archipelago now lay not far away. Gorzval proposed to complete his haul here: the Brangalyn had room for another few large dragons, two more of midsize, and perhaps forty of the small, and then he would drop Jus passengers and head for Piliplok to market his catch.
“Dragons ho!” came the lookout’s cry.
This was the greatest school yet, hundreds of them, spiny humps rising above the water everywhere. For two days the Brangalyn moved among them, slaughtering at will. On the horizon other ships could be seen, but they were far off, for strict rules governed impinging on hunting territory.
Gorzval seemed to glow with the success of his voyage. He himself took frequent turns in the boat-crews, which Valentine gathered was unusual, and once he even made his way to the cupola to wield a harpoon. The ship now was settling low to the waterline with the weight of dragon-flesh.
On the third day dragons were still close about them, undismayed by the carnage and unwilling to scatter. “One more big one,” Gorzval vowed, “and then we make for the islands.”
He selected an eighty-footer for the final target.
