Bazil Broketail (9 page)

“I don’t think anyone who could recognize me saw me enter. The boys there were too depressed to notice.”

“I thank you again, Lagdalen of Tarcho.”

“Goodbye, Relkin, try to be more careful.”

“Goodbye, Lagdalen, until we meet again.”

By midmorning the witchbrew was ready and Relkin’s patience was stretched to breaking point. Relkin had a very sulky dragon on his hands.

“This damn tail hurt too much.” Baz inspected his tail in the ray of sunlight that fell into the dragon stall through the roof ducts.

“Of course it does. You wouldn’t leave my poultice on it for long enough.”

“Bah, what good is human poultice? This is dragon flesh, fool boy.”

Relkin signed. Sometimes dragon-tending could be quite a trial.

“All flesh is corrupted in the same way, Baz. By the tiny things of the air and soil. Everyone knows that. Even dragons get infections.”

Bazil grunted and continued to examine the sore, corrupted tail stump. The infection had now spread back a full inch from the wound.

Relkin dabbed the wound with iodine disinfectant again. Bazil gave a yelp and emitted the weird hiss of the dragon in pain. The big eyes glowed.

“This better help,” he growled. The narrow dragon ears were laid back and the thick slate-colored lips tightened to bare two-inch fangs. It was not a reassuring sight on a beast weighing more than two tons.

Relkin adopted his most soothing tone of voice.

“I know it hurts, Baz. I’m sorry too, but if you’d just drink the magical brew I’ve made for you, all this would soon be done with.”

“Drink that stuff? No.”

“Bazil!”

“It’s disgusting.”

“It’s magic, it won’t hurt to try it.”

“It makes my stomach heave to even contemplate drinking it.”

“You must try.”

“I have a delicate stomach, as you well know.”

“Baz, in three days you must fight Smilgax. You must win so you can go up against Vastrox in the finals. Without the witchbrew you haven’t a chance against Smilgax. You’ll be out of contention for the legions.”

“How you can expect a dragon with a stomach like mine to drink that foul mess, I do not understand!”

Relkin squared his shoulders in anger.

“Now I know why they called you such a ‘sleepy’ dragon! You’re just being idiotic about this.”

The big eyes glowed, the hiss increased.

“Fool boy, can you not smell that stuff? I don’t know what it is, but it stinks something powerful.”

“You want to go back to Quosh? Join the other ‘Sleepies’ around the village. Haul a dung cart, pull a plough, day after day!”

The hiss stopped abruptly. Bazil gazed at the tall black pail, filled with the witchbrew.

“I will not drink anything that smells like cat feces, I don’t care what—”

“It may not be pleasant, but it isn’t that bad.”

“So speaks a human boy with a human’s useless nose. Bah, what do you know about smell. No human can smell his way out of a brewery unless he has a light to see by!”

Heavy dragon arms were folded at this for emphasis.

Relkin refused to give up.

“It wasn’t until your ninetieth day in the egg that they got tired of waiting for you to hatch and they opened the egg for you.”

Which was true. Bazil had been one sleepy little leatherback when he was first brought into the world. Baz shot him a look of outraged dignity.

“What has that to do with this, fool boy?”

Relkin continued in a mournful voice.

“You were just curled up there, waiting for them, they said. You didn’t know any better. You thought that’s what the world was about, just waiting until somebody came along and opened your egg for you!”

Bazil turned himself away with a big grunt. The tail flickered oddly, the two-ton torso expressed hurt and outrage. He looked back to Relkin.

“Now you’re just being nasty and I don’t have to take any notice of you.”

“Drink up that pailful of magical fluid. The witch promised me it would work.”

Bazil gave a dragony sniff of disdain.

“Nasty smelly stuff. No thanks.”

“I would remind you that I risked a lot to get that stuff for you. The least you can do is try to drink it.”

“Ecch!”

“Bazil! Do you really want to go back to Quosh and haul a barrow for the rest of your days?”

The dragon emitted a small sniff. Peeked back with one eye, turned away when confronted by Relkin’s angry stare, hands hunched on hips.

“You know what it’ll be like in the village. Soon as you do something silly, get too drunk, knock over a haystack, you know, they’ll have you down to the blacksmith’s and get out the gelding irons.”

Bazil grunted, looked away. By the Ancient Drakes, it would be a boring life to lead. As sedate as that of the cattle in the field.

“They won’t allow a boisterous dragon in the village.”

Bazil gave a vast sigh of unhappiness. For a moment he hissed softly to himself in the sibilant speech of the dragonfolk. Then with a groan and a big shake of the head he turned back to Relkin.

“Trouble is, Relkin boy, you are right. Pass me the pail.”

Relkin knew better than to waste the chance. He pressed the assault mercilessly.

“Just imagine pulling a plough all spring, Bazil. We’ll do well at that, won’t we? After a while you’ll be so plump and happy to please you probably won’t care much, I suppose.”

Baz groaned.

“You know how to get to me, fool boy! Pass me the pail!”

Bazil took hold of the pail of evil-smelling brown liquid. It was thick, with a shiny viscosity that made it look slightly like beer in the early stages of fermentation— cloudy, dark brown, with a yellowish scum at the top.

Bazil didn’t know whether he dared to believe boy Relkin’s story. On the face of it, it was crazy. A powerful witch with a chamber in the High Tower had taken the time and trouble to concoct a potion for Relkin Orphan-boy. In exchange for a few flowers he was carrying and a few sexual favors.

Bazil certainly didn’t believe the parts concerning the beauty of this witch and the nature of the sexual favors. He knew boy Relkin’s boastful little mind too well. But he couldn’t seem to shake the boy on the witch herself, or on her being the source of the potion. It was inexplicable, on the face of it.

He lifted the pail of evil-smelling fluid. It was hideously rank. His nostrils wrinkled shut in disgust. He put it down again.

It made his stomach jump and twitch, just at a whiff of it.

“It smells like the droppings of a sick cat!” he roared.

Relkin simply stared back.

With a weary groan, Baz lifted the pail, then tried a quick slurp. Maybe he could get most of it down before noticing it.

It smelled like cat droppings and by the gods it tasted pretty much as Baz had always imagined cat droppings probably tasted.

He set the pail down and gagged—the stuff wouldn’t go down! It was simply too awful for his throat and stomach to accept. Bazil clasped his big jaws shut and tried to swallow. It took an enormous effort.

As the stuff slid its viscous way down his throat, he told himself frantically that the witch had promised that it would work.

The stuff was like warm slime, the stink was horrible.

He was struck by a dreadful thought. What if the “witch” had simply been a lady happy to play a trick on an unfortunate dragon?

Such things were often rumored.

The first gulp was down. He shuddered and sucked in a deep breath.

“That was awful. That was truly horrible.”

Sweat beaded his muzzle and forehead. The long muscular stubs on his back, where wings had once grown in his ancestors, began to itch.

Relkin was pitiless.

“Finish it, Baz, now you’ve started.”

He eyed the pail. Could he? Could he really get that muck down? He lifted it quickly and poured a hefty gulp into his mouth, he swallowed, half of it went down, then he choked and gasped and spat the rest out in a spray of brown foam.

Relkin dived for cover behind the weapons rack, then peeked back. Bazil gazed at him with eyes filled with the infinite sense of agony that only dragon eyes as big as saucers can convey.

Once again Baz lifted the pail and poured a gulp into his mouth. He shivered and gagged and swallowed.

“By the Prime Egg, this stuff had better work!”

Relkin was awed. The stuff smelled every bit as loathe-some to him as it did to Bazil. He knew that his dragon was performing a quite heroic act. In fact, it was a mystery to Relkin that the dragon was keeping the stuff down. Baz had a notoriously finicky stomach, like a lot of leatherbacks.

But Relkin knew that the stuff possessed a potent magic of some kind. Of that he had no doubt, not since he’d boiled it up.

In fact it was incredible stuff. When he’d taken out the packet and opened it, there had been a small amount of brown powder and half a dozen twigs with a few tiny yellow leaves, but once he had begun boiling it in the bucket of water it had changed—astonishingly, becoming a thick, evil-smelling sludge that bubbled to itself long after it was removed from the heat.

Baz paused, fighting down the nausea; he belched and almost lost everything. He recovered after a moment. Swallowed and took a deep breath. Then he passed a huge hand over his eyes.

“Perhaps it would not be so bad to live in Quosh after all, Relkin. In fact I was never unhappy when I lived there in my youth.”

“That was then, Baz, but now you’d have to work full time for your food. You know how it is. To get started you’ll have to take on a lot of heavy labor. But there’ll be a nice stall, and regular meals and a stove to keep off the winter’s chill. And in the spring there’ll be ploughing, and in summer hauling and in autumn harvesting— you know, the peaceful bucolic life.”

“Alright, alright, I’ll try again.”

Baz made a great effort and raised the pail and drained the rest of the witchbrew. He put the pail down with a clang and leaned back against the wall of the stall. His head was swimming.

“I feel awful,” he said. “I think I am going to die…” The nine-foot long torso sagged, the big hind legs gave way and Baz slid down the wall. He gave a huge shudder when he reached the floor, and curled up to sleep with his battered tail tucked inside under his neck.

Relkin watched anxiously for a minute or so. Had he poisoned his dragon? They’d hang him if he had. What if the witch had been wrong? Or made a mistake in the process of assembling the spells?

Baz began to snore, loudly. Relkin pressed a finger to the big artery behind Bazil’s ear; the dragon pulse was slow but steady. He examined the inner lining of the ear; it was a healthy pink. The nose tip was cool. Baz didn’t exhibit the usual symptoms of poisoning.

Finally he felt the skin along the wingstubs below the shoulder blades. They were normal. A sick dragon always ran a temperature there first.

The minutes lengthened, Baz continued to snore peacefully. Relkin tiptoed away and began to work on Bazil’s armor and shield; both had taken a beating from Smilgax and still required work.

Baz slept on. Indeed he remained asleep for a straight twenty-nine hours before awaking again, in late afternoon the following day. Then he came back to life with an enormous appetite and a new tail tip, a little shorter than the old one and bent at an odd angle so that it appeared broken.

But it was a tail tip, and quite flexible and controllable after a few practice efforts.

Relkin gave a whoop of triumph and danced around the stall. Baz stared at the new tail tip—the horrible potion had worked, although he was not sure he liked the look of the result.

“Oh, well,” he said sadly, “I will always have an ugly tail now.”

The tail tip was grey and contrasted oddly with the olive green of the rest of him.

Relkin just whooped.

Experimenting, Baz picked up a pail with the tail tip and tossed it up in the air and then caught it and threw it against the wall. It was as if he’d used it all his life!

He gave a happy roar, and reached into the weapons rack with the tail and pulled out a dragon mace. He whipped the mace about in the air with the tail, gave the exercise bag hanging in the corner a few hearty thwacks. Relkin dived for cover.

“It worked, Relkin boy! It damn well worked!” The mace thwacked the bag with vigor.

Baz threw back his head and gave a great roar of delight.

A few hours later, Bazil, already nicknamed “Broke-tail” by onlookers, practiced vigorously in the gymnasium, his new tail a wonder to behold. He actually found it an improvement on the old one in some ways, since it had a subtle grip on a small sword hilt. He thought he might become good with the tail sword, the most difficult of the dragon combat arts and one that had never been a very strong part of his repertory of skills.

Finally he gave in to Relkin’s pleas and stopped. It was time to take a splash in the pool and then get some dinner. The crowd of onlookers drifted away, except for a tall, green-hided dragon.

“Greetings, Smilgax!” said Bazil, recognizing his foe.

“Bazil of Quosh, you will serve the empire well, as a farm dragon of course. I will go forth to the legions, you will return to the dunghill. It is the way of things, is it not?”

“I don’t know about that, Smilgax. I’ll be ready for you in the final combats. I have a renewed tail tip, and I can wield mace and shield with ease.”

Smilgax gave a mournful laugh.

“That mutant tail you’ve grown will not help you when I attack, cutting and slashing with the blade from Vo, ‘Blue Murder.’ ”

“My sword from Quosh, ‘Piocar’ will meet you. And my new ‘mutant tail,’ as you so rudely term it, will enable me to defend against tail mace and small sword. As you recall, Smilgax, when we met before things did not go all your way.”

Smilgax seethed.

“That disgusting thing you have for a tail now will not save you, Quoshite! Once I am in the ring a few strokes will suffice to lay you on the dust.”

The tall, hard green was staring, twitching.

“You seem very confident, Smilgax! But look, see my tail, I will be ready for you.”

Bazil swung the tail up, whirled the mace, threw it into the air and caught it cleanly on its way down. Then he gave Smilgax a contemptuous look before tramping off to the plunge pool.