Dragon Ultimate (11 page)

"No. I cannot come back now." She threw out her hands toward the city. "Everything is gone, everything is dust and ashes. We are all dying."

"Not so, Lady."

"My boy Efen is lost. Taken to the Mother's Hand too soon. He was sent to Eigo, and he survived that. But he has not survived the black plague."

"Your son would not have wanted you to take your life. You can be sure of that."

"My son…" the woman sobbed. She wobbled on the brink, then steadied herself. "Efen served in the Legions like yourself. He was in the first rat team."

"He will be honored by his death, Lady. Marneri honors its dead. His name will go on the monument and be looked to for a thousand years."

Head slightly askew she looked at him quizzically.

"You are a dragonboy?"

"Yes, Lady. How can you tell?"

"Your boots, the bits of your real uniform that I can see. I know the Legions, child. My father was Commander of the Third Regiment, First Legion. I grew up in Dalhousie."

"Aye, Lady. I am a dragoneer. 109th Marneri is my unit."

"You have a sad face, child. You have seen a harsh side of life."

She was staring at him with a fixed expression. "I know, you see, I know what it was like. Efen saw battle and survived. I know what hell that is. I knew what you must have faced. Like my son, Efen, you have seen enough war."

"Yes, Lady."

She turned back to the drop.

"My son is gone. I see only the darkness."

"The city will need all of us before this is over. I think we will win."

She stared at him, not really focusing.

"What is your name, child?" she said.

"Relkin."

"Relkin? That is a Blue Stone name. Are you from Querc?"

"No, Lady, Quosh."

"I spent part of my youth camping in the hills around Quosh and Querc. That's wonderfully pretty country."

"Aye, Lady, that it is. And I hope to see it again before I die."

Her face sagged. "But now you are doomed. We are all to die."

"It is not ordained, Lady. The plague is spread by fleas. So we get rid of fleas. We know how to do that."

She stared at him. "No. We are doomed. I have seen it in the signs."

"Not so, Lady. We're stopping it. I heard the number of new victims had dropped to almost none in the past hour."

She shook her head. "How can this be?"

"We're winning the war, Lady. I been smoking out houses down on Fish Hill. That's why I'm so grimy and all. See these cuffs, so tight they hurt, and that's how my collar was too when I was down there. We wear knit helmets, too, and grease our faces. You don't want to be bit by any fleas down there. And they're quick, but we kill them all and the cleaners sweep them up and throw them on the fire."

She peered at him intently. "What are you? You are no simple dragonboy. There is something in your eyes that speaks to me; I do not know you and yet I feel this attachment."

"I would not lie to you, Lady. I am just Relkin of the 109th Marneri Dragons."

She leaned closer, trying to read something written in a script beyond her comprehension.

"What have you been? In other lives, I mean. Your aura is strange, child. You have been marked."

Relkin shivered. This he did not want to hear.

"Tell me, child, who are you?" She insisted.

Who indeed? He thought to himself. He'd been the Iudo Faex, he'd made love from the banks of the Oon to the twilight world of magic inhabited by Ferla. He'd felt the hand of the mind mass press upon him.

"I am just a dragoneer, ready to sleep, Lady."

She stared at him blankly for a moment, and a new expression came over her face softening it.

"You never knew your mother, did you, child?"

"Correct, Lady. I never knew my mother or father." A bastard, an orphan, the unwanted, Relkin had lived his life with these designations.

"Poor child, what a life you have led."

By the gods, thought Relkin, there was something in what she said. But the Lady was no longer peering into the drop. Relkin hoped that was a sign of progress.

"Efen died here, you see. His wife died, too. Now their children are orphaned."

"The worst is over, Lady. We will win."

"No, the worst will be later. When we weep over our dead."

She said this, but she turned and wrapped her arms around him and sobbed on his shoulder while they teetered on the outermost course of bricks. Moving very carefully, he backed up and started the climb up the slates, holding on to the woman all the way to the door that led back into the house. She came without protest, and proved quite agile enough.

"We will take a glass of wine and some biscuits. That is what we must do," she said, pausing in the doorway.

"Anything you like, Lady," he murmured. Just go through the door, he willed her.

With a last look at the roof, she went in.

He followed her down to the first floor, where she rang a gong and bade him seat himself at a long table in a room lined with magnificent tapestries.

"Rest here, child. I am sure you are very weary."

Relkin sat down with a groan.

The woman disappeared in the direction of her kitchen A few minutes later a servant brought almond biscuits and sweet white wine. She found Relkin already asleep, slumped over the table, his head on his arms.

He awoke and for a long moment thought he was still dreaming. He was in heaven—naked and freshly bathed and lying under fine cool linen in a huge, soft bed. Someone had even shaved him.

A chill ran through him. Heaven? Or was this how one awoke in the Halls of Gongo? Had he joined the legions of the dead?

He spread his hands out. The linen was very smooth. After a moment it began to feel too real, too cool. He sat up and found himself in a large, well-appointed bedroom with walls freshly painted white, and black oak beams and doors. There was a piece of fine Marneri lace on the back of the sitting chair which told him he was still in the city. Gongo, although Lord of the Dead, wouldn't bother with touches like that. There was a blue-cloth rug on the floor, too, which confirmed his continuing mortality.

The feel of smooth linen on his bare skin was a very unusual, very pleasant sensation. Normally he slept wrapped in a blanket in a cot set high up the wall in the dragon's stall. In the field he slept on the ground or in a hammock strung between trees. This was astonishing.

Then he blushed. Someone had bathed him and put him to bed the previous evening. He'd slept through it all and then right through the night until the first rays of the morning. Someone had bathed him and shaved him, and he'd never known about it.

There was no sign of his clothes. He wrapped himself in a sheet and tried the door. It opened easily, and he went through into a smaller room, lined with twin chests of drawers. His clothes, freshly laundered, were laid out on a small table.

As he dressed he wondered how he was going to explain being absent all night from the dragonhouse. He was sure Cuzo would have noticed. By the gods! they might have already posted an alarm and started a search for him. The trouble he was in had suddenly magnified itself to major proportions.

Another door led him out into a larger interior hall. Stairs took him down another floor, and there he was met by a servant woman wiping her hands on her apron. She was all smiles and welcome.

"Young Master, it is good to see you up and about, again. Can I get you some kalut? Cook has just boiled some."

Hot, steaming kalut sounded wonderful. And while he sipped it, he chatted with the servant woman, Elzer. He learned that the Mistress Selima had not yet risen and the Mistress Marda, the younger woman, had already left the house and gone to the temple.

Elzer had a cheery familiarity that made Relkin just a little embarrassed. The cook and Elzer were the only servants remaining in the house. Everyone else had fled the city.

He sipped the kalut, already thinking of how to play this roll of Caymo's dice. He would have to be open about it all with Cuzo. Explain and hope for the best. He was too clean and presentable to get away with claiming he'd slept in the streets.

"Uh, Elzer, tell me something. If I have to get a confirmation of the fact that I slept here last night, will you give it?"

"Well, of course, young Master. And it was me and the Lady Selima that put you to bed, so I well know you did sleep here. And the whole night through."

"Ah."

Elzer gave him a sweet smile. In truth she had much enjoyed bathing the young man. He had a beautiful body, albeit one that bore a lot of scars.

Relkin couldn't look her in the eye, suddenly struck with a strange bashfulness. He lived in an all-male world of dragonhouse and military unit. He had lived with women, but only in distant surroundings, such as the ruins of Ourdh or a boat on a river in the ancient jungle lands of Eigo.

Elzer patted his hand.

"Ur, well, thank you, Elzer."

"It was a pleasure, young Master."

He left the tall house and hurried up the hill. The guards nodded him through routinely, so he took it there was not yet a general hue and cry out for him.

Bazil was awake and in a bad mood. Worst of all, he was hungry.

"Ah," he said at the sight of Relkin. "So boy live!"

"Look, I'm really sorry. I fell asleep at this lady's house. I was just worn right out by the end there, yesterday."

Bazil snorted. He knew what Relkin had really been up to.

"Even in plague time you have to fertilize the eggs?" Truly humans were a sex-crazed species, driven far beyond dragons in this regard. The dragon rampant was a spectacular force of nature, but his ardor only lasted for a brief moment, a breath of great flame against the dark, then it was over. For the humans it went on and on, with enormous complications of emotion that Bazil had to struggle to comprehend. Dragon life was simpler in these areas.

"No, it wasn't like that."

The huge eyes just blinked at him, obviously in complete disbelief.

"Really. I was asked to help talk someone's mother down from the roof. She was going to jump to her death."

"That sounds like work for witches, not dragonboy."

"I was the best she could find."

"Search must have been short."

Relkin scratched his head under his cap. The dragon was well sulky, and he had a right to be. Dragons had to depend on dragonboys for everything when they lived within the Legion system.

"Look, I know I let you down. Things are a little confused these days, right?"

"Very. Dragon go hungry. This not right."

"Look, I'm sorry. I'm gonna get enough hell from Cuzo."

"That's absolutely correct," said a familiar and unhappy voice from just outside the stall. Cuzo stuck his head around the corner.

"I'd like a word with you, Dragoneer Relkin. You know where my office is."

"Yes sir! Dragon Leader Cuzo."

Cuzo disappeared. The whole horror was working out as if choreographed by his worst enemies. Relkin sighed. The Old Gods never made it too easy on you.

"So, you talk to woman on roof?" The wyvern was still angry.

"Right. And it worked. She decided not to throw herself off the roof."

"Then you fertilized her eggs?"

"No! She was an old lady." Relkin was aghast that the dragon could even think like this about him. Had he really been that much of a ladies' man? It didn't seem that way to him. The opposite, if anything.

"Why that stop you? Nothing else ever seem to stop you before."

"Oh go ahead, kick me when I'm down. It helps."

"Bah. This dragon hungry."

"Yeah, right. Just a moment."

Relkin went to the galley and wheeled back a potcheen of stirabout. Then he went to see Cuzo for what promised to be an unpleasant little meeting, which it was. His fate hung with the ladies at that house on Foluran Hill. Cuzo would ask for a certification of his story. If it came through, then probably he would escape full censure.

He wandered back to the stall. The dragon had gone for some morning exercise, lifting half ton weights in the weight room. Relkin got about a minute to himself before dragonboys began drifting in to quiz him.

"So what was she like?" said Swane, never known for subtlety.

"She was about seventy years old, and her hair was as white as snow, if you really want to know. And I stayed there because I just fell asleep when I sat down. You remember yesterday, we worked all bloody day long. I just went out like a light. I woke up this morning."

"Where was this?"

"On Foluran Hill." Relkin told his story once again, noting to himself how implausible it sounded.

"A likely story," groused Swane. "You just don't want us to know what really happened."

"Hold on, you think I'd cheat on Eilsa? You know me better than that, Swane."

"The dragons know something about you. Must have come from the Broketail."

"Oh this is great. Now you believe dragon gossip. You know that's worthless."

"Come on, Relkin, everyone knows you. You must have been well taken care of, you're all clean and so are your clothes."

"It's like I keep telling you, I talked this old lady out of jumping from the roof. They were going to give me some food and something to drink. I just conked out as soon as I sat down."