The First Dragoneer (11 page)

The old King’s Ranger hadn’t been
exaggerating. They were fed enough roasted pork to fill a small
battalion and they were welcomed as if they were the king's own
retinue. The lodge’s common room was clean and empty, save for one
of the hands that labored for Swinerd. He was at a plank-wood table
near the ale keg, hovering over a plate of food. The log walled,
plank-floored space boasted a large, stone fireplace at one end and
three shuttered windows on the wall facing away from the pig barn.
Swinerd’s wife was an excellent cook, and she was as nice as she
was round. She hummed and sometimes sang the words to a trio of old
folk songs as she floated about the table, keeping the tankards
full of dark stout that had been brought there all the way from
King’s Island.

The younger men and boys listened closely,
as Swinerd recounted the tale of how he and his sons had very
recently saved a group of herbalists from a pair of roaming trolls.
The herbalists came this way from Port and Three Forks every spring
to gather their wild growing wares. They had chanced upon the wrong
berry patch this year, though. Swinerd and his sons had been
letting the sows fatten in a thayzle-nut patch down by Demon's Lake
a few weeks back and had been able to frighten the gangly beasts
away before they killed anybody.

Zah suggested that those trolls could be
scouts gathering tactical information for their coming attack.
Three of the four men at the table, Master Kember, Herald, and
Swinerd, shook their heads and agreed that was foolishness. They
didn’t have enough fingers and toes to count the number of trolls
they had fought over the years. They spoke from experience, which
had come at a grim price for a lot of men.

“Trolls don’t reason,” Herald insisted.
“They can’t think or plan beyond their instinct to hunt and eat.
It’s that simple. Wolves are ten times cleverer than trolls.”

Linux never entered the conversation, but
Jenka saw a look pass between him and Zah. After that, she held her
tongue when she didn’t agree with the men. Her face showed her
displeasure, though. A light tension hummed through the air, save
for when Swinerd’s plump wife was there to smother it with her
lovely musical voice.

It turned out that Swinerd was just a
nickname, which seemed obvious to Jenka now. Their mother had named
them Herald and Gerald, and Gerald had been selling pigs to the
rangers up at Kingsmen’s Keep just as long as Herald had been a
ranger. Kaljatig was the name their father gave them both, and his
long years of working the Great Wall gave it some weight. The Yule
pig at the king's own table had come from Swinerd’s farm the last
seven years running, and he was proud of it. Swinerd also sold his
hogs to the good folk up in the other foothill villages, and two or
three times a year he sent a herd down to Three Forks. The anger he
had displayed at his older brother earlier was over just such a
journey that had ended four days ago near Demon's Lake when road
bandits got away with a score of his pigs. Herald had promised to
come down with a few of the rangers and escort the herd safely to
Three Forks, but the king’s business had kept him from keeping his
word. Swinerd’s oldest son had gotten knifed trying to defend the
herd. The boy had survived the chest wound and was out in the bunk
house healing. Swinerd had just been venting his anger over the
situation, and the animosity was almost already forgotten.

Zah offered to look at the boy’s wounds, but
Swinerd refused her as politely as his rough manner would allow.
Herald tried to explain that it would be good for the boy, but
there didn’t seem to be any sway in his brother’s superstitious
stubbornness.

Solman, Rikky, Mort, and Stick were put up
in the bunk house. Since Jenka had been assigned the position of
personal attendant to the druids, he was assigned a room in the
main house with Linux. Linux had already politely requested that a
hot bath be filled for him, and as soon as Jenka finished his meal,
he went about getting the water heated and hauled.

Zah, being a young lady, was given her own
quarters. Jenka had to haul a bath for her too, but that chore he
did happily. When the work was done, he was too tired to haul a
bath for himself. Master Kember and Herald each got a private room,
and though they were all the way at the other end of the hall,
their thunderous snoring kept Jenka awake most of the night. It was
during a lull in this nocturnal nasal symphony that Linux spoke to
Jenka for the first time.

“You have a destiny, Jenka De Swasso,” his
voice was eerily deep and his tone somewhat grave. “Zahrellion does
too. What that destiny is, I am not certain, but the dragons seem
to sense it. That’s why they have approached you two. I think that
your path leads somewhere other than to the King’s Rangers. I
believe that there are more of you, and I believe that your destiny
is far greater than that. I also believe that the trolls are far
more powerful than the King’s Rangers believe, and this is
troubling.”

“Are you and Zah human?” Jenka asked the
first question that came to mind. “Or are you elvish, like the
village folk say?”

Linux chuckled. “That is not the correct
question to ask, Jenka, but it’s a good one.” There was a flash as
a small flare of sapphire druid’s fire burst forth on the wick of
the candle sitting on the table between the two beds. After a beat,
the blue color burned from the flame, leaving a typical yellow
glow. Linux grinned at Jenka’s unease. “You should ask me if I have
descendants that washed up on Gull's Reach after the Dogma was
swallowed by the sea. Now that is the proper question.”

Jenka looked at the strange man for a
moment. The pointed beard made Linux' head look unnaturally long,
and his eyes were a clear liquid blue that rivaled the depths of
Zahrellion’s lavender orbs. But other than that, and the tattoos,
he looked perfectly human to Jenka. Jenka shrugged. “Well?”

“Yes, my ancestors were on the Dogma, and so
were Zahrellion’s, but neither of us are completely human. Nor are
you. There were a handful of the elvish on the Dogma, and a few of
the little folk, if it is to be believed. It’s true that some of
the members of our sect have a touch of high elvish in their blood,
but it is thin in most of us. A few, though, are still more elvish
than human. There are smatterings of high blood in a good portion
of the kingdom’s people, but if you tell anyone about it, I’ll be
forced to spell you into a tree-sloth or a mud busker.”

Jenka met the strange druid’s gaze and was
relieved to see a wide, toothy grin spread across Linux' eerie,
tattooed face. Jenka wasn’t sure about how much of what he had just
been told was true, but he didn’t doubt any of it. He was quickly
finding out that the foothills and forests around Crag and
Kingsmen’s Keep were only a tiny little piece of a gigantic world,
full of far greater concerns than his meager hopes and desires.

“What are we supposed to do to convince King
Blanchard that the dragons don’t need to be killed? Ridding the
Islands of the deadly wyrms had to be a long and bloody business.
Master Kember says that it’s a grim sort of work, but it has to be
done. He says that killing dragons is part of our heritage, that by
conquering the dragons and trolls we are displaying our dominance
over the frontier, like the leader of a pack of wolves does over
the others.”

“Ah, eliminate the competing predator before
it can eliminate you,” Linux shrugged helplessly at the foolishness
of it. “Men are not as primal as most species, but they are
animals, Jenka. I’ll not get into that argument with you, though.
Zah seems to think that she has a plan. She hasn’t told me what it
is yet, but she is a clever, clever girl. She said that you were a
dimwit,” the suddenly juvenile-seeming druid chuckled. “I’ll save
you some trouble, Jenka: That means that she likes you.”

*** * ***

Morning came far too swiftly for Jenka.
Linux felt sorry for him, and saddled his and Zah’s horses while
Jenka and the other boys went through their morning exercise drills
with the two Foresters.

The day was pleasant, and the first half of
it went by fairly swiftly for Jenka. He spent most of his time
turning over stones of thought deep within his skull, while
enjoying the wide open carillon sky and the vigorous life that
flourished in the world. Zahrellion’s beauty, and the idea that she
liked him, kept him wondering. The complexity of what she wanted
him to believe, and how it affected his future, kept a brooding
look on his face. But every now and then he would catch Zah giving
him a curious look. After that, he would beam for a little while.
Once he caught her staring at him from behind a fist-sized gourd
nut she was sipping. She held his gaze when he caught her.

A little after midday, the road eased up
next to the Strom River. The Strom came out of the Orich Mountains
up near Crag, but it wound away to the west before turning its flow
southward toward the sea again. A man with a strong arm could
probably throw a stone all the way across it, but it ran swiftly
and looked fairly deep. The rutted road would follow the river’s
general course the rest of the way to Port.

“We won’t get to cross the Strom until we
get almost to Three Forks,” Mortin, the carrot-haired Forester,
said to the other boys. “Tomorrow we’ll pass by Demon's Lake.
That’s where Crix Crux used to hole up before the pilgrims and the
Kingsmen ran him up into the hills.”

“How do you know?” Rikky asked in disbelief.
“If that’s true, then Crix Crux has to be older than water.”

Jenka and Stick both chuckled at the young
hunter’s sound reasoning.

“It’s called Demon's Lake because the wind
makes a deep groaning sound where it passes over the grottos, not
because of the Crix Crux fable,” Zah informed them. “When our
ancestors first left the Islands and started settling here on the
mainland they feared the place because of the sound and called it
Demon's Lake.”

“That’s true, lass, about them howlin’
caverns, but that en’t why it’s called Demon's Lake,” Herald heeled
his horse over and added to the history. “Way back when they was
building the Great Wall, a 'fore any pilgrims ever dared to venture
farther inland than the coastal strongholds, they came a 'hollering
that a lake monster had slunked up out of the caves during the
night and snatched a man and the cattle he was watering. After
that, it went and killed and ate a dozen caravan men who had just
filled the king’s water wagons at the lake.” He paused and spit a
wad of phlegm off to the side. “A group of Kingsmen went down into
them grottoes and found some cattle carcasses, and half a man’s
body too. Then, after about half of them got roasted to ash they
realized that they had holed in on an old fire wyrm. They went back
to the construction settlements, where the wall was going up, and
got reinforcements with lances and crossbows. They came back to
kill the savage red bastard, but by the time they returned it had
killed most of the troop and fled for the peaks.”

“If that tale is true, then those men got
what they deserved,” Zah said with a touch of defiant anger in her
voice. “How would you feel if some strange creatures came and
violated your home and tried to kill you?”

“How would you feel if you was one of them
innocent farm folks that fire breathin’ bastard was a' eatin’,
miss?” Herald’s expression was a study in indignant righteousness.
He spat another wad of dark phlegm. Then he spat his words. “I lost
a fist full of friends and a few kin to them scaly fargin wyrms
over the years. If you ever knew the truth of things, about how
them dragons nearly killed off our first ancestors and ended us,
then you’d have a different bit of reasonin’ in your pretty skull.”
He huffed away some of his ire and glanced around at the group.
“When the survivors of the Dogma first washed up on Gull's Reach,
they had to fight the dragons just to get from the sea shore into
the thickets. Learned druid or not, you haven’t read all the books
there is, miss. There’s a bundle of journals wrote by them
survivors. I read some of them back when I was stationed on King’s
Island.” Herald’s grizzly expression softened a bit as a fond
memory intruded on his anger. “My betrothed was a scribe there.
She’d been markin’ copies of old manuscrifts to preserve them.”

“They are called manuscripts,” Zah snorted.
“And I am sure it was hard those first years out on Gull's Reach,
but we washed up in their land. We are the ones who … who … um … ”
She faltered and mumbled something else but no one heard what it
was.

Everyone was suddenly sitting still in the
saddle and holding their breath. Even the horses had seemingly
frozen in place. All eyes, including Zahrellion’s, were now staring
at the dark, sinuous thing in the sky that had just completely
eclipsed the sun as it passed over them.

It was a dragon, a big old red, and it was
looking back and down at them. Curls of dark smoke streaked out of
its snout with its slow exhalation, and its scales glittered
scarlet and ruby in the afternoon sun. It was an intimidating
beast, and it was banking around for a closer look.

Jenka scanned around in a panic. There
wasn’t a tree or a sizable bush in sight. Besides the swiftly
churning river, there was absolutely no place for them to run for
cover. Solman and Mortin panicked and charged their willing horses
away from the group. Master Kember just managed to catch Rikky by
the saddle and stopped him from joining them.

“Stay together!” Linux and Herald both
commanded at the same time. Herald added, “Mind your horses now!
Don’t let them get away from ya!”

Jenka pulled on his reigns and his horse
backed up close to Master Kember and Rikky. He looked around for
his fleeing friends, and his heart dropped to the grassy turf.
Solman and Mortin had almost made it over to the river, but
Zahrellion was by herself, about halfway between them. A glance at
the sky told Jenka that if the dragon wanted to kill her then she
didn’t have a chance. Then, to make matters even worse, Zah’s horse
reared up and tossed her from the saddle. It instantly rolled
itself back to its hooves and tore off in a mad dash, away from the
flying death that was now streaking down from the sky.