Wings of Renewal: A Solarpunk Dragon Anthology Page 24

  My boots were wonderful for flying, but not so great for hiking long distances. I could feel a blister beginning on the inside edge of my big toe, and when I checked the cube for our position relative to the dragon's carcass, I realized we were there. I nearly ran into a motionless Ionescu on the edge of a blank patch on the mountain.

  “There you go. A few minutes ahead of schedule,” she said, her head inclining to the beast before us.

  A clearing began about the dragon's withers and continued back the length of its body and a little more, made when the dragon plowed through the canopy on its way to the ground. The head of the dragon was buried in a mound of soil a few meters into the trunks. I held up the cube and checked the readout. The entire length was about forty meters instead of the thirty I was expecting, and fear flickered to life in my gut. That long could be a post-adolescent female. She might be mature. The implications of that were potentially catastrophic.

  Even a carcass, the dragon was exquisite. Kodály was lovely, silver and sleek, but this … the dragon was an iridescent crimson that rippled down the skin as if it were chasing prey, as if it were in flight even desiccating on the forest floor. The color was deepest at the spine, which was lightly ridged, lightening to a rose as it descended the flank, and had we been able to see underneath no doubt it would have lightened still further to a pale pinkish cream. The only things marring the perfection of the beast were the ragged nubs just behind the forelegs, up near the spine, where once there would have been a pair of magnificent wings, gossamer and lace, a pearlescent silver that seemed far too flimsy to hold up such a massive creature. These were cut with a saw. I could see the striations.

  The perfection of the hide was already beginning to show thin spots. Alive, dragonhide resisted cutting by nearly everything, as it did for some hours after death. But shortly, within a day, dragon decay accelerated dramatically. It had been almost twenty hours now for this one, and the skin was beginning to sag.

  “Dragonfly,” Ionescu said, from the other side of the carcass. “You should see this.“

  I jogged around to where she was, feeling an urgency shoving on me. We might not have much time. “I'm sorry,” she said, almost shy, “I don't know your name.”

  “Sarkany Csilla.” I was annoyed. It was irrelevant. But because I felt guilty for taking it out on her I said, “I don't know yours, either. Ionescu is a family name.”

  “Ana.” She pointed. “Look there. That's what I wanted to show you.”

  The cube recorded it all, of course, but it was worth seeing with my own eyes. On this side the sun had been on the body and the decay was much more advanced. We could see right into the chest cavity in two places, and in one of them there was a shape poking out what must have been the stomach. It had a black woolly face—a sheep. There was only one place that sheep could have come from.

  “No time to digest it,” Ana said. “Must have been the last thing she ate.” She. The dragon was female. Worse and worse.

  I edged closer, though the stench of decay rose like a miasma from the body. The ribs had begun to show through the hide, making it possible to approach the sheep by stepping right up to the carcass. Steeling myself, I inhaled deeply. It was difficult to tell with the assault on my nose, but it seemed to me the half-digested sheep gave off an odor of arsenic.

  “The sheep's been poisoned,” I said in horror.

  “Dragons won't eat poisoned bait. Their noses are too keen,” Ana said, joining me, and reaching in to pry at the sheep's carcass. She sniffed. “But there's no doubt of it.”

  I straightened up, my back aching, conscious that my age showed in more than the streaks in my hair. Systematically, I circled the carcass, recording everything as quickly and thoroughly as I could. Hurry. Hurry. Every minute or so I looked up at the sky, still empty of all but the sun. Would it stay that way? Could we be that lucky?

  My examination finished at the buried head, and even with fear beginning to burn my insides, I had to take a moment to pay respect to this magnificent creature. To apologize for my race, my species. To grieve. It was as if one of my friends lay here.

  I spread my arms wide, as I would have for Kodály, and leaned forward in a bow. I'd have pressed my forehead to her, but settled for the dirt.

  “Menj az égbe, légy szabad,” I said in prayer. I got the same answer from this dragon as from all my Dragons. Nothing but deep silence.

  I rested there, a pervading sadness crushing me. So few of these magnificent creatures left. Now one more that would never mount the sky again.

  I heard something whisper. I didn't catch the words, but I felt my hands tingle, a susurration in my mind. Something there opened that had been closed forever. I leaned into it, reached for it, eyes wide …

  “Csilla! Csilla, come quick!” Ana's voice rang out in the woods. Oh, no. Not now. Not when I'm so close.

  But she was screaming, and there was another voice there, too, saying something in Romanian that sounded like “let me go.” I pushed back to my feet and tore off in the direction of the voices.

  I could hardly find where the voice was coming from, the trees were so thick, but working my way through the underbrush I came on Ana struggling with someone, a young girl, whose unkempt blonde hair flew about her head like an aura. She tugged and strained, but there was no getting away from Ionescu.

  “I caught her skulking about the clearing. I thought we were being followed.”

  The blonde shrieked as if her teeth were being pried from her mouth. We didn't have time for this. I stepped forward and ripped her face with a stinging backhand. She crumpled to the ground.

  “Who are you? Did you have something to do with this?” I said, looming over her like a thunderhead.

  She sobbed, but I thought her head was nodding. “It killed Georghe and Maria. It et our sheep. We couldn't do nothing but what we done,” she said in broken Amerish.

  The girl lay on the floor of the grove, her shoulders shaking.

  “What did you do?” I put all the weight of my uniform and the Confederacy and the Dragon Corps into the question, whipping her with it.

  She cringed, wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve. “We … poisoned the sheep.”

  Drága Isten, I thought. Ana was saying, skeptical, “Dragons don't eat poisoned bait.”

  “We made the sheep eat the poison that it still be alive. It was takin” our flocks. We had nuttin for winter.”

  Before I could think what to do, Ana grabbed her filthy hair and jerked her head back. “Do you know what you've done?” she shouted in her face, pointing back at the dragon's carcass.

  The girl shrieked and started babbling in Romanian, far too fast for me to follow. But Ana staggered like she'd been struck, and let go of the girl. White showed around her eyes.

  “We have to go. Right now.”

  My heart turned to ice. I was right. “She had a mate,” I said. Ana nodded, and started to run.

  I crashed through the underbrush, looking for the path back to the clump of trees where we'd been before, when a shriek erupted above me and I threw myself to the dirt.

  Nothing on earth sounds like a dragon's cry. The eerie wail of the humpback, the lonesome call of the loon on the water, the high moan of the jaguar, all of them together do not freeze a woman's blood like the high, keening ululation of the dragon in flight. I was under the deep canopy of trees; there was no way I could be seen from above, but I doubted the dragon was looking for me. I was afraid I knew what it was looking for, and it would be all too easy to find.

  When the mate realized what had happened, he would look for revenge. There was only one target.

  I climbed back to my feet and raced after Ana, trying to keep up with her headlong sprint. I did not have her woodcraft, but my thighs and calves were lean and hard, and if I took more scratches in the face than she did, still I kept her in sight for the first fifteen minutes, and slowly overhauled her after that. Her face had gone red, and her wind was failing. I took her hand. “Not far
now,” I said, encouraging her.

  All along we could hear the keen of the dragon, whipping back and forth in the air above us, circling, searching, or more likely pacing the sky in grief, a grief that would give way to anger and violence any time. He might be wary, his mate having been dispatched, but his anger would outstrip his caution and when it did, the village and all within it would burn. Rare though they might be, a dragon attack was as immolating as a bomb, and far more thorough.

  They'd have shelters in Telciu, under their houses, but the ground above would burn so fiercely they would roast alive, or suffocate as the oxygen was ripped from their cellars. A few might survive.

  I had time to think of this as we crashed heedless through the forest, into the valley, but nowhere did my thoughts find an escape. The sensible thing would be for us to hide in the forest, lest we be burned up with everyone else. How could we stop a grieving dragon, bent on revenge for the murder of its mate?

  And then the screaming started.

  Ahead of us, and not very far, I could see through the trees a flicker of light, pulsing and dancing, rising. An unearthly deep vermilion, not a natural color for a flame. The edge of the village, burning. The dragon swept over our heads, wide and perfect, as awesomely beautiful as anything I'd ever seen, and as he passed us he bent his head and I heard the rushing of the blast that would consume another part of the town. Telciu wasn't terribly large, but the houses were well-spaced, and it would take him dozens of passes to get everything. If the people were fleeing, he might need a few more.

  If they were hiding in the forest, perhaps it would take all night. But he would get them all.

  Frantically dashing forward, we burst from the forest onto the edge of the burned property where Kodály still lay in the cinders of the wheat field. From the village to the right came the wailing of voices, and houses were aflame. Not all of them, though. There was yet something that might be done, if we could figure out what that something was.

  From the trees on the other side of the field a man took a step into the clear, looked overhead in terror, and dashed toward us, yelling. “Please, you have to save us!”

  I had to do no such thing, even if I could think of how it might be done.

  “My wife … my children … we've done nothing.” He put his face in his hands, sank to his knees. But what could I do?

  The dragon swept overhead and I ducked instinctively, though he was many hundred feet up, circling like a great eagle, cautiously seeking his next target.

  Two children, teens, probably, stumbled in a frantic run down the street past the lot where we were, looking over their shoulders at the inimical sky. The dragon gathered its wings and dove, plummeting from the heavens with a thin cry that rang in my bones, and the teens covered their heads with their arms as the dragon fell on them and crushed them to the earth.

  “No!” screamed the man, taking a step forward then stopping, helplessly, his arm outstretched as he realized there was nothing to be done.

  “We can't stand by and watch this,” Ana said, her voice hoarse.

  “We can't leave. So I don't see what choice we have.”

  “We could fly.” She was so sure, so naive.

  Bitterly, I said, “We can't. Or, we could, and if we got off the ground, we would be incinerated, broken in pieces, and become additional missiles crashing on the town. That's not an improvement.” But I felt a great rending of my soul, watching the dragon mount the sky again, his mouth agape, sucking in the oxygen that would belch forth as flame scant moments from now. The man sank back to his knees, sobbing. In a small village every adult is parent to every child, and he felt their deaths as if they were his own.

  “Would your Dragon do nothing?” Ana said.

  My Dragon? If anyone here was innocent, she was.

  “Would she try? If she could?” Ana backed away from me, toward Kodály, trying to get me to see something.

  I nodded. “We both would. But we can't. There's nothing to be done.”

  She spoke quick and low, as if afraid to be overheard, but her eyes bored into me. “Together we can do something, even if it's only dying.”

  “We can die without doing anything at all,” I said.

  She shook her head. “But we don't have to. You think of Kodály as alive. What will happen to her if we do nothing? Do you think the dragon will just leave her sitting here, when he's destroying everything else?”

  No. Of course he wouldn't.

  I could hide in the woods and maybe escape. Maybe. But I wouldn't leave Kodály in the field to burn alone. I could see it in my head and it was as if my heart were dipped in molten metal.

  But to fly … would that not be the same thing? “To go up against a dragon … no Dragonfly has ever survived it.”

  “Then don't,” she said, a too-wild smile taking hold of her face.

  “Don't what?” Was she raving?

  “Don't go up against the dragon. Go up to the dragon.”

  I'm ashamed to admit I couldn't understand what she was getting at.

  “Don't go up and oppose the dragon. Go up and persuade it. Ask it to stop.” She said this cheerfully, her eyes smiling, though she was clearly mad.

  Something inside me responded. It was better than standing helplessly here. “I don't … I don't know how to do what you're asking,” I said.

  Ana patted Kodály's hide. “She does.”

  Kodály. Ana thought she was alive.

  Didn't I?

  In that horrific moment—the dragon spouting flame behind me, the man's sobbing taking on an imploring wail—I realized that Ana Ionescu, the Dragoneye, believed in my Dragon more strongly than I did. I had thought I was the only one who believed in Kodály's reality, in her life. On that ruined field I discovered what it was to really believe.

  Again, Ana could see my heart. “Please,” she said, her voice calm against the fiery maelstrom behind us, “please try. She will listen to you. I felt it. I know she will.”

  “Why …” I started, swallowed, tried again. “Why not you?”

  “Because she isn't mine,” she said, as if it were obvious.

  I took the dozen steps to the snout of the beast, and stood before her as I had so many times, but now in need that inflamed my purpose. I spread my arms wide.

  What if it doesn't work?

  I laid my hands on either side of her nose and my forehead to hers.

  What if she will not speak to me?

  “Gyere hozzám, légy velem, segits, kérlek.”

  What if she is not there?

  Nothing. I felt nothing. I heard the crackling of the flames, felt the scorching heat as the village burned, heard the wracking sobs from the man. I tried to block them out, to concentrate, but I couldn't. I didn't know how. I was failing and there was nothing …

  Two arms enfolded me, and a body pressed itself against mine, wrapping me in an embrace, and then the hands extended and laid themselves on Kodály's head, to either side of my own.

  “Ascultă-ne, vorbește-ne, ajută-ne,” Ana's voice said, in incantation.

  She whispered, so quietly only I could hear. Speak to us, help us. There was no response and the yawning void in my soul rose. For a moment I wished the dragon would descend on us then, and erase us body and spirit.

  Then the tingle began in my hands, and in the black void inside my mind a light pricked. I saw …

  I saw myself, rising on the back of a dragon. No, a Dragon. No … it was both. It was Kodály as I saw her in my mind, as only I could see her, alive and breathing and swimming through the air, a creature of light and fire. Under my hands and through my forehead I felt her come alive, as alive as if I were in the saddle, and more alive, because I could see in my mind what to do and how to do it, and feel in my heart a yearning beyond anything that had ever been.

  It came to me that Ana was no longer there. I was terrified to open my eyes, afraid this vision would fade if I tried to subject it to normal sight, but if I was going to get in the air on Kodály I'
d have to look where I was going.

  My eyes opened, and there was Ana, strapping herself into her saddle. “Come on,” she said, as if we were going for an afternoon ride. “She's dying to get airborne.” Ana's smile was dazzling. My fear left me. I could still feel Kodály in my chest, pulling on me. I wanted this as badly as she did.

  Two running steps put my right foot in the stirrup and I swung myself over her back, my hands flying over the console, locking in my legs, clipping the cube back in place, and I realized that Kodály was doing these things before my fingers registered the commands. All I had to do was think it, and it happened, and the same was true for her; she told me to lean forward, all the way down, for her launching leap, and I did. I felt Ana's hands grip my waist. She heard it too.

  Kodály gave a great leap, almost straight up, snout first into the deepening blue. My goggles were small help; the rush of wind almost tore my helmet from my head, and made talking impossible. But I didn't need to talk. I could hear Kodály as if she were myself, and I felt inexpressible joy from Ana, all bound together. We rose swiftly, Kodály's wings buzzing, and the sun strengthened against her belly as we arrowed almost vertically into the sky.

  I could not see the dragon. It goes without saying I couldn't hear it. It could be anywhere.

  I should have been afraid. Any moment the dragon could come from above, below, from any point on the sphere and rip into us, Kodály's delicate skin and ultralight bones crumpling under the onslaught, and down we would go. Instead I exulted. I had never been alive. I would never again be content, an ant on the ground, my head in the dirt.

  I felt Kodály in my cells, as much myself as I was. She was flying, I was flying.

  More, though. Someone else was with me, a warm, wild presence, utterly unlike mine or Kodály's, but somehow a blend of us both. I knew it was Ana. This is what it is to be whole, I thought. I never knew.

  The three of us mounted above the mountains and hovered there. We reached out, looking at the village, damaged but still not terribly, as if the dragon were reluctant to punish, but felt compelled. The dragon himself had vanished.