Ship of Magic

Page 156

There came a time when she looked around her and found no more animals to skin. She stood slowly, rolling the ache from her shoulders. She cleaned her knife on her bloody trousers, and then held her hands out to the rain, letting the icy water flush the blood and gobbets of fat and flesh from them. She wiped them a bit cleaner on her shirt and then pushed the wet hair back from her eyes. Behind her, men bent to work over the flayed carcasses in her wake. A man rolled a cask of salt toward her, while another followed with an empty hogshead. When a man stopped beside her and righted the cask, he lifted his eyes to meet hers. It was Brashen. She grinned at him. “Pretty good, eh?”

He wiped rain from his own face and then observed quietly, “Were I you, I'd do as little as possible to call attention to myself. Your disguise won't withstand a close scrutiny. ”

His rebuke irritated her. “Maybe if I get good enough at this, I won't need to be disguised any more. ”

The look that passed over his face was both incredulous and horrified. He stove in the end of the salt cask, and then gestured at her as if he were bidding her get to work salting hides. But what he said was, “Did these two-legged animals you crew with suspect for one moment that you were a woman, they'd use you, one and all, with less concern than they give to this slaughter. Valuable as you might be to them as a skinner, they'd see no reason why they couldn't use you as a whore as well. And they would see it that by your being here you had expected and consented to such use. ”

Something in his low earnest voice chilled her beyond the rain's touch. There was such certainty in his tone she could not imagine arguing with it. Instead she hurried off to meet the man with the hogshead, bearing with her the tongue and heart from her final beast. She continued with this task, keeping her head low as if to keep rain from her eyes and trying to think of nothing, nothing. If she had stopped to think of how easy that had become lately, it might have frightened her.

That evening when she returned to camp, she understood for the first time the naming of the rock. A trick of the last light slanting through the overcast illuminated The Dragon in awful detail. She had not seen it before because she had not expected it to be sprawled on its back, forelegs clutching at its black chest, outflung wings submerged in earth. The contortions of its immense body adumbrated an agonized death. Althea halted on the slight rise that offered her this view and stared in horror. Who would carve such a thing, and why on earth did they camp in its lee? The light changed, only slightly, but suddenly the eroded rock upthrust through the thin soil was no more than an oddly shaped boulder, its lines vaguely suggestive of a sprawled animal. Althea let out her pent breath.

“Bit unnerving the first time you catch it, eh?” Reller asked at her elbow.

She started at his voice. “Bit,” she admitted, then shrugged her shoulders in boyish bravado. “But for all that, it's just a rock. ”

Reller lowered his voice. “You so sure of that? You ought to climb up on its chest some time, and take a look. That part there, that looks like forelegs . . . they clutch at the stump of an arrow shaft, or what's left of one. No, boy, that's the for-real carcass of a live dragon, brought down when the world was younger'n an egg, and rotting slow ever since. ”

“No such things as dragons,” Althea scoffed at his hazing.

“No? Don't be telling me that, nor any other sailor was off the Six Duchies coast a few years back. I saw dragons, and not just one or two. Whole phalanx of 'em, flying like geese, in every bright color and shape you can name. And not just once, but twice. There's some as say they brought the serpents, but that ain't true. I'd seen serpents years before that, way down south. Course, nowadays, we see a lot more of 'em, so folk believe in 'em. But when you've sailed as long as I, and been as far as I, you'll learn that there's a lot of things that are real but only a few folk have seen 'em. ”

Althea gave him a skeptical grin. “Yea, Reller, pull my other leg, it's got bells on,” she retorted.

“Damn pup!” the man replied in apparently genuine affront.

“Thinks 'cause he can slide a skinning knife he can talk back to his betters. ” He stalked off down the rise.

Althea followed him more slowly. She told herself she should have acted more gullible; after all, she was supposed to be a fourteen-year-old out on his first lengthy voyage. She shouldn't spoil Reller's fun, if she wanted to keep on his good side. Well, the next time he trotted out a sea tale, she'd be more receptive and make it up to him. After all, he was as close as she had to a friend aboard the Reaper.