Bazil Broketail (5 page)

There was an appreciative murmur in the stands, where sat a dozen or more heavy set champions, like Great Vastrox, the four-ton Master of the dragon school.

Smilgax snapped his jaws and attacked once more. This miserable Quoshite oaf would not be allowed to stand in his way!

The swords rang, whined off shields. They clashed belly to belly for a moment, and Smilgax used his superior mass to force Bazil into retreat. Once again the swords swung, Bazil defending desperately as Smilgax attacked with renewed vigor.

Smilgax caught Bazil’s shield with his own and pulled it aside from his body. Smilgax feinted with his sword, Bazil turned to counter, and Smilgax thrust out a leg and kicked the leatherback on the thigh.

Such kicking was regarded as poor technique, since if countered the blow might result in the loss of a foot. But this time Bazil was taken by surprise and sent tumbling.

Smilgax pounced, his sword swinging high. Bazil dodged a decapitating blow. Smilgax was in a fury and would hold nothing back.

Piocar was almost struck from Bazil’s grip in the next moment, and the Quoshite was forced to roll ignominiously across the sand to avoid the next attempted death-stroke.

Smilgax’s tail mace, however, connected several times with his head and shoulders, and when he recovered his footing a moment later, Bazil received another blow right on the helmet that rang in his ears and sent him reeling.

Smilgax charged, Bazil defended, Piocar catching the next huge overhand slice, and Bazil turned inside the bigger dragon and tried to elbow Smilgax in the throat.

Smilgax dodged, their shields clashed, and Bazil swung Piocar low and forced Smilgax to jump.

Tail maces rang together, Smilgax danced backwards and tripped over his own feet and went down with a crash that shook the place.

Bazil stood over him but deliberately refrained from a killing stroke.

As Smilgax regained his feet there was a ripple of applause from the human observers in the gallery above. Such honorable qualities were much appreciated. And the rally between these two young drakes had been quite spectacular.

But Smilgax cursed most horribly and rushed forward again. Once more their blades clashed, their shields smashed together with all the force of their two-ton bodies behind them. Smilgax continued to snarl curses; he spat at Bazil and tried to trip him, a most dishonorable tactic that brought boos from the gallery as they broke apart.

Bazil went on the offensive, swinging Piocar from side to side in great measured sweeps that kept Smilgax moving back, with no time to maneuver or do more than counter.

Smilgax reached the wood wall, then ducked away to the side and Bazil caught him with the flat of the blade along the rump. The smack was embarrassingly loud, and Smilgax jumped as if stung.

The hard green’s eyes were now rigid in rage. Smilgax jumped forward, swinging with all his might.

Piocar met his swing and deflected it. Smilgax staggered and almost lost his footing. Bazil shoved him hard with the shield, then moved in with Piocar once more, hewing from side to side, keeping the other on the defensive, until once more he was forced to the wall, turned and received another swat on the rump.

Applause erupted in the gallery above. The champions shouted approval.

Smilgax was maddened to a dangerous level. Once more he approached, and they grappled and he spat and hissed and attempted a throw that Bazil, off balance, was forced to spin away from. Then Smilgax brought up his heavy knee and caught Bazil a low blow to the groin.

Bazil gasped, ducked aside, and dodged the sweep of the sword that followed. He spun off balance and Piocar knocked away Smilgax’s illegal stab at his back.

A chorus of boos broke out in the crowd.

Frustrated and enraged, Smilgax slashed with his sword at Bazil’s tail and sliced off the last two feet and the flexible tip that gripped the small mace.

Bazil fell back, stunned by the loss. The crowd in the gallery rose to their feet with a gasp. There were more boos and cries for a disqualification. However, the rules were inflexible on this issue. There could be no stoppage to a combat except by limit of time or the surrender or loss of consciousness by one or another opponent.

Grim-mouthed, the champion dragons now watched as Smilgax set to destroy Bazil of Quosh in the remaining minutes of the bout.

Bazil did not give up. He fought stoutly and well, Piocar keeping Smilgax’s sword away, his shield work still deft and strong. But without a tail he was unprotected from Smilgax’s own tail mace, and again and again it whirled in and struck him about the head and shoulders.

Bazil survived, grinding out a draw by sheer endurance and a stubborn refusal to give up. When the final horn was blown, he was still on his feet, unbowed. Smilgax gave a violent curse and stormed from the ring, with boos in a crescendo beating down from above.

Bazil maintained his dignity and staggered into the Dragon House, keeping his feet until Relkin could lead him into his stall, whereupon he collapsed and gave up consciousness.

Bazil’s tail was a disaster. The surgeons in the dragon yard did their best. Medicine in Marneri had attained a high standard of skill and cleanliness, but the reattachment failed and the last two feet of the tail soon began to mortify.

Relkin was forced to remove it at last and cauterize the stump with a sulfur poultice. Bazil sank into a terminal gloom.

Relkin faced the future with dread
in
his heart. It would be a drab future. Crippled dragons always returned to their village to aid the agricultural effort. Relkin would go with Bazil—such was the law for the dragonboy, wedded at six to his two-ton charge.

Still Relkin grasped at every straw, as it occurred to him.

“You’ll face Vastrox in the final combats,” he announced cheerfully after seeing the postings on the notice board.

“Oh wonderful, my pail runneth over at the prospect. Vastrox will handle me like a bantling.”

“But Baz, think of the honor they do you. Vastrox knows that you were winning before Smilgax committed the foul. Everyone knows that.”

“It will matter little. Without tail mace I can never join the legions. Face the truth, fool boy! We are going to be working with a plough for our suppers pretty soon.”

Bazil was hunched over, lost in despair.

But Relkin would not give up. He went out to search for a magical remedy. They needed work, their money was running out, and this New Legion presented a great opportunity. A new start, patrolling the frontier in Kenor. A hundred silver ducats a year for them, and the village of Quosh would be free of the Argonath military tax for every year they served. The village would be well repaid for its efforts and for giving an orphan boy a chance in life.

The legion term was ten years, after which troops could retire or sign up for further service. Older active legionnaires provided the engineers, the transport command and dozens of other essential components of the overall military effort that was being made by the Ennead cities of the Argonath.

When they retired, legionnaires, including the dragons, were encouraged to settle in the colonies and become free farmers, owning their own land, working it for themselves and paying only a tithe to the colony to help support of the legions and administrative services provided by the Ennead cities.

They were also seen as the nucleus for resistance in the event of raids into the frontier by the savage Teetol or fell parties of raiders from the dead lands of the Tummuz Orgmeen.

In retirement, Relkin foresaw a farmstead, maybe two hundred acres, out in Kenor. He and Bazil would work the land together. Relkin would still be a young man and would take a wife from the frontier people. Bazil would apply to the Dragon Propagation Board and would be given the opportunity to fertilize an egg. Later when they were rich they would hire others to work for them, and they would lead whatever lives they cared to.

But now this bright shining future was about to be snuffed out. Instead of colonial freedom they would go to Quosh as agricultural laborers.

Relkin flung himself out of the Dragon House and down to Tower Square. Goats were being sold, and wild drover boys with skinny arms projecting from goatskin shirts and shorts were running between the pens.

Relkin wondered what life might have been like if he had grown up in a family that herded goats. Would he have been happy in such a life?

He crossed the square. It was pointless to speculate. He’d been born an orphan, his parentage unknown; his future lay before him, he could only go on. This he had learned at an early age. His father was unknown, possibly a soldier from the garrison in Ryo. His mother had left the village in disgrace and her family had refused to take him in. He had never known any family until the day they gave him Baz.

He turned onto North Street and went on down it, with the elf quarter beside him on the left. Here the elf houses, cramped three-story tenements lacking in straight lines, jammed together along narrow lanes. Elf children, boys and girls in smocks and breeks, sprang through the lanes in play, their high voices raised in happy song.

On the south side of the street were tall terrace houses with whitewashed fronts and high, shuttered windows. Occasional servants could be seen at work in an otherwise sedate scene. These tall white houses, belonging to prosperous merchants, seemed to frown across the street at the untidy squalor of elfdom.

Further on, past the drapers’ row at the junction with Foluran Hill, the buildings became more haphazard, with shops of many kinds at street level.

He turned down Sick Duck Street and entered the shop of Azulea, a medicine crone who dealt in love philters, curses and their removal, plus arcane medicaments for unusual ills. She had been recommended to him by another dragonboy, name of Gath, who already belonged to the New Legion and knew the city quite well.

Azulea heard Relkin out. She rustled through a spell book and a directory and then informed him that she had nothing that specifically addressed the problem of re-growing a dragon’s tail. She had a good dragon liniment that would cure the pox and a great tonic for a piqued dragon that was made from mandrake root, but neither of these would do much for a severed tail.

However, she did have a spell and the recipe for an unguent that would grow new branches on a tree, and she offered to try it on Bazil for six Marneri ducats.

Relkin said he’d think about it. He went out and strolled on down Sick Duck Street, stopping to look into a few more shop windows. The old buildings here were made of wood and lathe covered in white plaster and roofed in black slate. The walls bulged and curved in near organic disorder. Many of the shops were very old, run for decades by their current proprietors.

Six ducats! He had scarcely two left in the world, and he and Baz needed to eat. Baz had been good, but he was tiring fast of the horses oats that were the free ration in the Dragon House.

On the corner with Hag Street, Relkin stopped in to see Old Rothercary, a country
brujo
with a million herbal remedies and potions in bottles and tubes in the back of his narrow shop.

Rothercary was an enormous grey-haired man with ruddy cheeks and a big red nose. He roared with laughter at Relkin’s request and rummaged around in the back parlor before producing a small bottle containing a tiny quantity of a viscous red fluid.

“This’ll do the trick!” he pronounced. “The blood of a Cunfshon steerbat that’s been waned nine times to boiling by the concentrated light of the moon. The price is ten ducats.”

Relkin’s jaw dropped at the sight of the small phial of dark red fluid.

“But what does it do?”

“Do? Why it, grows things back, like the limbs and sex organs and so on. It’s very popular among the castrati in Cunfshon, they say, though whether it really works on that area I cannot report for sure, but I’ve sold it a few times to unfortunates here in Marneri. Just paint it over the stump and in a matter of days there is fresh growth. It’s wonderful stuff, which is why it’s so expensive.”

But ten pieces of silver was an impossibly huge amount.

Relkin went back to the Dragon House rubbing his chin, lost in thought.

At the notice board he found a special note. A rematch in the first combat had been sought by Smilgax, in protest at the awarding of a draw in his fight with Bazil of Quosh.

The rematch had been granted. Bazil would have to fight Smilgax again, on the morning of the day of the final combats. The winner of the bout would then perform against Vastrox.

This negated Vastrox’s noble attempt to give the dragon from Quosh at least one moment of glory, by taking him on, even without a functioning tail tip, before the big audience of the final day.

Instead Smilgax would grab that opportunity. Smilgax’s action was contemptible, but apparently the hard green did not care about opinion. All that mattered was getting into the Legion, even if he had to trample over his own honor and the Quoshite leatherback in the process.

Relkin reeled along the passageway to the infirmary and collected fresh supplies of liniment, disinfectant and talon restorer. Then he went on down to the stalls and their temporary home, a stall with a worn stone floor, beam and plaster ceiling and heavy curtain instead of a door across the front. There was a small, potbellied stove, a human cot and a large oak beam crib for a dragon set across one end.

Bazil was sitting on the crib, attempting to shave a damaged claw with a knife made for human hands. Relkin winced at the sight of all the bandages and abrasions on his dragon’s head and shoulders. Smilgax had done evil work with the mace in his effort to capitalize on his ill-famed lucky blow.

“Give me that,” he said, snatching the paring knife out of the big dragon’s paw. Baz barely seemed to respond. Relkin sensed the profound dragonish woe that enveloped his huge, leathery charge. The eyes, those immense yellow and black saucers, seemed milky and opaque, decidedly unfocussed.

“You fought well, Baz, and you’ll fight again. We’re not going to let this thing beat us.”