Harry Turtledove - Into the Darkness

As Istvan had expected, pulling straight a tiny crease in his blanket took but an instant. Had Jokai been in a decent humor, he wouldn’t even have noticed it. Maybe his emerods were bothering him. He was likely to have big emerods, because he was certainly a big…

Istvan sighed. He could think Sergeant Jokai as much of a billy goat as he liked, and it wouldn’t change a thing. All that mattered was that Jokai was a sergeant and he wasn’t.

Jokai inspected the repairs, then grudgingly nodded. “Now report to Turul. He’d better give you a good character at the end of the week, too, or you’ll wish you’d never been born.” Istvan was already inclining in that direction. Jokai added, “And I’ll have my eye on you, too—don’t think I won’t. Do you understand what I’m telling you, soldier?”

“Aye, Sergeant.” Istvan said the only thing he possibly could. Jokai stomped off. Istvan hoped he would find someone else with whom to be furious. Misery loved company. Besides, he might get stuck with less work that way.

Turul cackled like a laying hen when Istvan came slouching up to him. “I was waiting for Jokai to find somebody to give me a hand with the beasts,” the old dragonkeeper said. “How’d he happen to choose you this time?”

“I was there,” Istvan answered bitterly.

“That’ll do, that’ll do,” Turul said. “Now you’re here. The world won’t end, even if it will stink for a while. And after you’ve been on this duty for a bit, you won’t hardly even notice that.”

“Maybe you don’t,” Istvan said, at which the dragonkeeper laughed again. Istvan didn’t think he’d been joking; after so much time around quicksilver and brimstone, dragon fire and dragon dung, how could Turul have any sense of smell left at all?

At the moment, Istvan’s own sense of smell was working altogether too well to suit him. He and Turul stood down-wind of the pens of the dragon farm. Along with the brimstone reek of their fodder and droppings, he also inhaled the strong reptilian musk that was their own distinctive scent.

Two of the beasts, both big males, began hissing and then shrieking at each other. They reared up and spread their wings, each trying to look as enormous and impressive as he could. The chains that secured them to their iron tethering posts rattled and clanked.

Other dragons started hissing, too. Through the growing commotion, Istvan asked, “Can they break loose? Will they start flaming?” He knew he sounded anxious. He couldn’t help it. From everything he could see, anxiety made perfect sense.

“They’d better not,” Turul said indignantly. He picked up an iron-shod goad, similar to the ones dragonfliers used but with a longer handle, and advanced on the closer male. The dragon swiveled its unlovely head on its snaky neck and stared at him out of cold golden eyes. In spite of his protective clothing, it could have flamed him to a cinder.

It did nothing of the sort. He shouted at it, a shout without words but with strong overtones of the shrieks dragons aimed at one another. The male hissed and flapped its wings; Istvan wondered why the blast of wind from them didn’t knock Turul over.

The old dragonkeeper shouted again. He whacked the dragon on the end of its scaly nose with the goad. And, as a big fierce hound will yield to a pampered lapdog that learned to dominate it when it was a puppy, so the dragon, trained from hatchlinghood to obey puny men, subsided now.

Istvan admired Turul’s nerve without wanting to imitate it. The dragonkeeper picked his way between pens and walloped the other contentious dragon, too. A tiny puff of smoke burst from its mouth. Turul hit it again, harder this time. “Don’t you do that!” he yelled. “Don’t you even think of doing that! You do that when your flier tells you, not any other time. Do you hear me?” Whack!

Evidently, the dragon did hear him. It crouched down, almost like a puppy that knew it had made a mess in the house. Istvan watched in fascination. Turul sent a few more yells at it, these wordless. Only after he was sure he’d established his mastery did he stamp back towards Istvan.

“I didn’t think they were smart enough to obey like that,” Istvan said. “You really made them behave themselves.”

“Smart hasn’t got a whole lot to do with it,” Turul answered. “Dragon’s aren’t very smart. They never were. They never will be. What these bastards are is trained. They’re almost too stupid to be trained, too. If they were, we couldn’t fly ’em at all. We’d have to hunt ’em down and kill ’em, same as we do with any other vermin. Curse me if I don’t sometimes think that’d be for the best.”

“But you’re one of the people who do train them,” Istvan exclaimed. “Would you want to be out of a job?”

“Sometimes,” Turul said, surprising Istvan again. “You put in so much work training dragons, and what do you get back? Shit and fire and screeches, that’s all. If you didn’t train ’em so hard, the cursed things’d eat you. Oh, I’m good at what I do, and I make no bones about it. But when you get right down to it, lad, so what? Even a horse, which isn’t the smartest beast that ever came down the pike, will make friends with you. A dragon? Never. Dragons know about food and they know about the goad, and that’s about it. It wears thin now and again, that it does.”

“What would you do if you weren’t a dragonkeeper?” Istvan asked.

Now Turul stared at him. “Been a while since I thought about that. I don’t rightly know, not now. I expect I’d have ended up a potter or a carpenter or some such thing. I’d be settled down in some little town with a fat wife getting old like me, and children, and maybe—likely—grandchildren by now, too. Don’t have any get I know of, not unless my seed caught in one of the easy women I’ve had down through the years.”

Again, Istvan had got more answer than he’d bargained for. Turul liked to talk, and didn’t look to have had anyone to listen to him for a while. Istvan asked another question: “Would that have been better or worse than what you have now?”

“Blaze, how do I know?” the old dragonkeeper said. “It would have been different, that’s all I can tell you.” The net of wrinkles around his eyes shifted as they narrowed. “No, it’s not all I can tell you. The other thing I can tell you is, there’s lots and lots of dragon dung out there, and it won’t go away by itself. Put on your leathers and get to it.”

“Oh, aye,” Istvan said. “I was just waiting for you to finish up here.” That was close enough to true to keep Turul from calling him on it. With a stifled sigh, he went to work.

Hajjaj stood in front of the royal palace in Bishah, watching a parade of Unkerlanter captives shambling past. The Unkerlanters still wore their rock-gray tunics. They looked astonished that the Zuwayzin had captured them instead of the other way round. Being herded by naked Zuwayzi soldiers seemed as demoralizing to them as being jeered by naked Zuwayzi civilians.

Following the captives came Zuwayzi soldiers marching in neat ranks. The civilians cheered them, a great roar of noise in which Hajjaj delightedly joined. It picked him up and swept him along, as if it were the surf coming up the beach at Cape Hadh Fans, the northernmost spit of land in all Derlavai.

A woman turned to him and said, “They’re pretty ugly, these Unkerlanters. Do they wear clothes because they’re so ugly: to make sure no one can see?”

“No,” the Zuwayzi foreign minister answered. “They wear clothes because it gets very cold in their kingdom.” He knew the Unkerlanters and other folk of Derlavai had more reasons for wearing clothes than the weather, but, despite his study and his experience, those reasons made no sense to him, and surely would not to his countrywoman, either.