Into The Darkness

Evidently, the dragon did hear him. It crouched down, almost like puppy that knew it had made a mess in the house. Istvan watched fascination. Turul sent a few more yells at it, these wordless. Only aft he was sure he'd established his mastery did he stamp back toward 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.. 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 kill'em, same as we do with any other vermin. Curse me if I don't some times 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 d stifled sigh, he went to work.

Hajaj 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 Hajaj delightedly joined. It picked him up and swept him along, as if it were the surf coming up the beach at Cape Hadh Faris, 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.

As things turned out, he might as well have not bothered speaking.

The woman followed her own caravan of thought down its ley line.

"And they're not just ugly, either. They're pretty puny fighters, too"

Everyone was so afraid of them when this war started. I think we can beat them, that's what I think."

Plainly, she did not know to whom she was speaking. Hajaj said only, "May the event prove you right, milady." He was glad - he was delighted – the Zuwayzin had won their first engagement against King Swemmel's forces. Unfortunately for him, he knew too much to have an easy time thinking one such victory would translate into a victorious war. Only few times in his life had he wished to be more ignorant than he was. This was another of those rare occasions.

Another swarm of captives tramped glumly past the palace. [..Pe..] cursed them in Zuwayzi. The older men and women in the crowd, those who'd been to school while Zuwayza remained a province of Unkerlant cursed the captured soldiers in rock-gray tunics in their own language.