“You’re not of our clan, Haz. You speak hardly a dozen words of our tongue. How do you know how we’ve suffered from the dragons in the Red Mountains’ dales? Try keeping your flocks and herds with a grown one of these around. Then tell me about giving them a chance.”
She reached out and touched his neck. Her skin was greasy compared with his dry hide. He felt dirty where she placed her hand. “A suffocated hatchling won’t bring us much in trade. We can’t even get a purse of silver for this one’s hide. There’s no market for aphrodisiacs from such a young one. Some magiker might want his bones, but that won’t replace your stolen sheep after we’ve had our cut.”
She spoke into his ear, her tone soft, but he couldn’t understand the words. One sounded like it might be sea, but he couldn’t be sure. She looked up again and returned to her conversation. “I can’t bear seeing any creature tortured. Even dragons.”
The others just shook their heads and laughed.
The sea. Auron had heard of it, had seen his parents’ visions of soaring above its jagged coastline on their mating flight. His first real sight of it was as a choppy bay seen through the angled bars of a cage.
It was mostly obscured by something made of wood, the size of a full-grown dragon floating upside down with its claws pointing in the air. Two trees grew out of the center of the construct, but they were striped bare of branch, twig, and leaf. It must be a ship: the wooden wings that hominids used to cross water. Shirtless men in loose pants stood around, waiting to pull on lines, or helped dwarves carry more constructs on board. All around was man-laid stone, man-cut wood, man-flattened earth. Only the birds retained their natural shape, though Auron wondered if men colored them white to make them more pleasing to the eye against the bright sky.
He smelled the ocean, and he didn’t like it. It smelled like rotted fish and stagnant marsh, overlaid with salt.
Four dwarves picked up his cage, one at each corner, and walked up a ramp to the ship. Auron’s limbs had more mobility; he had lost weight during the wagon ride, and his circulation flowed more freely. It was the closest he had been to comfortable since capture. As he passed along the deck, Auron got his first look at the limitless horizon of the sea, a precise line dividing the world in two. They set Auron down on deck, and he felt the surface move in the harbor. It was a pleasant feeling, bringing memories of his dreams of flight.
“Take the dragon below,” he heard the now-familiar voice of Hazeleye order.
“What, to the hold? He’s riding on deck with the horses—we have enough cleaning to do as is.”
“He’ll die of thirst in this sun. Below, or by Helo, I’ll take it to the captain or find another ship.” She climbed up onto the high deck at the back of the ship and looked out at the quay with her hand shielding the sun from her eyes.
“Ugly elf-witch,” one of the sailors muttered to the other as they picked Auron up. They attached a line to his cage and lowered him into the dark of the hold. Musty-smelling netting lay everywhere: bound around cargo, piled on the floor, hanging limp from the ceiling. They ensnared Auron in another layer of it, securing his cage to the ship’s side, as if the leather bands and cage weren’t enough to keep him captive. Auron smelled rat urine.
He waited a day, a night, and another day in the stuffy hold. Rats nibbled at the sore spots the leather had made on his hide. Hazeleye fed him, and cleaned him by spraying seawater into his cage. The water disappeared into some kind of gutter at the wall of the ship.
“I’d give you some chicken if I dared take your bands off,” she said, pouring a little blood-mixture into the nasal tube. He still hated the tube. He felt as though he were starving anyway, so he might as well starve without having a piece of leather threaded through his snout twice daily. No matter how much he struggled and glared, she persisted in her feedings.
Two other hatchlings arrived, caged as he was. One was hardly out of the shell, a young silver dragon with a barely healed wound where its egg tooth had been. It was wan and looked at him miserably. The other was green, a dragonelle.
Auron made mind contact with the young male, and got such a wave of confused anguish that he had to break off the conversation before it even started. He read all its history in a flash. The dragon had been hatched in captivity, had never known the smell of its mother or the proud eye of its father. Just some brute of a blighter who had cared for it, and poorly at that. It was harder to know the mind of the female; she must have been a more distant relation. If they could only speak!
He tried again, simplifying his thoughts to her, trying to remove emotions, mind-pictures, ideas, anything but bare words.
“You . . . name?”
“Not . . . as . . . such.”
Not as such? What did that mean?
“I Auron. I gray. Father AuRel. Father bronze. Your name?”
“Not . . . as . . . such.”
Auron thumped his tail against the deck. Wasn’t she paying attention? “What?”
“Not as such.”
Auron broke it off and rotated his neck so his eyes faced the wall. But for some reason, he felt better. Just the smell of other dragons, the feel of their minds, comforted him. In some ways, wretched as he was, he had it better than they. The dragonelle didn’t have the knack of mind-speech, and as for the poor young male, fresh from the egg, he was utterly lost. At least Auron had known his mother and father, his sisters. He had seen dragons and knew what he was.
Hazeleye and another elf came into the hold, two ship men trailing behind. The male bore a box. He set it carefully on deck and opened it. Sawdust spilled out onto the floor, Auron sniffed the distinctive dry odor. The ivory tip of a dragon egg could be seen within.
The elves spoke for a moment; Hazeleye squatted and put her ear to the egg, before shutting and locking it again. They talked as the sailors secured the chest among sacks half-filled with more sawdust. The male spoke sharply to one of the men in Parl.
“Watch it there, that’s not a cask of pork. Humans! You never take the time to do aught properly, do you?”
The sea-men ignored the comment. Perhaps they were inured to that kind of speech from elves. Another sailor descended with a pair of lanterns, and put them next to the chest. Auron smelled the almost dragonlike scent of burning oil. The elves spoke some more, and Hazeleye pointed to netting in the corner of the hold.
Later that day, the ship’s motion altered. Auron felt it change directions, and rock harder side to side. Was it beginning its flight above the water?
Auron submitted to a feeding from Hazeleye and watched her do the same to the female and the hatchling. It was almost as bad to watch it as it was to go through it. He tried to keep out the other dragons’ pain as best he could.
With the ordeal over, the elf filled the oil in the always-burning lanterns and climbed into some smaller netting strung between two square-carved tree trunks holding up the ceiling above like stalagmites in a cave. Auron watched her rock and think with the eye facing her, and she looked back at him. With one eye.
A man in clothing so bright, it reminded Auron of a dragon’s hide stepped down into the hold the next morning. “So, how is our floating garbleup?” the man said, using an unknown word.
“Well enough, Captain. It’s not my first passage.”
“To the Isle of Ice? Truly?”
“A long voyage, I know.”
“Then you should also know better than to claim you could hire another ship.”
“It got your mate to do what I wanted.”
“This is my third trip in three years. Each time with dragons.” He looked at the cages. “This one won’t live much longer,” he said, eyeing the little one. “The female seems a fine strong one—you’ll get your price for her. But what is this?” he said, coming to Auron’s enclosure.
“A male.”
“Of no color? His Sagacity’ll no more take him than he’d buy a basilisk. He’ll be cut up for fish bait by sunset the day we land.”
“We’ll see.”
“I know the pointy-head will laugh in your face if you try to sell him a birth defect.”
“Then he doesn’t know as much as he claims about dragons. Rumor is he has an idea to breed them. A gray can have any color offspring.”
The captain shook his head. “I think not.”
“Captain, these cages aren’t doing them any good. Can your armorer fix it so they’re chained to the wall?”
“If you’re willing to pay for the damages to my ship.”
Auron saw the elf clamp her jaw shut as tightly as his. “Yes,” she finally said. Funny that hominids could show emotion now and again. It made them almost dragonlike.
“Then I’ll arrange it, kind heart. I might have a goosedown pillow in one of my sea chests, if you’d like that for their precious heads, as well.” He walked back up the entry hatchway, chuckling. The elf said something to herself in her own tongue to the gaily colored back.
She walked over to Auron’s netting. “Were you listening? Were you?” she asked, absently patting him as she looked up the hatchway the other had used. Auron didn’t understand her language, but at her touch, he knew her feelings. They were warm and caring, similar to Mother’s, and lifted some of his misery. She paused in her stroking, drawing her hand away as if he were burning. Her eyebrows came together like head-butting hatchlings. “You were listening,” she said, switching to the Parl she employed with the captain. “I saw your eye. You looked at me; you looked at the captain. Are you one of the dragons who know our tongues? Nod if you understand.”