Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [110]
“The harness!” Garin bellowed. “Come down!”
“I will, then.”
With a yell to Arzosah to fly and meet him on the grass, Rhodry hurried down the long staircase. He’d had a dreamless sleep the past few nights, when he could sleep at all. It seemed that every few minutes he’d wake, thinking he heard the raven shrieking over Lin Serr. In the sunlight, though, with the tanner and armorer bustling about, showing off their shiny handiwork, perilous dreams and shape-changers seemed very far away.
“Let’s try it on, shall we?” Rhodry said to the dragon. “Will you let them work the buckles and suchlike? I’ve no idea how this thing goes together.”
“Very well. But they’d best be careful of my beautiful scales.”
Once it was fitted, Arzosah pronounced herself satisfied with the new harness, an elegant thing of black leather set off with polished bronze buckles and the little gold dragons, inlaid round the martingale, that Otho’s bequest had bought her. Rhodry found it much easier to ride in a proper saddle, though this arrangement of pads and leather loops rode and felt far different than any horse saddle he’d ever used. He still knelt more than sat, but securely so now. As they soared and dipped over Lin Serr, he realized that, at long last, he’d grown used to dragonback.
Now that he wasn’t worrying about falling hundreds of feet to his death, he could try out his various plans for fighting during the battles ahead, but there he was in for a series of grim discoveries. First, he tried using his hunting bow. When he shot in the direction they were traveling, the wind that Arzosah’s forward motion created blew the arrows right back at him, though all lopsided and harmless. When he tried twisting in the saddle to shoot behind, he nearly impaled her wing. Arzosah shrieked like the clash of a hundred swords on shields.
“Oh, do be careful,” she whined. “You almost hurt me, Dragonmaster! Those things are little, but I’ll wager they sting.”
“I’ll wager so, too. Very well. We’ll try fighting with a long spear.”
But unless she flew so low that she was in danger of being stabbed from below, and on her vulnerable belly at that, his spear thrusts would never reach an enemy. Next he tried carrying aloft a pouch of big stones to throw, but again, the wind stirred up by her enormous wings made it just as likely that he’d hit a friend as a foe. Swearing with every silver dagger’s oath he knew, he let her land in the park land for a rest, only to discover they’d gathered an audience of five dwarves, Garin among them. When Rhodry dismounted, sliding down from the dragon’s neck, he told her to go drink at the river, then walked over to join them.
“Things look bad,” Garin pronounced.
“They do, at that. Ye gods, you hear all those bard songs about the glorious heroes of old, fighting from dragonback, but the blasted bards never say exactly how they did it!”
“I don’t think there is any how.” Garin waved a vague hand at the other four dwarves. “I don’t think you’ve met these gentlemen, but they’re weaponmasters, the weaponmasters, if you take my meaning.”
Since Rhodry did, he bowed, a gesture they acknowledged with grave nods. The eldest of the four, all bushy white eyebrows and white beard, stepped forward and spoke to Garin, who translated.
“He says to tend your mount, then come meet with him in the armory. Rori, if he invites you in, the Council can’t say one rotten word against it. This is Varn Avro Krez, the greatest warleader Lin Serr’s ever had.”
As if he knew he was being flattered, the old man snorted in disgust, then turned and stomped off, his confederates trailing after.
“He’s turned command over to Brel,” Garin went on. “But he served as avro for some hundreds of years. They say that once someone shot an arrow at him, but he flicked his great-ax up and knocked it from the air.”
“I believe it. You can see his mastery, somehow, in his eyes.”
After he’d removed the harness and stowed it to the armorer’s satisfaction, Rhodry rubbed Arzosah