Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [151]
“Now!” Rhodry yelled.
With a roar of laughter, the dragon tucked her wings and plunged, plummeting down toward the camp and roaring over and over. Such was the rush of air around him that Rhodry could do little more than cling to her harness with both hands as he bent low over her neck, but he could hear the whinnying and yelling below. As she leveled off and began to climb, he could look down and see the Horsekin camp erupting in a swirl of panicked cavalry.
“Again!” he yelled. “Try to drive them toward their own spearmen.”
She rumbled in a long laugh and turned, dipping a wing and soaring into position while Rhodry clung for his life. As she leveled out, though, he caught a glimpse of a bird—the raven, he assumed—flying fast toward them from the west. Arzosah had seen her, too, judging from her sudden hiss.
“Hurry!” he called out. “One more pass before she gets here!”
Arzosah roared and dropped, down and down in a rush of wind that tore at Rhodry’s clothes and tried to grab him from her back. He clung to the straps, his hands stinging and aching from the effort. Just as he felt that he was bound to be torn off and sent falling, she leveled with a huge roar, answered from below by the screams of horses and riders alike. Rhodry risked sitting up and leaning to the side to look down. Horses were plunging through one of the gaps, trampling the spearmen as they surrendered to an orgy of herd fear no matter how hard their riders yelled and beat at them with quirts and the flat of blades. Rhodry started to laugh, then swore as something sped by his face.
“Arrow!” he screamed. “They’ve got archers! Climb!”
“Just one,” she yelled back. “I saw him. But I’m climbing.”
With a few huge beats of her wings, she flew up well out of range of any bow on earth. As she turned, he got the barest glimpse of a man with a longbow, a tiny figure, smaller than a toy from his height, standing on the east ridge behind the tents with pennants. The rest of the camp, down in the lowlands, had broken into complete chaos, horses running and bucking, thrown riders scrambling up and running after them, infantry racing this way and that. The sound of yelling and neighing drifted up like the crash of waves on a distant shore. Beyond the earthworks, the Deverry army sprang to the attack as Horsekin charged out the gaps for want of anywhere else to go.
“Once more,” Rhodry called. “We’ll have them on the run good and proper, then.”
“This is grand sport, Dragonmaster!”
Arzosah flew round to the north, turned once more, and suddenly roared in rage, gliding on silent wings, cocking her head this way and that. Rhodry heard a sound, a high squalling note, a piping gone sour that he recognized all too well. He rose in his stirrups as best he could and looked frantically round, but whoever or whatever was playing upon the whistle had turned invisible. The sound seemed to be coming from a point in the empty air off to the west, and it was to the west that Arzosah turned, snapping her huge jaws, roaring again with a flap of wings to gain height.
“Dive!” Rhodry yelled. “Make your dive! It can wait, whatever it is!”
The piping screech hung loud in the air, as if a huge invisible bird cried out as it flew away, always west and away from the battle. Hissing in blind rage, Arzosah followed the five sour notes. Rhodry turned back and realized that he couldn’t even see the battlefield, it lay so far behind.
“Arzosah Sothy Lorezohaz!” He tossed back his head and intoned her name, called it out again, felt the name boiling out of him as if he spoke it with his entire body. “Ar Zo Sah Soth Ee Lore Ez O Haz!”
She moaned and fluttered, losing height, then flapping in a frenzy of wings to steady herself.
“The whistle,