"I suppose," said Pet.
"You don't sound convinced," said Burke as they walked along the wall. He gave the guards silent nods of greeting.
"I'm sorry," said Pet. "I'm not feeling up to contemplating deep moral questions right now."
"War isn't the time for that," said Burke. "Morality becomes what you carry in your gut."
Burke stopped, surveying the surrounding landscape.
"Give me the box," he said.
Pet handed him the heavy case and watched as Burke nimbly flipped clasps and slipped open hidden compartments. The box transformed into a tripod and stand for a large owl figurine with giant glass eyes. Burke leaned over to stare into a small window at the back of the owl's head, fiddling with knobs on the owl's wings. Anza waited a short distance away, her arms crossed, her hands tucked into her armpits.
Pet looked at her and gave a wink. "Cold enough for you?" he asked.
She glared back at him. Pet wasn't surprised his charm was failing, given the ratty state he was in.
Burke said, "Anza doesn't speak."
"Oh," said Pet. "Is she deaf?"
"No. She hears better than my dog. She's just not said a word her whole life."
"Oh," said Pet.
"It hasn't held her back. Anza has other ways of getting her point across." Burke adjusted one more knob and said, "Ah, there we are. I've tied a ribbon in a tree down the north road, almost exactly one thousand yards distant. A thousand yards is a significant number. Do you know why?"
"Why?" asked Pet.
"Because sun-dragons rarely fly above 700 yards. Sky-dragons usually cruise even lower. It takes a lot of energy to fly. There's a safety element from being well above the landscape, but there's a trade off in the energy it takes to get up there."
"That's still pretty high," said Pet. "Almost half a mile."
"More significantly," said Burke, "it's about twice as high as most arrows reach. A strong man and a good bow might get 500 yards range. It's nothing to laugh at, but it means that dragons always command the high ground in war. They can drop on us anything they can carry, and we can't stop them. They might not have accuracy on their side, but they don't need it. They can fly a thousand passes over this fortress, confident that not even one arrow can reach them. If only one in a hundred of the war darts they drop kills someone, what does it matter? They'll whittle us down. If we take shelter in buildings, they drop flaming oil, or send in the earth-dragons while we're cowering. It's how they destroyed Conyers, and that town was much better prepared than Dragon Forge. We had food stocked, plentiful water, and bows in the hands of every man. Yet we were slaughtered by the thousands, and only three sun-dragons failed to return from that war."
Burke cast his gaze toward Anza. Pet looked back to find she'd unwrapped the bundle she'd carried. Propped on the wall in front of her were three bows. At least, they looked something like bows. They were shorter than a longbow, only four feet tall, and crafted from freshly-forged steel instead of wood. At the tips of the bows were the grooved oval disks Burke had showed Pet when they first met. They served as pulleys and were strung with a thin, braided, metallic cable.
Anza grabbed one of the bows and took an arrow from the quiver on the wall. Burke pointed toward a distant tree that was almost invisible in the darkness. Anza drew the bow, her well-defined muscles bulging as she first pulled the string, then slackening as the pulleys held the force of the bow while she aimed.
She opened her fingers and the arrow simply vanished. The bowstring snapped back into place with a loud, musical zing!
Burke leaned over to look in the owl.
"Ooooh," he said, sounding sorry. "Close. You hit the limb, but missed the ribbon."
Anza frowned.
"Take a shot, Pet," Burke said.
Pet lifted one of the bows. It wasn't as heavy as it looked. The metal wasn't pure steel, apparently, but an alloy with something lighter. He placed the arrow against the cable and was surprised by the resistance of the first few inches of the draw. Then, suddenly, the remainder of the pull was effortless. He held the bow at full draw without any strain at all.
He aimed at what he assumed was the target tree. He couldn't see where Anza's arrow had hit, and definitely didn't see a ribbon. He released the arrow and was startled by the speed it launched into the air.
Burke clucked his tongue a few seconds later.
"You missed the whole damn tree," he said. "Shot over it, in fact."
"I can barely see it," said Pet.
Burke bent up from the owl, stretching his back. "Neither can I without mechanical assistance. Anza can be grateful not to have inherited my family's eyes."
"Her mother must have good eyes then," said Pet.
"I wouldn't know," said Burke.
"Why wouldn't you know?" Pet asked. Immediately, he regretted asking the question. Burke's relationship with his wife was none of his business.
Burke didn't seem offended by the question. He scratched the gray streaks of his hair, looking thoughtful. "After Conyers fell, I found good reason not to think of humans as any better than dragons. The survivors of the battle, the refugees, did terrible things. We'd gathered from distant villages, drawn together by Bitterwood's tale of injustice. He believed if we would all put aside our differences and stand together, we could change the world. We'll never know if he was right. We never did put aside our differences. We were squabbling among ourselves before the dragons came. After they left, the squabbles turned to bloodshed. They call it the Lost Year. For twelve months, there was no peace or safety as man turned on man in an orgy of reprisals, pillaging, and rape."
"Oh," said Pet. He wasn't quite sure how this answered his question about Anza's mother, but it seemed like something that Burke needed to get off his chest. "I'm sorry," he said.
"The only time I saw Anza's mother was in the ten minutes my tribe took to burn her village" Burke said. "Two of my brothers raped her. I didn't stop them. It was a bad, lawless time, a world turned upside-down."
Pet didn't know what to say.
"Somehow, knowing that my own blood was capable of such atrocities made me feel as if Conyers had been doomed from the start. What's the point of fighting monsters if we ourselves could be so inhuman? How much history have you learned, Pet? What do you know of the time before dragons?"
"I didn't know there was a time before dragons," said Pet. "I mean, I know a little of the Ballad of Belpantheron, where the dragons defeated the angels, but I assume that's only fairy tale."
Burke shook his head, as if he was sorry to hear these words. "A thousand years ago, there were no dragons. I know this because I am a descendent of the Cherokee, the true natives of this land. We had already had our land stolen from us once, by men. When these men lost it to dragons, my tribe vowed to remember the true history of the world. We called ourselves the Anudahdeesdee-the Memory. We remembered not only our history, but the history of all nations before the time of dragons."
"Is this how you know how to make all these things? These bows? This owl?"
"Over time, we lost much of our knowledge," said Burke. "Some men say our memories were a curse. Anyone who knew the great secrets, such as how to make gunpowder, always met misfortune, as if some evil spirit was out to destroy the memory of these things. I've only inherited a handful of secrets: an education in alloys and engineering that's but a shadow of the knowledge mankind once possessed."
"But why are these things secret?" asked Pet. "Why didn't your people share them with the world? Maybe men could have done more to free themselves from the dragons."
"Perhaps. But, having watched my brothers turn into savages, I've despaired that men would only use the knowledge to hurt each other. The only good to have come out of my stand at Conyers was Anza."