“Spears won’t stop them.”
“Their claws are bigger than our knives.”
“The weapon we have is not held in our hands,” I said. “It’s up here.” I tapped at my temple.
Coming down off the hillside, we made a wide circle northward and crossed the river at a shallow point where it frothed and babbled noisily white among broken rocks and flat-topped boulders. I kept a wary eye on the sky, but saw no pterosaurs.
Once under the trees on the far bank, I squatted on the sandy ground and drew a map with my finger. “Here is the bowl of the god who speaks, where the dragons are waiting for us, expecting us to walk into their trap. Here is the river. And here we are.”
I explained what I wanted them to do. They were doubtful at first, but after a couple of repetitions they saw that my plan could work. If everything went off just the way I wanted it to.
We had another weapon that the dragons did not: fire. The dragons had used the cooking fires of the huts to help destroy the village by the lake. Now I intended to use fire and the element of surprise to destroy them.
We worked all night gathering dry brush for tinder. The floor of the canyon was strewn with bushes and clumps of trees that would burn nicely once ignited. The dragons would either be asleep or torpid, I reasoned, during the cool of the night. Reptiles become sluggish when the thermometer goes down. The time to strike would be just before dawn, the lowest temperature of the night.
My one fear was that they might have some sort of sentries. Perhaps heat-sensitive snakes such as the ones who had attacked us in our caves. My hope was that Set was arrogant enough to think that a band of five little humans would camp for the night and resume their journey only after the sun came up.
We made dozens of trips across the slippery wet rocks, carrying armloads of brush and dead branches from windfalls. The moon rose, a slim crescent that barely shed light, and close enough almost to touch its edge, that glowering red star rose with it. Swiftly, silently, we began to carry our cache of tinder toward the canyon.
I saw the looming dark shadow of a dragon at the canyon’s mouth. It was sitting on its hind legs and thick tail, not moving. But I saw the ruddy light of the strange star glint off its eyes. It was awake.
A guard. A sentry. Devilish Set was not so arrogant after all.
I stopped the men behind me with an outstretched arm. They dropped their bundles and gasped at the monster looming in the night. It slowly swung its massive head in our direction. We backed away, hugging the wall of rock and its protective shadows.
The giant lizard did not come after us. To me it seemed half-asleep, languid.
“We can’t get past it!” Chron whispered urgently.
“We’ll have to kill it,” I said. “And quietly, so that it doesn’t rouse the others.”
“How can—”
I silenced him with a finger raised to my lips. Then I commanded, “Wait here. Absolutely silent. Don’t speak, don’t move. But if you hear that monster roar, then run for your lives and don’t look back for me.”
I could sense the questions he wanted to ask, but there was no time for explanations or discussion. Without another word, I reached up for handholds on the steep cliff face and began climbing straight up.
The rock was crumbly, and more than once I thought I would plunge back to the bottom and break my neck. But after many sweaty minutes I found a ledge that ran roughly parallel to the ground. It was narrow, barely enough for me to edge along, one bare foot after the other. Flattened along the cliff, the rock still warm from the day’s sunlight, I made my way slowly, stealthily, to a spot just above the dragon.
The soft hoot of an owl floated through the darkness. Crickets played their eternal scratchy melody while frogs from the riverbank peeped higher notes. Nothing in the forest realized that death was about to strike.
I nearly lost my footing and tumbled off as I turned myself around and pressed my back against the bare rock. Silently I drew my dagger from its sheath on my thigh. I would have one chance and one chance only to kill this monster. If I missed, I would be its next meal.
Taking only enough time to draw in a deep breath and gauge the distance to the dragon’s back, I stepped off the ledge and into the empty air.
I dropped onto the monster’s back with a thud that almost knocked the wind out of me. Before the dragon realized what had happened I rammed my dagger’s blade into the base of his skull. I felt bone, or thick cartilage.
With every ounce of strength in me I pushed the blade in deeper.
I felt the beast die. One instant it was tense, vital, its monstrous head turning, jaws agape. The next it was collapsing like a pricked balloon, as inert as a stone. It fell face-first into the dirt, landing with a jarring crash that sounded to me like the result of an elephant falling off a cliff.
I lay clinging to the dragon’s dead hide. For a few heartbeats the noises of the night ceased. Then the crickets and frogs took up their harmony again. Something canine bayed at the rising moon. And none of the other dragons seemed to stir.
I made my way back to the waiting men. Even in the darkness I could see their wide grins. Without wasting a moment, we began piling up our brushwood across the mouth of the canyon.
The sky was beginning to turn gray as we finished the last piece of it. The barrier we had erected looked pitifully thin. Still, it was the best we could do.
Chron and I crawled the length of the brushwood barrier. Through the tangle dry branches I could see the dragons sitting as stolid as huge statues near the cliff wall, tall enough for their snouts to reach the lowest of the caves in the rock face. Their eyes seemed to be open, but they were not moving at all, except for the slow rhythmic pulsing of their flanks as they breathed the deep, regular breath of sleep.
It took several moments for Chron to start a fire from a pair of dry sticks. But at last a tendril of smoke rose from his busy hands and then a flicker of flame broke out. I touched a stick to the flame as Chron plunged his burning brand into the brush. Then we scrambled to our feet and raced back along the length of the barrier, starting new fires every few yards.
The others had their own fire going nicely by the time we reached them. The whole barrier was in flames, the dry brush crackling nicely, bright tongues of hot fire leaping into the air.
Still the dragons did not stir. I feared that our fire would go out before it could ignite the bushes and trees of the canyon, so I got up and grabbed a burning branch. With this improvised torch I lit several clumps of bush and started a small batch of trees alight. Then the grass caught. Smoke and flames rose high and the wind carried them both deeper into the canyon.
The dragons began to stir. First one of them awoke and seemed to shake itself. It rose on its hind legs, tail held straight out above the ground, head tilting high, nose in the air. A second dragon came to life and hissed loudly enough for us to hear it over the crackle of the flames. Then all the others seemed to awaken at once, shaking and bobbing up and down on their two legs, hissing wildly.
I had thought that they would be sluggish, torpid, in the cool of early dawn. I was wrong. They were quickly alert, pacing nervously along the hollow bowl of the rock wall as the flames rose before them and the wind carried the fire toward them.
For several minutes they merely milled around, hissing, snarling, their hides turning livid red with fear and anger. They were too big to climb the curving wall of rock and escape the way a man would have. They were trapped against the rocky bowl, the trees and grass and bushes in front of them turning into a sea of flame and thickly billowing smoke. I could feel the heat curling the hair on my arms, singeing my face.