Jeryon sighs with relief. He could render the dragon for himself. A dragon bone blade is better than steel, and mounted in a bamboo culm it would make a spear or a knife far easier to wield than his tiny blade and far sharper than a bamboo blade. The skin would be too heavy for a sail, but it would be a great tarp. If the phlogiston hasn’t leaked away, he would have a precious source of fuel for light and fire.
If he could bring the renderings to Hanosh, he would have the wealth to ruin his mates, their families, and everyone they ever knew. He could go in disguise under an assumed name so they wouldn’t suspect anything. He could befriend them so they would also feel betrayed when he finally revealed his identity. And being close to them would make his revenge more exquisite. Such a complex plan, though, would have too many potential pitfalls. Better to trust the Trust and the law.
It occurs to him: How can the dragon be breathing?
Its skin doesn’t rise so much as it bulges in places. And the bulges are moving. The skin draping the neck billows out. Something is inside. The skin flips up. A broad blue claw, leaf-shaped and smiling with sharp white teeth, emerges. A thinner claw, as long and as toothy, tests the air, followed by two eyes the size of shegas on stalks. They peer in every direction before settling on Jeryon. He doesn’t move. The front legs come next, a darker blue and as long as hand-and-a-half swords, followed by the body, blue with white smears and big as a buckler. Whereas the crabs on the beach had stubby white horns, this crab has a crown of them.
It scuttles out of the neck toward Jeryon. He dares to slide an inch down the rise. The crab takes a few more steps forward. Jeryon snakes away until he can barely see over the crest. The crab’s eyes bend from side to side, as if it can’t see him anymore, and it clicks its claws. Jeryon smiles at the crab’s frustration. He’ll return with a bamboo spear, he will kill and eat that crab, and he will take this dragon for his own.
A few answering clicks come from inside the neck. Then a few more. Another claw appears. And another. The watch crab clacks once decisively, and Jeryon would swear it’s pointing its skinny claw at him. A chorus of clicks erupts from the neck, followed by dozens of the huge blue crabs, which charge across the hollow, claws raised.
Jeryon slides down the rise and flees downstream.
The crabs spread across the water and the banks. They leap from tree trunk to tree trunk. A few get into the canopy and leap along the branches like spiders until they dive at him, but miss and crack open on the rocks in the stream.
He counts the blazes. When he gets to the grassland, he thinks he’ll be able to lose them in the brush. This is their island, though, and as he veers into the underbrush it trips him up. Ship life makes for strong bodies, but not fleet runners. He returns to the stream and hurtles downhill.
His salvation is the pond, where the fat black frogs prove a more tempting meal than the bounding brown man. The frogs dive deep, the crabs plunge in, the frogs hop out, and soon his pursuers are scattering through the forest while he races past the shega tree. That’s enough exploring for one day.
For the rest of the afternoon he weaves bamboo and vines into a lean-to, periodically feasting on the increasingly fatalistic white crabs. He also makes himself three spears, a bamboo handle for his blade, and a set of cups to replace the one he left at the dragon hollow. He sets the lean-to against a spur of cliff at the edge of the beach and puts the spears inside. Then he makes a bow drill out of vine and bamboo, gathers firewood, scrapes himself a pile of tinder, and gets a blaze going in pits on either side of the lean-to. If a ship sees his fire, if the poth sees its smoke, so be it. They’re meant to keep the white crabs at bay. The spears are for the blue ones, although he doubts they stray far from the dragon.
A few more crab claws and legs grilled on bamboo skewers, several more cups of water, and the shega, then Jeryon lets himself fall asleep long before star-rise.
Nevertheless he bolts up in the middle of the night. The pits glow red. Shadows seethe in the lean-to. The sand is skillet hard. The sea will not stop sizzling on the beach. Knowing that no one can hear him, that no one might ever hear him again, Jeryon screams and screams and sobs and screams.
3
* * *
Four days later, Jeryon jiggles a blue crab’s shell above a fire, using two wet palm leaves folded into squares as pot holders. The crab’s body meat falls off skewers too easily, so he begins frying a mix of blue and white with the paste of crushed olives. The bitterness is worth the oil. With his other hand he pours water from a broad bamboo culm into a cup. As someone who lives from berth to berth, port to port, he knows that wherever your plate and cup are, that’s your home.