Mulcent takes his glass to the mast and says, “I will stay here.”
Solet says, “As you wish.” He smiles again and gives Mulcent his goggles and bandana. “Because of the pepper,” he says.
A sailor gives Solet a replacement pair of goggles as he mounts the stern deck. He hears Sumpt bar the cabin door, as if a four-inch iron peg will protect him. Solet laughs. Sumpt is too scared to act stupid. Mulcent is too stupid to be scared. And if he and his efficiencies are swept overboard in the confusion, there is a precedent for such a tragedy.
2
* * *
The first mate, Jos, has the oar. An old bone pipe hangs from his bottom lip like the stump of a cigar. Others might be bothered by that, waiting for the pipe to fall, but Solet finds it amusing. He appreciates insolence when carried off well. Jos would make an excellent match for one of his sisters, but he’s from Duva, and they wouldn’t have one not truly of the sea. Pity.
Mylla, Solet’s cousin and former ship’s boy, rests her candlebox on the rail as she reads messages from the other two ships. “The Kolos has concerns about the dragon,” she says. “Barad’s nervous.”
Barad, the Kolos’s lamp, is always nervous around her, Solet thinks, even when he lets them flash chat during their downtime. Poor kid likes her, and he has zero chance. She keeps her black hair tied up and back. If she liked Barad, she’d grow her bangs long to hide behind them.
Mylla is still on the scrawny side, but carries herself as far larger. Although an obscure regulation would let her wear, as a female, a fustanella, which she would prefer, she nonetheless wears plain blue uniform pants with the white one-button shirt befitting her rank. Solet got his uniformed personnel exempted from wearing the uniform hat—by throwing them all away during their first voyage, then claiming they were lost in the fighting—but she doesn’t mind the blue vest, which her own study of the regulations revealed she could cut short and have made of any fabric she wanted. She chose a thick cotton and made a pocket inside for her knife. Trapped in his boots, he envies her sandals, which she despises. They catch on her toe rings.
After her predecessor was devoured, she proved such a quick study with the candlebox that she can identify other lamps by how they flash. He’d be concerned that her expertise would get her transferred to another ship if he didn’t know how much the Shield hated girls being aboard in the first place.
“The Kolos may be right,” Jos says. “That dragon looks rabid.”
“Could be injured,” Mylla says, “or distressed or diseased.”
Solet hates to read, and he hated schooling even more; when did math keep a boy from being incinerated? Fortunately, Mylla loves it, another thing that recommended her to him, and she happily traded her cheap broadsheets full of fanciful tales about dragons for stolid reports about actual ones.
“We might want to give it a wide berth,” Jos says. “Or watch it for a bit.”
“We can’t afford that,” Solet says. The dragon jerks and flies a hundred yards south before jerking east again. “Mylla, see if anyone can spot a second dragon. Maybe it’s caught the scent of one.”
The girl flashes the other two galleys. The Kolos responds, then, a moment later, the Pyg. “No,” Mylla says. “I also told Barad to ask the trackers if they found spoor from more than one dragon, and they said no.”
“Good,” Solet says.
“Besides, a dragon thinks either food or enemy,” Mylla says.
Solet has an idea. “Tell the Pyg if the dragon passes without dropping the stag, she should send up some bolts to get its attention.” Mylla flashes. “We may have to improvise a bit with this one.” That might not be a bad thing. After two successful attacks, then the dry season, the crews may have gotten complacent or bored. What could happen? they might be thinking. How many ways could a dragon and a galley fight? If they lost interest, they could lose focus, then real problems would arise.
Solet says, “Oh, and tell them, ‘Good luck.’ ”
Mylla flashes.
Barad responds, “You too, Mylla.”
She scowls at Solet. “You’re a bad man,” Mylla says as he and Jos grin.
By the time the dragon flies over the rocky shore, the crews are prepared: goggles and bandanas on, weapons ready, decks sanded, pails of water and sand at hand. The dragon glides toward them, a hundred yards high, to investigate. Solet stands at the front of the stern deck and says to Jos, “Let’s begin.”
Jos blows three shrill notes. Mylla flashes. The Pyg and the Kolos acknowledge. As the Pyg backrows, the monoremes row forward, creating a pocket between the ships.
When the dragon reaches the edge of the pocket, the Pyg blasts two large packets of pepper into the air. The spicers have charged them well: the packets explode in front of the dragon, and the pepper washes across the beast’s face. It chokes and drops, catches itself, and flings the stag, which bounces down the Pyg’s deck.