that hemmed the river. Evening began its slow creep when the sun moved past it. Bright daylight was short and twilight dominated their lives. Four years had passed since the summer she had emerged from her case. Four years of thwarted hopes, poor food and neglect. Four summers of too much shade, four winters of rainy, grey days. Four years of no life save eating and then sleeping, sleeping far too many hours of every day. Instead of feeling as if she slept too much, Sintara always felt vaguely weary. Swampy land and dimness were the province of newts, not dragons. Dragons, she thought to herself, were creatures of strong sunlight, dry sand and long hot days. And flight. How she longed to fly. Fly away from the mud and the crowded conditions and the gloomy riverbank.
She craned her neck to nuzzle at a patch of gritty mud that had dried behind her wing. She rubbed at it, then stretched her stunted wing and slapped it several times against her body in an attempt to dislodge the irritation. Most of it went trickling down her side in a cascade of dust. It was a minor relief. She longed to bathe herself in a pool of hot, still water, to emerge into strong sunlight to dry, and then to roll and scratch in abrasive sand until her scales gleamed. None of those things existed in her current life. Only her ancestral dreams informed her of them.
It was not the only dragon memory that taunted her. She had many dreams. Dreams of flight, of hunting, of mating. Memories of a city with a well of liquid silver where a dragon could slake that thirst no water could quench. Many memories of gorging on hot, freshly-killed meat. Memories of mating in flight, of hollowing out a sandy beach nest for her eggs. Many, many frustrating memories. Yet for all that, she knew she did not have a full complement of memories. It was maddening that she knew enough to know she was missing whole areas of knowledge, but could not reconstruct for herself exactly what that missing knowledge was. It was an additional cruelty that the dragon memories she did have showed her so clearly all her physical body lacked.
The memories were a heritage denied her. It was the way of her kind. In the serpent stage of their lives, they retained access to an ancestral hoard of serpent memories. Migration routes, warm currents and fish runs were not the only information; there was also the knowledge of the gathering places and the songs and the structure of their society as serpents. When a serpent entered the cocoon, such memories faded until by the time the dragon emerged from its case, its life as a serpent was only a hazy recollection. Replacing those memories were the hereditary wealth of a dragon’s proper knowledge. How to fly by the stars, and where the best hunting was to be found in each season, the traditional challenges for a mating duel, and what beach was best for the laying of eggs were some of those memories. But each dragon also could claim the more distant but personal memories of a dragon’s particular ancestry. The memories came, not just from the serpent’s changing body, but from the saliva of the dragons that helped the serpents shape their cocoons. There had been precious little of that when this generation of serpents cocooned. Perhaps that was what they were all lacking now. Perhaps that was why some of their number were as dull-witted as cattle.
The sun must have reached the unseen horizon. The stars were beginning to show in the narrow stripe of sky over the river. She looked up at the band of night and thought it a good metaphor for her truncated and restricted existence. This muddy beach by the river bounded by the immense forest behind her was the only existence she had known since she hatched into this life. The dragons could not retreat into the forest. The picket trees fenced them onto the shore as effectively as their namesake. Although the immense trees had been well spaced out by nature, their supplementary roots and all manner of underbrush, vines and plants grew in the swampy spaces between them. Not even the much smaller humans could travel easily on the rain forest floor. Paths pushed through the brush soon became sodden trails and eventually swampy fingers of mud. No. The only way out of this forest for a dragon was up. She flapped her useless wings again and then folded them onto her back. Then she lowered her head from her stargazing and looked around her. The others were huddled together beneath the trees. She despised them. They were stunted and misshapen things, sickly, quarrelsome, weak and unworthy.
Just as she was.
She plodded through the mud to join them. She was hungry but she scarcely noticed that any more. She had been constantly hungry since the day she hatched from her case. Today she’d been fed seven fish, large if not fresh, and one bird. The bird had been stiff. Sometimes she dreamed of meat that was warm and limp with the blood still running. It was only a dream now. The hunters were seldom able to find large game close by; when they did get a marsh elk or a riverpig, the creatures had to be chopped into pieces before they could be transported back to the dragons. And the dragons seldom got the best parts of the beasts. Bones and guts and hide, tough shanks and horned heads, but seldom the hump from a riverpig’s back or the meat-rich hind haunch of a marsh elk. Those parts went to the humans’ tables. The dragons were left with the scraps and offal like stray dogs begging outside a city’s gate.
The boggy ground sucked at her feet each time she lifted them and her tail seemed permanently caked with mud. The land here suffered as much as the dragons did; it never had a chance to harden and heal. All the trees that bordered the clearing were showing the effects of the dragons’ residence. The lower trunks were scarred and scraped. Dragons scratching vermin from their skin had eroded bark from some of the trees, and the roots of others had been exposed by the traffic of clawed feet. She had overheard the humans worrying that even trees with trunks the size of towers would eventually die from such treatment. And what would happen when such a tree fell? The humans had somewhat wisely moved their homes out of the treetops of the affected trees. But didn’t they realize that if one of the trees fell, it would doubtless crash through the branches of neighbouring trees? Humans were stupider than squirrels in that regard.
Only in the summer months did the muddy beach approach a level of firmness that made walking less strenuous. In winter, the smaller dragons struggled to lift their feet high enough to walk. At least, they had struggled. Most of them had died off last winter. She thought of that with regret. She had anticipated each of the weaklings dying, and had been swift enough, twice, to fill her belly with their meat and her mind with their memories. But they were all gone now, and barring accidents or disease, her mates looked as if they would survive the summer.
She approached the huddled mass of dragons. That was not right. Serpents slept so, tangled and knotted together beneath the waves lest the currents of the ocean sweep them apart and scatter them. Most of her serpent memories now were dimmed, as was appropriate. She had no need of them in this incarnation. She had been Sisarqua in that life. But that was not who she was now. Now she was Sintara, a dragon, and dragons did not sleep huddled together like prey.
Not unless they were crippled, useless, weakling things, little better than moving meat. She approached the sleeping creatures and shouldered her way into them. She stepped on Fente’s tale, and the little green wretch snapped at her. At her, but not scoring her skin. Fente was vicious, but not stupidly so. She knew that the first time she actually bit Sintara was the last time she’d bite anything. “You’re in my spot,” Sintara warned her, and Fente clapped her tail close to her side.
“You’re clumsy. Or blind,” Fente retorted, but quietly, as if she hadn’t meant Sintara to hear her. In casual vengeance, Sintara shouldered Fente into Ranculos. The red had already been asleep. Without so much as opening his silver eyes, he kicked Fente in rebuke and resettled his bulk.
“What were you doing?” Sestican, the second largest blue male asked her as she settled against him. It was her place. She always slept between him and the dour Mercor. It did not indicate friendliness or any sort of alliance. She had chosen the place because they were two of the largest males, and sheltering between them was the wisest place to sleep.
She didn’t mind his question. He was one of the few she considered capable of intelligent conversation. “Looking at the sky.”
“Dreaming,” he surmised.
“Hating,” she corrected him.
“Dreaming and hating are the same for us, in this life.”
“If this is to be the last life, if all my memories must die with me, why must it be so dreary?”
“If you keep up your useless talk and disturb my sleep, I might make your last life end much faster than you expected.” This from Kalo. His blue-black scaling made him nearly invisible in the dark. Sintara felt the small venom sacs in her throat swell with her hatred of him, but she kept her silence. He was the largest of them all. And the meanest. If she had been capable of producing enough venom to damage him, she would probably have spit it at him, regardless of the consequences. But even on days when she had fed well, her sacs produced barely enough venom to stun a large fish. If she spat at Kalo, he would kill her with his teeth and eat her. Useless.
