Lawrence Watt-Evans - Dragon Weather

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DRAGON
WEATHER
Lawrence Watt-Evans
Copyright © 1999 by Lawrence Watt-Evans
Dedicated to Charles Worsley,
an honorable man,
and the man who has made my sister happy
Book I
Arlian
1
Dragon Weather
The sky to the west was dark with heavy black
clouds; Arlian didn’t like it at all. He was eleven
years old, almost a man by the standards of his
village, but right now he felt much younger, and
very unsure of himself—his father was away, and
the weather seemed threatening and unnatural. He
stayed close to his mother as she stood staring
down the slope of the mountain, watching the men
of the village haul the heavy water wagons back up
the winding, stone-paved road.
Oxen would have made the hauling much easier,
but the village had no place to graze oxen on the
rocky mountainside; what little arable soil they had
was all reserved for human needs. That meant that
the men of Obsidian had to use their own muscles
to fetch water up from the river.
In another year or two Arlian would be big
enough to join them, but for now he stood beside
his mother and watched.
Arlian’s mother fanned herself with one hand,
while the other clutched at her black-and-gold
brooch, holding her collar open; the air was thick,
hot, and stagnant, and her gray dress was soaked in
sweat. “I can’t stand weather like this,” she said. “I’ll
almost be glad to see winter come this year!”
Arlian looked up at her—though not far up, as he
was almost as tall as she, now. He always liked
winter, and had never entirely understood why the
adults didn’t. In winter the mountain was covered
in snow—well, except right up by the crater—and he
and the other children of the village could go sliding
down it; there was plenty of cold, clean water
available for the melting, without having to haul it
up from the valley when the streams ran dry. He
could play outside for hours, then come in and
warm up by the fire, and no one would order him
out of the way or ask him to help with the chores.
Even the adults had less work to do in the
winter—so why did they all hate it? Yes, there was
less food and it wasn’t fresh, and the cold seeped
through everywhere, and the fire had to be kept up,
but still, Arlian thought that winter was wonderful.
And anything was better than this stifling hot,
humid summer, when the sun didn’t seem to want
to show its face and hid behind a thick haze or
clouds. This wasn’t how summer was supposed to
be—there should be bright days and rainy ones, not
these endless smothering gloomy days when the
clouds hung overhead but the rain never fell. This
was ugly and exhausting.
It hadn’t rained in weeks, and the crops were
suffering— the water the men were hauling up from
the river would help, but a good cistern-filling rain,
splashing down the mountainside and pooling in
the rocks, would have been better.
Those clouds in the west looked even uglier than
most of this year’s skies. Maybe they would bring
storms, and put an end to this nasty heat—but their
appearance was not promising, and Arlian didn’t
trust them.
His grandfather—his mother’s father; his father’s
father was long dead—stepped out on the rocky
ledge beside them and looked, not down the slope at
the water-haulers he was too old to assist, but out
at the clouds.
“Dragon weather,” he said with a frown.
“Oh, nonsense,” Arlian’s mother said. “You’ve
been saying that for weeks. It’s just a hot spell.”
“Isn’t that what dragon weather is, Mother?”
Arlian asked. “A hot spell?”
His mother glanced at her father.
“Not just the heat,” the old man said. “Look at
that sky—hot as a furnace and days dark as night,
that’s dragon weather. You need the heat and the
dark. If those clouds move in and settle here, that’s
really what we’ll have.”
Arlian looked straight up at the sky overhead. It
wasn’t dark as night, but it wasn’t very bright,
either; the summer haze was thick and foul with the
gasses from the smoking peak of the mountain. The
fumes had been thicker than usual lately, but
whether that had any connection with the weather
no one seemed to know. Arlian had heard the adults
arguing about it, but the arguments were never
settled.
“Why is it called dragon weather, Grandsir?” he
asked.
“Because it’s the sort of weather that brings the
dragons out of their caves,” his grandfather replied.
“They can’t abide cold or light, Ari. In the days
when the dragons ruled over our ancestors the
world was warmer than it is now, and the great
beasts darkened the skies with their smoke so that
they could come out by day, as well as night. When
the weather’s dark and hot now, old and tired as
they are, they still stir in their sleep, and sometimes
they awaken and come out to feed.”
Arlian stared nervously at his grandfather. The
old man spoke in a deeper voice than usual—his
storytelling voice. It made his words seem more
important, and more ominous.
“Don’t mind him, Ari,” Arlian’s mother said,
patting Arlian’s shoulder reassuringly. “That’s just
stories. No one’s seen any dragons in hundreds of
years.”
Her father shook his head.
“No, Sharbeth, you’re wrong,” he said. “When I
was a boy I saw a village where a dragon had been
not long before. I may be old, but it wasn’t
hundreds of years ago.”
“Tell me about it!” Arlian said.
His grandfather smiled down at him. “Are you
sure? They say it’s bad luck to talk about the
dragons, just as it’s unlucky to speak too much
about magic.”
Arlian nodded. “Tell me about it, Grandsir!”
Grandsir looked up at the sky and frowned, then
back down at Arlian, his smile reappearing. “I was a
year or two older than you are, and my uncle Stirian
had taken me on a trading journey down to
Benth-in-Tara, to meet a caravan that was passing
through,” he said. “We saw the ruins on the way.
We’d had a hot summer the year before, weather
something like this, and for a few days the smoke
from the mountain had been much thicker than
usual and had collected in that valley over in the
Sandalwood Hills.” He pointed over the shoulder of
the mountain; Arlian had never been to the
Sandalwood Hills, but he had seen them from the
crater rim and knew where his grandfather meant.
“The dragon must have come out late that
summer,” the old man continued, “and no one
discovered it over the winter. When we got there in
the spring, there was nothing left but charred ruins
and bare bones.”
“And how do you know it wasn’t human raiders
who destroyed it?” Arlian’s mother asked. “Those
bandits in the south are surely bad enough without
worrying about dragons!”
“The Borderlands bandits never get anywhere
near this far north,” her father said; “and human
raiders don’t leave six-foot claw marks.”
“And neither do dragons,” Sharbeth said, her
hands on her hips, “because the dragons, if there
are really any left alive at all, stay asleep in their
caves, deep beneath the earth. You must have just
imagined those claw marks, Father, or
misinterpreted sword cuts or wagon ruts.”
“They were real, and they were claw marks,” her
father insisted, but without much vehemence;
Arlian realized that the two of them had
undoubtedly had this argument many times before,
as they had so many others, and had worn the
passion out of it. His mother and grandfather
argued often, and had done so ever since Grandsir
had first come to live with them while Arlian was
still a small child. He could barely remember a time
when Grandsir had not been there—or when his
mother did not argue with him.
“I’m not going to listen to your nonsense,”
Arlian’s mother said, with no great anger. “I’m
going to go see that those men have something fit to
eat when they get those wagons up here, something
to keep their strength up!” She turned and started
back toward the house.
Arlian hesitated. He wanted to stay close to his
mother, and help out when the water wagons
arrived, but he also wanted to hear his
grandfather’s story about the ruined village—it
wasn’t one he remembered hearing before. He
wanted to know more about the dragons and what
had become of them.
“Are you coming, Arlian?” his mother called. She
paused and looked over her shoulder.
“No, Mother,” he replied. “I’ll stay here for a
while, with Grandsir.”
“Hmpf.” She marched on across the rocky yard,
toward their thatch-roofed home.
Grandsir looked down at Arlian. “Eager to see
your father and brother back?” he asked.
Arlian nodded. “Tell me more about the
dragons,” he said.
His grandfather laughed. “That’s my boy!” he
said. “What do you want to know?”
“Have you ever seen a dragon, Grandsir?”
The old man shook his head. “Of course not,” he
said. “I’m still alive, am I not? There aren’t many
who see dragons and live to tell of it!”
“There must be some people who see them, or
how would we know anything about dragons?”
Arlian asked.
“A fair question,” his grandfather said, smiling.
He glanced at the water-haulers, judged it would
still be a while before they reached the village, and
settled down cross-legged on the ledge, into a better
position for storytelling. Arlian settled beside him.
“Yes,” Arlian’s grandfather said, “there have been
a few people who saw dragons and lived to tell
about it. Most of them were at a safe distance, and
the dragons simply didn’t notice them, but there
have been a few…” His voice trailed off as he looked
to the west, at the approaching clouds. He frowned.
“A few what, Grandsir?” Arlian looked, trying to
see what his grandfather was staring at.
The old man shook himself. “Nothing,” he said. “I
just don’t like this weather.” Then he smiled at
Arlian, and said, “Of course, there were a few who
got a good close look at the dragons. There might
even be some of them who are still alive today.”
Arlian nodded. “From that village in the
Sandalwood Hills, you mean?”
“Oh, no.” Grandsir shook his head. “Nothing like
that; I saw that village, and there wasn’t so much as
a rat left alive there, just bones and cinders. But
there are old stories, very old stories, about dragon
venom.”
“Venom?” Arlian frowned. As Grandsir had said,
most of the adults in the village didn’t like talking
about the dragons; there were so many
superstitions about them that most people thought
it safer not to discuss them at all. Dragons were
magical, and magic was wicked and untrustworthy,
and speaking too much about it could attract
misfortune.
Still, Arlian had thought he had a reasonable
understanding of what a dragon was, and he didn’t
remember anything about venom. “I thought
dragons breathed fire!” he said.
“Well, they do, after a fashion,” Grandsir said.
“Or so I’m told. But the older stories, the ones from
the early days of the Years of Man, say that
dragonflame isn’t so much fiery breath, as some
people would have it, but a spray of burning venom,
like a snake’s spit of poison. Except dragons
somehow set their poison ablaze, and thereby spit
flame.”
“Ooooh!” Arlian shivered at the thought. It
seemed somehow more real to know that dragonfire
was burning venom, rather than some sort of
magical breath. It made dragons seem more like
actual beasts, rather than spirits, or illusions like
the little images the village sorcerer sometimes
conjured up.
“Whether it’s the truth or not I can’t say,”
Grandsir continued, “but there are stories, very old
stories, so old I don’t know where they came from,
that say that sometimes the venom doesn’t catch
fire properly. It’s still deadly poison, of course, a
poison that will burn the flesh from your bones—but
supposedly it quickly loses some of its virulence
when once it’s been sprayed, and a mixture of this
dragon venom and human blood is said to bestow
long life on anyone who drinks it. Very long life.
There are tales of men who lived centuries after
surviving dragon attacks in which blood from their
wounds was mixed with dragon venom and then
swallowed—though many of them had been horribly
mutilated in the attacks, their faces burned away,
arms or legs lost, so that such a life would hardly be
a blessing.”
Arlian shivered again. He looked at the clouds.
The dragons seemed so terrible that it was hard,
sometimes, to believe that they were ever real.
Everyone knew they were real, though, or had
been once, at least. The dragons had ruled all of the
Lands of Man, from the eastern sea to the western
wilderness, from the Borderlands in the south to the
icy wastes of the north. People had resisted their
rule sometimes, fought great wars against the
dragons, but to no avail—until one day, about seven
hundred years ago, when the dragons had all gone
away, leaving humanity free.
Arlian’s mother said the dragons had all died,
perhaps of some plague, but most people insisted
they were still alive, deep in their caverns, and
might come back at any time.
And sometimes, according to Grandsir, they did
come back, briefly.
“That village in the Sandalwood Hills,” Arlian
asked. “What do you think the people there did to
anger the dragon? Why would it destroy them all?”
“I don’t think they had to do anything,” Grandsir
said. “The dragon simply felt like destroying
something, and they were close at hand.”
“But that’s so unfair! You mean they didn’t do
anything to deserve it?”
“Not a thing,” Grandsir replied.
Arlian absorbed that unhappily. He didn’t like it
at all. He knew life wasn’t always fair, but he felt,
deep in his heart, that it should be. He always tried
to be fair to his brother, Korian, and to their
playmates in the village-even the giggly girls. In the
stories his mother told justice always triumphed in
the end. Why was the rest of life so messy and
unjust?
His father said it was because the gods were
dead, and only Fate remained, and Fate had its own
plans for everyone.
The village sorcerer—the only person in the
village of Obsidian whose name Arlian didn’t know,
because he said names had power—had said that
justice was as much an illusion as any of the little
tricks he did to entertain the children.
Arlian wondered sometimes if it might be the
other way around—maybe everything did work out
fairly in the end, somehow, and the apparent
injustices were the illusions. He wiped sweat-damp
hair away from his eyes and looked down at the
approaching wagons.
Maybe the dragon did have a good reason for
destroying that village. Maybe the dragons were
part of Fate’s plans.
“Do you really think it’s dragon weather?” he
asked.
His grandfather put an arm around Arlian’s
shoulder and gave him a reassuring hug.
“I hope not,” he said. “Come on, let’s go give your
mother a hand.”
Together, they turned away from the ledge and
ambled toward the house.
2
The Coming of the Dragons
The dark clouds hung heavy in the western sky
for the next three days, creeping very slowly nearer,
spreading across the sky like a stain. The water
wagons were brought to the cisterns above the
village and emptied into the great stone basins, and
water was doled out carefully to each family,
enough to keep both crops and people alive, but still
thirsty.
The mountain above the village continued to
smoke and steam; the air now had a very noticeable
sulfurous stench to it, and the sun, when it could be
seen through the haze at all, was as orange as a
pumpkin.
Despite the oppressive heat and gloom the young
men of Obsidian returned to their usual tasks,
working the mines, carving the black glass, tending
the crops. The women kept house, cooked and
cleaned, wove and sewed, minded the livestock and
the children. The old men thatched roofs, polished
brightwork, and took care of the other less urgent,
less strenuous jobs.
And the children ran errands and helped out as
required, but still found time to play and explore.
摘要：

DRAGONWEATHERLawrenceWatt-EvansCopyright©1999byLawrenceWatt-EvansDedicatedtoCharlesWorsley,anhonorableman,andthemanwhohasmademysisterhappyBookIArlian1DragonWeatherTheskytothewestwasdarkwithheavyblackclouds;Arliandidn’tlikeitatall.Hewaselevenyearsold,almostamanbythestandardsofhisvillage,butrightnowhe...

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