But the nits always rallied and returned. Each time he woke, fresh masses had gathered.
He’d never forget the fish of that deep, vast lake. They were bony, and had thick hides with horny dimples running the back and side, with long shovel noses. But the softest, tastiest flesh he’d ever sampled ran from just behind the jawline and along the underside down the long tail. If he dipped his tail in the lake and poked at the bottom, overturning rocks, the fish would often come, drawn to whatever creatures were stirred up by his probe. And more often than not he could get his jaws on one before it could flee, though he once was taken on a wild underwater ride by a specimen three times his own length.
He came back bloody-mouthed, having lost a pair of hatchling teeth.
He feasted on fish and the bats feasted on him and the nits feasted on both—though the bats were better at digging the creatures out of their fur. Scale had its disadvantages.
But after a period of rest and feasting on fish he felt the urge to move on. The bats took some convincing, for there was good insect hunting, especially over those awful pads in the middle of the lake, but after one of their number was eaten by some swooping thing that was all mouth and wing, they saw the wisdom in moving on.
Just when he thought it was time to strike off downriver again, they were delayed by one of the younger bats giving birth to a trio of young. The bats had a strange system of feeding their young in which the newborns lapped fluid from their mother. It struck the Copper as being wasteful; to his mind the sooner young learned to feed themselves the more likely they were to survive. But considering the utter helplessness of a pink newborn bat, their system had been literally born of necessity.
Thernadad cadged twice-daily feedings of dragonblood for the nursing mother. The Copper agreed, mostly because Thernadad said a well-fed mother would mean well-fed young, and well-fed young would soon be able to cling to their mother as she clung to the dragon, and thus they’d be able to get going downriver all the sooner.
It meant more fishing, and as fish were growing scarce at that end of the lake, the Copper explored its edges. He found a few old dwarvish camps and exploratory tunnels filled with little but mold and slime.
During one of these trips, swimming back with half of one of the bony fish floating along in his mouth, he came across the wreck.
He’d missed it during his climb across the rocky edge of the lake because it was more than half-submerged. It was a strange sort of vessel, hardly large enough for more than three dwarves, only a quarter the width of the other vessels, and entirely lacking in machinery. Parts of it were charred, and the wood that was in contact with the water had rotted.
The Copper found a few tasty metal pegs made out of a greenish heavy metal. They smelled hearty, and he extracted one with his teeth. Finding it palatable, he pulled out a second one, and the vessel parted from its lower half and rolled over, breaking into two pieces, one of which was dry and still floated.
What dwarves could do, he could. He hopped into it and, after a moment of precarious rocking, found that it supported him. It was curved, and about half of it went under the water. He found that if he lay between the two raised arms he could be mostly out of the water.
He pushed off and paddled with his saa, alternating with tail swipes when his legs grew tired. With this, he didn’t need a dwarf boat. It wasn’t quite swimming, nor could it be called riding, but it would do.
He paddled it back to the rocks where the bats waited, clinging to the cavern ceiling, and showed off his prize. The bats were more interested in the fish than the find.
The Copper had gotten better at pounding ideas into minuscule bat skulls. Or perhaps the bats had grown used to following his orders. “This way you don’t need to fly all the time. You can rest on the wood edges, there.”
“Ooo, m’be not liking that,” Mamedi said. “Bit of dwarf craft. It’ll go wrong and end up on top of me in the water!”
“Then cling to my back. I won’t roll over. Here, try.”
She stayed where she was on the rock until Thernadad gave her a shove. Then she fluttered down and settled on his head.
“You’re blocking my good eye with your wing.”
“M’regrets, sir,” Mamedi said.
He pushed out and swam in a slow circle. He wondered how the piece of wreckage would handle in the stronger current of the river tunnel. But even if he bumped his whole way to the Lavadome, it would be easier, and warmer, than swimming. The dwarves, for all their faults, knew how to get from one bit of cavern to another with as little discomfort as possible.
Another advantage of the Copper’s discovery was that it allowed the young mother bat to travel with her young.
Looking back on matters later, he counted the final leg of the journey as one of the key turning points in his life. A thousand tiny circumstances might have caused him to miss the camping demen and their egg. Had he ridden lazily in the piece of wreckage instead of paddling, had he not passed up likely landing places because of dwarf-smell and pushed the bats, had it been another season when the river flowed more slowly, or more quickly…
The strange chain of events started when he saw a distant shape in the dim light of the tunnel. A brighter patch of light that marked a tunnel mouth revealed it as three hominid shapes rowing in a little shell of a boat not much larger than his own bit of wood.
He reached out a saa and arrested his drift.
Three demen struck the tunnel mouth. Two dragged their boat out of the current while a third scouted, spiny projections on his back bristling. The two began to take baggage out of their craft.
“Kuu! Kuu! Kuuuuu!” a chorus of voices shouted.
The demen shoved their boat back into the river.
The Copper heard a scream, and he saw one of the demen fall toward the boat, sprouting new quills in the chest and leg where none had been before. He dropped some light-colored orb into the water as he fell. His companion shoved their craft into the water and fell on board.
The Copper saw sparks fly as missiles struck the tunnel wall.
A group of dwarves charged into view, striking at the deman who’d gone ahead to scout. He fought like a mad thing, lashing out with blades in each hand, head-butting dwarves with his spiked helmet, but fell when an ax caught him across the horned spine. The dwarves didn’t stop to celebrate, but threw wide, flat-bottomed craft of their own into the water and pursued the wounded deman and his companion.
The Copper waited with the bats, who filled the time by complaining of exhaustion and hatred of the river and travel. He ignored the chatter. The only bat he couldn’t afford to lose was Enjor.
“Keep out of sight,” he told the bats. “If I jump off the craft, just drift with it for a while.”
He approached the tunnel mouth. He caught the smell of burning flesh—heard the dwarves chattering as they burned the body of the slain deman.
A pale white object just beneath the river’s surface caught his eye. He arrested his silent drift and retrieved it by pinching it between his good sii and the crippled limb. The dwarf watching the river stiffened and took a step toward the bank.
It was an egg. Smaller than a dragon egg and wider at one end than the other, it had a faint, clean smell that reminded him of wet sand.
He released his grip and let his raft continue downstream. The dwarf looked out onto the river, unsure of his own eyes, but by the time he called his fellows over the Copper was rounding a riverbend.
He heard a distant hammering sound. Not long later they came upon the dwarf boat, anchored just beneath a series of cracks in the cavern wall that led to another hole in the cavern roof. He smelled demen here, and a little dwarf.
The dwarves had anchored their craft with an arrowlike piece of metal driven into one of the cracks. The Copper bumped up against the dwarf boat.
He dug his teeth into the line holding the boat. A quick grind of his teeth and the boat commenced drifting. He tossed the egg into some canvas at the bottom of the boat, hopped in after it, and sniffed around the bottom. He found some bread and dried meat wrapped up in waxy cloth, ignored the bread, and swallowed the meat.
As he ate he sniffed the boat. It was a clever thing, with canvas sides held up by wooden slats. It leaked a little through the hinge at the bottom. He guessed the dwarves folded the boat up to carry it through the tunnels.
He smelled a slightly sweet fluid and looked at the egg. It was cracked, either when the deman dropped it or in his clumsy retrieval—perhaps even when he’d tossed it into the boat.
He tasted the fluid. Delicious! He widened the crack and began to lap at the fluid within, and found it so tasty he greedily shoved his nose in and sucked the yolk down. He felt like a new dragon afterward.
The bats, always sensitive to a meal being served, joined him. They licked up bits of egg that had dripped or pooled in the cracked shell.
He smacked his jaws open and shut and ran his tongue around the edges of his mouth. It was the best meal he’d ever had. If he were ever king of his own land like the dragon-lords of old, he’d eat one just like it every day.
He crunched down the shell. Then he left the dwarf boat. No one would ever mistake it for a bit of flotsam. And if the dwarves needed it back…well, war was a series of misfortunes, wasn’t it?