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DRAGON SHIP

O NE MOMENT HE was curled in oblivion, resting in womb-like isolation.

Wintrow was aware of nothing save his physical body.

He worked on it as he had once worked stained glass.

The difference was that it was a restoration rather than a creation.

He found placid pleasure in his work; dimly it echoed memories of stacking blocks when he was a very small child.

The tasks that faced him were simple and obvious, the work repetitive; he was only directing his body to do more swiftly what it would have eventually done on its own.

The willing focus of his mind speeded the labour of his body.

The rest of his life had dimmed to an absolute stillness.

He considered nothing except repairing the animal he inhabited.

It was rather like being in a small cosy room while a great storm raged outside.

Enough, growled the dragon.

Wintrow curled himself smaller before her irritation. ‘I am not finished,’ he begged.

No. The rest will take care of itself, if you nourish your body and encourage it from time to time. I have delayed for you too long. You are strong enough now for all of us to confront what we are. And confront it we shall.

It was like being seized and flung into the air. Like a panicky cat, he flailed and clawed in all directions, seeking something, anything to attach himself to. He found Vivacia.

Wintrow!

Her exclamation was not a verbal cry of joy, but a sudden pulse of connection as she discovered him again.

They were reunited, and in that joining they were once more whole.

She could sense him; she could feel his emotions, smell with his nose, taste with his mouth, and feel with his skin.

She knew his pain, and agonized for him. She knew his thoughts and –

When one falls in dreams, one always awakens before the impact.

Not this time. Wintrow’s awakening was the impact.

Vivacia’s love and devotion to him collided with his anguished knowledge of what she was.

His thoughts were a mirror held to her corpse face.

Once she had looked into it, she could not look aside.

He was trapped in that contemplation with her, and felt himself pulled down deeper and deeper into her despair. He plunged into the abyss with her.

She was not Vivacia, not really. She had never been anything except the stolen life of a dragon.

Her pseudo-life was fastened on to the remnants of the dragon’s death.

She had no real right to exist. Rain Wild workers had split open the cocoon of the metamorphosing dragon.

The germ of its life had been flung out, to perish squirming on a cold stone floor, while the threads of memory and knowledge that had enclosed it were dragged off and cut up into planks to build liveships.

Life struggles to continue, at any cost. A windstorm flings a tree down to the forest floor; saplings rise from its trunk.

A tiny seed amongst pebbles and sand will still seize a droplet of moisture and send up a defiant shoot of green.

Immersed in saltwater, bombarded with the memories and emotions of the humans that bestrode her, the fibres of memory in her planks had sought to align themselves into some kind of order.

They had accepted the name given to her; they had striven to make sense of what they experienced now.

Eventually, Vivacia had awakened. But the proud ship and her glorious figurehead were not truly part of the Vestrit family.

No. Hers was a life stolen. She was half a being, less than half, a makeshift creature cobbled together out of human wills and buried dragon memories, sexless, deathless, and in the long run, meaningless.

A slave. They had used the stolen memories of a dragon to create a great wooden slave for themselves.

The scream that tore out of Vivacia ripped Wintrow into full consciousness.

He rolled over and fell to the floor, landing heavily on his knees beside his bunk.

In the small room, Etta jerked awake with a start from where she’d kept watch over him.

‘Wintrow!’ she cried in horror as he heaved himself to his feet.

‘Wait! No, you are not well. Lie down, come back!’ Her words followed him as he staggered out the door and towards the foredeck.

He heard noises from the captain’s stateroom, Kennit shouting for his crutch and a light, ‘Etta, damn you, where are you when I need you?’ but Wintrow did not pause for that either.

He limped naked save for a sheet, the night air burning against his healing flesh.

Startled crewmen on the night watch called out to one another.

One seized a lantern and followed him. Wintrow paid him no mind.

He took the steps to the foredeck in two strides that tore his healing skin and flung himself forwards until he half-hung over the railing.

‘Vivacia!’ he cried. ‘Please. It was not your fault; it was never your fault. Vivacia!’

The figurehead tore at herself. Her great wooden fingers tangled in her lush black curls and strove to snatch them out of her head.

Her fingernails raked her cheeks and dug at her eyes.

‘Not me!’ she cried to the night sky. ‘Never me at all! Oh, Great Sa, what an obscene jest I am, what an abomination in your sight! Let me go, then! Let me be dead!’

Gankis had followed Wintrow. ‘What troubles you, boy? What ails the ship?’ the old pirate demanded, but Wintrow saw only the ship.

The yellow lantern light revealed a horror.

As swiftly as Vivacia’s nails cut furrows in her perfect cheeks, the fibrous flesh closed up behind them.

The hair she tore from her scalp flowed into her hands, was absorbed, and her mane remained thick and glossy as before.

Wintrow stared in horror at this cycle of destruction and rebirth.

‘Vivacia!’ he cried again, and flung his being into hers, seeking to comfort, to calm.

The dragon was waiting there. She rebuffed him as effortlessly as she wrapped and held Vivacia in her embrace. Hers was the spirit that defied the ship’s desire to die.

No. Not after all the years of repression, not all the ages of silence and stillness. I will not be dead. If this be the only life we can have, then we shall have it. Be still, little slave. Share this life with me, or know none at all!

Wintrow was transfixed. In a place he could only reach with his mind, a terrible confrontation was taking place.

The dragon struggled for life as the ship tried to deny it to both of them.

He felt his own small self as a rag seized by two terriers.

He was pulled between them, torn in their grips as each tried to claim his loyalty and carry his mind with hers.

Vivacia caught him up in her love and despair.

She knew him so well; he knew her so well, how could his heart differ from hers?

She dragged him with her; they teetered on the edge of a willing leap into death.

Oblivion beckoned alluringly. It was, she convinced him, the only solution.

What else was there for them? This endless sense of wrong, this horrible burden of stolen life; would he choose that?

‘Wintrow!’ Kennit gasped out the name as he dragged himself up the ladder to the foredeck.

Wintrow turned sluggishly to watch him come.

The pirate’s nightshirt, half-tucked into his trousers, billowed about him in the night breeze.

His one foot was bare. A tiny part of Wintrow’s mind noted that he had never seen Kennit in such a state of dishevelment.

There was panic in the captain’s ever cool and sardonic glance.

He feels us , Wintrow thought to himself.

He is starting to bond with us; he senses something of what is going on, and it frightens him.

Etta passed the captain’s crutch up to him.

He seized it and came swinging across the deck to Wintrow’s side.

Kennit’s sudden grasp on his shoulder was the grip of life, holding him back from death.

‘What do you do, boy?’ Kennit demanded angrily.

Then his voice changed and he stared past Wintrow in horror.

‘God of Fishes, what have you done to my ship!’

Wintrow turned to the figurehead. Vivacia had twisted to stare back at the growing mob of disturbed sailors on the foredeck.

One man shrieked aloud as her eyes went suddenly lambent green.

The colour of her eyes swirled like a whirlpool, while at the centre was blackness darker than any night.

Humanity left her face. Her black tresses blowing in the night breeze were more like a writhing nest of serpents.

The teeth she bared at them in a parody of a smile were too white.

‘If I cannot win,’ the lips gave voice to the dragon’s thought, ‘then no one shall.’

Slowly she turned away from them. Her arms lifted wide as if to embrace the night sea. Then slowly she brought them back, to clasp the hull of the ship behind her.

Wintrow! Wintrow, aid me! Vivacia pleaded only in his mind; the figurehead’s mouth and her voice were no longer at Vivacia’s command. Die with me, she begged him. Almost, he did. Almost, he followed her into that abyss. But at the last instant, he could not.

‘I want to live!’ he heard himself cry out into the night. ‘Please, please, let us live!’ He thought, for an instant, that his words weakened her resolve to die.

A strange silence followed his words. Even the night breeze seemed to hold its breath.

Wintrow became aware that somewhere a sailor gabbled out a child’s prayer but another, smaller sound caught his ears.

It was a running, brittle sound, like the noise of cracking ice on the surface of a lake when one ventures out too far.

‘She’s gone,’ breathed Etta. ‘Vivacia’s gone.’