Dragon Trials

There weren’t always dragons in the valley.

Dragons only ever migrated down from the Star Reaches when the winter cold reached its peak, which was around every three years. No one was quite sure why the winters ran in cycles like this, from a misting chill in our long safe valley to the cold Freeze where the snow would creep down the very slopes of the Star Reaches, and even begin to invade the gentle swamps that gave us most of our food and colour.

My family lived close to the swamp. Actually, we lived on top of the swamp. Our house crouched over the water on half-hearted pilings that always looked like they were about to crumble or fall over. When I was small, I was scared to go to my bed in the far corner because I was sure that the supports would give way under my slender weight and the cottage would go tumbling into the oil-smooth, dark waters of the night swamp, taking me with it.

But that wasn't how I died.

~ ~

Cha Palen raced headlong down the slick muddy hillside, slipping and skidding as much as running, his momentum lending him speed.

“The dragons are back,” he shouted joyfully, when his brothers came into view. Brat and Gray were tending the boilers in the grassy meadow of the swamp eddy, instantly identifiable as dye traders by the streaks of blue and green staining their muscular forearms. They straightened up from their work, hands on hips, grinning at his enthusiasm. Cha’s flailing arms didn’t help him keep his balance and he tumbled ungracefully the last few muddy steps. Brat roared with laughter.

“He’ll never make the treetops, this one,” he chortled to Gray. Cha caught his breath in concern and looked consternation at Brat from his muddy landing. Gray grinned sympathetically at him and hauled him up.

“But if I don’t get nestwood for the burning this year then I’ll have to wait for the next Freeze!” he exclaimed. “You said you’d be able to shepherd me this year, when can we get started?”

“We can train you,” Gray said calmly. “After we finish getting these dyes and mordants in for Auntie Jona. She’s weaving a high-quality loom set for Tasha’s joining ceremony, so she wants only our dyes.” This was said without any arrogance or conceit. It was a simple and enviable fact that the Palens found and tended the shyest, most delicate marsh plants and were able to patiently coax the best dyes out of them. “You can help by sorting out that mess you made when you landed in the dimwort pile.”

Cha blushed when he saw the damaged plants; Brat was still grinning at him and reached over to pick a crushed dimwort out of his hair, striking a mock grand pose and solemnly handing it to him like a sadly dangling token.

“Sort that mess out and then fetch some more peat for the boilers,” Brat said, in a kinder tone. “Then we’ll start telling you how to gather dragon nest wood while we finish this lot.”

~~

When he’d been drinking at the end of the day, especially when he could get his hands on some boozy Lorg, my father tended to ruminate on his decision to live here, over the swamp, which he believed should have been the key to his success. We were so close here to the rich fishing grounds that provide for the comfort and wealth of the other trammellers and their families. But somehow, despite his planning and dreams, he had never gained the success he felt he deserved.

Auntie Ren would snidely remark that if he looked after his flat boat and cormorants as much as he nursed his ego he’d be the richest trammeller in our village. She was wary enough never to say it in his hearing though, she wasn’t any more immune to his fists than we were. Auntie Ren is half blind and mostly deaf but very smart. No one can read the weather like her; all the trammellers and sappers come to her when they need to make their big decisions, even if they looked askance at my father. Looking back, I have no idea why she stayed in his house. Unless it was in memory of my mother.

Living in Rand Juk’s house, I’d learned to read the weather like an auntie: the personal weather maps and pressure systems of this shambling man. Enough so that when he started to talk about the unfairness of his life, I make sure to keep my younger sister quiet and out of sight. Any talk that started with unfairness would usually end in bitterness and resentment about all the ways in which his deserved success had been thwarted by life, circumstance and the ill will of others. At times like this I missed my mother more than ever. She could sometimes calm him and reduce the flow of bile that looped and fed on itself until it crested in an acid bitter wave that crashed over all our heads.

On more peaceful nights he was simply morose. “Trammelin’ is for younger men,” he would mutter, gazing into the meagre peat fire warming the living area of our house. It never had a chance of warming the bedrooms.

~~

Cha found it hard to stay focussed on his tasks in the meadow, his head and mouth full of stories of past dragon trials, and speculations about which youngsters would be successful this year. Eventually his brothers took pity on him and released him from the boilers, charging him with trawling through the swamp shallows in search of their plants of trade, especially dimwort or the rarer pillow pinks.

“He’ll use up some of this nervous energy that way,” chuckled Brat. Gray nodded as he watched Cha jog towards the shallows.

“Let’s take him up through the provider groves today,” he suggested. “After dinner. And hopefully Auntie Jona has some dragon news. We can ask her when we drop off the dye.”

Brat grunted agreement, most of his attention focussed on the double headed alembic distilling the mordant, his large hands moving delicately as he added more dimwort. This mordant always created a superior fixative for the gentler dyes.

Gray turned and gazed up the Valley to the east, as if trying to see the gnarled Provider groves with their newly arrived dragon inhabitants.

“I wonder if our old favourite has returned?” he murmured to himself.

~~

The great Valley that sheltered them all ran east to west continuously across the massive continent, a silver blue river travelling its length. On both sides the Valley was protected from harsh weather by the intimidating spires of the towering Star Reaches, a twin parallel mountain range of jagged peaks. And while many of the younger people speculated about what might be on the other side of these ranges, there had never been anyone who came back to tell any tales. Explorers aplenty; tales: none.

At many points along the Valley’s great length, it spread wider, at other points it narrowed. At each widening there was a settlement taking advantage of the slowed river meanders, occasional floods and the resulting swamps and rich farmlands. Fishermen would launch their flat boats and trawl the rich swamps with the help of their fisher birds, the soot black cormorants that perched on their shoulder poles like untidy feather bundles. On dark misty mornings it was common to see fishermen heading out to the fishing grounds, the Provider-wood pole across their shoulders weighted by at least one cormorant. Traditionally, a tiny gas lantern was fixed to the flatboat’s bow, causing a dim sphere of glowing mist. From a distance the flatboats looked like giant fireflies performing a slow stately dance in the swampy mists.

The floodplain soil was rich and bountiful. The great Provider groves nestled here, their massive boles and root systems flood proof; interspersed with the precious flax as well as tuber plants and vine greens which made up such a large part of the villagers' diet. The swamps also produced stripe greens which added to the diet of fish and tubers.

The Provider trees had always been called such, time out of mind. Uncles speculated that the name of Provider had been granted by Star Reach Hunters in the distant past, where Providers were the only reliable source of sustenance on the otherwise barren wastes of the Reaches. Originally, they’d only grown on those barren slopes. Over the years, careful Uncles and Hunters had gently transplanted young trees to the safer groves when a new seedling was discovered in the Reaches. The Valley groves were part nursery for new trees and part orchard of mature Providers. The more mature trees were covered with warty growths, some the size of a man’s head, that could be tapped to provide the villagers with sweeting, a clear amber sap that was rich in sweet, complex flavour. The sweeting could be purified and cooked into colourful sweets for the youngsters (and not so young) at festival times or fermented into potent brews like Lorg. In dire straits the raw sweeting could keep a person sound and whole in body and spirit through the darkest winter days.

This year, the Elder circle was rejoicing in the abundant harvests of swamp, soil and tree. The consensus weather prediction this winter cycle was for an extreme Freeze, which could put the fishermen out of work for months and the farm tillers scratching at bare frozen earth. In an extreme Freeze the fish were known to burrow into the soft, silky mud of the swamp floor and it was best practice not to disturb them out of this safe haven. Instead of fishing, tilling and tapping, the life of the village would be driven indoors. This was where the glowing creativity of the weavers and painters could really blossom; villagers scurrying through the bone-chilling cold from one home to the next to share techniques and group together to work on larger projects. In the next Warming, after the Burning Ceremony, these creators would gather at markets where people from different villages up and down the endless Valley would gather to meet, share, buy and sell.

Several villages would often band together to hold the Burning ceremony. This was a ceremony to welcome back the sun and to banish the cold back the Star Reaches. The young people who had successfully completed the dragon trials would join together to build a sun in effigy, lighting it to represent the return of warmth, light and growing things. And the best sun effigies were always made of the hardened and dragon treated nestwood only found in the slender topmost branches of the towering Provider trees.

The dragons themselves: iridescent, hot blooded and wary, created their nest balls from the flexible thin branches, weaving them into an impenetrable cage of chemically hardened wood, open only to the sky. Their saliva coated the branches with a translucent film that allowed them to weave the branches before it hardened to a resilient and incredibly tough shiny finish. The dragons ranged in size from that of a cormorant in the youngsters, to the size of a man in the full-grown adults, and their nests were large enough to accommodate just one adult and two youngsters at a time.

~~

The Provider grove was echoing with the shrieks and rumbles of dragons when Cha and his brothers approached that evening.