Chapter Eight
10 April 1767
Prince Haven,
Temperance Bay, Mystria
“Are you certain, Highness, that this is wise?”
Prince Vlad scratched the side of his head, then righted his floppy-brimmed hat again. “I’m more convinced it isn’t entirely stupid. If it works, it will be wise.”
Mugwump, the Prince’s dragon, blinked a golden eye. When Mugwump had arrived in Mystria with Prince Vlad’s father, he’d been a thickly constructed, dull black beast. The wurm’s official portrait confirmed his appearance. As with all wurms, he’d been largely seen as a giant gecko, save for claws, horns, and a mouth full of ivory teeth. As wurms went, he had been unremarkable.
Since living in Mystria he had changed. His skin had become very shiny. Gold and scarlet stripes and spots had risen to make him appear festive. And then, in 1764, he’d undergone a molt and chrysalis which, instead of killing him as the Prince had expected, had transformed him into a dragon. His head had narrowed and his neck grew longer. His tail had similarly slimmed down and lengthened as a counter-balance. He grew ears, which swiveled about freely, suggesting great auditory acuity. Mugwump, while being leaner and lighter than before, had become far more supple and strong.
And then there was the matter of his wings. When he first emerged from the cocoon, the wings appeared underdeveloped and clearly never meant to sustain flight. But stories of old had told of dragons cruising high through the clouds. Over the next three years, the wings had become stronger. Using a long lead, the Prince had tried to encourage Mugwump to hop about or glide—efforts the dragon took with seeming equal parts amusement and disdain.
Before he’d gotten his wings, Mugwump had been an avid swimmer. As his wings developed, he took to the water less and less. Though he had not spun another cocoon, he did regularly shed scales bilaterally—much as a bird sheds feathers—leaving Vlad with little doubt that the dragon was meant to fly.
Unable to come up with any other way to convince the dragon to test out his wings, Prince Vlad reconfigured the saddle he’d used for swimming with Mugwump and cinched it into place. He added a bridle with no bit to provide a suggestion of direction—the Prince never could have wrestled the beast’s head around. He attached a second set of reins to Mugwump’s horns hoping again that tugging on them might convince the dragon to climb.
Prince Vlad hauled himself into the saddle. “Now, Mr. Baker, I want you to pay close attention to what happens.”
“So I’ll know where to find you when you fall off?”
“Let us hope it doesn’t come to that.” Vlad forced himself to smile. “I want you to note how much Mugwump spreads his wings when we go over the jumps.”
“Yes, sire.”
The Prince started the dragon off at a slow pace, heading up the drive, past Peregrine’s enclosure, then toward the west to a five-acre lot he’d decided to leave fallow. With the help of Baker and Owen’s man, James, they’d harvested wood and created four log walls roughly six feet high. They placed them at the cardinal points around an imaginary circle. The Prince intended to ride Mugwump toward one and encourage him to jump over it. The walls would prove little obstacle as the dragon’s playful pouncing upon game had previously showed. Primarily Vlad hoped that Mugwump would associate a tug on his horns with leaping.
Vlad settled goggles over his eyes. Mid-April and it was already warm. Trees had budded and farmers were predicting a good harvest if they got some rain at the right time. Only a few clouds threaded themselves through the blue sky, drifting slowly with warm breezes. Prince Vlad closed his eyes for a moment, drinking in the warmth and doing his best to relax.
Mugwump’s transformation from wingless wurm to dragon was the most closely held secret in Mystria. Fewer than a dozen people knew it had happened and all of them had been sworn to secrecy. To further obscure things, Vlad caused to be circulated a number of very fanciful stories about fantastic creatures to be found in Mystria. Within these were absurd stories about dragon colonies living in caverns dug into mountains in the far west. While a few inquiries came back from Norisle and elsewhere asking him what he knew, he promised to check, then later declared all of them lies. Were someone to learn the truth about Mugwump and report it back to Norisle, it would be assumed to be another fantasy and dismissed out of hand.
Wurms were not common back across the ocean. Every nation had a regiment or two of wurmriders to play off against each other. Since the advent of brimstone, the nature of warfare had shifted away from a basis where wurms could completely dominate battle. While cannon and muskets couldn’t easily kill a wurm, they could kill riders and hurt the beasts, so wurm regiments paraded more than they fought. But when they did fight, they could still be terribly effective.
Vlad reached down and patted Mugwump on the neck. “Take the jumps easily, just one after the other.”
One ear flicked back at him, then both flattened against the wedge-shaped skull. The dragon began running through the grasses, less as a lizard might than with the power of a great cat gathering speed to pounce. Mugwump stretched his neck out, heading straight for the first fence. Prince Vlad tugged back on the horn-reins and Mugwump left the ground, but only cleared the fence by inches.
Now apparently aware of what the game was, the dragon hit the ground without losing any speed and sprinted toward the next fence. Vlad tugged harder on the reins and again the dragon leaped into the air. His wings began to spread just a bit, but then he was down again and running. They approached the third fence even faster than the first two. Vlad yanked hard, but the dragon’s breastbone grazed the top log.
They turned and made for the last fence in the circuit. Vlad quickly wrapped the reins around his hands and stood in the stirrups. The moment Mugwump’s nose neared the fence, Vlad hauled back for all he was worth. Mugwump’s head came up. He leaped, his tail lashing the fence to splinters.
“Up! Up!” Vlad held on tight.
Mugwump’s wings spread, fluttering weakly and out of synch. They started to dip to the right. His tail went left, then down, dragging like an anchor. That brought his bottom down and threatened to flip him over onto his back. So his wings spread fully, in complete, batlike glory, catching enough air to slow his speed. He landed hard on his haunches, tossing Vlad back and down into the saddle, then his forelimbs came down and his wings furled again.
The Prince took a moment, shifting in the saddle and rubbing his buttocks. Then he patted the dragon on the neck again. “You’re getting it.”
Mugwump’s head came around. The dragon stared at him with a single golden eye. It seemed to Vlad as if the beast was saying, “Was that it? Was that what this is all about?”
The Prince found himself nodding. “Yes, that’s what I want. We need to get your wings strong so you can fly.”
As if he understood, the dragon loped off toward the first wall, barely faster than a man could trot, and leaped high. His wings snapped out. His tail twisted. He soared over the wall and flapped his wings to slow his descent. He landed hard again on his haunches, but he’d managed to stay level. Vlad had braced for the landing, so he didn’t slam into the saddle again.
From that point forward Mugwump needed no encouragement, but followed no direction. He wandered through the field, sometimes taking the fences, other times just leaping into the air as if a cat pouncing on a mouse. He’d stop, nibble the forward edge of a wing, then trot off again. His behavior bordered on playful, but he pursued it with a concentration that bespoke far greater intelligence than most people knowledgeable about wurms would allow.
Perhaps wurms are intelligent, or, rather, dragons are. Most wurmwrights considered wurms to be on an intellectual par with draft horses. For as long as Mugwump had been in his care, Vlad would have pegged him as being a bit smarter than that. Since the chrysalis, however, the dragon had been brighter. Prince Vlad would have matched him to a dog and yet, the way he approached testing his wings, took him further than that. Vlad had seen his son exhibiting similar self-awareness.
Vlad flicked the reins. “Time to go home, Mugwump.”
The dragon came about and started trotting back toward the wurmrest. As he went he would spread his wings and give one solid beat. His body rocked and got a little lift, but not nearly enough to sustain flight. He stopped trying to fly as he came back into the yard and he shied from where Miranda and Richard were running around—something not terribly easy for a sixty-foot-long lizard to manage.
Prince Vlad remained in the saddle until Baker caught up and took charge of the dragon. He watched the dragon return to the wurmrest, then began to think. At the battle of Anvil Lake, Mugwump had scaled a sheer cliff as if it was nothing. If he were to gain height that way, then leap into the air, he might be able to glide or actually fly. Bats, who had similar wing designs, roosted upside down in attics and caves, allowing them to drop into the air before they had to begin flying.
That gave the Prince one area of inquiry to pursue. Then he turned back to the question of intelligence. At the time Mugwump had entered his cocoon, Msitazi of the Altashee had arrived with a gift to celebrate the dragon’s birthday. That day, correctly predicted, was really the day he emerged from the cocoon. It occurred to the Prince that he’d been judging intelligence incorrectly simply because the wurm was almost seven centuries old. In any other creature, that would have established his being an adult and fully grown.
But what if the clock started anew when he emerged from the cocoon? If that were true, then Mugwump was, in effect, only three years old. Given the likely timescale of a dragon’s life, he was, for all intents and purposes, still an infant. Assuming his intelligence was developing at a rate that roughly paralleled that of his physical development, he might quickly work his way past the intelligence of a dog and on up to a small ape. Or even a man?
Part of Vlad wanted to dismiss that idea out of hand, but another more tantalizing thought tempted him to go beyond it. No one truly knew the limits of a dragon’s lifespan. While stories told of repeated raids by the same dragons over a number of centuries, old bards’ tales were hardly reliable sources of empirical data. Still, if dragons could outlive men by a factor of ten, who was to say that they could not also become ten times smarter than a man? Judging by skull volume alone, Mugwump’s brain had to be at least ten times the size of a man’s.
The implications of what he’d seen and was thinking made Prince Vlad want to retreat to his laboratory and scribble copious notes. He wanted to set up some experiments to determine just how smart Mugwump really was. He had Richard for comparison, and Miranda. He could pose problems for them, measure how well they solved them, then offer the same problems to the dragon. He would do these things. Science demanded it.
Then he stopped. He could gather his data, test his theories, but then what? He couldn’t possibly share them with anyone else. Others would want to duplicate what he had done, which meant creating more dragons, or having Mugwump taken away from him. An intelligent creature, capable of flight, capable of carrying small swivel guns could terrorize cities and towns. People feared wurmriders and they would find dragonriders infinitely more terrifying.
The greater moral dilemma struck him. He owned Mugwump. The dragon was chattel. But if Mugwump proved to be as intelligent as a man, or even more intelligent, did Prince Vlad have any right to own him? The Prince and all civilized nations had long since repudiated the horror of slavery. Indentured servitude often amounted to the same thing, though the contract did contain limitations which, in theory, prevented abuse. And what would become of all the wurms whose growth and development had been stunted by their long captivity? Could a thinking man condone their enforced infantilization?
He looked up and saw his wife out with the children. She’d told him that he’d train Mugwump, but would educate his children. How will you take it, my dear, if Mugwump needs educating?
A cold chill ran through him. He wished, just for a moment, that both he and dragon were stupid. He literally had no choice. He had to educate Mugwump and determine just how smart he truly was. He would have to encrypt all the records, and likely needed to create two sets containing disparate data that he could untangle with the proper key. They would send anyone who stole his information off in the wrong direction.
Gisella approached him, her brow furrowed. “What worries you? Have you had bad news?”
“No, good news, I think.” I think. Is that what Mugwump can do? He slipped an arm around her slender waist and watched his son bend down to pick something off the lawn. It appeared to be a twig, which the boy peered at closely, then immediately attempted to stick into his nose. Madeline took it from him, which appeared on the cusp of starting him crying, but Miranda presented him with a yellow flower, which distracted him.
“Are you going to tell me, husband?”
He smiled. “Nothing to tell yet, darling. When there is, I will let you know.”
She leaned her head on his shoulder. “And did Mugwump take well to his training?”
“Dashed one fence to pieces, and did more hopping than flying, but his landings became less and less jarring.” He kissed the top of her head. “Which reminds me that I’ll likely need a pillow on my chair for the next several days. If a bruise comes up, you must promise not to laugh.”
Her blue eyes flicked up and she smiled. “I would never…”
“…laugh aloud?” He squeezed her tightly. “As long as you keep it a secret, darling, I think we will do just fine.”