A Dragon at Worlds' End by Christopher Rowley Read Free Book Online Page B

had dragged the boat farther up until it was beside the big beached tree. Now they built a "boma" around the position, cutting out brush, branches, and masses of twisted vines, some of them bearing savage thorns. The barrier was eight feet high before they were finished, and Relkin was satisfied that it would deter all but the biggest predators and even delay those.
    Here they would stay until the girl either got better or died.
    Before the sun went down, they built their rock oven and laid over it the haunches of meat they'd brought down from the hills. The meat cooked while the sky darkened and the moon rose. Relkin thought of Eilsa, and tried not to think too hard about the girl with the tail, lying on a bed of palm fronds he'd made, bandaged and struggling for life.

Chapter Four
    Their life by the river wasn't difficult, particularly once Relkin had the time to make a crude bow and some arrows, and then some fishing line and finally a net. These items improved their diet quite considerably. It turned out to be a necessary move, as the supply of over-aggressive reptilian predators had thinned out over the weeks as they were killed off night after night by Bazil and the sword. The lack of such ill-mannered fellows had also made for uninterrupted sleep.
    From the skin of one of the largest red-brown beasts Relkin had renewed his own wardrobe and outfitted a sun hat for the dragon, with a long flap at the back that could be unrolled to cover the shoulders. Bazil had long complained of the power of the tropical sun's rays. Leatherback dragons were creatures of the northern coasts, after all.
    Their camp gradually took on a more permanent look. First Relkin built a crude shelter, over the girl and thus over the boat. Around it there sprouted a palisade of sharpened sticks, and around that an outer palisade. Finally a ditch of sorts was dug and more stakes put out in the bottom.
    By then there was a much larger shelter inside, in which both dragon and boy could sleep at night. Attacking animals made so much noise on the stockades that it always woke them up well in time to deal with the nuisance. Then the animals grew fewer in number and dwindled to nothing and the nights became quite peaceful.
    To capture more food, Relkin tried a deadfall trap and a pit with a stake at the bottom, but neither produced any game. Bazil did manage to surprise some big two-legged critters and kill one of them after an epic chase. The bounty from this kept them in meat for a week. In all this time the girl drifted in and out of unconsciousness while her wound swelled briefly and then drained and began to heal. The bruising began to fade and the color deepened in her cheeks. When she stirred and groaned, Relkin had found he could feed her soup, and so meat soup had become a staple and was made fresh every day in a hollowed-out trunk. In time this became fish soup. He thickened it by grinding the flesh of the fish between two smooth rocks before adding it to the hot stock in their firepit cauldron. Without a pot or a kettle it was arduous work, but Relkin was used to such a life and he quickly adapted.
    With Bazil's powerful assistance they examined the trees and plants in their surrounding area, searching for whatever might be useful. From the bark of a tall tree that had leathery little round leaves Relkin could extract long threads of fiber. These he wove together to make string. By various means he learned to make this fiber string stronger and more effective, and eventually coated it with pine tar and dried it in the sun and then by the fire. After some trial and error he finally had an effective bowstring with reasonable strength. These strings broke more frequently than good Marneri-made twist, but he could always make more, and they did the job well enough to give him an effective addition to their armament.
    In addition he was working on softening the sinews of the beasts they had killed. When cooked they were useless, as stiff as pieces of