Read Online The Dragon Book by Gardner Dozois, Jack Dann - Free Book Online

she’d taken the mule loaded with the gold. She hated to let him spend any of it, though, and in any case, he had to land her half a mile off and walk if he wanted there to be anyone left to buy things from. Finally, he lost patience and started setting her down with as much noise as she could manage right outside the nicest villa or farmhouse in sight, when they felt like a rest. Then he let her eat the cattle and made himself at home in the completely abandoned house for the night.
    That first night, sitting outside with a bowl of wine and a loaf of bread, he considered whether he should even bother going on to Gaul. He hadn’t quite realized how damned fast it would be, traveling by air. “I suppose we could just keep on like this,” he said to her idly. “They could chase us with one company after another for the rest of our days and never catch us.”
    “That doesn’t sound right to me at all,” she said. “One could never have eggs, always flying around madly from one place to another. And I want to see the war.”
    Antony shrugged cheerfully and drank the rest of the wine. He was half looking forward to it himself. He thought he’d enjoy seeing the look on the general’s face when he set down with a dragon in the yard and sent all the soldiers running like mice. Anyway, it would be a damned sight harder to get laid if he were an outlaw with a dragon.
    Two weeks later, they cleared the last alpine foothills and came into Gaul at last. And that was when Antony realized that he didn’t know the first damn thing about where the army even was.
    He didn’t expect some Gallic wife to tell him, either, so they flew around the countryside aimlessly for two weeks, raiding more farmhouses—inedible food, no decent wine, and once some crazy old woman hadn’t left her home and nearly gutted him with a cooking knife. Antony fled hastily back out to Vincitatus, ducking hurled pots and imprecations, and they went back aloft in a rush.
    “This is not a very nice country,” Vincitatus said, critically examining the scrawny pig she had snatched. She ate it anyway and added, crunching, “And that is a strange cloud over there.”
    It was smoke, nine or ten pillars of it, and Antony had never expected to be glad to see a battlefield in all his life. His stepfather had threatened to send him to the borders often enough, and he’d run away from home as much to avoid that fate as anything else, nearly. He didn’t mind a good fight, or bleeding a little in a good cause, but as far as he was concerned, that limited the occasions to whenever it might benefit him.
    The fighting was still going on, and the unmusical clanging reached them soon. Vincitatus picked up speed as she flew on toward it, then picked up still more, until Antony was squinting his eyes to slits against the tearing wind, and he only belatedly realized that she wasn’t going toward the camp or the rear of the lines; she was headed straight for the enemy.
    “Wait, what are you—” he started, too late, as her sudden stooping dive ripped the breath out of his lungs. He clung to the rope he’d tied around her neck, which now felt completely inadequate, and tried to plaster himself to her hide.
    She roared furiously, and Antony had a small moment of satisfaction as he saw the shocked and horrified faces turning up toward them from the ground, on either side of the battle, and then she was ripping into the Gauls, claws tearing up furrows through the tightly packed horde of them.
    She came to ground at the end of a run and whipped around, which sent him flying around to the underside of her neck, still clinging to the rope for a moment as he swung suspended. Then his numb fingers gave way and dumped him down to the ground, as she took off for another go. He staggered up, wobbling from one leg to the other, dizzy, and when he managed to get his feet under him, he stopped and stared: the entire Gaulish army was staring right back.
    “Hades me fellat ,” Antony