The dragon went almost straight down through the pellucid water, headed for a shadow that was lounging under a ledge.
Herzer suddenly felt a sharp pain in his ears and shook his head, yawning, as they “popped” painfully. He grabbed his nose, half instinctively, and blew against the obstruction, relieving the pressure and popping them again. He blew one more time to be sure, then looked around at the sea-bottom, which was coming up fast.
The bottom was sand with broken coral heads, and the big fish, maybe one of those grouper that Duke Edmund had mentioned, was using the coral for cover. As the shadow of the wyvern swept over it, however, it took off, a brown and gray streak, headed across the sand for another ledge.
Chauncey turned to follow and Herzer was nearly ripped from his perch as the dragon pumped its wings through the dense water. Clearly the reef fish was the faster but Donal suddenly stooped down upon it and it turned desperately to the side. Chauncey made another radical turn to the right and the fish reversed again, but not in time as the wyvern’s head darted down and snapped onto the body of the man-sized fish.
The water was clear and the sun high above was shining down so that the sand positively glittered, but Herzer was amazed to see that the blood that flowed from the fish, was bright, emerald green, like new leaves or growing grass after a spring rain. There was a lot of it, as well. It always amazed him the quantity of blood that a being could hold.
The fish had been swimming into the Stream and for just a moment the sea around him turned to the same bright, emerald hue. He was so surprised that he nearly lost his grip again. But the wyvern hungrily finished off the fish, brilliantly colored scavenger fish darting out from the reef to get the dropped morsels, and headed off on another hunt.
Herzer had never been into underwater sports so he was amazed by the sights around him. The shadow of the ship overhead was blue as was the deeper water to the west. The dragons passing in every direction were unreal and amazing, their wings tucked in and “flying” against the current as they hunted over the reef. The water was so clear it seemed that he could see for miles but he realized that the visibility was no more than seventy meters or so, as Shep kept drifting in and out of sight in the distance.
Sharks had started to gather to the feeding frenzy of the dragons and he was a bit worried by that. The wyverns might be able to survive an attack by the much smaller sharks, but if they thought they were prey it would be an ugly encounter. The sharks avoided the dragons, though, perhaps recognizing through some instinct or survival coding ancient beyond belief that the dinosaurlike flying creatures were deadly fellow predators. And the dragons ignored the sharks, in turn.
The exception was Joanna. Chauncey was beating madly after one of the reef fish again, this one no larger than Herzer’s thigh, when he saw the great dragon emerge from the gloom to the east and close on one of the medium-sized sharks. A dart of her head on its long neck and the shark was neatly bitten in two, the tail and head continuing to quiver as they drifted for the bottom. Other sharks closed around the remnants and her head darted in again to take one of the smaller ones whole. One of the sharks turned to bite at her but its teeth bounced off her folded wings as her neck turned all the way around and did to the shark what it had been unable to do to her. Apparently satisfied, she sculled back towards the ship, giving a special flip of her tail in the direction of what had once been the most dangerous predator in the sea.
Herzer had released Chauncey to watch the by-play and he suddenly realized that he was not one of the most dangerous predators in the sea as a group of sharks moved towards him. He wasn’t sure what kind they were, except that they were big and brown and the most “traditional” sharp shape he had ever seen. And they apparently considered him a potential meal. With the exception of his belt-knife, he was entirely unarmed and not sure whether to head for the surface or the bottom. The sharks were between him and the ship, so heading for that was out.
He turned to the side and dove for the bottom just as one of the bigger sharks darted forward. He managed to deflect it with a well timed blow on its snout, to which the shark reacted by turning and swimming rapidly away, then to the side to circle. The punch had not been without damage to Herzer, however, as the skin on his knuckles had all been ripped off by the sandpapery skin. He kicked towards another, which took that as an opportunity to grab his fin.
The fin was of almost indestructible plastic but the same could not be said of Herzer. The shark reacted to the bite by trying to rip off a bit of flesh, shaking its head rapidly and powerfully back and forth. Herzer found himself being tossed like a rat held by a terrier and distinctly felt something in his ankle pop. After it was clear that nothing was going to come off the shark released him but by this time the first one had circled around and was coming in for another run at more vulnerable parts.
Just as it was about to reach him there was a blue shadow over it and Chauncey bit it just behind the head. She wasn’t as large as Joanna but her jaws could spread almost like a snake’s and the powerful jaw muscles cut through tough skin, bony cartilage and flesh, leaving the head attached to the tail only by a narrow strip of skin.
The water around Herzer was suddenly filled with wings and green blood as the wyverns reacted to the threat, and meal, of the gathered shark frenzy, snapping in every direction. The sharks tended to head for extremities, biting at the wyvern’s wings. But, to their dismay, they were just as impossible to pierce as Joanna’s and the wyverns reacted by dragging the wings over to their mouths and having little clingy shark snacks.
Herzer decided that the best thing to do was head for the bottom, like any good reef fish, and watch the battle royale from the safety of a ledge. There were seven sharks that considered the dragons fair game, but the five wyverns had killed four of them before Joanna made her reappearance. She, in turn, killed two more and the last was finished off by Donal, who nearly swallowed the relatively small shark whole.
As soon as the last of the sharks were nothing but bits drifting to the floor, Herzer pushed off from his ledge and headed up to the group, favoring his leg and doing most of the work with his right hand. The dragons, however, headed for the surface even faster and there was no way to keep up with them. As he was ascending he considered what Edmund had said and breathed normally. He did notice that he tended to seem to breathe out more air than he took in on the way up and wondered what he should do about it. He also noticed that there weren’t even bubbles, which surprised him, but he guessed that the exhaled gasses were distributed by whatever mechanism gathered them in for breathing.
His ears started hurting again when he was close to the surface and he paused to let them clear, working his jaw back and forth. As he headed up he noticed that he always seemed to be at the surface, but it was always farther away than he anticipated. It was something of a surprise when first his outstretched left arm and then his head breasted the surface.
He surfaced downstream from the dragons, well away from the ship, but Joanna was already serpentining towards him.
“You were almost part of the food-chain there, Lieutenant,” the dragon said, grinning with her mobile lips. There was a bit of white flesh stuck in her teeth with a piece of shark skin still attached.
“Just think of me as bait,” Herzer replied with a smile.
“You’re taking it pretty well,” Joanna said, coasting up beside him. “Climb on.”
“I’m used to people, and things, trying to kill me,” Herzer admitted. “It’s a hell of a thing to say, but getting attacked by sharks is the first normal thing that’s happened to me on this trip.”