He clamped down on the weapon's shaft and dropped into a squat, both to drive the blade deeper and to keep from being jerked out of the dugout. The creature's head erupted from the water, filling the swamp with a loud, sizzling hiss.
Tang jerked his halberd free and swung the blade, axe- like, at the creature's head. The beast retracted its sinu- ous neck. Instead of counterstriking, it hissed again,
wagging a forked tongue as long as a pennon flag.
Tang had seen whiptail lizards wag their tongues at prey often enough to know what was coming next. He dove into the bottom of the dugout and heard the wyvern's barbed tail swishing over his back. The sound ended in a slurpy thud, then a boatpusher-the snake- bitten one, judging by his delirious voice-screamed.
With a trembling hand, the prince grabbed his sword, dropped it, grabbed it again, and came up swinging in time to see the wyvem's tail jerk his boatpusher from the punt. The fellow landed facedown and did not move. So deadly and quick was the wyvern's poison that the man puffed up before Tang's eyes. The flesh on his hands and neck grew black and slimy, while the red stain blossom- ing around the man's head suggested his nose was bleed- ing profusely.
The wyvern flicked its victim off its tail, then dove back beneath the water and swam toward Number Three
Raft. Tang remembered the other beast and spun around, half-expecting to feel a tail barb piercing his own flesh.
He found only an empty dugout, with a forsaken halberd and a pool of black slime to mark where the second boat- pusher had been standing a moment before.
Tang's earlier jubilation had vanished like smoke into fog; now he felt helpless and frightened. If a halberd could barely scratch a wyvern, how would it pierce a dragon's thick armor? He had been a fool to come into this swamp without a wu-jen.
The men on Number Two and Number Three Rafts voiced their battle cries and thrust their halberds into the swamp. A pair of tails lashed out of the water almost as one, each driving a barb through a soldier's leather armor. Tang saw scales rippling as the wyverns pumped their victims full of poison, then a flurry of blades as his soldiers hacked at the beasts' sinuous tails.
In the next instant, the back end of Number Three
Raft rose on a wyvern's back. The creature's wings beat the swamp as it struggled to raise the boat higher. Men
tumbled into the water, screaming and slashing at alliga- tors. Finally, when the raft had grown light enough, the wyvern twisted sideways and flipped it.
Number Two Raft suffered a similar fate; then the two creatures dove beneath the surface and swam toward the rafts Yuan had held in reserve.
Tang grabbed a halberd and used it to push his punt after Number One Raft, which had nearly reached
Cypress's roost. It was difficult to say whether the dragon was watching the approaching vessel or not. He held his head turned to one side and slightly cocked, so that one empty eye socket was turned toward the dark water and the other on the murky canopy. His scaly lips were slightly curled, as though he found the cacophony of howling voices a pleasant evening serenade.
Number One Raft scraped past a heap of shark skele- tons and stopped beside Cypress's roost, less than twenty paces from the dragon. Several men quickly formed a wall at the front of the craft while their companions gath- ered behind them.
Tang pushed harder, trying to catch up before they launched their attack. The voice in his lasal-clouded head kept urging him to turn back. The closer he came to his foe, the less he cared about the disrespect his men had shown him earlier-or the shame he would bring upon himself by failing to rescue his mother. Nevertheless, the prince continued forward, not because he cared about his men or was suddenly determined to prove that he was no coward, but because he knew that the only way to leave the swamp alive was to kill his foe.
Tang had almost caught Number One Raft when the men in the front hurled their halberds like spears. As the shafts arced toward the dragon, half a dozen soldiers leaped onto the toppled tree and rushed forward to attack. The boatpushers again started to move their clumsy vessel forward.
Cypress calmly brought a wing around to shield him- self from the flying halberds. The steel blades pierced the
leathery scales easily enough, but lacked the force to drag the heavy shafts through the tough hide and pene- trate the dragon's body. One weapon splashed into the swamp, but most simply lodged themselves in a wing and dangled there like needles in an oxhide.
Cypress lowered his wing and swept the line of charg- ing warriors off the toppled tree, then hopped off his roost and landed in the middle of the raft. The boat settled a few inches beneath the water, but did not sink, and its occupants whirled on their foe in a flurry of flashing steel. Growling and hissing like one of his wyverns, the dragon lashed out with tail and wings and sent bodies splashing into the water on all sides.
Tang gave his punt another shove and stepped into the bow, praying his weak knees would have enough strength to hold him up when he leaped onto Number One Raft.
Before he arrived, Cypress raked his black talons down the length of the raft, severing the lashings that held it together.
The logs rolled apart, plunging all who had been standing upon them into the swamp. Tang's punt contin- ued to glide forward, and somehow-perhaps because he was too frightened to move-the prince found himself standing fast in the bow, with a clear flank shot and
Cypress looking the other way. The prince clamped his arms around his halberd and gathered his rubbery legs beneath him, determined that the dragon would not shrug off this strike as easily as the wyvern had shrugged off his first.
Tang was staring at the scale through which he intended to drive his halberd, so he did not see Cypress's wing sweeping toward him on the backswing. He simply heard an earsplitting thump, then found himself sailing over the toppled tree trunk with his gold-trimmed helmet flying in one direction and his weapon in another. He splashed into the warm water, sank to the bottom, and nearly got tangled in a bed of fish skeletons before he recovered his wits and kicked free.
His head ringing and his body aching. Tang broke the surface and peered over the log. The bog scum had erupted into a pink-tinged froth, with the dragon stand- ing waist-deep in blood and shark skeletons, battering his foes with wings and tail and calmly tearing their bod- ies apart with gore-dripping talons. The prince's warriors could do little to defend themselves. The legs of most were hopelessly tangled among the fish bones, and the rest could barely hold their chins above the water, much less swing their heavy blades powerfully enough to pierce
Cypress's thick scales.
The voice inside Tang's head shrieked through the lasal haze, reminding him that he was a Shou prince and should have fled long ago. He managed to ignore it for a short time, but when the alligators appeared at the fringe of the battle and began to drag away the wounded, the voice began to sound wise. Tang pushed away from the log and, moving very slowly to avoid attracting alli- gators, he slipped beneath the surface and swam toward the mountain.