140 - Crazy Crazy Village Defenses

The Emir-al led the train out, with the Amir following up the rear as the restless, fractious birds screeched and flapped wings and tried to bite chunks out of each other, or run.  Everyone had their hands full and Ky nearly rode up Werfas’s bird, it stopped so suddenly.  “Hey!” They ended up with the two birds tangled together, smashing beaks even though Werfas was in between, until they shut the hoods down.

Kyrus and Ilax had stopped, flinging their hands up.  “What in my ancestor’s ill-gotten and profane names is this?” Ky heard his stepda exclaim.  Hara reached over with her goad and helped him and Werfas get untangled.

“It’s safe enough,” the Emir-al called back, in a peculiarly hushed tone.  “Its part of the village defenses.”

“Defenses? It’s insane!”

Ky was able to quit fighting with his bird, as it stood still at last, and looked around to see what they were talking about.

What he’d taken for the road merely running under an outcrop of tsingy rising up over their heads, melding into the karst where the cavern was, was actually built.  He looked up and realized that the holes in the rock over his head were sized perfectly for nesting bush dragons, and that the piles of what he’d taken for rocks on either side of the road where the shed-scale nests of the bushies.

It was day and just after a major storm so the predators would have gone at the first instant they could fly to scavenge.  They probably had enough things caught in the flying sand and glass that they wouldn’t have to hunt.  The cracks overhead were empty instead of filled with boron-laced scales and teeth.

Also, once they’d molted their nesting scales and the sticky eggs attached to them, quite literally crawling out of their skins to do so, most females tended to migrate away.  Over to one side was the dessicated corpse of  male that had somehow gotten coated in eggs and was not able to molt before the offspring hatched.

The nearest pile of dull green brown scales, with glittering glass edges shifted, and a juvenile bush dragon head wove up to focus it's eyepatches on them.  It was the brightest living animal that Ky had ever seen. The soft body scales were banded red and yellow, edged in acid green.  An actinic blue stripe ran down its ventral side and though he couldn’t see for sure probably matched by a dorsal stripe as well.  It’s bright pink baby wing-scales flapped, uncoordinated. All three of it’s mouth flaps were peeled back, showing the rings and rings of triangular teeth.

“Just be quiet and stay on the road.  They’re not old enough to thumb-worm or roll yet and they’re still eating their siblings,” the Amir whispered from behind.  A second baby bushie poked out of the same pile, and every other pile all along the road to the opening, was also rustling and grinding as the bushies caught their scent.

The first bush baby snapped its scales wide to make itself bigger, hissing, and the whole area was flooded with the stench of enraged dragon.  Every war bird froze where it stood, but then the nestlings noticed each other and either lunged into a mouth-locked grapple with a sibling or dove into the pile of scales trying to hunt each other down in the heap.

“Quiet.  Sure.”  But Hara whispered that and everyone got down so they could lead their birds blind past the now rattling, heaving, scraping, grinding nests.  Dust and sand filtered down as they hissed and fought unseen, making noises like a dying steam kettle or cracking boiling pots.

No one could spare a hand to cover their ears when the iron nails scraping on dry slate noises started and echoed all through this artificial nesting ground.

Lovely.  I can see that trying to get an offensive group through here would be more than difficult.  Probably impossible.  What were these people thinking?  Bushies have been getting smarter and more vicious even in the time we’ve lived here and some people think they’re developing a taste for Terran meat and veg.  Birds you can walk through.  They seem to know that baby bushies only attack each other until they’re... well, not fledged exactly, fliers anyway, and that they are too toxic for any other predator to go after, except maybe oyucks and the parasite lizards.  If they hatch at all.  That dry old corpse is so full of nestlings its heaving like its alive.

Werfas had his hand pressed tight to his veil to try and keep the stink out, looking back at Ky and Hara, white showing all the way around.  “I hate snakes and dragons,” he choked out.

“Shhh.  Shhh.  Its just a few more steps... then we can get on and let the birds run themselves out.”

“Yeah.”

Ky could see, outlined in sunlight at the opening, the road dipping down, his da and Ilax swing up and snap the bridles open, the birds gone so fast they kicked up dust all the way back into the nesting cavern, the zon following suit.  “Let’s go!” Ky hissed, jumped for his saddle.  “Go, go, go!”  That’s just crazy.  Encouraging a bushie nest?  Nuts.  We Lainz are all nuts.