How Beer Saved the World

One Burp to Save Them All ^{Irene Radford}

Berd followed behind the caravan’s magician. They both checked the cords and bindings of the precious cargo loaded onto sledges. The casks of beer gave off small whiffs of yeast and malt and hops. More hops than usual. It had been a good year for hops. The heady aroma eased his mind and soothed his posture.

But not his concerns. He still double checked everything the magician touched. The magician had appeared out of the dark surrounding the campfire last night, just as the men wandered off to their bed rolls. He had papers assigning him to this caravan. Berd couldn’t read the words on the paper but he recognized the wax seal of the mayor of Brewtown.

The mayor’s approval didn’t mean Berd trusted the magician.

One loose strap and fifteen casks would roll back off the sledge, break apart and spill the rich amber liquid into the thirsty plains of Coronnan.

The caravan hadn’t had a magician along their route in nigh on twenty years. Every power-mad one of them had signed on with one lord or another as battlemages, neglecting their normal duties. Berd had been loading and lashing cargo so long on his own, he didn’t didn’t see a need for the man wearing a faded blue tunic and trews, carrying a twisted staff.

Stargods only knew the central plains needed moisture. All the beer in this entire caravan wouldn’t raise a clump of mud. But there were a lot of thirsty people at the end of the journey. Three cities hadn’t yet managed to clear their wells once the peace treaty had been signed. Poisoning and clearing wells was a specialty of battlemages. Maybe this magician could finish the cleansing. In the meantime, Berd had the responsibility of transporting beer safe for drinking from the springs of sweet water in the foothills across the wide plains of plentiful grains to the coast, where even clean wells were brackish with bay and tides and unfit for brewing. And he had to get these casks to the city intact.

This magician wasn’t exactly young, more like an old geezer past his prime. No longer strong enough or keen enough to stand up to a battlemage. Chances were, his eyesight had faded along with the dye on his journey clothes.

“You needn’t double check everything I do,” the man in blue said, with his back to Berd, a full sledge ahead of him. “I know how to stabilize a load.”

Berd grumbled something rude into his beard rather than reply.

“I understand that the caravans, indeed all of Coronnan, has been missing magicians for too long, but the wars are over and we are back, with royal sanction. We actually have a king with authority now too. And the blessing of the dragons. I intend to do my job of easing the journey. Do you still have problems with steeds stepping into overly deep ruts and upsetting the cargo?”

Berd had to nod at that. As the seasons changed weather played havoc with the trails, filling in some holes, deepening and widening others.

“And do your steeds still bog down in mud?” the magician asked.

Berd allowed a wry grin to crease his face. “Not this year. Ain’t had morn’n a trace a rain in six moons. No mud to slow us down.”

“Fewer creeks and ponds on the route to ease the thirst of the animals who do most of the work,” the magician reminded him. “And what few water sources remain, you can’t be sure are safe until someone drinks from them and sickens… or survives.”

“Um…” Berd didn’t have an answer to that. The caravans had gotten so used to fending for themselves, they hadn’t thought a magician could actually help. They were running out of caged rats to test the purity of water on.

The war had killed more than people.

“My name’s Lyman,” the magician said, pulling on a strap and retying a knot that had come loose.

“Berd,” the drover replied, chagrined. He recognized the knot as one of his own. It shouldn’t have loosened this quickly. Young Jyson, now, he couldn’t tie a knot in a neck scarf, let alone on cargo. He learned, but slowly. At the moment he was better suited to feeding the steeds.

He looked over his should to make sure Jyson and the seven other drovers completed their duties of cleaning up their camp and loading personal items on the last sledge in line.

“I am satisfied,” Lyman said. He looked back along the line of sledges with one hand shading his eyes from sun-glare.

“Yes, we are late in starting,” Berd confirmed. He held a hand out measuring how far above the horizon the light had risen. “We should have been on the road an hour ago.”

“No. We are right on time. We will pass the first watering hole before noon. Before it evaporates in the sun.”

“If no one has poisoned it.”

“It was clear the last time you passed?” Lyman turned his penetrating gaze on the drover.

Berd noticed for the first time that the magician’s eyes were purple. The deep color of the Southern Mountains in the afterglow of sunset. Unusual.

The butt end of the magician’s staff in the small of his back ceased his musing. He reached high to grab the cheek strap of the lead steed and bring the long head down to his own eye level. He whispered a few words into the stallion’s ear. Abruptly the beast lurched, straining against its padded collar and harness. Head down he plodded his massive feet forward beginning the long journey.

“You have a magic of your own,” Lyman said, walking beside Berd. “The steed responds to your wishes. Most of the caravan animals I have encountered are stubborn about their laziness, putting more energy into resisting their masters than it would take to just comply.”

Berd threw back his head in laughter. Something moved in the deep blue sky still shedding the last traces of night to the West. Must be dust swarming on the slight morning breeze. Too early and chill for a heat haze. “Ah, I know those headstrong steeds well. I do not employ them on my caravan.”

“This one looks like a herd leader. I’m surprised he agrees to follow your lead.”

“Champion and me, we have an agreement.” Berd said nothing more, keeping to himself the knowledge that this lead stallion was the only intact male in this particular herd. And the majority were mares. No other steed challenged his authority or breeding rights, and for that favor he didn’t challenge Berd.

Until now. Twenty steps into the journey the steed shifted his feet without moving forward. He jerked his head away from Berd’s grip and bellowed in challenge.

“What?” Berd demanded.

Champion sidled, snorting, nostrils flared and eyes rolling. The other steeds picked up their leader’s distress and began stamping and trumpeting. The previously straight line lost cohesion.

Now alarm spread upward from Berd’s gut to his head and down to his feet. An instinct in the back of his mind told him to run. Run far. Run fast. Anywhere but here.

Berd forced himself to anchor his feet and search for the source of the steed’s alarm.

Something screeched louder and deeper than a steed’s bellow. The booming sound rippled up and down half a dozen scales totally absent of harmony and sent flusterbumps up and down his spine.

The stamping of frightened steeds could not drown out the noise.

Lyman appeared on the other side of the lead steed. Together they held his harness. Berd threw a blanket over the beast’s eyes to calm him.

Then a new odor swarmed up from the dry grassland half a mile a way.

Smoke.

Strong, semi-sweet, gray-brown and headed this way.

Without a word he and Lyman steered the stallion across the small creek they’d camped next to. Not much of a barrier. Was the fire strong enough and hot enough jump it?

Berd hastened the steed across with a firm slap on his rump. “Smell the water,” he commanded, holding a cupped handful of liquid beneath the beast’s nose. “Keep the water in your mind and smell its sweetness. Water good. Water safe,” he reminded his beast. Over and over he chanted the litany of safety.

Champion kept moving, thank the Stargods. He didn’t like the idea of stepping out of the creek onto dry land again, but he could still smell the water, and without sight, he trusted Berd. He had to trust Berd.

With a flip of his finger, Lyman lifted the end poles of the sledge so that it cleared the creek and all the rocks water rippled around. He did the same for the next sledge and the next as drovers urged each animal away from the fire in an orderly manner—as orderly as frightened steeds could manage. If the men relaxed their vigilance, the horses would stampede, dragging their cargo with them until they broke free. As long as the smoke stayed behind Champion his instinct to flee was satisfied.

And then Berd saw it. His bowels turned to water and his mouth went dry; drier than the dusty road and the rain-starved grasslands.

A dragon! A great yellow-tip. Its massive body reflected sunlight, forcing Berd’s eye to look anywhere but at it, and yet drawing it irrevocably, directly to it. Only the yellow wing veins and spinal horns outlined the monster and gave it definition. And in the morning light the yellow rapidly faded in the sky’s background. It flapped its mighty wings and belched flame. A new patch of grass erupted into a conflagration.

The thing was huge. Monstrously huge. As wide as two sledge steeds and as tall as two more. Any one of Berd’s precious beasts would make a nice meal for the dragon. He couldn’t afford to lose any of his herd. Six spare beasts marched at the rear of the group. Still…

A wall of heat hit him, driving him back and back again.

He still had two sledges and the six spare steeds to get across the creek to safety. Safe from the fire, not from the ravening appetite of the dragon.

“I thought you said we had the blessing of the dragons!” Berd yelled toward the magician.

Lyman continued to levitate the guide poles of the sledges as they crossed the creek. But stood a little apart from the group, closer to the fire, closer to the dragon. He anchored his staff against the ground and stared at the oncoming fire that rose as high as the tucked in paws of the dragon. Smoke swirled and raged, giving the dragon more definition than clean air.

Berd gulped. Then his fear drove his sense of responsibility. “Keep those steeds moving. One at a time. Cover their eyes, make sure they smell the water and not the smoke,” he commanded, not letting his men sense his knocking knees and trembling hands. The steeds could smell his sweat and know what drove them. He had to make sure they smelled more water than fear. He began splashing their faces with handfuls of water.

“Lyman, we could use a little help here!”

The magician remained firm, facing the dragon with a stern scowl on his face.

“Useless, trumped up piece of…”

And then a miracle happened. The dragon ceased its agonized roaring, gulped back his sheets of flame and turned a wide circle. He flew the perimeter of his fire again and again, creating a wind that contained the flames and forced them to eat themselves rather than seek out new fuel in the grassland.

The last embers winked out just as the final steed cleared the safe boundary of the creek.

Only when the dragon disappeared toward the South did Lyman turn and accompany the last of the herd through the water. He wore a rather smug smile.

“What was that about?” Berd demanded, shoving a skittish mare into line with his burly shoulder.

“An old and cranky dragon, displeased with himself and the world,” Lyman dismissed the beast with a wave of his hand as he moved into line checking straps and knots again as Champion led the caravan East toward the cities. “Of course compared to me, Chrysum’s still a youngster. Sulfur would be a better name for him considering the stench of his breath.”

Berd shook his head, trying to clear his ears. He wasn’t sure he’d heard the last bit or imagined it.

They traveled without further incident all day. The watering hole they passed at noon was clean. The well they found by an abandoned farmstead was not. Berd’s firm control of Champion and therefore the herd was all that kept the thirsty animals from stampeding to the water. “Keep moving!” Berd yelled at all the drovers. He slapped the steed’s rump sharply.

Champion snorted and rolled his eyes, but he kept moving forward, even though he looked back to where Lyman stood beside the circle of stones around a natural spring.

“Keep them away until I finish,” the magician said calmly. Then he thrust the butt of his staff sharply into the water, all the while chanting nonsense syllables under his breath. One short stanza of his almost rhyming words was followed by a wide circling of the staff still in the water. Ripples of slimy liquid worked outward and slopped against the stones. He repeated the process four times more. With each repetition the staff came a little further out of the water revealing more and more green muck clinging to it.

Berd watched him closely while his men moved the caravan further along the deeply rutted road, each of the steeds straining to get to the water they could smell, but were forbidden to drink.

Lyman’s knees began to sag and his back slumped as he pushed harder on the fifth time through. He acted as if he pushed the staff through thick and rapidly solidifying mud. Berd slapped the haunches of the final steed as it passed him and hurried back to the magician. He might not like having a magician assign himself to the caravan, but once with him, he was now Berd’s responsibility. He shoved a shoulder beneath Lyman’s arm as the old man slammed the tip of his staff into the solid ground five times. The muck slid off it into a stagnant pool at his feet. It flattened out but remained semi solid, neither seeping into the dirt nor sliding back toward the ring of stones.

“The water should be clean now,” Lyman said weakly. “You’d best test it on a rat before allowing the steeds near. But I can smell that it is clean once more. The farmer can return to work the land again.”

“And what of you, old man? What do you need?”

“Food and rest. By morn I’ll be strong as your Champion.” He dropped abruptly to his knees, slithering out of Berd’s grasp.

That night Berd fed the old man an extra portion of journey rations. Lyman smiled as he wolfed down the jerked meat in two huge gulps, barely bothering to taste the salt. Then he drank deeply of the newly cleaned well water.

“Oh dear,” he groaned, clutching his belly and rolling back and forth on the ground.

“What is it? Is there still a taint in the water?” Berd helped the magician sit up.

“Nothing quite so dramatic. I ate too much too fast. My belly is not used to such abuse and protests most heartily.”

Berd searched his memory for some remedy he might have in his kit, or possibly seen growing near by. All he could think of…

“What you really need is a stout mug of beer,” the master drover muttered into his beard.

“You cannot tap a cask for me, young man,” Lyman said. “Though it would taste good right now, the pain will pass as all sour bellies do. If they don’t burn your throat out first.” His half-smile turned into a grimace as he clutched his belly and groaned again.

“Water is good for some things. Beer is better for others.” He hoisted the small cask he kept hidden on the last supply sledge to his shoulder. He and his man had been on the road long enough that they all craved beer. But they’d not get more until they reached the city, five days hence. The small cask would only last one night with eight thirsty men and a bone-weary magician. To shouts of joy from his men, he tapped the cask.

The first mug went to Lyman. He sipped gingerly at first, then drank more deeply. Before the other men had managed to down half a mug each, Lymen loosed a belch that started in his toes and worked upward, long and low and…

“That smells of sulfur worse than the dragon,” Berd said from across the farmyard. A second belch, just as loud and odiferous brought a smile of relief to Lyman’s lined face. Then with a sigh he sought his bedroll and slept deeply.

Before the first bird cheeped a meager query of the not yet visible sun, amongst groans of sore heads and moans of eyes that winced in the pre-dawn light, Berd ordered the caravan up and on the road. Berd himself felt much calmer and full of energy to face the next leg of the journey. Lyman looked restored and eager to move as well. The road quickly opened up into grasslands again, leaving behind the copse that shaded the farmstead. Berd wondered if anyone alive could legally claim the land. A pretty place, fertile, with sweet water again. Might be a comfortable living for a retired caravan drover. When he was done with following roads, wondering what lay over the next hill, what cargo awaited him to carry back toward the foothills.

He settled into a rhythm of steps matching Champion stride for stride, head bob for head bob, looping thoughts bouncing back and forth between enjoyment of his life and longing for a more settled future, perhaps with a wife and if they were lucky, children. He’d make provisions for caravans to camp on his property and use the well…

A long rumble echoed around the heavens. Berd immediately searched for the dark clouds that would produce a thunder storm.

Nothing. A vast expanse of clear blue stretched from horizon to horizon, barely punctuated by a copse or a higher hill. A whiff of sulfur preceded a blast of smoke.

“Lyman! Your dragon is back,” he yelled. “Get the steeds to water,” he followed through with his primary concern.

The crackle of flames on dry grass turned his knees liquid. Half the southern horizon glowed fire green with a wall of black smoke rising up as it swelled toward them. Steeds screeched their distress, half-rearing in their traces. The sledges rocked and tilted.

The dragon came at them low and fast, flame dribbling from his mouth.

“Chrysum, stand down!” Lyman shouted, waving his staff at the winged monster. “Swallow your anger and go back to the lair where you belong.”

The dragon ignored him.

Lyman lifted his staff high, holding it by the tip and circled it in the air. He chanted strange words in the same fluid language he’d used the previous night in cleansing the well.

Backlit smoke showed the dragon’s outline of the rounded body tipped with golden yellow along the wing veins, tips and spinal horns. The rest of him sparkled with iridescent fur that pushed the eye to look anywhere else yet demanded all of Berd’s attention.

He didn’t have time to stop and admire the apex predator. He needed to get his steeds and his cargo away from here, toward water that he couldn’t find anywhere by sight or smell.

Lyman shouted his commands again.

In response, the dragon belched a sheet of flame. The stench of rotten meat laced with sulfur and a neglected latrine nearly felled Berd and his herd. And yet…

It smelled the same as Lyman’s upset stomach from the night before.

Hastily Berd grabbed the lashing holding six kegs of beer tight on the jostling sledge. “Cut the traces!” he yelled at the nearest man trying to calm the steeds and lead them North toward a depression that he hoped contained a stream wide enough to stop the fire.

“Champion will run,” the young drover warned.

“Let him. He’ll lead the others toward water and he’ll find it before you do. Cut the traces.” Berd obeyed his own orders and gave up on loosening knots and buckles. He cut the straps with a slash from his utility knife and let the barrels roll off the conveyance. Some deep core of him shuddered in dread. What was he doing?

Saving his world.

As soon as the first barrel cleared the guide poles, Berd flipped it upright and began leveraging the lid free with his knife. He had to close his eyes before he regretted the sacrifice of one of the finest brews of the year.

“Lyman, how much can a dragon drink?” he asked as the smell of yeast and hops and barley swamped his senses.

“The alcohol will fuel the flames,” Lyman called back even as he ran from the path of the dragon. Yesterday he’d faced the beast and subdued it by will and magic alone.

Maybe the old man had used up all his reserves of magic. Maybe the dragon’s stomach was more upset than yesterday. He knew old men who couldn’t sleep because every meal burned back up the throat.

Berd turned his attention to a second barrel. Lyman worked on a third barrel, and the youngest drover righted a fourth.

The dragon kept coming.

“This has to be enough,” Lyman called. He gestured with his staff for them to retreat, across the road and down a shallow decline.

They ducked and ran.

Chrysum roared again. More flames tickled the running men’s feet. Then the fire stopped as the dragon back-winged and dropped to the ground beside the open barrels. He slurped up the liquid as rapidly as a child with a reed straw with a glass of milk. Then he sucked on the second barrel, draining it before Berd could blink twice.

Chrysum paused and sank back on his haunches. He opened his mouth. Only a slender trickle of dying flames dribbled from his mouth, through the froth of beer foam that rimmed his lips.

A look of almost surprise pushed the dragon’s eyes open wide. All the colors of the rainbow, dominated by shining gold and fire green, swirled together. He bent his head to start on the third barrel and paused again. Then a deep rumble grew from the tip of his tail, rolling up and out on a belch. Berd clapped his hands over his ears before the sound deafened him. He couldn’t cover his nose as well. The sulfurous miasma nearly felled him.

Chrysum lifted his head and bellowed in triumphant relief.

(Thank you.)

“Did I just hear that?” Berd asked in wonder.

“Aye, you did. You are honored. The dragons do not often deign to speak to mere humans. They haven’t learned to trust you yet.”

“He spoke to you…”

“I’m not an ordinary human.”

(One more drink. Come share,) Chrysum suggested.

“Um…” Berd eyed the two empty barrels the dragon had tipped over in order to drink the last of the dregs, and the half empty barrel he currently sucked the liquid out of. “We don’t want to deprive you,” he said hesitantly.

“Don’t insult him by declining the invitation. Besides, you deserve the reward of a good long drink. You saved the plains from this dragon’s upset stomach.” Lyman slapped Berd’s back, urging him back to the road.

“Not quite, that fire is still growing!” Berd backed away from the blaze.

Chrysum backwinged. The fire kept coming.

“We need water!” Berd called.

(Then make water,) the dragon called. He sounded almost drunk. Were two barrels enough to make a dragon tipsy?

Then the dragons’ words penetrated Berd’s mind, reminding him that he’d barely taken time to take a leak this morning. After last night’s beer he really needed to take a leak.

He approached the edge of the fire, opened his trews and loosed a stream. A bit of fire retreated. He spread his aim. More fire retreated. Lyman joined him with a really impressive stream. Someone handed Berd a mug of beer and he replenished his load. Within seconds all of his men had a full tankard and a weapon against the fire.

Berd drank deeply, as much as he craved, and then some. “Good thing there aren’t any women with us. They’d line up judging accuracy and duration.”

“And awarding prizes,” Lyman chuckled.

The fire tried valiantly to hold its own.

Chrysum joined the party drowning half an acre.

Berd looked over his shoulder at the milling steeds still attached to their sledges some distance off. They were safe for now.

Just then the dragon belched again. Not a hint of flame left his mouth and his recycled air smelled of hops and yeast and barley. He eyed the fifth barrel longingly.

“Thanks, master dragon, aye, I’ll drink with you. But then I’ve got a cargo to deliver and a farm to buy. You come to me when your dinner doesn’t sit well and I’ll give you new beer to damp your flames.”