A Dragon at Worlds' End (7 page)

The general outline of the situation was clear to Relkin by now. Lumbee's home lay on a plateau several weeks' journey upstream. There, the Ardu folk had dwelled since the beginning of the world, or so their shamans told them. They were the chosen of the forest gods, and thus they were allowed to keep their tails while all other peoples lost these precious, beautiful attributes.

Bazil was much amused by this concept. Relkin was left wondering. Could this really be true? Could the Old Gods have made this sort of bargain with the Ardu? Relkin had been exposed to too much great magic in his short life to be really sure of anything. He tended to call on the Old Gods, the deities of Veronath, like Asgah and Caymo, except in the tightest spots, and then he was likely to ask the Great Mother for her help, too. He wasn't sure, however, if the rule of the Old Gods extended here to this far-off land. As for tails and no-tails, this was a problem he had never encountered before.

Furthermore, the existence of tails on the Ardu left him wondering what other variations on the human norm there might be in the world. He had never heard of tailed people. Might there be folk with three legs, or four, and standing eight feet tall? What about two heads?

None of this bothered Bazil. The gods of dragonkind were immutable, ancient, harsh in the rule of the Egg. Humans were a comic turn, very new in the world. His amusement continued unabated.

However, amusement faded as Lumbee's story continued.

The uniqueness of the Ardu had, in fact, become their undoing once travelers from the southern cities broke into their isolated world. Lumbee was unsure exactly how long ago that had been, but thought it had been in the time of her great-grandmother. Since then slavetakers from the south had haunted the forest of the Ardu, snatching anyone they could catch and taking them away in chains to sell in the rich markets of the southern cities. Especially in the dread city of Mirchaz. Even speaking that dreadful name caused Lumbee to break into tears.

So it had been with her more immediate family. First some of them had been taken while out hunting. They knew this because Ommi, Norwul, and Uncle Durs didn't come home one day. Lumbee's father, Uys, then moved their camp to the lake of two rivers, where the honto trees were in fruit. The family ate well, but worried about the missing men. Then came the slavers, tracking them with dogs, surrounding the camp and attacking at dawn. The family had been taken, including her mother, Erris, and no doubt were soon to be sent south as slaves.

Lumbee had been left drifting down the river to the north, preparing herself for death before she lost consciousness.

Relkin and the dragon had heard many terrible tales during their time, but this struck home in a way that many had not. Their eyes met in a grim, nonverbal communication.

Later, when they went to check the nets, they spoke.

"I know what you are thinking, boy. I am thinking the same thing."

"I have been thinking about it, Baz. I know the Lady would want us to help her. The Lady hates slavery more than anything. She would do it."

"Then we agree. Question is, how?"

"Build a boat."

"Boy know how to build a boat?"

"Not yet."

The next few weeks brought some surprises.

The first boat wasn't strong enough. Relkin had attempted to make rough planks by splitting a certain type of conifer. These balks of wood were then held together with wooden pegs made laboriously from a much harder type of wood. Lumbee assisted in making the pegs and scouting the forest for the right kind of trees. A few pieces were taken out of Lumbee's boat and used intact in the new one.

Now healed and fit, Lumbee came into her element in the trees. She could climb almost as fast as a monkey, and her strong, effective tail was put to constant use. Relkin found himself quite outmatched when it came to climbing trees, something that he'd always prided himself on since boyhood. It took a little getting used to, for not only was he outmatched at tree climbing, but by a girl.

Still, they worked well together. Lumbee found useful trees. Bazil hewed them down with Ecator and all three strove to haul them out and split them. The effort took a month of hard work before they finally floated the boat, a flat-bottomed scow. It was crude and tended to list a little to one side, but it was beautiful to their eyes as it floated there, moored by a thick piece of vine. Relkin spent an hour just gazing at it in slightly smug self-satisfaction. It was the best thing he had ever built.

Alas, the next morning it broke under the dragon's weight, the pegs separating, the planks coming apart, and the whole thing collapsing, leaving them swimming in the wreckage.

With frantic efforts, Relkin saved as much as he could from the wreck and started anew. The second boat was larger and cruder, a narrow raft of logs tightly bound together, with a prow stuck on the front made from salvaged parts of the first boat. This boat stood up to the test of Bazil's weight.

There was a mast, a yard, and a single sail that they made up binding together strips of bark into a square, flexible mat. This became the base on which Relkin poured layers of latex-rich sap from a tree with large dark leaves. Lumbee had exclaimed with delight upon finding some of these trees and immediately began the process of making rubber, a material that her people used extensively in mats, storage containers, and the like. The resulting latex was flexible and waterproof and their sail could be rolled up quickly to the yard when the wind became unfavorable.

Relkin had never encountered latex before and was much impressed with this material.

After experiments showed the need, they made a keel board by weaving together stout saplings into a very stiff mat. They cut a space for it to be raised and lowered through a gap between the central logs.

The effect of the sail with a wind coming directly upstream was quite good, enough to overcome the current and allow them to gain some way and move slowly through the water. By rigging the yard on the mast and adjusting the crude sail, they could also make some way on winds that were not quite directly from behind the boat. Any other kind of wind had them in trouble, however, and forced the sail to be rolled up. Bazil had to provide the motive power then, with Relkin and Lumbee steering with oars set in the prow.

Bazil's huge paddle was made from woven sapling material, with sheets of liquid latex poured over it and dried in the sun. As soon as each sheet was dry, another would be added. After a while there was a thick coating of crude rubber around the head of the paddle. The handle was a six-inch-wide tree trunk, which Bazil had cut and trimmed with Ecator.

It was the attachments that were the problem. The crudely made vine rope tended to give way under the heavy stresses of paddling. Eventually Relkin reworked it all with sinew and coated the whole thing with latex. The latex wore off quickly and Bazil complained of the smell, but it partially solved the attachment crisis and they continued to make slow but steady progress up the river.

In the mornings there was often a breeze heading inland from the sea and they were usually able to harness the wind and use it to ride many miles upriver. This wind would die in the heat of the day and they would rest, laying up and preparing food. In the later part of the afternoon they would paddle until the sun was well down in the sky. Then they would find a campsite and immediately gather all the brush and driftwood they could find, which was always considerable. No one had combed it out before themselves. This was unexplored territory, the very heartland of the Lands of Terror.

While the fire was burning high, they dug their cook pit and later filled it with hot rocks and glowing coals. They would roast fish and bake the tree fruits that Lumbee selected, mostly a greenish pod the size of a coconut but with a soft outer skin. Raw, these fruits smelled sour and almost rotten; baked, they had a pleasant nutty smell and a bland taste. They were quite common and easy to collect. Groves of these trees would appear in certain regions along the bank and the travelers would heave to beside them and collect the fruit for an hour or two.

As they moved inland, out of the district they'd previously emptied of predators, their camps were once again visited at night by aggressive beasts. Many were deterred by the improved bomas surrounding their camps. Relkin had learned to use thorn tree saplings as long spines jutting out of the main mass of twisted vines, branches, brush, and small trees that they piled up every night. But now and then a large, particularly aggressive specimen, often one of the red-brown type, would force its way in and then Bazil would slay it with Ecator. They always had good warning of these eruptions, first from growls and snarls as the heavy beast struggled with the outer part of the boma, then the crushing and crashing as it forced its way in.

As before, Bazil found that these beasts were far more aggressive than they were intelligent. They were fierce and terribly active, but their form of attack was fixed, just a few basic instinctual moves. The big head would bob, the neck muscles bunching behind it. The beast would lurch forward and bring the jaw around in a hook for the wyvern's throat or flank. In so doing, they opened themselves perfectly for decapitation with the dragonsword.

These beasts were added to the travelers' larder. Baked whole and rolled in ashes to preserve them from flies, their powerful haunches were sufficient to feed them all very well at the end of the day. The meat was chewy but satisfying and had a taste like a gamy chicken. They ate tremendous meals, and slept soundly thereafter. The starved look had long since given way to a robust good health. Lumbee's wound had completely healed weeks before. Bazil was even putting on a little weight.

As they traveled, so their exchange of languages went on, and with them descriptions of two utterly different and separate worlds: the greater world outside, from which came Relkin and Bazil, and the forest world that was Lumbee's.

Lumbee told them the names for the trees, and the wild beasts, and the birds, and various insects, and a thousand other things. Slowly the names solidified in Relkin's memory. The "chai" tree, the "medor" tree, the "chich" ants—the list was long.

Some were easier to recall than others. For instance, the big red-brown carnivores were called "pujish." In fact, all carnivore beasts were pujish of some kind, but the red-browns were the archetype because they were the largest and fiercest.

The smaller, yellow-skinned killers that hunted in packs were called "kemma wan," which translated as "deadly lizards," although Relkin was sure they weren't lizards; they were far too active and their flesh was warm to the touch when they were freshly killed. Still, he had no argument with the "deadly" designation.
Deadly
was a popular description of things, it seemed. Many other things in the jungle were "ke"—they were ke-this and ke-that, and that meant they must be avoided. Lumbee repeated these things in the same tone in which they had been taught to her when she was a little girl.

Whole regions were riddled with "ke," and were best avoided. "Ke" was a powerful force in the Ardu universe, as Relkin soon came to realize. Swampy, low-lying areas, covered in rushes, were particularly strong reservoirs of "ke," and Relkin understood that this was a reference to the plague that had felled the Legions during their trip down the great river. For days the entire army had been paralyzed by fever and delirium. They had survived only by the slimmest margin when the great red-browns forced their way in past the failing lines of dragonboys and the few fit men still able to stand. A single dragon had awoken from near-coma just in time.

All pujish were ke, of course, but in varying degrees, with the red-brown pujish as the strongest and other, smaller varieties having less ke about them, except for the yellow-skinned killers, which had almost as much as the red-brown pujish.

In exchange for these insights into the ancient forest world, Relkin told Lumbee about the cities of the Argonath, and then about the land of Kenor, with its fierce winters, where he and the dragon had served for much of the past few years.

Her eyes went wide as he described ice and snow and the wintry blasts that sent a chill right through a Kenor freecoat. She was aghast at the thought of water freezing solid and of all the trees losing their leaves and "dying" for the winter.

She had many questions, a great many.

Then there were the cities.

He told her about Marneri, the white city on the strand overlooking the blue waters of the sound, the queen of the Argonath cities. He told her about Foluran Hill, with its great houses and busy shops and the great, somber Tower of Guard that stood at the top of Tower Street and dominated the whole city spread out below. He told her of the fairs and the festivals, like Fundament Day, which was everyone's favorite.

Lumbee was familiar with the general concept of a city, a place of power where many people came from, but she had no clear idea of what a city actually looked like. The Ardu were semi-nomadic, moving about their family and kin group ranges on an annual trek with migrations to the land of summer camps, where they roamed as they waited for the monsoons. Then they would migrate up to the plains and hunt for three-horns. They would salt and dry the meat to see them through the journey back to the summer camp region in the south. There were only just enough of the Ardu to live in balance with the land and the game animals that they lived off. They had no villages, no towns, no large buildings at all.

What cities she had heard of previously had all been located far to the south and were led by the dreadful name Mirchaz, which stood for all that was unholy in Lumbee's life. Just the sound of the name brought a tremor to her lip and filled her eyes with angry tears.

At such moments Relkin had a strong urge to take her in his arms and comfort her physically. She was beautiful and he was attracted to her. Moreover, he had hardly seen a woman in months. These desires disturbed him deeply.

Relkin still loved Eilsa Ranardaughter. And if he ever came home alive he would wed her, if she would still have him. This was a bedrock conviction, the foundations of the edifice of the future life he had built in his imagination. However, Eilsa was thousands of miles away. He had not seen her in almost a year and it was possible he would never see her again.