Heart of Light (20 page)

This time, Nigel feared Emily was right. The carriage had stopped moving forward and was falling inexorably on its side. He could almost feel the effort of the magicians to hold it upright, causing it to lurch up now and then. But in the end, it would fall, and as full as it was . . . well . . . they might not die, but they would all be wounded, here in the middle of Africa, with no one to rescue them.

Nigel and Emily slid toward the back, as did all their fellow passengers, crushed together against the broad bench that ran across the side of the carriage, where the soldiers had sat, their red coats vivid in the gloom.

The baby cried more shrilly. And in this situation, for the first time since his marriage, Nigel felt the stirring of unabashed desire for his wife. Now that he could no longer protect her, now that he couldn't even feel guilty for lying to her, he could enjoy her.

He dug his hands into her shoulders, pulling her about, so that they faced each other. Their lips joined, and her lips were hot and sweet. He kissed her and hoped to die kissing her, as the train surged and bumped beneath them.

A stray thought told him they were giving an indecent spectacle, but his saner self did not care. He smelled Emily's perfume—lilac and rose. He pressed her close and felt her heart beat against his, her breasts pressed against his chest.

What a fool he'd been. All this was his and he'd not taken it. Fear for his mission and guilt about bringing her to Africa under deception had combined to make his body not function. Now excitement surged through him and desire for Emily burned like molten gold through his veins. He craved her touch and her feel, the silk of her skin, the cinnamon of her breath. His tongue felt hers, sparring against it. Her hair brushed his face.

What a way to die, in the middle of the night, in the middle a mysterious continent, kissing the most beautiful and exotic woman he'd ever met. His wife.

The train groaned then trembled and, slowly, creakingly, righted itself.

People picked themselves up. Stranger muttered apologies to stranger, in a language the other might not understand. The tribesman in a pelt bowed and muttered something that sounded apologetic to an Arab in a sturdy caftan. Yet the screaming hadn't stopped but changed tone, and now indignant voices mingled with it, in Arabic and some in English, demanding to know what the train line was going to do about this and that—a ruined hat, a spoiled basket of food. The people speaking other languages were probably also complaining, but Nigel could not understand them.

He pulled back from Emily, breaking their kiss.

She clung to him, her arms around his shoulders. He took deep breaths. They weren't to die after all. He would have time to show her how much he desired her, how much he loved her.

He gulped the stale air of the train carriage. It stank of sweat and vomit and urine and the irrational fear of a scared mass of humanity penned in the dark.

Someone opened the door on the far side, and a strain of warm night air, perfumed with vegetation, rushed in. Somewhere nearby, water ran.

Nigel adjusted his cravat. “I should go see what's happening,” he said. “I should go see where we stopped and why.”

It seemed to him that Emily looked at him with a disappointed expression.

“I'm a magician,” he said. “I might be able to help.”

They were stopped somewhere between Cairo and Port Said, in the land of Kush. They might be in the middle of the desert, but Nigel could hear water running. More likely they were in one of the oases that, like hopeful flags of life in a desolate landscape, broke the parched despair with some semblance of habitation.

If the train couldn't be made to go any farther, would the company send rescuers for them—perhaps a fresh train? With such a scrape-by operation, it was hard to tell. For all Nigel knew, they didn't own another train, and would be forced to come on foot looking for the stranded passengers. But surely some of the people—he eyed the man in the leopard toga—would know how to survive in the wilderness. It was all a matter of someone's taking charge. Peter surely had some idea how to do it. But where had he gone?

Nigel pulled away from Emily's reaching arms. “I'll go see what's happening,” he said. “I'll be right back.”

He pressed through the door with a massed group of many men, all speaking different languages, but all seemingly addressing each other, full of shared purpose and determination.

They were, as he'd expected, in the middle of a verdant oasis, so thick with vegetation as to be called a jungle. Except that most of the trees seemed to be palms, and the ground vegetation was some sort of high, thin grass.

“Look out,” the conductor yelled in Arabic, and reaching out pulled back three men, Nigel included, so they were more or less hidden in the gloom cast by the vehicle.

“Look out why?” Nigel asked in Arabic.

The man turned and gave Nigel a casual look that, on seeing Nigel's pale hair and skin, turned to a slow inquiry. He removed his large hand with its hairy knuckles from Nigel's middle.

“The dragon,” he said, as though it were self-explanatory.

“Dragon?” Nigel asked.

Both the other men started babbling. One of them spoke a dialect of Arabic from which Nigel could only understand the stray word:
went
and
look
and
blood
and
eat.
The other one was even less helpful. He was a tribesman from deeper into Africa, with dark skin and kinky hair clipped close to his oval-domed head. He spoke just as fast and animatedly as the Arab, moving his long-fingered hands for emphasis, but in a language that Nigel could not begin to fathom. And he punctuated his jabbering with pointing toward the edge of the woods with his short lance.

“Bloody hell,” Nigel said, and immediately repented of the cursing, looking over his shoulder to ensure no women or children had heard it.

Thankfully, another stout Arab behaving with the authority of a railway employee was at the open door to the carriage, forcibly holding the passengers inside and haranguing them in Arabic and broken English.

Nigel looked at the other two men cowering in the darkness outside the carriage, clinging to its shadow for cover. Dragon? There were no dragons in Africa, though there might be beasts that looked like them.

He thought of the dragon that had disrupted their flight over the coast of Spain. Problems with the moving spell on the train. Problems with the spell on the carpetship. Was a dragon following them? But surely, any dragon that had dared fly so blatantly close to a carpetship and its passengers, disrupting commercial flights, would have been hunted down by now.

And if it had escaped, it had surely sought refuge in northern Europe or Asia, where the natives retained enough respect for the beasts to never turn one of their number in.

Why would it have come into Africa, where no dragons had ever lived? And besides, what need had he of a dragon to explain the failure of the Shake and Rattle's moving spells? It was an old thing, working with patched magic. Was it possible that these ignorant, credulous natives had crashed the train and put everyone in this impossible situation because they fancied they saw a threatening beast in the bushes? Oh, he had it. Suddenly he smiled. He was sure they'd read of the dragon disrupting the flight of the carpetship and in their naive innocence had so been expecting a dragon field to interrupt their travel that they'd done something stupid to the moving spells for the train.
That
would be it, for sure.

Nigel had heard from other Englishmen who'd been abroad that natives often behaved in irrational ways. Perhaps they had been right.

The night air felt close and hot. The train tracks stood in a little clearing that must have been hard won from the verdant oasis by railroad workers with sharp blades and shovels. Even then, their respite from encroaching vegetation had been short-lived. Already the vegetation was creeping back, growing nearer and nearer to the train tracks, shooting exuberant green trunks and twining vines close enough that, from where Nigel stood, he could touch them with an extended arm.

Of course, the problem with vegetation growing that close was that it cast shadows and darkness near the railroad as well, so that any movement, anything out of the ordinary, would be magnified in the minds of the conductor and the other railroad men, obviously not very aware of the reality of the world beyond their tribe or squalid huts.

Try as he might, Nigel could see nothing moving in the shadows of the high-canopied trees or even beneath them. He saw no eyes peeking from between the blades of vegetation, nothing threatening.

“There can be no dragon,” he said in Arabic. He tried to take a step toward the jungle and found the railroad man's hand again on his middle, stopping him. Nigel was strong enough to overpower the man, of course, but it wouldn't do to be seen brawling by the side of the train. And even if there was no one to see him, Nigel remembered his father's oft-repeated injunction that wherever a well-born Englishman went, there was England.

“Dragons are an oriental beast,” he said. “A thing of China or India, which you no doubt read about in newspapers and mythical accounts. But they do not occur in Africa. Dracus Horriblis is a creature of—”

“Mister. We know what we saw,” the railroad man said. He spoke in heavily accented English and exhaled an odor of cloves and garlic in Nigel's direction. “There was a dragon. He swept close in front of the train. And the first passenger who ran out of the train—an Englishman like you, sir—was eaten by the beast. I saw it with these very eyes.” And his expression, the way he had insisted on speaking English, all showed disdain for Nigel and his opinion.

But the other Arab shook his head. “We don't know he ate him. Only that the dragon was chasing someone or something.”

The other Arab argued, “No simple man could resist a dragon!”

“You saw a man, but I say it was only an antelope.”

Nigel strode forward, freeing himself from three pairs of arms which struggled to hold him back. The railroad man said something in Arabic that seemed to imply that Allah would punish Nigel for his impudence.

Right then, Nigel would like to see anyone try. As far as he could see, his trip had been interrupted and he—and, worse, Emily—had been exposed to great inconvenience and danger because one of these natives had read or heard a terrifying news story about a dragon.

He tucked his walking stick beneath his arm and made for the shadows of the forest with renewed enthusiasm. There would be nothing there. He'd show these poor natives that there was nothing to fear. If there had been a dragon, if it had eaten a passenger, surely there would be something left at the edge of the forest: blood or guts, spoor or discarded, torn clothes. But there was nothing. Not even any feeling of a strange illusion spell. And the only other Englishmen on the train were the militia men. He was sure none of those had been eaten, or his comrades would be raising a fuss. As Nigel beat at the ground with his stick and pulled up blades of grass and straggling, trailing pieces of ivy, he knew he was doing it more to gratify his annoyance with the natives than to find traces of something he was sure could not be there.

Presently he heard other men edging hesitantly behind him, but it could not make him feel better. Not even when, from the voice, he realized one of them was the Arab railroad man who had detained him before. Looking over his shoulder, he realized that another man had taken over guarding the door and his old acquaintance was now following him around.

“I don't know what happened,” the man said, speaking Arabic again. “But there was a dragon, save as I'm here and breathing—”

Nigel shot him a glare. He looked toward the front of the train, where the insufficient light of the mage-lights affixed there gave the train the impression of a felled beast with baleful, yellow eyes. In that light, it would be easy to mistake a squirrel for a tiger, a lizard for a dragon.

“We must get back under way again,” Nigel said forcefully. “I have a schedule to keep.” Peter had spoken of maybe gaining a day on the Hyena Men. That wasn't very long at all. But it was their own, scant margin of safety.

But the corpulent Arab cast Nigel a dispirited look. “Under way, effendi?” he said, in English again. “We can't. The moving spell has been destroyed. We told you we'll have to wait till a crew comes to repair the spell. Next week, the week after, if we're lucky.”

Nigel patted his jacket, pulled his pipe from his pocket and filled it with tobacco, while thinking that at any rate the spell had broken. But then, it didn't mean there had been a supernatural agency or a magical agent, much less a dragon at work. And it didn't even mean that it had been done recently. It could have been some malicious spell—the work of miscreants a day or more before, after the last train had passed and before this one arrived. Yet—he lit his pipe and inhaled deeply the aromatic smoke—whether it had been a dragon or not, recent or not, the moving spell remained wrecked. And the train remained stopped. For a week, maybe two.

And the Hyena Men would at best be just a day behind.

ALL THE DRAGONS IN THE WORLD