Authors: Angus Wells
I nodded and held her as great rolling drumbeats of thunder beat over the castle and lightning flung spearing tongues of pure fulgence at the peaks.
“This is a wild place,” I said.
“A place fit for dragons,” she returned, and laughed, and folded herself against me. “An old world that perhaps shall make a new.”
I said, “I’d find that out. And ere Ennas Day.”
She smiled agreement and cupped her hands about my neck, drawing my face down. Our kiss was fierce: a commitment.
“So,” I declared when at last we tore our lips apart, “do we find Bellek and the others and set this dream to flight?”
But I must curb my impatience a while.
In the days that followed we found Bellek a somewhat furtive host. Oh, he was friendly enough and gave us answers to the questions we hurled at him, like some bombard from those war-engines dead Gahan had ordered built. But there were always things left unexplained, or hints of doubt in answers that seemed honest and clear.
How old he was and how long he’d lived alone, he would not say. He gave us to understand that certain of the female dragons—my lovely Deburah, Kathanria, Anryäle, Peliane—had dreamed of us as long as we had dreamed, unwitting, of them. I think he could not explain this clearly, any more than an ordinary man (and Bellek was by no means ordinary, or any longer quite sane) can explain the substance of his night fancies. They, I gathered, rather than Bellek, had been the
manufacturers of our rescue—it was they had sensed our presence in Trebizar and the danger we faced. Bellek had followed their instincts, when he brought them to us.
He showed us the lairs—natural caves dug deeper into the stone by the bull dragons—where the broods lived. Each bull lorded a harem of some five or six dams, which he guarded with ferocious jealousy, and each dam guarded her nest with no less enthusiasm.
The caves were warm and filled with the scent of the dragons, which was akin to leather drying in the sun, a hint of raw meat. I came close to soiling myself the first time Bellek led us in, past that same huge bull I’d seen caressing Deburah, his hide all yellow and black mottlings, not unlike the mountain cats that inhabit the forests of the massif.
He sat proud on the ledge before the cave, talons and teeth busy as he preened. He was vast, far larger than the dams, and as we approached, he fixed us with his yellow eyes and spread his wings and opened his jaws in rampant display of sword-blade teeth. He hissed. I felt his suspicion and halted as Bellek raised a warning hand. I heard Rwyan gasp in naked wonder, and from behind me Urt’s small cry. I looked back and saw Tezdal clutch the Changed’s shoulder. The Sky Lord did not flinch, only met the dragon’s stare with his own.
Communication with dragons is not verbal, and their minds do not follow those tracks ours take. Bellek did not speak, but I found my head filled with … emotions, images—I can tell it no better. The Dragonmaster urged the bull to calm; he radiated a plea that we be granted entry to this magnificent place, that we might marvel at the bull’s harem, which was irrevocable proof of his greatness. From the dragon came a sending of pleasure, of pride and agreement: we were allowed entry.
We walked under the shadows of his wings. His breath was hot and meaty. I looked into his eye and shaped a thought of obeisance: it was not difficult. I felt in return strength, permission. I understood his name was Taziel. I walked past and moved away from Rwyan as a spiritual tugging too powerful to ignore governed my steps. Rwyan seemed scarcely to notice: she was moving toward Anryäle even as I went to Deburah.
My—almost, I say,
love
—crouched upon her nest. She
turned her head toward me, and I felt beckoned. I climbed the ragged stone that brought me to her perch and saw the egg she coddled. It lay upon a bed of branches and torn hides not unlike the nest of a bird. It was pure white, veined with a tracery of red, and high as my waist. I understood that I was allowed to touch it: I did and smiled as I felt the pulsing heartbeat within. It was slow and steady as a metronome, and I understood from Deburah that it should hatch within the year, and be a bull, and mighty as his father.
I felt awash with love. I touched Deburah’s cheek, and she turned her head against my hand, almost pitching me from the nest. I stumbled against the leg she thrust out to catch me and leaned against her shoulder.
Into my mind came the thought:
Shall we fly soon? Shall we hunt?
I answered,
Yes. Soon,
and got back such pleasure as makes the finest wine nothing. I left the cave dazed. Nor was Rwyan in better state. (That night we made love with a passion that left us both as weary as exhilarated: the communion of dragons and Dragonmasters heightens the senses.)
Bellek took us on to other caves. This mountain—this Dragoncastle!—was riddled with them. Peliane sat an empty nest in the first, and we others stood back as Tezdal went to her, and looked her in the eye, and bowed formally as if he attended some high-born lady in the courts of Ahn-feshang.
Then I saw something that we neither of us ever mentioned. I had never thought to see it, not since he told Rwyan and me of Retze’s death. I saw Tezdal shed tears. They ran ignored down his cheeks, and from Peliane I felt an outpouring of sympathy and compassion. I watched as Tezdal stepped blindly toward her and raised his arms, as if he’d fling them about her neck. She ducked her massive head and swung it close, so that he stood leaning against her, his face pressed to her cheek.
Into my ear, Rwyan whispered, “Tezdal shall be with us, I think.”
I only nodded and held her close. I thought my Sky Lord friend had found some other bond to fill that vacuum in his life. I thought he should put the Way of Honor behind him now. I hoped it should be so.
Of Urt I was far less sure.
I saw the sweat that beaded his face despite the cold that
gripped the mountainside between the eaves as we went to where Kathanria built her empty nest. (Dragons mate frequently but are seldom impregnated. Their gestation periods are counted in years, and the production of an egg is a rare and marvelous event. My Deburah was special in this, as in so many other ways.) He shuddered as we entered under the watchful eye of a bull striped bloody red and dark green. He looked about at the dams that studied us from their ledges. I thought he might turn and run, but then he made a sound that came from deep in his chest and stumbled over the bone-littered floor to climb toward Kathanria. He seemed not entirely willing but rather compelled by an emotion that overrode his fear. He seemed to me like some gamblers I’d known in Durbrecht—afraid of the losses their gaming might bring but incapable of resisting the temptation. He seemed almost to fight himself as he climbed the path to the dragon’s nest.
Then Kathanria fixed him with her eye and raised a paw that swept him to her cheek, whether he be willing or not. And I heard Urt moan and saw him lie against her like a puppy finding its dam.
“Urt, too,” I whispered into Rwyan’s ear. “Soon, I think.”
But should it be soon enough? Could we learn so much in time? I saw that fateful Ennas Day loom ever closer, a threatening reef in the sea of my ambition, and I could only curb my impatience and hope it should be in time.
We saw the winter out in the Dragoncastle. We saw such snows fall as I’d not ever seen, or imagined. We learned to saddle our bond-mates—even Urt, though he was slow to overcome his innate terror, for all Kathanria’s sendings of comfort and confidence—and we learned to ask their cooperation. Ever that–to
ask;
never to command—and that alone was hard enough for folk better accustomed to heeling horses into direction, with use of bridle and bit. I was minded of my gray mare (was she yet hale? I hoped she was) as I learned to
request
of Deburah that she go where I’d have her fly.
But what glory to sit aback a dragon and vaunt the heavens. To soar above the clouds that dusted the valleys with
snow and see the high blue sky, the sun that rode its path from east to west, invisible to those below us.
And to hunt!
Oh, I came to understand the joy of that. To loft the sky on slow-beating wings, alert to those beating hearts below, the warmth of pulsing blood. To swoop over the forests, searching hungry. To find the one chosen and plummet, claws poised to snatch and slay. To fold our wings and drop, the air howling past us. To anticipate the evasions, avoid the crags and trees our quarry sought to hide in, and take it. Swift! A single pounce, and beat our wings to rise again, triumphant. I came to understand the challenge it must be to contest with sorcerers for mastery of the sky. I grew impatient to bring my Deburah south. I found a taste for bloody meat: I changed.
For better or for worse, I’ll not say. I was carried on a flood of belief, of trust in Deburah and the attainment of all my hopes. I know that Urt and Tezdal came to share the dream and joined my loves and I in its shaping. I think we all changed then, that long winter in the Forgotten Country, and was that wrong, I give you Rwyan’s answer: it was the pattern. Did we change, it was not for lust of power—though whatever gods exist know we came to own that commodity in full enough measure—but rather for desire of some calmer order in face of the chaos men bring.
The dragons changed my thinking. They were fleshed creatures and magical both. They ate those crystals that waste Truemen and drive Changed mad, but they suffered no such fate themselves. They held communion with those elemental spirits that the Attul-ki sought to control and master, to bend to their will; but the dragons knew them as cohabitors, as other, equal beings. The dragons are different. I think they are likely wiser than we men, True or Changed, Ahn or Dhar. And we who consort with them are likely made different by such proximity to them and those strange stones that even now I cannot pretend to understand.
We learned to ride the dragons. We explored the Dragoncastle, and that
of
itself could make a tale.
It was no keep, this place, but rather a town, a city, built into and about the mountain. Only great magic could have shaped those courts and halls and yards, those cleft-spanning bridges, the winding corridors and the multitude of chambers,
large and small. I questioned Bellek on this, but he proved evasive and left us mostly to guess the manner of the making and the numbers that must once have inhabited the warren.
Memory of magic lingered still, side by side with ruin and decrepitude. A lightless passage all draped with spiders’ webs and paved with rats’ droppings was likely to emerge onto a plaza large as any in Durbrecht and clean as if new-swept, where neither wind nor rain nor snow gained entry but was held off by the power that still lingered there. Or a square all disrupted by roots and ivy, where birds left reminders of their springtime nesting, would offer us a rotted door beyond which lay pristine, dustless chambers. We found halls as great as that in which we ate and balconies that wound vertiginous along the mountain’s flanks. There were manufactories filled with rusted machinery I did not comprehend; others in which great wheels and cogs turned silently, glistening with oil, untouched by time and entirely inexplicable. We saw armories filled with rusted weapons and antique battle gear; rooms where dust and cobwebs hid the contents, and rooms that might have been only recently vacated. There were salons where tapestries hung rotted and gnawed by mice, alive with insects; and others where the draperies were as bright as if the weaving were but yesterday finished.
I spent much time studying these, but all they told me was that once men had ridden dragons and lived here happy, it seemed. I saw no evidence of any children, but I thought little of that, then.
We investigated Bellek’s kitchens, and Rwyan voiced her disapproval and used her own talent to restore all there to pristine cleanliness. After, she and Urt and I (Tezdal had no knowledge at all of the culinary arts) took over the preparation of our meals.
We met with the Changed who farmed the valleys. We gave them meat that winter and took in return Bellek’s tithe of their produce. It was a fair exchange, and none of them feared the dragons, but rather saw them as fellow inhabitants of this wild land. We spent days amongst them. Urt was first amazed that they showed no fear of our coming, and then entranced by the life they led, under the shadow of the dragons’ wings. They laughed at his doubts and told him
they had freedom here, from Truemen and war and Allanyn. He was surprised they recognized her designs, and they no less that he’d not seen them.
Ere long, he came to wholehearted support of our cause.
Tezdal was harder to persuade.
The Sky Lord was come to the same communion with Peliane as I had with Deburah: he loved her. But he was not yet to be convinced he should bring her against his Kho’rabi brethren.
“You ask too much of me,” he said. “You ask that I gainsay those vows that shaped me. I cannot expect that you understand what it is to be Kho’rabi, but you know that in my language that means ‘the Dedicated,’ and that is what we are—dedicated to the reconquest of our Homeland.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but he raised a hand to halt me, and so dour was his dark face, I held my tongue. I had known him long enough now I might judge his moods, and for some while he had been sunk in melancholy introspection. Indeed, the only time I saw him happy was in company with Peliane. Oh, he remained civil—his manners were ever better than mine—and he acknowledged the debt he felt to Rwyan, the friendship that had grown between us, and between him and Urt. But a worm of doubt had been chewing at his soul since first we came to the Dragoncastle and he deemed Rwyan safe. I had endeavored to speak with him of such matters, and so had Rwyan, but he would not, or could not, and gave us only responses as evasive as Bellek’s. This was the first time he showed any willingness to discuss it openly, and so I sat silent as he continued.
“You cannot understand,” he said. “You Truemen Dhar came down into Kellambek with your magic and your swords, and you made my people slaves—those you did not slay. You brought your one god and mocked the Three—you took away my people’s heritage and ground us down under your heel. But Attul gave us back our hope and showed us the way east, to the islands of Ahn-feshang; and then the Three gave us those gifts I’ve told you of, that we might take back what is rightfully ours. The Attul-ki show us the way now, and we Kho’rabi yearn for the reconquest—what you call the Great Coming.