The Book of Earth (28 page)

HOW CAN A LIE BE RIGHTEOUS? Erde scrawled stubbornly.

“When it will forward the righteous cause.” The knight watched her consider this, then added, “Perhaps expedient is more accurate, the
expedient
lie. Does that rest better with your conscience, my lady?”

Erde shook her head.

“You see no difference between our little lie that might save your life and the great big lie Fra Guill is using to raise up an army against you? An army, child! An
army!
”

F.G. IS NOT RIGHTEOUS.

“And I am? Well, thank you for that, at least. I do consider myself a righteous man, imperfect but at least trying to do what’s right.”

WHAT IS RIGHT?

“Phew! You need a priest, not an old soldier! I mean, a real priest.” Hal looked so confounded that Erde finally had an inkling of how the dragon must feel when she could offer nothing profound enough to answer one of his all-encompassing questions. With a look of apology, she wiped the dirt smooth and rephrased her thought.

I AM NOT RIGHTEOUS.

He smiled. “Why ever not? Did you steal a few too many sweets or mumble your prayers at Sunday mass?”

His gentle condescension provoked her pride and a scowl. Impulsively, she wrote, I KILLED A MAN.

Hal read, then glanced up at her quickly. “You did? When?”

ESCAPING.

“Killed? Not just wounded or . . .”

She underlined ‘killed,’ and lifted Alla’s dagger briefly from its sheath.

“So it’s not all tall tales they’re spreading.”

Erde placed her palm over the offending word. She was surprised what a relief it was to tell him at last, to admit her dreadful crime, the crime that burdened her so that each day she trudged along carrying the weight of two. Three, if she counted Alla. Three deaths? Was it three deaths on her conscience? Erde shook her head to clear a sudden fog of confusion. Why did she think it was three when she could only remember Georg and Alla?

“Would this man you . . . killed have prevented your escape?”

She nodded, still distracted.

“Was escape necessary to your survival?”

Erde made herself focus on him. She could tell where his argument was going and did not want him rationalizing for her. She’d hoped he would scold her, or at least glare at her disapprovingly, this “righteous” man. Then she could feel somewhat punished for her sin. But he was taking it ever so calmly. She tried to imagine what penance Tor Alte’s chaplain would have exacted in response to such a confession.

“Would this man you killed have hurt you to prevent your escape?”

Erde shuddered at the memory of what he would have done, his invasive touching and clutching, which brought back vividly the memory of what she
had
done. Hal saw tears well in her eyes. He picked a bit of brush to sweep her confession into blank forgiving dust.

Then he said, “Dear girl, just as there can be a righteous lie, there can be a righteous killing. Not a mere expedient, but the only right choice given the circumstances. Self-defense. What would the Dragon have done if his Guide had died before finding him? These are choices we must make, and there will be many such. Then we live with the burden that righteousness has placed on us for acting for its sake. I wish I could tell you that my own experience has been otherwise. Meanwhile . . .” He reached over and clasped her shoulder warmly. “Congratulations. We’ll make a soldier out of you yet!”

And Erde thought,
I should have known he’d take it that way.
Even so, she knew his answer, however practical, was one she would never be entirely comfortable with.

T
hey traveled through the night, a long shallow climb into lightly wooded hills where narrow streams fell back along curving lowland glens toward the lake. Despite all indications that Griff meant what he said and could be trusted, Hal wanted to put as much distance as possible between them and the baron’s disaffected huntsman. Once he made them freeze, like deer in torchlight, thinking he’d heard the rattle of harness and armor moving past in a valley below them. Skittish, he skirted the open meadows, where the grass was tall and damp, taking the time to go the long way around within the deeper shadow of the tree line. He was not happy that the she-goat lagged so far behind, catching up on her grazing while there was good grass to be had.

“But I’d sure like a moon tomorrow to see our way by, when the going really gets rough,” he remarked as they rested beneath a large oak, the biggest Erde had ever seen. In the darkness, she could only guess at its true size from the great girth of its trunk. Hal laughed as she stretched her arms around it.

“I can tell you’re a mountain girl. This tree’s a midget compared to some of the oldsters along the river near Erfurt.”

Erde was content with just the sighing sound of it. She wandered around trying to reach a lower branch. She thought its leaves must be huge, in scale with the trunk, for it to make so heavy and melancholic a rustling.

The hills got steeper as they went on, and the trees closer together. It also got colder. When they finally made camp
at first-light, Hal insisted on their weapons practice, and Erde was willing to give up the last of her strength to it because she stayed warmer when she was moving than when she sat still. Afterward, she was too tired to struggle with the stale bread and dried venison that was all that remained of their food supplies. She fell asleep propped up against the dragon’s side, with a cup of goat’s milk in her hand. Hal eased the chased silver out of her grip and drained the milk himself, then laid her wool cloak over her and let her sleep.

He retired to his bedroll and sat staring at the little cup, letting the gray morning light swell until he could make out the Weisstrasse coat-of-arms embossed on its side. He traced the emblem with his fingertip, then sighed and tossed the cup back in his pack.

*   *   *

Earth dreamed again that sleep-time, more vividly than he had since Hal had joined them. The dream seemed as real to Erde as her own life, and the Summoning took on a new urgency. Later, she recalled an endless enclosing maze of corridors, and knew it was a city, though unlike any city she had ever imagined. The walls were hard and cold and shining dully like the blade of a knife. Where the passages turned, the corners were as sharp as broken glass. The floor was a grid of metal strips, laid with spaces between, like rows and rows of tiny windows, so that Erde could see through them into the vast and roaring distance below. As always, there was the bitter smell, and the smoke and clang of the forge or something like it, so much more acrid and more deafening than the forge she knew at home.

For the first time, she saw herself and the dragon in the dream together, as if she were watching it from outside, yet still hurrying down the corridors, her lungs aching, the metallic air sharp on her tongue, desperate to get Somewhere, only they didn’t know where. The voice of the Summoner rang in their ears like a cry of pain.

Ahead, another razor-edged corner, then the corridor darkened and stretched away for an endless distance, as straight as a stone mason’s plumb line. They knew that the Summoner was at the end of that distance, and the dragon began to run, so fast that Erde could not keep up. She
snatched at him, caught hold of the end of his stubby tail, and was jerked off her feet to be carried aloft behind him, like a battle pennant.

In the nearer distance, the corridor bloomed with sudden brightness. A man of light on a horse of fire, an armored knight with a shining silvered lance, wreathed in glowing smoke. He wore a golden circlet on his helmet, a crown. His visor was down. She was grateful that she could not see his face, for rays of incandescence leaked through the ventings and she knew his face would blind her. His shield, a perfect circle, bore a strange emblem, rather like a spiraled compass rose, dividing it into four nested arcs like the bowls of spoons lying one against the other. Again, these spaces were like separate window openings. Through one, Erde saw trees and rolling meadows; through another, green water and foam-crested waves. The third arc showed a dark mountain ablaze with a fountain of fire, and beyond the fourth was only air, as blue and empty as the sky.

She urged the dragon onward, to get a closer look. But as they sped toward the unknown knight, he seemed to get farther away, shrinking like a dying flame until he was only a pinpoint, as tiny and brilliant as a star. The bright circle of his crown persisted momentarily, and then he was gone. As his light faded in the darkening corridor, the Summoner shrieked and moaned like a mad thing, and the walls trembled with her grief.

Erde woke to the rending cries of the woman she’d seen burned at the stake. Half in, half out of dream, she realized it was the she-goat, bleating in terror. Across the clearing, Hal swung upright on his bedroll with a shouted oath of surprise. A harsh red dusk was falling. The trees thrashed violently, though there was no wind. Erde thought the big oak would uproot itself. The ground heaved beneath them.

The dragon was still deep in his dreaming. Erde shouted him awake with a barrage of thought. He stirred, lifted his head, and the ground quieted.

Hal continued swearing until he’d gotten hold of himself, then he and Erde stared at each other across the strewn contents of the mule packs, scattered by the rolling of the ground.

“Terra is suddenly not so firma,” he remarked at length.
“Is it over?” He groaned to his feet, dusting himself off unnecessarily. He looked around, noted the she-goat struggling up on wobbly knees by the base of the big oak. “Earthquake. Must be.” He coughed, then shrugged. “I’ve heard of them happening farther south, but here . . . ? Where’s the Mule, I wonder?”

Erde rolled over and hugged the dragon’s rough-skinned foreleg. His golden eyes were as wide as she’d ever seen them, and he was shaking.

—
Earth, you were dreaming again.

His brain still racked with nightmare, Earth relayed an apology.

—
No, it’s all right, only . . . the ground moved.

Earth agreed that it had.

Erde sat back on her heels, studying him pensively. The obvious, sensible explanation was that the agitation of the ground had sparked the trembling in the dragon’s dream. But she’d been sure when she awoke that it was the other way around. She cleared a patch of dirt and tried the idea out on Hal.

“Yeah, he was dreaming . . . And?”

THE GROUND MOVED.

“So?” He looked around, whistling for the mule.

Erde added HE DREAMED at the beginning of the phrase.

Hal licked his lips, looked at the dragon, looked at her. “What are you saying?”

She shrugged, then put a period after HE DREAMED.

“Oh, no. No, no, no. Not possible. The earth does not move to any command but God’s, not even for dragons.”

NAMED EARTH, Erde scrawled, unable to stop herself. Then to keep from feeling completely crazy, she added a question mark.

“Earth . . . quake. Hmm.” Hal grew thoughtful, then with a flick of his eyebrows, dismissed the notion as insane. “What does
he
say?”

HE DOESN’T REMEMBER. HE WAS

Hal stayed her hand. “I know, I know—he was asleep.”

Erde nodded.

The knight rolled his eyes and went off in search of his mule.

*   *   *

Earth was skittish that evening. First he wanted to stay in the oak clearing and not move until they’d discussed his dream in lengthy detail. When Hal insisted it was perfectly normal to walk and discuss at the same time, the dragon came along, but he stuck very close to Erde, crowding her sometimes dangerously as they moved into the dense and rocky woodlands of the upper hills.

Erde took extra care to avoid getting stepped on, and did not scold him. She knew how anxious the dream and its aftermath had made him. It had made her anxious, too. She wondered if the sudden sharp chill in the air, like the first tang of winter, had anything to do with the earthquake. Hal was more than usually pensive as well. He had not been granted the moon he’d wished for, and the climb was getting steeper and rockier, their footing increasingly treacherous, with roots and loose stones hidden beneath a slippery layer of leaves. He let the mule lead the way, and they stumbled upward in near blackness, each wrapped in the separate silences of concentration.

But eventually, Hal could contain himself no longer.

“How could he make the ground move?”

His question was rhetorical, since Erde had no way in the darkness to provide an answer, even if she’d had one to offer. She wondered why this latest surprise bothered him particularly, when he was so ready to believe the dragon capable of all sorts of miracles. In fact, expected him to be. Erde wished the knight would stop focusing on what a dragon
should
do, and concentrate on what this dragon
could
do, especially while Earth was struggling so hard to discover what his skills were. Hal was like a stern parent disapproving of a brilliant child because its gifts were not as orderly or predictable as he’d like them to be.

Erde suspected that magic was neither orderly nor predictable. She thought it peculiar that the knight seemed to divide the miraculous into categories: this is possible, this isn’t. But she had to keep in mind Hal’s long years studying dragon-lore. When a man has devoted himself that passionately to something, he’s bound to want to see it proven right. Perhaps he just needed enough time with each new bit of information to fit it into his own scheme of things.