The Book of Earth (29 page)

Sure enough, half a mile later, he cleared his throat tentatively.
“Well. Let’s say it’s possible. Maybe it is. If it is, is it something he can control?”

She did not know, and neither did the dragon.

And later, she could hear the ghost of a smile in his voice. “You think he’ll be practicing moving the earth over and over again, like he does with becoming invisible?”

Erde did know the answer to that one. The quake had terrified Earth. He had no desire to feel the ground move again just yet, or even to attempt doing it on purpose. Mostly, he wanted to think about it and what it meant and, to Erde’s dismay, ask her a million other questions that she couldn’t answer.

*   *   *

After a rest and a meal break, their ascent grew so sharp that in places Erde had to haul herself upward with her hands. But the trees thinned and the moon at last made a fitful appearance, slipping in and out of slow-drifting veils of cloud. Their route lay over solid rock now, pale ledges each the size of a castle yard, like a vast staircase aspiring to be a mountain. Small trees huddled in hollows where soil had gathered. Tufts of brush bunched in the seams and cracks, and here and there thin grass softened the weathered granite.

The dragon hated the climbing. His thick-limbed body was not built for hauling its own great weight straight upward for hour after hour. His gleaming ivory claws were not meant for gripping stone. He gave Erde to understand that he was sure there was a better way to travel, if only he could remember what it was. She urged him to try, but he could only picture himself first in one place and then in another, with no idea of how he might actually accomplish getting there. Erde worried that he might be feeling bad about his lack of wings—he’d heard Hal complain about it often enough. It occurred to her as she urged him up a particularly steep ledge that each of them was defective in some vital way: Earth had no wings, she had no voice. It was probably why they had ended up together.

The thought made her sigh, and she was tired of sighing. A sigh was an irritatingly melancholy sound but the only one besides a cough or a sneeze that she could still produce. She decided she would ask the knight to teach her how to
whistle, something even her grandmother had not allowed her to do.

“Ladies do not whistle,” the baroness had always insisted when Erde expressed envy of the stable boys. They could hear a tune once, then whistle it again whenever they wanted to. Erde understood that it might not be appropriate for ladies to whistle in public, but wouldn’t it be a good thing to know how to do, to amuse yourself when you were alone? Not that she’d spent much time alone growing up in Tor Alte. That was another thing ladies did not do. If she wasn’t with Alla or the baroness, there was Fricca, or some chambermaid. There was always somebody watching, telling her what to do and what not to do.

She thought about all this as they topped a particularly barren rise. The way they’d come spread out behind them in an endless march of nighttime hills glazed with moonlight. Far off, the ghostly shimmer of the lake—and beyond . . . ? Now that Gerrasch had mentioned a city, she was coming to believe that there might actually be such a gathering place for mages. Idly, she conjured the slim spires of her fantasy, to glow like a mirage on the horizon. She felt the dragon in her mind, imaging it with her, and saw its towers grow more real before her very eyes under the power of his belief in it. The breeze gusting across the ledge was damp and raw with chill, but Erde was conscious of how deeply she could breathe, of the sense of lift and freedom that came from being surrounded by all that open space. She felt hopeful. Like a bird must feel, just before taking wing. There were advantages to leaving home, she realized, beyond the obvious one of her survival. She doubted if Hal would ever say, “Ladies do not whistle.” Most ladies did not learn to use a sword, either.

From the crags ahead came a sudden distant yowl. The mule’s long ears flicked, and the she-goat glanced up sharply from the bush she was eating. The mirage towers vanished, leaving only a darkly crenelated, threatening horizon.

“Wildcat,” noted Hal. “Best stick close from now on. We’re not the only hungry creatures out prowling these hills tonight.”

Erde shrugged her cloak more tightly about her shoulders.
Free or not, she wondered if she would ever be warm again.

*   *   *

The intemperate yowl of the cat seemed to follow them, fading in and out with the rush of the wind as they struggled over ledge and through gorge. The mountain brush was as rough as the rock. Erde’s cheeks and lips were chapped from the icy gusts. Her hands stung with scrapes and scratches and the brittle ends of thorns. She had thought she was hardened to travel, but her knees and ankles ached from the constant up and down. Hal had never pushed them this punishingly before. For the dragon’s sake as well as for her own, Erde insisted they stop more often than Hal was willing to. Always he would offer a courtly apology for tiring them, then want to be off again the next moment.

“Not much farther,” he’d promise, already in motion up the slope. “Not much farther.” He was tireless, eager, driven, a man with a real destination finally in mind.

She knew they were descending when the wind stopped screaming in her ears, but it still felt as much up as down, and the going did not get any easier. It clouded up again and they lost the little bit of light the moon had offered. Then it began to sleet, a fine blowing frozen mist that invaded Erde’s eyes and nose like needles and melted into the layers of her clothing. Twice she lost her footing in a slide of ice and loose gravel, and went tumbling to the bottom of a slope with Hal shouting after her to grab on to something, anything she could, and the dragon wailing in her brain not to leave him out there alone in the darkness. Each time, after Hal had made his way down to help her up, he reminded her how lucky it was she hadn’t slipped beside the edge of a cliff, and she began to have some notion of how infuriating, even heartless a man can be when in the throes of some particular obsession.

The dragon had begun to mutter, at least Erde had come to think of it as muttering, the peculiar grunting sound he made when he was fretting about something. This time it was a scent his clever nose had caught but could not identify. He tried relaying it to Erde in the same way he sent images, and she recalled how vivid the odors always were
when she shared the dragon’s nightmares. But awake, her mental nose was no more sensitive or sophisticated than her anatomical one, so she was no help to him. Earth kept muttering. Obviously the smell was not going away.

The rain tapered off as the clouds thinned again. Ahead of them rose a rank of tall stones, standing almost upright like a slightly drunken army at attention. The mule disappeared among them and the rest followed. Erde heard Hal cursing under his breath as they threaded almost by feel the narrow alley between towering walls of rock. Then a screech and a bleat behind them stopped him cold.

“It’s that cat! It’s got the goat!”

He whirled to race back to the aid of the she-goat, but the dragon blocked his path. As the goat’s outrage escalated into shrieks of panic, Earth struggled to turn himself around, wrenching his bulk from side to side, his claws grinding uselessly against the rock. The shadowy shape of him bucked and swayed, and for a moment, Erde was convinced she saw him blur and fade, blur and fade, then grow substantial once again. She blinked hard, several times. Perhaps she had stared too long, trying to make him out clearly in the darkness, or perhaps . . .

—
This is no time to go invisible
, she warned him. All she sensed in return was a wall of desperation that also danced in and out of substance, as if Earth’s existence itself was wavering.

Then new pandemonium broke out behind him. The cat yowled in fury. A moment later, the she-goat came scrambling over the dragon’s back, nearly bowling Erde over as she bolted past and collapsed against Hal’s legs. The cat did not follow.

Hal knelt over the goat, feeling for damage. “Bit of a mess here . . . that’s quite a gash there. Be all right if the bleeding stops.” He tried to get her up on her feet but she kept sinking back against him. “Come on now, girl, I can’t be carrying you.”

Earth crowded in, his great head wedged between Erde and the rock wall. Hal stood back, offering what little room he could. The dragon nosed at the goat, sniffing and muttering. In the dark, Erde could not quite tell what he was up to. She worried that he might at last be considering a meal, if only to put the wounded goat out of her misery.

But listening carefully, Erde realized that he was licking her, his huge rough tongue making great doglike swipes across her back, nearly enveloping her horned head and her stick-thin legs. He did not stop until he had licked her all over at least once, and her fur was damp with his saliva. Then he scooped her up in his jaws and stood there, holding her delicately, waiting for the humans to proceed.

“He exhibits a most generous nature,” noted Hal. “Unusual in a dragon to be so sensitive to the needs of lesser creatures.”

Erde knew he was alluding to Earth’s peculiar hunting habits, which were inconvenient if, like the knight, you wished to keep your dragon well fed. But she thought that if dragons were, as Hal claimed, the most perfect of God’s creations on Earth, they very well ought to have generous natures. Unlike Man, or most men anyway, who were—judging from her recent experience—the most imperfect. She did notice that whenever Hal expounded on the nature of a “proper” dragon, even speaking in the arcane language of the dragon-lore, it sounded more like what he’d want a leader of men to be, for instance, the king he served so loyally. High expectations indeed. But a man could not be a dragon, nor a dragon a man. No wonder the knight was so often disappointed in both.

*   *   *

They came down out of the standing stones without further mishap, beyond a few additional scrapes and bruises. The icy rain had stopped. The moon had set, but the sky seemed to be clearing at last. In between the scudding shadows of clouds, a few stars could be seen. They reached level ground, a broad grassy ledge, and Hal whistled to call back the mule. Erde heard water falling over rock somewhere in the darkness.

“We’ll stop here for the rest of the night.” Hal tossed down his shoulder pack and stretched. “We need to get warm, so we’ll risk building a fire, if we can find anything up here to burn.”

Earth lumbered about with the goat suspended in his mouth until he found a spot to his liking. Erde heard him scratching up grass and dirt into a sort of nest to lay her in. When he was done, the goat curled up in it immediately and went to sleep as if drugged.

Erde helped Hal search out stray twigs and branches for the fire, then walked carefully to the edge of the ledge, where the rock sheered away sharply as if cut with a knife. Beyond, she could see nothing but the deepest night, but she sensed a large volume of space just past this pale, white-veined border, and was intrigued by the current of distinctly warmer air rising up out of the void.

When Hal had managed a small fire, she went over and cleared her usual pallet-in-the-dirt.

WARM! she wrote, inscribing an arrow in the direction of the edge.

“Yes,” Hal agreed. “It’s quite remarkable, really.” And then, despite every strategy she could muster, all during the parceling out of their meager meal and until she finally gave in to her exhaustion, he refused to elaborate further.

*   *   *

Erde woke in daylight, curled up between the she-goat and the dragon, conscious of the sound of birds and an unusual sense of well-being. Frost lay white in the hollows of the ledge, but the sun on her shoulder was actually warm. She sat up carefully, to avoid jostling the injured animal. The goat stirred with her and rose easily to her feet. Her eyes were bright and her carriage erect and lively. Her spotted coat gleamed like new-spun wool, with no sign of blood or wounds anywhere. She shook herself like a dog and trotted off toward the sound of falling water.

Erde glanced around for Hal, to bring this new amazement to his attention. Then she caught sight of the view. Scrambling up, she ran to the edge of the ledge to stare in wonder. The dragon roused himself and followed.

A valley spread out beneath them, all green and golden in the softly angled rays of the mid-afternoon sun. Like the valley in her dreams, not the rank nightmares she now shared with the dragon, but from her childhood, her dreams of the “safe place,” the holy landscape, what her grandmother always called Arcadia.

The valley was long and narrow, embraced by a high palisade of rugged hills such as she had just endured. From the rolling prairie far below, sheer cliffs rose abruptly on all sides, to a point level with Erde’s ledge, as if the entire valley had broken free at once and dropped away into the earth. Thin white cataracts plummeted down the cliff face,
then snaked in shining ribbons to meet the river that wound and sparkled between velvety patches of forest dotting the bottom land. Huge flocks of birds rose in arching coordinated flight. Above, a pair of hawks circled. Erde heard their screeching blown on the breeze, but nowhere could she spot a sign of human habitation.

And then there was the warmth, a soft draft like a breath from below, carrying the scents of summer. Earth hunkered down to arch his long neck over the edge. He inhaled deep inquiring breaths. The old image of fat white sheep ghosted into Erde’s head and made her laugh, a soundless explosion of spontaneous joy.

—
It isn’t the Mage City yet, but it’s almost as good
.

Daydreaming succulent sheep, the dragon agreed.

“Ready for a little exercise?” Hal appeared beside them with the practice swords, his hair and beard dripping from a dunk in the waterfall. He waved an arm at the valley, grinning from ear to ear. She had never seen him so pleased. But he still would not tell her where they were or what they’d find, once they’d braved the final precipitous descent.

Erde remembered the goat and dragged him over for a look. Hal’s solicitous inspection grew more amazed and deliberate as he discovered no fresh wounds anywhere, only the occasional pink glow of scar tissue.