Forged by Fire (16 page)

I hastily finished eating the kadoob tuber I’d dared to withdraw, with meticulous care, out of a saddlebag; Tiwana auntie had insisted we pack food with us, and I was now grateful for her foresight. The starch of the raw vegetable squeaked against my teeth. My escoa craned her neck snakelike over her shoulder to stare at me as I crunched, but I didn’t give her the remains of the tuber. I’d made that mistake moments before, having given her a whole root. She’d rolled the kadoob around her mouth several times, then dropped it, either classifying it as inedible, or because she’d been unable to eat from the pain of her mutilated nares that had been ripped from the barbell through her nose. The tuber had dropped down, down, down into the jungle valley below us, disappearing as a speck into the sea of green leaves.

Wasn’t the root I saw fall. In my mind, I saw a six-year old girl.
I choked on the last of my meal. My escoa gave me a baleful look and turned forward again.
Trying not to look at the wind-tossed green far below, I inched my arm along first one side of the escoa’s neck, then the other, and retrieved the dangling reins. They were attached to the makeshift neck halter the dragonmaster had rigged. I didn’t know if the escoa would obey any com mands given her via means of that halter. An escoa was used to obeying the tugs of a nose barbell.
I wanted my mount airborne. She wanted to rest. I wanted to get off our precarious perch. She wanted to stay. I kicked her hard along her spine, again and again, and finally she unfurled her wings and sprang into the air.
There was a brief, terrifying sensation of freefall be fore she flapped lazily a clawful of times and settled into a glide.
Jungle below, jade and verdant. A rolling valley of it, rip pling like ocean swells. I shivered hard in the wind.
“Savga!” I bellowed. “Ryn!”
I wanted to go lower, but how to make an escoa descend? Press forward with knees? Pull down on reins? How could I make her turn in one direction or another?
A dark green-and-rust blur on my left, in the air. Dragon. My heart leapt. Then plummeted; the dragon was riderless.
Please, not Savga . . .
I prayed it was the escoa that had been tied behind me. Over and over I prayed,
pleasepleaseplease,
while images of Savga’s still and shattered body, sprawled jellylike over the crown of a tree, rose into my mind with such horrifying clarity I feared I was seeing a vision of what had actually occurred.
My dragon was descending.
Ahead of us, a river. One of the tributaries that fed into Clutch Xxamer Zu’s river, perhaps.
Was my mount heading back to the Clutch? I was as good as dead if she were. By returning to her home byre, the es coa would unwittingly deliver me straight into the hands of every holy warden in the daronpuis’ stockade.
I glanced behind me. The riderless escoa still followed. No sight of Ryn and Savga. No sight of the dragonmaster and Piah.
Please . . .
I no longer knew what I prayed for.
Sludgy, sage green water flashed below us, obliterated from sight here and there by bowers of trees and hanging moss. We descended lower. Floating caimans submerged into the river as we swept over. A white egret poised on the root-tangled bank took flight.
I would jump. Better to risk surviving the fall into the river than the return to Xxamer Zu.
My escoa stopped flapping. She glided long and smoothly over the river’s milky green back, and, for a moment, the wind died. Completely.
Silence, save for the delicate whisper of flight. A song of strength and freedom and hope, that. A song that encapsu lates the distance to the stars, the greatness of the skies, the marvel and immensity of life. For a heartbeat I knew peace. For a heartbeat I was suspended in that silent glide, no ac tion expected of me, no decisions required. The lush, silent profusion of creation had inhaled, and I and my dragon were suspended in that pocket of time before it would ex hale.
Perhaps life is made sweet by the knowledge that it will never come again.
The moment ended, and I knew I must jump from my mount or ride helpless on her back to Xxamer Zu. I re leased the hand rungs and tensed to swing off her back. I was gripped by a raging thirst, and I knew the dryness came from terror.
A great fallen tree stretched across the river ahead of us. Turtles, or perhaps frogs, frantically plopped into the water at our approach. My escoa altered her position, was suddenly back-fighting the air and lowering her legs, and I scrabbled for the hand rungs instinctively and jammed my feet back into the stirrup rungs.
We were landing.
We touched down on that great fallen tree as lightly as dew. I shuddered and thanked the Infinite Winged for the mercy shown me, and then I leaned over my escoa’s neck and retched. After several moments, the escoa trailing be hind us touched down at the other end of the trunk.
My escoa cocked her head to one side and eyed the river suspiciously. She tilted her head at a different angle, examined the water some more. Inspection complete, she snorted, folded her wings over her back, knelt on her fore legs, and bent to the river for a drink.
Time to dismount.
Trembling, I squirmed backward to her rump, which was elevated from her stooped drinking position, and slid out from under her wings. The log was slick un derfoot from the rainfall, but wide enough that I could readily balance. I reached into the saddlebags—several inches of cold water sloshed inside them—and with drew a pair of brass wing bolts. While the dragon drank, I bolted her folded wings to her saddle. A fly alighted on her; her withers shuddered and her tail slapped against her flank. Still, she remained crouched over the river, sucking in long, slurping gulps of water. She was still drinking as I approached the escoa perched on the far end of the fallen tree.
I moved briskly, with false confidence. I feared the escoa might vault into the sky, and it was imperative that I catch her, for should she return to Xxamer Zu, Ghepp could dis patch a herald upon her to the Ranreeb and alert him of the theft of all Xxamer Zu’s winged dragons. The myazedo would descend from the hills into the jaws of a regiment of Temple’s rabid dogs.
The riderless escoa lifted her snout from the water and eyed me warily as I approached her. Beads of blood dripped into the river from her maimed nares, and when I saw that mangled snout, hope blazed within me, that most power ful and mundane form of magic unique to all humans, for Savga and Ryn had been mounted upon the one escoa that had
not
been injured during my escape from the daronpuis’ compound. This, then, was not their mount.
Tears of relief sprang to my eyes.
Be alive, Savga. Be safe.
The riderless escoa looked as if she were considering lunging for the skies. Her maimed nares distorted her en tire face, so that she looked snub-nosed and warthogish as she warily regarded me.
“Hey-o, fold up. Fold up!” I commanded sharply, even though her wings
were
folded over her back.
The show of authority was enough to stay her; she dropped her head to the water again and noisily sucked down water. The muscles in her neck rippled with each swallow, and her dewlaps glistened with raindrops. The viridity of the surrounding jungle and the milky green of the river turned her hide into scales of jade, the rufous flecks subsumed under green. I placed a hand firmly upon her muscular shoulder girdle.
She’d lost her saddlebags during the storm. I had no wing bolts for her. After a moment’s thought, I wrestled with the makeshift halter rigged about her neck and managed to un tie the rain-swollen knots. I laced the reins through the two brass-ringed holes punched into her wing membranes and bound her wings together that way.
With both dragons rendered flightless, I drank, and with each swallow I thanked the One Dragon for hope, my life, the escoas, the possibility of tomorrow. Somehow I knew Savga was alive. Yes, I knew it. She was alive and hale, and though some might argue that my belief was denial, or des perate hope, or a delusion necessary to retain my sanity, I say that one doesn’t need to look upon the moon to know that its light is what one sees by at night. And the spirit of a child shines as distinctly as celestial light. Even at great distances.
I’d journey upriver, I decided. Unless I was far, far inland from the savanna, and unless the river flowed in another direction entirely from the Clutch river, downstream would only lead me to Xxamer Zu. I’d journey upriver and trust the One Dragon to lead me to the myazedo.
And, come the morrow, if my faith-led journey had brought me none the closer to the camp of insurgents, I would take to the sky in hopes the dragonmaster or Ryn would see and retrieve me. But for now, I would walk. My escoas were spent, and I had little desire to brave those glowering, roiling skies again that day.
I let the escoas decide which side of the riverbank to walk along. My mount chose the bank closest to her, and the other one plodded after her with stolid calm, as though still tethered to her. Thus our course was decided.
The skies remained overcast and peevish. The wind died. The air turned sultry. Gnats and flies and mosquitoes swarmed around us as we wove through frond and ivy and palm leaf, stumbling over knots of exposed roots and rot ting deadwood. Dragonflies skimmed over the river, and toads plopped from the banks and disappeared beneath skeins of algae. Several times the lead escoa’s head shot forward, viper fast, and her tongue lashed the back of a toad as it sprang for the river, but never did she catch one. If her venom sacs had not been removed, I warrant the jun gle would have been several frogs poorer for her accuracy that day.
My bitoo hindered my progress. I knotted it up around my thighs. Occasionally I cupped my hands around my mouth and bellowed for Savga. I thirsted and drank from the river, and ate another kadoob tuber, and pulled a leech from my calf.
The heat continued to rise, and as it did, great black clouds began amassing upriver, shouldering aside their gray cousins and exerting a heavy pressure upon the earth. I slipped on a fat, slimy ring of toadstools and fell to my knees. The dragons stopped behind me, and, after a pause Toadhunter pushed through bracken and creepers to kneel at the riverbank for a drink.
Warthog remained where she was standing and flicked her tongue in the direction of a nearby tree. The tree’s but tressed roots arched smoothly from the jungle floor like giant green ribs, and some seventy feet above our heads, through a dense canopy of liana vines and hanging moss and hairferns, I could just make out the tree’s lowest branches.
Warthog flicked her forked tongue again at the tree, her pupils and ear slits dilating. She lunge-hopped to the stee ples of root soaring ten feet up the trunk and poked her narrow head into one crack, then another, becoming more animated with each foray between the roots.
Her head disappeared right into the tree, and her neck followed, and she shimmied up to the buttressed trunk un til she looked decapitated at the shoulders. Evidently, the tree was hollow.
After several moments she withdrew her neck and head, a giant snail the size of a durian fruit clamped in her jaws.
She dropped the giant snail upside down at her feet. The snail laboriously began righting itself. The escoa cocked her head and watched it intently with one lizard-slitted eye; then her snout shot forward, wickedly fast, and she had the meat of the snail between her razor-sharp front teeth. She shook her head side to side in a short, furious burst, reached up to her snout with a foreclaw, and slowly pulled the snail from its shell, stretching the glaucous slug until it was the length of my arm. She lunged forward, severed the length of the body from its shell-embedded tail, and gulped the meat down.
I stared. Again, she inserted her head into the tree. Toad hunter swung away from the river, snout dripping, and watched Warthog retrieve and devour yet another giant snail. Toadhunter joined her, and they both strained and pushed against the hollow tree as if trying to squeeze them selves between the roots and climb inside.
A hatchling might be able to do that.
No. A hatchling
could
do that.
A memory suddenly leapt at me, bold as sunshine, and for a giddy moment I remembered being a hatchling, and scrabbling face-first down the hollow of a tree from its lightning-blasted crown, feasting on whip-scorpions, giant millipedes, a blind baby squirrel in a nest, and a snail twice the size of my head.
But after gorging myself, my leathery belly was so swol len and taut, I found I couldn’t turn around to climb back out. I was lodged.
I shrieked for my mother. Over and over I shrieked, and the trunk of the hollow tree suddenly shuddered mightily. I smelled my mother as her neck and arrow snout snaked down the hollow tree. Her teeth clasped me none too gen tly around the neck, just above my shoulder blades, and she heaved me out of the hollow, dragging shreds of rotted wood and mushrooms and lichen along with me, nigh on ripping off my wings in the process.
The image left me breathless and reeling.
The memory had been as clear as the dragons forag ing in front of me, far and away more coherent than any dragonmemory I’d experienced when hearing dragonsong. Sharper, even, than some of my
own
childhood memories. It was as if a thousand scattered shards from a smashed urn had suddenly coalesced into a whole in front of me.
In that fantastic moment, I was surrounded.
They peeled off of tree trunks, detached from fountains of fern, unfurled from the loamy ground, slid out from be tween lichen-stippled roots. A rotting log hairy with moss and slimy with mushrooms rose onto legs, spear in hand.The escoas shied; the standing log—the
woman
—held up a hand and spoke to the escoas in a mellifluous flood of Djimbi. The words soothed like warm yolk sauce in an empty belly, enfolded like a down-padded quilt on a blustery night. I heard not words but the sounds of images: a babe suckling at breast; sunlight twinkling on a dewy web; a deep green pool surrounded by a rainbow spray of water, cast by a thin waterfall crashing from a thousand-foot cliff. The escoas not only calmed; they looked entranced. I tell it true. Their eyes glazed over and they looked as witless and impotent as goggle-eyed pyumar birds. The speaker clucked her tongue thrice, and the escoas blinked, then resumed foraging for snails, as if the strangers who had emerged from bracken and soil with weapons in hand were as unremarkable as the surrounding creepers and vines.
I was still on the ground, where I’d landed from slipping upon the toadstools. Warily, I rose to my feet.
There were six of them that I could see, though I wasn’t trusting my eyes; there may yet have been more present that I couldn’t discern from root or trunk. And they were Djimbi. Freeborn Djimbi.
Pureblood
Djimbi.
Their whorls blended in perfectly with their surround ings, shadings of moss green and palm frond emerald dappled with the rich, wet brown of loam and the grayish brown of peeling tree bark. The women wore crude loin cloths only, like the men, made of shagreen. Their breasts were small and high, their nipples and areolae a dark, wet ivy. Great hanks of hair the exact pale green of hanging moss hung to their waists; the men were hairless, their pates as smooth as the tree roots about us. All of them were lean and sinewy, their arms and legs long. The untanned leather loincloths they wore were no more than a waistband strip of granulated leather with a flap attached fore and aft; their hard, lean buttocks were visible.