Forged by Fire (35 page)
I clambered out of that crater, through a thick sea of cin dery smoke, the black earth beneath my hands and knees and feet as hot as smoldering coals. My skin blistered, burst, and wept from the heat.
I reached the lip of the crater, pulled myself out. Lay there, faceup, as the Skykeeper soared through the shifting smoke above.
Its flaming wingspan seemed to engulf the sky, and con trails streamed in its wake. It was a true Skykeeper; had she still existed outside of me, my mother’s haunt would have been dwarfed by it. Not just by size, but by the crackling potency, the sheer
imminence
of it.
Instead of reeking of death, it smelled of molten cop per, of new-forged steel. Its sapling-sized talons gleamed like brass. Lightning licked and crackled over its blue wings. Its smoking beak was massive, made of gold and serrated knives, and its eyes were pools of lava that bubbled and spewed forth molten rock. Its tail was not the thin, whiplike thing that the haunt had had, but a great plume of fiery blue feathers streaming behind it. It loosed a cry that sounded like the scream of a typhoon, and the earth beneath me heaved as if it were an ocean swell.
Savga appeared by my head. She studied me a moment from a sooty face, eyes grave. Agawan was silent in her arms, staring wide-eyed at the Skykeeper wheeling high above.
“Can she be ridden?” I croaked.
“If I ask her.”
“Ask her.”
Savga opened her mouth and sang. Dragonsong. I stoppered my ears to block out the exquisitely painful
pleasure that Savga’s unearthly song provoked within me. It was terrible, such hedonic power coming from a child’s lips. I couldn’t watch her, either. I focused my gaze on the Skykeeper instead.
At once, the immortal creature began descending. Lightning forked over her wings and sizzled down the length of her great body. Trapped against her, black clouds swirled and clashed in miniature typhoons. As she swooped lower, the glare from her golden beak brightened smoke into gilded fog and obliterated everything from sight, much the way a brilliant flash of lightning momentarily erases ev erything visual.
In that eerie yellow fog of nothing, the Skykeeper landed, settling within the crater as if it were a nest. I slowly sat up, every part of me aching.
The Skykeeper was enormous. Two pools of bubbling lava that were eyes, each the size of a small dragon, dripped lumps of molten rock to the ground, and the heave and ebb of her blue-feathered breast sounded like the swell and crash of mighty waves breaking against miles of cliff. Her two legs were scaled ruby spires, and her tail fanned above her, larger than any rainbow, scintillating various hues of blue: turquoise, sapphire, the color of sunlit blue glass and of small, powdery flowers. Heat and cool billowed off her, as if she were all seasons at once, and she smelled both me tallic and coal-like, as if forged from the core of the earth.
“She’ll burn Xxamer Zu to the ground with that dripping lava!” I shouted above the din of her breathing. “Can that be stopped?”
Savga shot me a reproachful look. “Those are
tears
. She’s crying.”
“Then you have to talk to her, soothe her grief. Tell her . . .” I paused, unsure of what the Dirwalan Babu should tell the immortal deity that had birthed her.
I might not know what the Dirwalan Babu should say, but I did know what
I
wished I’d had the chance to say, as a child, to my mother.
“Tell her you’ll grow strong and live long, despite losing her,” I said. “Tell her that you’re her child and will never forget her, but she must let you go, as you have to release her. Tell her . . . tell her you love her.”
Lower lip trembling, eyes laden with unshed tears, Savga sang.
A massive claw at the end of a towering, crimson leg ponderously moved. In a cloud of brilliant yellow smoke and dust, the fires licking from the puddles of lava were stomped out of existence. Molten rock stopped dripping from those lava-pool eyes.
“Can we mount her?” I shouted.
Savga sang my request to the Skykeeper, and again I hastily screwed my fingers into my ears. But still I could hear. Great Dragon, I could! I thought I’d go mad if Savga didn’t soon stop her otherwordly song, knew I would hurl myself in a rage of excruciating ecstasy into those storms that roiled and clashed over the Skykeeper’s oceanic body.
After a pause, a belt of green materialized from the tip of the Skykeeper’s beak and ran, like a path of foliage, up to the Skykeeper’s head. Ponderously, the great creature lowered its beak to the ground, as if she were a bird about to sip water from a pond.
Savga stopped singing. With Agawan still in her arms, she hurtled toward the Skykeeper.
My hoarse cry of alarm went unheard.
But Savga—almost whitewashed from existence by the radiance of the Skykeeper—stepped unharmed onto that green trail on the Skykeeper’s beak and clambered up the creature’s head.
After a moment I followed, squinting against the bril liant light.
It
was
a belt of green foliage that had appeared on the Skykeeper’s head. It smelled verdant and fresh, astringent with bud sap. Cautiously I stepped onto the grassy trail on the Skykeeper. The soles of my feet tingled.
Taking a deep breath, I climbed the lush knoll that was the Skykeeper’s head. I could feel each swell of her breath and the surge of her immortal blood as if I were walking over the surface of a rushing river. The weeping blisters on my hands, knees, and feet healed.
Just beyond the crest of the Skykeeper’s head, Savga had sat down. Velvety vines had entwined about her legs and torso. She beamed up at me.
“Look what Mama can do!” she said, patting the vines about her. “Look what she made for Agawan!”
A cradle of vines. The toddler was, impossibly, peacefully asleep in it.
But I was alarmed and disturbed by the vines that strapped Savga down, and it must have shown on my face, for Savga looked annoyed. “How else are we going to stay on when she flies, hey-o?”
Vines began to slither about me, velveteen and warm. Their sinuous movements were uncomfortably sensual as they twined up my calves and reached for my thighs.
Those slinky vines were an extension of the Skykeeper, and the Skykeeper had once been Tansan, a woman I’d lusted for. Her firm, intimate touch brought a flush to my cheeks.
The network of vines soon enclosed me up to my col larbone and braced my neck, extending around me in thick buttresses.
“Hold on, now!” Savga shouted. “You’re going to love this!”
I tensed myself for the ascent, and then I and my two children rode a Guardian of the Celestial Realm to free dom and victory.
The first thing the Imperial army saw as it descended from the scrubland surrounding the jungle was the Skykeeper and Temple’s retreating forces. With only some slight resistance, the Imperial army surrendered to our waiting soldiers.
At my request, the Skykeeper then hovered over the roofs of the daronpuis’ stockade, whence the Council of Seven, from within their glass observatory, watched Savga, and me holding a sleepy and content Agawan, descend down the verdant ramp on the Skykeeper’s lowered neck and beak.
The Skykeeper didn’t ascend into the skies. No. Within a blink she was suddenly gone, and with her, every fire that was blazing over Xxamer Zu was extinguished.
Savga wept bitterly and clung to me.
We never saw the Skykeeper after that. Rather, no one but Savga saw her, and then Savga saw her only in her dreams.
I would like to say that Malacar was radically changed for the better after so many died that day, but life isn’t like that. People’s beliefs and wants vary for a myriad of reasons: up bringing, status, health, perceived needs. Culture, personal quirks, family foibles. Fears. Boundaries. Experiences, or lack thereof. People react strongly and uniquely to situa tions for all the above reasons, and emotions are triggered. And so people disagree and disagree vehemently.
Life is change. Growth is optional. One must choose wisely.
Two weeks after the Great Uprising, the Ashgon fled Li reh. His departure sparked an exodus of landed gentry re turning to the Archipelago.
Political factions sprang up. Over the next eight years Malacar teetered again and again on the brink of civil war. Perhaps it will continue to do so for decades yet to come. I don’t know. Perhaps I might hear how my poor, belea guered country is faring, from wherever it is that I decide to disembark from this Xxelteker merchant ship as it plies its trade up and down the Xxeltek coast. But for now, I’m content to know nothing.
I earn my keep as a sailor, and I write, in moments of calm on the ocean, this history that some would call a mem oir. This ship, and the captain who sails her—an astound ing Xxelteker woman introduced to me, years ago, by Jotan Bri—have become my home.
Savga and Agawan chose to stay behind in the Skykeep er’s Dragoncote, which is what Xxamer Zu was renamed. Of all the things I’ve experienced in my life, only two I consider an indisputable success: raising Savga and Aga wan, and securing Xxamer Zu as a Djimbi-governed eggproduction estate, one free of any Temple influence.
Leaving Savga behind ripped a part of my soul out of me, and I cradle that ache, for it is mine and mine alone and I have every right to feel it. But she would not come with me—willful young woman that she is—and I could not stay. If it had been left to me, I
would
have stayed in Malacar, and descended into venom madness and died as violently as Jotan Bri did last year, but Savga screamed at me to go, demanded that I tell her I loved her and then . . . set her free.
She had no wish to watch me further battle my need for venom, understand. She had no wish to watch me lose that battle one last, devastating time.
And that may have been my fate. Yes, I admit it: I knew, at the end, that unless I fled from dragons and dragonsong, I would die as Jotan Bri had.
Until her descent into madness and her brutal suicide last year, Jotan had been a formidable ally to me. Her network of spies, her wealth, her intelligence, and the influence she wielded through her century-established family connections, all aided me mightily in my dedication—addiction, you could say—to securing Xxamer Zu as the self-governed commune it is today. It was also through her that the Coun cil of Seven, which renamed itself the Iron Fist, heard my views, again and again, as they tried to create a new foun dation upon which to build a nation. Three of the original seven have been assassinated, over the years. Some say by fellow members of the Fist.
But despite the grief and uneven support the Fist has given me in my determination to secure Xxamer Zu as a self-governed dragoncote, that mighty political party has done some good for my people, the Djimbi. Not out of em pathy or compassion. No. Where’s the profit in that? But because of the power they witnessed a young Djimbi girl summon from the skies, and because of the powers my sis ter, Waivia, had exercised while partnered with Kratt.
I am Djimbi now, too. Finally, some years ago, I found the courage to eradicate the enchantment my mother spun around me at birth. My skin is the brown of a water vole, whorled with green as dark as wet ivy. It still takes me by surprise every time I glimpse myself in mirror or water. But it is me, nonetheless. Zarq Kavarria Darquel. Zarq of my mother, Kavarria, and my father, Darquel.
As for the Fist: It has begun a clever eradication and assimilation program, whereby the symbols, dates, and rituals of Dragon Temple are being slowly and irrevoca bly converted into a fusion of new and ancient Malacarite
and
Djimbi religious practices. This transmogrification will, over the years, help eradicate Temple’s presence in Malacar and unite Malacar under a single religion.
Or so is the hope.
And what of dragons? What of the fifteen bulls that so many people died protecting the day the efru mildon clashed? I’ll answer the latter first: They were taken from us. As Tansan had predicted.
When Xxamer Zu’s allies departed, the Council of Seven took every bull with them. But the old brooder that Tansan had stolen from Xxamer Zu’s egg stables prior to the war and force-marched into the hills produced a neonate bull. That’s all we needed: a single bull. From that single bull and the brooders left to us, the dragoncote grew. Several more bulls were produced over the years, and those that we could afford to give away, were given away wisely, to two small Clutches that proved open to certain radical ideas, such as refraining from amputating the wings of brooders and not shackling them for life in egg stables. Ideas such as overturning the barbarous laws that prohibit pairings between Djimbi. Ideas such as teaching rishi—male and female, Djimbi and otherwise—how to read and write.
I’d hoped to change a nation. Some would say I failed. But I
did
change certain practices on three Clutches— Xxamer Zu, Diri, and Pera—and perhaps the seeds I sowed during my teachings as the One-eared Radical will some day take root and spread across Malacar. Who knows? We now live in an epoch in which the solid ground of tradition and preconceived ideas shakes daily under our feet, and that, to me is a good thing.
Are dragons divine? Most Djimbi say that they are. Rishi believe that they are. Jotan Bri was certain that they are
not,
and Sak Chidil is determined that they are no more divine than any other lizard or winged creature on earth.
As for me, I believe that both Sak Chidil’s and the Djimbi views are correct. I believe—no, I
know
—that divinity rests within all living things. Life is sacred, and we are alive. Ergo, we all are sacred.
Even the creature trapped within me.
The irony is not lost on me that just when I’d found the strength and conviction to say good-bye to my mother forever, I discovered that not until my own death would I be freed of the entity that grew from my mother’s obses sion with Waivia. Through whatever obscure powers she wielded when alive, Mother rooted herself to the earthly realm through me when she died in Convent Tieron, when I was but nine. Now that angry, grieving, powerless entity is trapped within me until I myself die.
But somewhere in that anger and grief, buried beneath those sweet and sour memories she forces me to relive some nights, lies my mother. The mother who turned the blood of her body to milk for me to suckle as an infant. The mother who molded with her power and art the soft and yielding heart of a child, a child who became a woman who shook an entire nation.
A mother who taught me that failure is not the falling down, but the staying down.