Song of the Dragon (60 page)

D
RAKIS STOOD at the tiller that night. He shifted the course of the
Cydron
five points to starboard and held it there for nearly three days. All Urulani's arguments were brushed aside by him as he held that course . . . because, he said, the song was calling to him, and this was the course where he heard it the loudest.

By the dawn of the second day the distant shoreline could just be made out on the northern horizon. It took until just before noon for the coast features, such as they were, to become defined: short, gnarled trees and scrub brush painting a dark line above a bright sand shore. Here and there a tumble of rocks could be seen, but for the most part it was the most unremarkable coast Urulani or any of her crew had ever seen.

Drakis leaned hard on the tiller, his red, sleepless eyes struggling to peer over the bow. Despite the lack of landmarks, however, he steered the ship with remarkable precision up one of a dozen channels that flowed over a wide sandy delta. The
Cydron
was made for shallow-draft river raiding and passed smoothly over the delta waters and into the main channel of what Jugar at once proclaimed to be the River of Tears. Only then did Drakis relinquish the tiller to Urulani . . . and he collapsus on the deck just as Urulani called for the sweeps to be set and the oarsmen to start pulling.

Drakis did not awaken again for another day and a half.

“How is your head?” Urulani asked.

“Much worse,” Drakis replied as he stretched. “Where are we?”

“I can report that we are definitely somewhere,” she replied, “And we are making good time.”

“Wonderful news,” Drakis responded, looking around them. The river had cut a meandering course, which Urulani was trying to make her ship follow. “I see that the riverbanks are sand. What's beyond?”

“More sand,” Urulani replied with a twinkle in her dark eyes.

“Then I think you are wrong,” Drakis said, drawing in a deep breath. “We've gone right past somewhere and have definitely reached nowhere.”

The shores of the Sand Sea drifted past them for a time, the silence broken only by the rhythmic stroke of the oars to the drum below.

“How is your Mala?” Urulani asked.

“She is . . . she is doing better,” Drakis replied. “She has calmed down and is speaking again . . . but she is still undoubtedly broken.”

“Then why keep her with us?” Urulani said to him with surprising softness in her voice. “I do not ask you this to be cruel, Drakis, but what kind of a life can you have together without trust? She is clearly a danger to you and perhaps to us all. What kind of a life can she have beyond the forgetful lie that the elves offer to all their slaves?”

“You make sense, Urulani,” Drakis responded. “In fact, all of you make sense . . . even Ethis is starting to make sense to me. I cannot explain it, but I feel responsible for her.”

“You did not break her, Drakis,” the captain said. “It is not your fault that she is how she is.”

“Yes, I know,” he said gazing out over the bow. “But I made promises to her when she was whole—when I thought she was mine—and now that she is no longer whole, I feel that those promises should still mean something. Maybe it wasn't real for her, but it was for me—or at least as real as I believe anything to be any more.”

“So, are you this Drakis they all want you to be?” Urulani asked through a smile.

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Then I'll really tell you . . . I don't know.”

“That's no answer,” Urulani scoffed.

“That's all the answer I've got,” Drakis said, reaching up for one of the back stays and leaning against it. “There's only one thing that I'm certain of and that is that I need to know—one way or the other—if this is my destiny. So much has happened, so many people have sacrificed so much—even their lives from time to time—that I have to wonder if all of this has some meaning . . . some purpose. Belag once told me that he
had
to believe in me or his brother's death would have had no meaning. All I'm left with now is that thought and this terrible song in my . . . wait! Look ahead, just around this bend!”

The bow was swinging around another turn in the river.

Urulani's face shifted into a crooked smile.

“Is that a
road?
” she asked.

“Ethis! Jugar!” Drakis shouted. “Break out the packs and make sure they're stocked! We're going on a little trip.”

“Master Ganja, you are in charge,” Urulani said, checking her pack and closing it. “I've got six of the crew with me . . . the rest are to stay here.”

There was a groan among those left behind. They would have liked the opportunity to see this new land.

“Drakis, are you ready?” she asked as she shouldered her pack.

“We're
all
ready,” he replied.

Urulani turned to acknowledge him when she was caught up short. “You're not serious!”

The captain had expected Ethis and Jugar to be joining the expedition but there, too, was a brightly beaming Lyric and, most surprising of all, Mala holding her pack and looked down at the deck, seemingly avoiding anyone's eyes.

“There is no way they are coming with us!” she said.

“There is no way they cannot,” Drakis replied.

“I'm not dragging those women across the Sand Sea!”

“
You're
not dragging anyone,” Drakis said. “Both the Lyric and Mala need to be watched . . . and not out of my sight.”

“You don't trust my crew?”

“Not with Mala,” he replied.

“Fine!” Urulani shouted. “But if she so much as spits in my direction, I'm going to kill her myself, and I promise you I will
not
be asking your permission ahead of time, you understand?”

“I understand,” Drakis answered.

Urulani turned on Mala, jabbing her finger at her collarbone. “And do
you
understand, princess?”

“Yes,” Mala answered, not looking up.

“Well, what a happy crew,” Urulani said though there was nothing happy in her tone at all.

Urulani had beached the
Cydron
on the riverbank, so they jumped from the bow of the boat onto the sands of the shore. Their feet sank down into the warm sands, causing them to struggle slightly until they managed to clamber up onto the remains of the roadway. There was some concern about the dwarf, who panicked for a time in the sands trying to get his footing, but in the end they managed to pull him onto the path as well.

The road of tightly fitted stones was broken in many places and completely obscured by drifting sand in so many more that Jugar feared they would lose it altogether, but in time they followed it up, at last cresting the sand dune at the edge of the river's channel.

They were greeted with the sight of a chain of towering mountains that seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon. Purple-blue in the distance and appearing to waver in the heat of day, their peaks were sharp, jagged pinnacles whose crests were still draped in the white of perpetual snow. They looked as though they had been pushed up angrily from below, rising abruptly from the sands at their base in sheer granite crags and towers—the savage teeth of the world.

“The God's Wall!” Jugar cried and began dancing a strange, dwarven step on the ancient stones.

“How did we miss
that?
” Ethis blurted out.

“We've been in the river channel,” Urulani shrugged. “The dunes must have hidden them from us.”

“That doesn't prove anything, dwarf,” Drakis said, his eyes narrowing to try to examine the mountains better. He raised his arm and pointed. “What are those?”

“What?” Urulani asked.

“There at the base . . . those tall shapes at the base of the range. They're too evenly spaced to be natural, and they seem to run down the length of the range.”

“They are my brothers,” the Lyric said with pride. “We are home!”

“The Sirens!” Jugar crowed. “Those are dragons, my boy! The dragons of the prophecy calling to you!”

“Is it . . . is it
possible
?” Drakis whispered.

“We came to find out,” Ethis said. “It must be four . . . maybe five leagues to the base. We could make it before dark, but we'd have to make camp and return in the morning.”

“You want to make camp . . . with dragons?” Urulani asked.

“Do dwarves float?” Drakis asked as he started down the road, which ran straight toward the base of the mountains.

Drakis stared up at the dragon.

The dragon's dead, stone eyes stared back at him.

Drakis stood on a wide, black marble platform. The surface had been pitted and scarred by the blowing sands over time, scuffed to a dull finish. Fixed to it, the great carving of a dragon rose above him, its neck craning downward until its chin also rested on the pedestal. Enormous wings, also of stone, rose high above them nearly one hundred feet into the sky, brightly cast in the red light of the sunset. The front and back claws clutched enormous crystals in their talons that were embedded into the marble base. The crystals looked dark and common, but the dragon carving was intricate and detailed with pictograms of people now long dead and fallen to dust pursuing great deeds that were now otherwise forgotten.

Drakis considered the statue in silence.

“I . . . I'm sorry, my boy,” Jugar said next to him. “More sorry than I can say.”

Drakis started to speak, considered for a moment, and then continued. “It's hollow. Can you see it? The head cavity all the way up the neck and into the body is entirely hollow.”

“Yes, lad,” Jugar said sadly.

Behind him, the rest of their party stood in the sand or sat on the edge of the pedestal. The Song of the Dragon rose and fell around them, a mournful, hollow sound. As far as they could see down both directions of the range, duplicates of this same statue stood on their own pedestals. Each of them in turn was making the same music across the Sand Sea to the south.

“The wind,” Drakis continued dispassionately, pointing toward the head. “It blows here constantly through that hole in the dragon's mouth. I saw a musician once who played an instrument by blowing into it. It looked about the same size as that hole. You know, there must be some mechanism in the head that varies the pitch so that the song can be played over, and over, and over, and over . . .”

“Come, lad,” Jugar said, pulling at Drakis' arm. “A little supper, perhaps, and a story or two . . .”

“There it is, dwarf!” Drakis shouted. “There's the great destiny of humanity! There are
no
dragons to save us, just these lovely, marble dreams we created for ourselves. All myths and stories and lies we tell ourselves to comfort us and make us think there is some
meaning
to what we do. Well, here they are, dwarf! Here are the dragons that I'm supposed to raise from the storybook past and make war with on the elves! Here's the source of the song that calls me back to a dead land filled with dead dragons! Here are your Sentinels—the sirens of the desolation—watching over us with stone eyes and weak songs!”