The Book of Earth (18 page)

This distress and their broken sleep plagued them and slowed their progress, but their biggest problem was always food. Erde presumed, as they journeyed south by two, seven, now ten days, that conditions would improve, that at some point, a decent harvest would appear and fields with fatter, healthier livestock. But the bad news that the fake-Guillemo had brought to her father’s banquet table was not exaggerated. Unending rain flooded the fields and the kitchen gardens. Blight and mildew and damp-loving snails claimed a huge portion of the crop wherever they went. Erde became an adept sneak-thief and stole, guiltily, what little she could from outlying hen yards and storehouses. But people do not leave much lying about in times of famine. She could not feed herself by thievery. She survived on the she-goat’s milk, and on the dragon’s foraging. For all his reluctance to take advantage of any but the most willing hot-blooded meals, he did show real talent for sniffing out a mushroom or berry patch, and seemed to know what was safe to eat and what was deadly. Erde’s only problem was to remind him to leave her some.

After Tubin, she’d carefully avoided any village larger than a few houses. But on the eleventh night, approaching the outskirts of a town, Erde decided they must by now have passed out of the sphere of von Alte, into some other baron’s domain. It was a very small town on a thinly-traveled road, surrounded by small rocky farms. Erde didn’t know where she was or exactly how far they’d traveled, only that each dawn, the sun still rose more or less
in the direction they’d come. It was time, come daylight, to risk venturing into town again, for news and information, and the chance of finding real food.

In town, it was market day, a good day for one wanting to eavesdrop in the anonymity of a crowd. A weak and uncertain sun was struggling through the clouds for the first time in several days, and the muddy town square was busy with carts and pigs and people. But as Erde wandered about trying to appear purposeful, she could see that though it was nearly September, well after time for the early harvest, the wood and canvas stalls were only half-stocked and the produce was bug-eaten and scrawny. The farm wives stood behind their canopied trestles and flat-wagons with their arms folded, grim and irritable with guilt as they refused over and over to barter food they might soon have to eat themselves for a broken crock or an old robe they didn’t need and couldn’t resell.

Listening to their restless chatter, Erde learned it wasn’t just the poor harvest that threatened these farmers’ livelihoods.

“Had little enough as it was and he took the best,” a thin and drawn woman complained to a nodding neighbor. “The very best, wouldn’t you know! And then the baron came after and took his share!”

“Mine, too.” The neighbor was plumper but pale and tired-looking. She jostled a basket of runty misshapen potatoes for emphasis. “Every one worth a prayer, he said. We must each serve God in our own way. Then he promised a mass for a better harvest.”

The first woman grunted and looked away, staring past Erde as she paused a few paces away to lean against a wagon wheel and fuss with her boot. “Does a man deserve more food because he wears a priest’s robe?” the woman muttered. “Does he deserve better?”

Her companion clucked warningly and resettled her potato basket, neatening this and that on her table unnecessarily. Two men walked by, haggling over the price of a thin donkey limping after them at the end of a frayed rope. When the men had passed, the plump woman leaned over to her neighbor and hissed, “We must all remember Tubin!”

The other woman crossed herself and nodded.

“Did you hear Mag’s baby died suddenly?” the plump woman began. “Seems there’s reason to believe . . .”

Chilled, Erde moved on to another row of stalls. She did better than many in the market that day. Pretending to be too shy to speak, she bartered a capful of berries and the two dozen mushrooms she had carried in the hood of her cloak for a loaf of dark bread and a salted fish. No one looked at her with any more suspicion than a solitary prentice boy might usually arouse, but everywhere she heard talk of ill omens and Fra Guill and his doom-ridden prophecies. The warning of Tubin was on every other tongue, and the farmer who’d stumbled across Earth in the forest had already become famous for miles around.

“Albrecht wouldn’t know a dragon if he fell on one,” a grizzled farmer remarked between hammer blows at the smithy’s portable forge.

“A bear, most likely,” agreed the smith’s customer. “He’s been listening to the priest too hard.”

The smith let fall a final stroke, then held up the crooked rake tine to squint at his repair. “Don’t be too hasty. What those trappers from the high hills came across didn’t sound like bearshit to me.”

His scrawny apprentice nodded, eyes wide, all bones and Adam’s apple. “Dragon sign! My da’s keeping our cow inside the barn all the time now, ’cept when he leads her out himself . . .”

Completing the circuit of the market, Erde heard a lot more dragon talk. Dragons had eaten this man’s sheep or that man’s dog. Dragons were gathering among the mountaintops, awaiting only the foul signal of their Dark Lord to launch themselves upon the countryside. There was no talk that day of raising dragon-hunts, but plenty of witch-rumor and threats of witch-hunt, and finally Erde overheard a rumor of an army that the Baron of Tor Alte (a distant and mysterious figure to these lowland farmers) was raising to vanquish the forces of evil and get his stolen daughter back so her soul could be saved by the Holy Brother Guillemo Gotti.

An army? Calmly munching her bread, Erde strolled out of the village when what she really wanted to do was flee headlong. This last rumor was just stupid enough to be true. With a touch of the graveyard humor that was becoming
her defense against fear and loneliness and her increasing sense that the world had gone mad, she totaled up the evils her father’s supposed army would face: a small dream-haunted dragon, a girl, and a spotted she-goat.

*   *   *

Earth found no willing victim in his hunting that day, but reported being nearly spotted twice by shepherds foraging for decent grass for their sheep. He was learning to conceal himself, but the land was becoming more populated as they left the high mountains behind. In the late afternoon, he and Erde lay down in a thicket to nap and slept through nearly till midnight, when both of them bolted up out of a shared nightmare. They had been pressed into a long, narrow, smelly room full of faceless bodies. They could barely breathe from the closeness and the stench. The noise was ear-splitting, and they seemed to be moving somewhere at breakneck speed. The dream upset Earth so much that he nearly forgot his promise to the she-goat.

Desperate for a way to calm him, Erde offered the thing that would have calmed her. She said what they really needed was a wise person with knowledge of magical things such as dragons and dream-visions, a person like her friend Alla. If there had been one such person, there had to be another. She conjured her childhood favorite, the Mage-Queen, who in her fantasies so resembled her grandmother. Inventing as she went along, she imagined a Mage City for the dragon, with many tall white towers gleaming in the sun. Into the early morning, when they should have been sleeping, she told him all the tales she could remember, until she had almost convinced herself that there was such a power in the world, and that the real purpose of their journey must be to find her. Heartened, Earth himself proposed the idea that it might be the Mage-Queen who was summoning him. Out of compassion and a remaining shred of childish hope, Erde did not discourage him. She agreed that the next day would be the first day of their search. Earth then ceased his pacing and moaning to regard her with those expectant dog eyes.
Now?
he seemed to ask.
Can we go now?

*   *   *

And so they moved on, traveling for the remaining hours until dawn, then slept through the day in a sweet-smelling
pine grove, so that Earth could take the next night to hunt. It was almost dry, deep among the pine boughs, where the cold wind was only a sighing in the upper branches. Erde stuffed her cloak with needles and could not remember the last time she had been so comfortable. Sharing Earth’s constant nightmares left her eager for the possibility of a length of sleep without them. She barely stirred when the dragon left for the deeper forest.

But she woke to the crackle of fire anyway, and the smells of smoke and charred flesh burning the darkness. She sat up to shake the nightmare from her head but it was not a dream. The fire was there, right in front of her. A small fire, of twigs and pine cones. On the far side of it sat the man in the red jerkin, grilling a small bird carcass on a stick and watching her placidly.

Erde recoiled into her pine bed with a breathy gasp. Feebly, she felt for Rainer’s sword where she had left it beside her.

Red-jerkin reached a hand to one side and lifted the sword out of the shadow. “Is this what you’re looking for?”

Erde stared at him like a cornered rabbit.

“Easy, now. I haven’t followed you all this way to do you harm.” He laid the sword down and patted it gently. “In fact, I had just the opposite in mind. You want to learn how to use this thing?”

He waited for her to say something. Erde’s return gaze was unblinking. She no longer believed the promises of men who said they were not going to hurt you. Besides, she could not comprehend how this man had sneaked up on her, lit a fire, and actually started cooking a meal without waking her. She’d have been speechless even if she’d had her voice. He was some baron’s footpad, or a thief who preyed on travelers in the forest. Where was the dragon when she needed him?

Red-jerkin mistook her quick glance sideways. “Don’t worry, I’m alone. Oh, except for the Mule, that is.” He saw he’d piqued her interest, or perhaps her concern. His grin was lopsided and sly. “’Course the Mule eats little children for breakfast, so maybe you should be worried.” He leaned back from the fire and called softly over his shoulder. “Come on out, Mule. Introduce yourself.”

Erde steeled herself for some exotic ogre of a man, this
cool thief’s monstrous partner. But it was indeed a mule that stepped up to the fire, a white lop-eared ordinary mule. It stood over her and stretched its neck down to study her with jaded, intelligent eyes. Not quite ordinary. Distracted, Erde smiled at it and stroked its soft gray nose.

“Later he’ll eat you,” remarked Red-jerkin.

Erde’s eyes flicked back to him and her smile faded.

“Does this really need to be a one-way conversation?”

She nodded.

“You mean, you can’t . . . or you won’t?”

Erde shook her head, obscurely irritated that a common thief should accuse her of guile.

Red-jerkin frowned. “Really? I was sure it was just a ploy . . . how’d it happen? Right, right, you can’t tell me. Well, let’s assume I believe you. So, yes and no answers only for now. Later maybe we’ll manage something more complicated. I don’t suppose you can read and write?”

Her prideful instinct betrayed her, sat her up straight in protest. She didn’t think to be surprised by the implication that he could.

“That so? Well, good for you. I’d assumed otherwise, you being Iron Joe’s daughter and all . . .”

Erde froze. He knew. Now she understood. He was some baron’s man, after all. He had found her out and now he meant to kidnap her and hold her for ransom. She shrugged and tried to look blank.

“But then,” he continued as if she had agreed with him, “you are also Meriah’s granddaughter.” He read the soft crease of Erde’s brow, and smiled. “Will you please believe I don’t mean to harm you? Meriah would see to it I burned in hell. She’s sure to be a favorite with the Recording Angel already.”

Erde felt the first stirrings of doubt. Would a thief have given up a silver mark? It could be what Red-jerkin himself had called a ploy, but very few people had called her grandmother by her given name. In the firelight, his eyes were kind. She narrowed her own eyes in what she hoped was a steely glare.

Watching her, the man’s grin turned rueful. “I see her in you. She was captivating, you know—in her youth and long, long after. As you will be, milady, if we can keep you
alive long enough.” He lifted the bird out of the fire, tore off one of the leg joints, and held it out to her. “Hungry?”

Erde felt as if she had come into a conversation that had been going on for a long time without her. Too confused to pretend otherwise, she accepted the leg gingerly. If he meant to hold her for ransom, he’d be unlikely to poison her. And he didn’t look so well fed himself, for all his silver marks. Though his eyes were bright, his cheeks were gaunt, and the hand that held the spit was ropy with starved muscle. She guessed he was as hungry as she was. Meanwhile, the bird was hot and delicious. Trying not to gobble too noisily, she waited for Red-jerkin to surprise her some more.

He tore off the other leg and stuck the spit upright in the ground beside him, then ate nearly half the joint before he spoke again.

“Now, introductions, yes? I know who you are, though you are welcome to continue pretending otherwise. I am, or was, Heinrich Peder von Engle, Knight of the Realm in service to His Majesty the King, and at your service, milady.” He bowed deeply over his crossed legs like some prostrating mystic, then sank back into his comfortable slouch with a fleeting mirthless grin. “Now I’m mainly Hal Engle, or Sir Hal, when I need to impress a few villagers who don’t know any better. Although these days, a King’s Knight gets very little respect . . .” He glanced away as if to toss aside his chicken bone, and Erde believed he was what he claimed, seeing that same twist of righteous anger catch his face, then pass him by. He had, she could tell, the rare gift of storytelling, for she was already drawn into his tale. She tried harder not to appear so interested.

“I had once upon a time and not so very long ago,” he continued, “land and estates to the north of here, maybe two weeks’ hard ride, like Tor Alte about as far as you can get from court and still be His Majesty’s subject. And I was very much his subject. My duties as a Knight of the Realm kept me in Erfurt a lot of the time. But I left my lands in the charge of my two grown sons, which proved to be such a workable arrangement that I grew farther and farther away from the everyday workings of the domain. I felt free, in my, ah . . . maturity, to pursue in between my court
duties a special interest of mine, the collection and study of legend and lore relating to the existence of dragons.”