The Book of Earth (21 page)

Hal’s eyes were back on the dragon. “He’ll be after us, you know, that hell-spawned priest, especially now he’s decided you’re the witch-child of his prophecies.”

WITH MY FATHER’S ARMY? Erde scrawled.

Hal snorted. “I heard that rumor, too. Who could feed an army in these times? No, I doubt an army, but there will be pursuit, and if I am killed, you must be able to protect yourself . . . and him.”

A new notion. Erde had thought the dragon was protecting her. Why else return to her fire, now that he’d proven he could hunt successfully on his own? YOU DON’T THINK I’M A WITCH?

“What if I did?”

Her eyes widened.

Hal grinned at her. “Never fear, milady. I’ve known a few witches in my time.”

She stared at him expectantly.

“Well, let’s say they’re like dragons. Never what you expect them to be.”

LIKE ME?

“I think that remains to be seen,” he replied cheerfully. “After all, we don’t know each other very well yet.”

His sudden evasiveness gave Erde a chill. Was he suggesting she
was
a witch? She decided to pursue the subject in another way.

WHAT, she wrote, IS A DRAGON GUIDE?

Hal peered at her thoughtfully. “It really must pass down in the blood, for you to be here with him and yet so unknowing. How did you ever find each other? No, wait, first
tell me this.” He again produced the dragon brooch out of his jerkin and handed it to her as if he’d rather not let it out of his keeping but knew he must. “Does it warm to your touch?”

Erde frowned at it, then laid it to her lips, recalling how she had done so before. The stone was warm, body temperature, as if it were alive. Superstition chilled her. She nearly threw the brooch down but caught hold of herself and merely nodded. Together they stared at it, lying there on her open palm: deftly wrought silver, finely carved red stone, a tiny dragon rampant.

IT HAS NO WINGS, she scratched in the dust.

Hal nodded, and they both turned to regard the dragon asleep in the shadows. After a while, he sighed and took the brooch from her hand, holding it up to the fire.

“Yes, girl, there is magic in the world.” He twisted the carved stone in the ruddy light. “Carnelian, I’d say. The setting, oh, probably a hundred years old at most, from the working of it. The stone, well . . . I always suspected Meriah was . . .”

A witch?
Erde glanced at him questioningly. He took her hand and wrapped her fingers around the brooch, then enveloped her fist gently with both his own as if she was something rare and precious. “Listen, dearest child, whatever we may think in the here and now, whatever our questions and confusions, our . . . disappointments or misfortunes, the truth is that longer ago than either of us can imagine, an eternal promise was made. This stone is the sure token of it. You are its fulfillment. Can you understand any of that?”

She shook her head worriedly.

“It will come, with time.” Hal squeezed her hand and let it go. “The token was passed down and down and down in secret, most of its bearers as unaware as you of the responsibility carried in their blood. Only through exhaustive study such as mine would you . . .” He turned his head away but it was less a negative than a warding off. Erde could read his ache and his effort to accept the evidence of his ears and eyes. Whatever this Dragon Guide was meant to do, Heinrich von Engle felt he was better suited to it than an ignorant fourteen-year-old girl. But acceptance of meanings deeper than he could perceive was part of his
scholar’s burden. She understood why he focused so heavily on the random luck of lineage.

“No one could know when the time would come,” he was explaining, “for the dragon to wake, for the promise to be called upon. The Dragon Guide must guide the dragon through the world of men while he carries out the purpose he’s been awakened for. The very purpose, milady, that we must set our lives to discerning.” Hal watched her hopefully, as if waiting for some light of revelation in her eyes. Erde could not offer him any, but the knight did appear to have achieved some pragmatic measure of resignation. He waved an arm unnecessarily. “But look, it’s dawn already, and a foolish old man with too much talk has robbed you of your necessary rest. Sleep now. The Mule will stand guard.”

Erde nodded her good night and lay down. Her stomach was full and her brain was bursting. She’d need many nights of lying awake to sort out the confusion that the knight’s arrival had added to an already muddled and complex picture. But tired as she was, this night would not be one of them.

An eternal promise? What if I cannot fulfill it?

She fell asleep listening to the dragon snore.

E
rde woke from a dream-struggle with a real hand clamped firmly over her mouth. She was sure her father had found her. But it was the stranger knight’s voice close to her ear, begging her to lie still. Her first clear thought was to regret that she’d misjudged him after all, then to wonder why the dragon did not come to her rescue.

“Hush, milady, you must be still! You must be still!” Hal’s quiet persistence finally got her full attention. She stopped fighting him, and he let her go.

“That’s better.” He sat back on his heels. “Are you awake?”

Erde looked about. Gray light filtered through the pine boughs, hazed with pale floating ash from the dead fire, which she had kicked up in her troubled sleep. She had no idea what time of day it was.

“You cry out in your sleep, did you know?” Hal whispered hoarsely. “Out loud.”

Erde stared at him.

“Truth, milady.”

She tried her voice. Perhaps it had come back while she wasn’t noticing.

Hal watched her strangled efforts. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your workings, I swear it. But it’s a providence you woke me. Listen.”

Erde heard, in the distance, the baying of hounds.

“Picked up your scent, damn their well-bred noses. I’d hoped the rain would . . . well, no matter. We’ll have to move in full light for a few hours. Pack up, now. Time we were leaving.
Quickly
.” He held her attention a moment
with a hand on her shoulder. “Was it one of . . . 
his
dreams that frightened you so?”

Erde shrugged. She remembered nothing but a sense of being unable to breathe.

“Well, try to remember it. Whatever it was, it gave you your voice again for a while.”

*   *   *

She had no time to think about dreams. It should have been easier traveling by daylight, even as it began to fade into steely dusk, but now speed was essential and the thick pine needle mat was as slippery as a slope of glass. The low-hung branches whipped at her face as Hal urged them swiftly upward through the forest, searching for drier, rockier terrain where their passage would leave a less obvious trace. He set a punishing pace, flanked easily by the she-goat, who had taken a liking to him as a stray dog might. Though the mule now carried her pack and sword, Erde managed a mere short hour before flagging. The knight did everything but drag her along to keep her going, and finally, it was the dragon who lagged behind, as if he didn’t really understand the need for all this urgency.

Hal stopped at the top of a rise when it was almost dark. A black sky whipped with clouds showed through the thinning trees. He seemed hardly winded, and the mule, who had followed behind the dragon as if herding him, was cool and dry.

“They’ll have us within the hour if we can’t move faster.” Hal looked up, sucking at his teeth. A bright full moon was rising past the dark branches. “I did think he would have wings . . .”

Catching her breath, Erde let her head loll back to stare at the clearing sky. She could not recall ever seeing such brilliant stars, as thick as daisies in a meadow. Even the moon did not diminish their sparkle, and the sharp music of the hounds cut through the night air like trumpet alarms. The pack was gaining.

“At least we’ll be able to see where we’re going,” Hal remarked. He pointed ahead down the hillside, where a narrow stony valley split the forest with a sudden gash of moonlight on weathered rock. A rush of water fell away in a twisted course among man-sized boulders. “No cover, but we might lose them in the creekbed.”

He led them down the rock-strewn slope toward the surging water, past waist-high stones that gleamed as white as teeth rising from the cold dark ground. At the river’s edge, the she-goat knelt for a long drink while Hal called the mule to him.

“He is very surefooted, milady. If you ride, we’re more likely to elude the pack.” He smiled as if it were a Sunday jaunt. “And you will keep your feet dry.”

Erde did not argue. The mule was narrow and bony, but her legs were twisted with cramp and the knight’s worn saddle looked very inviting. She had no strength left. Only her fear of capture kept her upright and moving. Hal had been right to say she’d been lucky so far. She let him boost her up. Feeling about for the reins, she realized there weren’t any.

Hal rested a hand on the mule’s dappled neck. “Oh, we did away with those quite a while ago, he and I. Can you manage without? Believe me, he knows better than we which road to choose.” He stroked the mule’s nose. “Swift as you can now, Mule.”

The mule tossed his head as if he hadn’t needed to be told, then moved briskly into the shallow, fast-moving water, picking a delicate sure path among the rocks. The she-goat followed, bounding from stone to stone with weightless precision. Hal waited for the dragon to precede him, but Earth stalled at the edge and would not step into the rushing water. He stretched his neck toward Erde and swayed back and forth in misery and confusion.

“My lord, you must,” muttered the knight, with the air of a man who senses his rhetoric to be out of date, but has no acceptable substitute.

Clinging to the mule as it tottered precipitously downstream, Erde saw in her mind the dragon’s panic, so like a child’s—lurid, distorted images of vast horizons, of dark and rolling waves, of falling water, wrenching currents and suffocating undertow, all foreign and terrifying to her own landlocked imagination. She’d seen Earth walk into water before, but then it had been shallow and still and comfortably (for him) confined by cavern walls. She tried to project calm and reassurance, but he would have none of it, perhaps because she was as frightened as he was. She didn’t know how to swim. Court ladies were not taught how to
swim. In desperation, she imaged the Mage City for him, his new goal, for which all fears must be overcome, and this convinced him at least to follow along the bank as fast as he could, slithering snakelike up and down among the boulders. Hal waded in behind, a dark silhouette against moonlit stone.

The pack was so close now that Erde could distinguish the voices of individual dogs and hear the occasional spooked scream of a horse being spurred against its better judgment through a strange nighttime forest. Her own fear encouraged the dragon’s. Together, their terrors built to a fevered pitch until she felt she was actually drowning in the nightmare ocean of Earth’s imaginings. She knew this could not be, yet felt the deep wet chill and the water rushing into her mouth. She welded her body to the mule’s saddle and gave up all other awareness in order to picture herself swimming, somehow swimming, holding the dragon’s great head above the torrent.

The creek deepened as they moved downstream, gathering in wide fast-moving pools between steepening rapids. The piled boulders lining the banks grew higher and higher until they fused into the broken walls of a gorge that rose straight up from the rushing water. The dragon was forced to climb the cuts and ledges to keep abreast of Erde and the mule. The rising sides threw the streambed into deep moon-shadow and the roiling of the water filled the air with noise. They came to the edge of a pool, a smooth oily surface spanning the width of the gorge. The mule hesitated, then launched himself into the frigid darkness.

The real water was colder and wetter than the imagined ocean. It shocked Erde’s awareness back to her own predicament. The air was dank and roaring. The mule was a strong swimmer but hidden currents in the pool drew them crosswise, toward the source of the noise, toward a black misted horizon where the river plunged into a gap between two huge upright stones.

A falls!
Erde could only stare ahead as she was drawn toward the thundering void. The mule struggled valiantly, and the dragon’s anguished call filled her head. This was what he had feared. This was what he had seen, before any of them had been aware of it.

Suddenly, a pale form materialized in the shadows alongside,
the she-goat dancing on a flat rock that jutted at a slant into the deep water. Her little hooves beat a staccato on her water-smoothed landing and the mule swerved toward her. Hope strengthened his breathless, groaning strokes. He gained momentum against the current, found footing at last. The current tore at stirrups and saddle and Erde’s numbed legs, but he heaved himself out of the water with a wrenching grunt and scrambled onto the she-goat’s rock.

Over the roar of the falls, Erde heard the baying of the hounds.

The goat danced back and away, seeming to vanish unaccountably. The mule plunged after her, into a slanting fault that formed a narrow ramp up the wall, hemmed in by an old rock slide from above, so narrow that Erde’s legs scraped the stone. The cut climbed toward the top of the gorge, then doglegged away abruptly in an open ledge. Below, the river plummeted into blackness with a sound like mountains falling.