Dragon Avenger

by E. E. Knight

  Shortly, she dragged herself outside. The mountaintops to the east were just visible through a part in the trees. She must have come some length down the river, perhaps as far west as Tumbledown, though the hills here were covered with grass and rock, and trees seemed to grow thickly only out of the wind.

  That she’d come so far without drowning was as miraculous as if she’d sprouted her wings. Yet she had not the tiniest memory of being in the water beyond the leap off the cliff with the dogs dragging at her.

  The elf’s behavior surprised her as much as her survival. According to Mother and Father, elves were soft-stepping hunters of spear and bow who blew horns and sang swanlike warbles over the corpses of dead dragons as they danced, holding hands sticky with dragon blood.

  The only part of that legend that rang true was the elf’s quiet nature. Whether passing over brick, wood planking, or soft grass, he hardly made a sound, save for the whispers of the wind moving around him. The rest of his manner was as gentle and tender as a mother dragon’s over still-wet hatchlings.

  Thoughts of Mother and Jizara left her cold and sleepy and miserable. Why didn’t memories heal and fade like wounds?

  That evening he cooked her a platter full of organs and entrails in a sharp-smelling herb she’d learned to call gar-loque, or dragon-buds, as the smell of the white clusters when crushed was faintly dragonish.

  The meal filled her gorge but did little for her anguished mind.

  To divert her thoughts, the next day Wistala ventured out of the stable and viewed Rainfall’s home.

  It was a vast home and garden for a single hominid and a few animals. Treble vast when she learned that the wild orchards, melons, and wheat- and tuber-fields around were also his. He made no effort to farm as she understood the word, though he threw the horse’s manure on two beds of flowers surrounding the trees on his threshold.

  They were the oddest trees Wistala had ever seen. They became positively animated when Rainfall worked in their vicinity. Their leaves rattled, and their branches scraped against each other, and now and then he looked up and spoke to the limbs, or plucked a bloom and left it to rest in one of the trees.

  Then there were the goats.

  They came in a variety of colors, sizes, and temperaments; the only attribute they shared was a fear of dragon smell. The goats wandered away whenever they saw or smelled her, horned billies keeping a watchful eye as their charges paced away with tails flicking. They climbed to the highest peak of the house—

  And such a house!

  Wistala had never seen anything like it.

  The house stood on, or rather comprised, a hill and the trees that grew on it. The main door stood between those two vast and arching oaks Rainfall attended, beneath a sort of webbing that had any number of brambles and berries stretching from the oaks to the hillside entrance. Several of the tree limbs supported a sort of stone-and-wood balcony that offered shelter to anyone at the door below.

  There were smaller balconies of stone, not shaped but cleverly laid together, windows you couldn’t see unless the sun hit them just right, and chimneys rising up through old stumps.

  The inside had narrow passageways and stairs that opened up on wood-paneled rooms with skylights carrying down birdsong from the outside. It was like a cave with surprises at every turn, including a lower room that held a small waterfall that ran warm after its passage around the chimneys, or so Rainfall explained.

  Some of the rooms echoed every claw-click of her saa on the wooden floors, others—the sleeping rooms—absorbed sound with moss-covered walls and ceilings thick with roots. At the uttermost top there stood a room filled with paper bound up in leather wrappers or enclosed in tubes, lit by a cupola of crystal that, when slightly opened to air the room, carried in the bleatings of the nimble-footed goats.

  Wistala passed a chamber that made her wonder if it was an armory, with many big-doored cases in between, perhaps for armor and shields.

  But the weapons seemed frail and lacking in edges.

  Rainfall took down one of the devices, vaguely like a small bow, and ran his long fingers along it. A sharp, clear sound unlike anything Wistala had ever heard came from a series of strings that hummed until they quit vibrating. Wistala’s nostrils opened in surprise—was the odd bow alive?

  “Senisote,” Rainfall said.

  Apparently one could create senisote by blowing into tubes and tapping on clay cylinders topped with leather, as Rainfall demonstrated. She enjoyed it all.

  He pulled out a wooden construct so he could squat without folding his legs and played on the instrument she liked best of all, a long wooden tube with a hollow chamber on the end like a hulled melon. It created a sound as pure as birdsong, sweet as a sigh a mother dragon might make over her hatchlings, and as varied as a waterfall.

  Wistala gave her first prrum in what seemed like an age. Her neck stiffened, and she began to bob her head. Strange magic. Her head rose and fell with the tune.

  Rainfall stood and stepped crabwise, his eyes so merry that Wistala couldn’t help but move opposite him so she could keep him in view. He turned a circle, and so did she, and the next thing she knew, they were moving this way and that across the floor. He capered as he played, and she imitated; the slight pain in her joints couldn’t keep up with the pleasure the music brought.

  The tune ended, and her host attempted to strike a pose that involved entwining his legs and spreading his arms, but he must have misstepped, for he collapsed to the floor with a bit of a bump.

  And then he began to laugh.

  She’d never heard the like. The sound was as pleasing as his music, and infectious besides, for she found her griff fluttering and scraping against her scales.

  The elf sat back and wiped his eyes, face split by his mouth that now seemed to stretch from cheekbone to cheekbone. He reached out with his foot and tickled her under the chin, and she couldn’t object.

  “A rare delight,” he said, and she took perfect understanding, for his words came out with such a wave of happiness, it was almost mind-speech.

  “Very good,” she said back. He used the expression whenever she pronounced an Elvish word particularly well. It must have suited him, for he gave a little bow.

  Wistala saw a smaller version of the stool the elf sat on as he played. She ambled over to the seat, thinking she saw a cat-size creature sitting there, but she realized it was only a bit of craft bearing hair and painted-on eyes. She sniffed at the rather dirty thing—it smelled of elf, but differently from her host.

  “How this played?” she asked, not seeing strings or blowholes in its design.

  At this, the elf stood. “I . . . you . . .” He fled from the room, leaving Wistala to sniff and wonder.

  The gray-white horse was another puzzle, for he did no work. Wistala knew little about the doings of the hominid world, but in the home cave she’d heard stories enough about horses—usually while dining over a piece of one—to know that hominids had them pull or carry or bear them.

  Indeed, he appeared to own Rainfall rather than the reverse, for the elf labored long in keeping his berth clean and the horse properly brushed.

  Wistala, while exploring the stable one morning in pursuit of mice, came close to his stall. The horse snorted and reared and kicked. His simple beast-speech was easy enough to understand. “Away! Stomp you! Kick you!”

  “You mistake me for a dragon. I’m but a hatchling.”

  It occurred to her that she was no longer fresh out of the egg; she’d survived aboveground and breathed her first fire. I’m a drakka!

  The horse seemed in no mood to make zoological distinctions. He danced in his stall. “Away! Beast! Sharptooth! Away!”

  Wistala left him stomping and raging and hopped out the window. She examined the roof and felt up to a climb, using a wide-bellied wheeled contraption—cart, she corrected herself—to gain the roof. She sniffed at the clay-lined holes that guided the rain to the central cistern and gained the peak.

  From he
re, even with some of the treetops, she could see more of the lane leading west away from the hill house and barn. She saw stone walls disappearing into overgrown fields, and a few roofless constructs at the base of two massive, partially bald hills to the north.

  She could see nothing of other hominid habitation, unless the ruined houses counted, but she doubted elves, men, or dwarves would live in homes with shrubs growing in the doorways and young trees poking through the roof. The only breathing creatures who seemed to be thriving in the vicinity were the goats.

  “Rah-ya! Rah-ya! Rah-ya!” came a joyous cry. The sound traveled from window to chimney to door of the house. Rainfall danced out the door and into the overgrown yard separating home from barn, dressed only in a cross-tied wrap of thin white material. He let out a whoop and ran to the weed-choked pool surrounding a statue of three figures.

  Rainfall tipped, plunged his head into the water, looking just like a duck on a dive, save for the long kicking legs.

  Wistala couldn’t imagine the causes and consequences of such action, so she jumped down from the roof. The impact pained her, but only a little.

  By the time she crossed the courtyard, he was head-side-up again.

  “Rah-ya, Tala! Rah-ya!” Rainfall said. He pointed to his head.

  At his temples a pair of fuzzy growths, like clover heads, hung rather limply from the rest of the lichen growth, and she detected a few patches of fuzz. “See? See?”

  “I see—yes. I understand—no.”

  “You wouldn’t, would you?” Rainfall said. “I’ve been . . . down. Ill. Wounded.”

  Wistala saw no scars. “Wounded?”

  “Not as you think. I’m old, but still a long way from my final haspadalanesh—age.”

  “The . . . greenstuff . . . means healing?”

  “Yes. Means healing. Thanks to you.”

  Wistala couldn’t imagine what she’d done. He’d stuffed her with hearty kid stews, swabbed her wounds. How would that improve his health?

  “You know a little of our language, but nothing of our souls,” Rainfall said. “In time . . .”

  “In time . . . ,” Wistala repeated.

  “Very good.”

  Time passed, and it was very good.

  The elf presented her with books, and she began to learn to read by associating sounds with the simple illustrations within.

  Once she began to read, her ability with Rainfall’s language took wing. Though she still made him laugh now and then with her pronunciations, they learned each other’s minds better through unfettered words.

  Now and then men, hairy, oily, and smelly, rode in to visit the estate Wistala learned was called Mossbell. Rainfall received them in his hall with as much food and drink as he could quickly prepare while she hid her body and odor in a masking grove of pines or up a yew tree. These visits always left Rainfall dispirited, and clumps of his bark-colored hair, now sometimes bearing tiny white flowers and red berries, would drop out.

  “Just formalities,” he apologized upon her return as he fed her in the stable on their leavings, which were ample, as they ate only the choicest goat loin.

  “Where are they from?”

  “His Rodship Hammar, the Thane of Nure and the Illembrian Foothills.”

  “Is that like a king?” Wistala asked, using the only human title she knew other than Dragonblade.

  “It may as well be, for Hypatia has no more knights to send to keep his ambitions in check in these dark days.

  “I must teach you Parl, the Hypatian vernacular, so that you might climb up one of my chimneys and listen. Though you’d fall asleep at their discourse and drop down the chimney like Old King Yule himself. And your appearance would bring no Solstice merrymaking.”

  “Correct me if I err. Hypatia is all the lands between the Inland Ocean and the mountains?”

  “Once it was much more. It ringed all the Inland Ocean like a necklace. But the necklace’s caretakers let it fragment, and others have grasped at the loosened jewels. Most are gone now, and even the chain is breaking. Once you were a Citizen of Hypatia first, and only a man, elf, or dwarf second. But tribalism has taken over since then, between the conniving Wheel of Fire and that madman Praskall howling up his humanist mobs in the Varvar lands. I fear I’ll live to see the last few jewels of Hypatia torn and stolen.”

  “Is Mossbell a jewel?”

  “Nothing so grand. But Mossbell does have charge of a link in that precious chain. Tomorrow I’ll show you.”

  The next day Rainfall put a light sort of woven saddle on the irascible horse—Avalanche was his name, and a stallion still, she learned as Rainfall spoke to him—and rode out with Wistala trailing along. First he cantered the horse a few times around the buildings to warm him and take the edge off. Only after this would Avalanche walk down the cobblestones to the Road.

  The Road impressed Wistala, once it had been explained to her. Fully wide enough for two carts to pass and space for outriders beside, it was raised up and paved with fine stones, smashed so as to give them teeth that allowed wheels and horseshoes to grip, keeping mud down and dry surface against wheel, boot, or sandal. Or so Rainfall said.

  “In my grandfather’s time, fully six hundred and forty years ago, he’d done his duty to waxing Hypatia in the Battle of the Sword-grass to the south. His skill in battle won him much renown. As a reward, the Imperial Directory awarded him this estate and charged him with keeping the roads and the bridge. He named it Mossbell for an ancient gong he found at the site of the old ferry. A light duty, one would think.”

  “Bridge?”

  “We’re coming to it shortly. Happily, it’s the cause of our meeting.”

  The trees grew close about the road here, and it seemed little traveled. Rainfall continually watched and listened to the west side of the road. “If you hear a crashing, or deep and whistling breathing from these woods, hide yourself as best you can.”

  “Is there something to fear?”

  “Rarely in the daylight. There’s a pestilence dwelling on the banks of the river south of here in the form of a troll.”

  Wistala wasn’t sure what a troll was, other than that they were more ravenous than a brood of hungry hatchlings.

  Rainfall continued: “None dare settle flock or cot here. Much of my grandfather’s estate is now the troll’s stomping ground. Once many sheep and cattle, even horses, were raised here, along with the best four-season trail oxen in the northlands, if you’ll forgive my pride.”

  “Is there no way to be rid of the troll?”

  At this, her host blinked and set his mouth, as if barring a gate to keep the words in. “It’s been tried.”

  They arrived at the bridge, and Wistala stood still in wonder until her eyes could comprehend it.

  The gorge here yawned far wider if a bit less high than around Father’s retreat, still so steep-sided that a hominid could climb it only with a careful choice of path and much use of hands. Naked rocks and broken timber filled the river, flowing hard but without the bank-to-bank froth.

  The bridge crossed the river in four arching leaps, columns of shaped and angled stone like towers bearing the road. There had once been a fifth arch in the center, but it had fallen and been replaced by wooden planking under an arch of its own. A stout stone bridge house stood at the Mossbell end. Wistala would hardly have noticed it, except that Rainfall slipped from the horse and went to the door.

  “I was attending to the lock here when I saw you. Oddest thing I ever saw, a condor was circling close over you, but not stopping to eat. You were just there,” he said, pointing to a black length of shattered timber sticking out into the river, “lying atop that grandfather bole. Even at the end of your strength, you managed to pull yourself out of the river. I had to pry your tail from one of the knots.”

  “What did the condor do?”

  “Flew off mountainways.”

  “You climbed all the way down there to inspect a half-drowned drakka?”

  “And more. I used my bala
gan to get you up.”

  “What is a balagan?”

  “A device for lifting things, using ropes and blocks. Another word for it is crane. It allows one to lift the weight of three.”

  “Whyever would you trouble yourself?”

  “Curiosity. Dragons are seen only rarely nowadays.”

  “And if it weren’t for you, they’d be rarer.”

  Chapter 12

  Rainfall was a fountain of information about everything but his Rown misfortunes. Only through numerous questions could she piece together his story. She tried asking Avalanche, but he was a simple, literal fellow, and at the slightest head-bob, griff-rattle, or harsh syllable would become enraged and threaten her with a stomping. And most of what Avalanche did know related to the quality of the hay, or displeasure at not being put out to pasture with the chance of meeting females.

  So she spent most of her time with Rainfall, his diverting conversation limited to lighter topics.

  Other than his grandsire, the only time he talked about his family was in the portrait gallery. Elves, evidently, had a “study” done of themselves once they reached maturity.

  A study didn’t use paints or inks, but instead bits and pieces found outdoors—tree bark and colored sands being the two most common media. Done in life size, the “portraits” were remarkable once you got away from the odd textures. Rainfall’s certainly captured his gentle expression, warm eyes depicted with carefully polished and carved stones.

  “And at the end we have my wife, son, and granddaughter,” her host said.

  Did elves not keep their family about? “I’d like to see them in person to compare with these likenesses,” Wistala finally said. “Will I meet them?”

  “An impossibility with Nyesta and Eyen, my wife and son. They are dead.”

  His wife had a softness to her features, done in colored sand and painted shell. “I hope she had a peaceful passing,” Wistala said.