Song of the Beast

by Carol Berg

  I’d never seen my father so angry—and he was not a soft-tempered man. His fury wasn’t so much directed at me as at the courtiers and servants who were listening. “It is no matter where he’s gone. He was nothing like these foolish stories that make him out a magician or a god. I’ll not have him spoken of. He’s gone and forgotten, and that’s the end of it.”

  Well, that was not the end of it for me. I would admit that perhaps the legend was not wholly accurate, because my father said so. My father was the king, and I believed he was never wrong. But I was still obsessed with Aidan. On that same afternoon, as I groused and mumbled about my studies, old Jaston, my tutor who had also been my father’s tutor and so had met the legendary Aidan, brought me a small, brass-bound box along with my lesson books. “Here’s something as may interest you, Prince Donal. Yours by right, but perhaps best kept private, as you’ll see.”

  In the box were some thirty letters, seals unbroken, all addressed to me. Jaston helped me sort them by the dates marked on them and helped me read the first one, as I was not a precocious reader.

  To my boisterous young cousin,

  I’ve had a mind to write you since our harmonious meeting a few weeks ago. It was such a pleasure and delight to make your acquaintance. I hope you’ve not tormented your good nanny in like fashion again, but rather sung the chorus we made together. The counterpoint was quite nicely done, I think, and tells me that you are indeed as much my family as your father’s.

  I’ve traveled quite a long distance since we met, and someday you may enjoy visiting this land beyond your realm where men wear trousers that look like skirts, and women wear gold rings poked right through their ears. It is called Maldova and is set high in the most gloriously beautiful mountains. ...

  Those letters became my most precious possessions, read over and over again through the years until the paper was as soft as cloth. They were filled with adventure and wit, and an education about people and places and all manner of things a man could learn from them. I knew Aidan MacAllister far better than I knew anyone, for my father had little time for me, and no one else dared speak so freely to the crown prince of Elyria. Some of the letters had drawings or sketches on them, and almost all of them had snippets of musical notation attached. Aidan said he composed them especially for me.

  Though I asked him repeatedly for one, my father refused to supply me a music master. But when I was nine I became friends with a squire who could play the lute and knew how to read the markings of music. I swore him to secrecy, and he spent a whole night playing my cousin’s melodies. I had never heard anything so wonderful in my life. Even in my friend’s awkward playing, I felt as if each phrase were plucked on strings right inside of me. It made me think my cousin knew me as well as I knew him, and I believed that if he walked into a crowded room, I would recognize him instantly, and he would recognize me.

  I devised all manner of explanations as to where Aidan MacAllister had gone and what he was doing. Mostly they were things holy and mysterious and fine. Sometimes I thought he was playing a joke on everyone, and sometimes I wondered if he was just tired and had decided to rest for a while. Never, ever, did I believe he was dead. Too much of life was crowding out of his thirty letters.

  When I was thirteen I came of age, and reading and writing and mysteries gave way to more serious matters. I had very little time to think about Aidan MacAllister, for I rode as my father’s squire, apprenticing at warcraft and statecraft until at seventeen I was given a command of my own. I was good at it, just as my father was. I knew it, and my father said it—as directly as he ever said anything complimentary. He had been king at eighteen, and his father at twenty, so I had to be ready.

  Only once did I ever hear my father speak of his cousin. It was the night he came to my tent in the training grounds south of Vallior to order me and my troops to the Gondari border. My musician friend, now my adjutant, was playing one of Aidan’s tunes as my father walked in.

  “Where did you learn that?” my father demanded.

  “I’ve heard it was composed by a famous musician from long ago, sire,” said my diplomatic friend, keeping his head bowed and his knee bent.

  “I thought as much.” It surprised me, as my father claimed to have no ear for music. He was not angry at the sideways reference to Aidan. Telling my friend to continue playing, he sat down on my cot and handed me the paper that would send me to our most dangerous frontier. Though he hated for me to venture into such a risky theater, it was time. I was eighteen, and he could afford to show no lack of faith in me. I had no doubts of his confidence, so I didn’t make him search for words that were so hard for him to say. Instead, I knelt and kissed his ring, sat back on the cot, and decided that if we were to talk of something difficult on this night, it might as well be something more intriguing than war.

  “I’ve heard that Aidan MacAllister could make people see visions with his music,” I said. “Was he as good as that?”

  “Better. He could make you live his visions ... and be changed by them.” He paused and smiled a little. “But he couldn’t look at a boat without heaving up his dinner, and he couldn’t shoot a bow worth dirt. Quit hunting altogether when he was ten. Said his fingers were made for harp strings, not bowstrings. I called him a sodding Florin plant-eater who couldn’t stand the stink of blood. He laughed and raced me back to the stables. He could run like a fox and ride like a horse thrall. I could never beat him in a footrace or a horse race either one.”

  Aidan had told me the very same story in his tenth letter.

  “What happened to him, Father? Why did he stop singing?”

  My father did not look at me, but only shook his head. “Some things are not meant to be. There is an order to the world, not always pleasant, not always just, not always explainable. It is why you will be a king, and Vart, who sleeps across the doorway of your tent, will never be other than a slave. Aidan and his visions did not fit within that order. I don’t know what happened to him. I don’t know. ...”

  I believed him and promised myself that when I returned from Gondar, I would find out the truth. But three weeks from that night my horse was shot out from under me by a Gondari bowman in a surprise attack. The horse—a very large horse—fell on my leg, which snapped in protest. At least eighteen soldiers died bravely trying to rescue me, but I woke up a hostage in Gondar Lair, facing the rest of my life in a filthy, squalid hut surrounded by dragons.

  After three months of captivity, I could walk properly again. At six months, my left arm was burned off by a dragon, teaching me the absolute impossibility of escape. At a year I had lost hope that my father could find any honorable way to set me free. By the eighteenth month of my captivity, I had determined that the dismal chill and unending rain of Gondari winter were preferable to the mind-destroying stink of summer in the lair. But I had not yet learned to stay asleep when a dragon screamed. My days and nights ran together in fits of waking misery and too-shallow sleep.

  Twenty-three dragons lived in Gondar Lair. I could recognize their different bellows, and I gave them names: Squealer, Volcano, Grinder, Devil ... Devil was the one who had taken my arm, and his throaty, malevolent screech would inevitably leave me shaking and sick. I laid wagers with myself as to which beast would roast me when I went mad and ran again. When that day came I would not fall back at the touch of flames as I had on the day I lost my arm. I would embrace the fire and free my father from the terrible position I’d put him in.

  I thought a great deal about Aidan MacAllister in those dreary months. I recited his letters from memory, trying to imagine myself in the places where he’d been, instead of the place I was. He had written a great deal about dragons, how he was always trying to figure out their role in the world. They had fascinated him. It was perhaps the only place where our interests diverged. Mostly I wished my cousin would come sing to me, to make a holy vision to replace the muddy desolation that was everything I would ever see. I would have traded a month’s rations for him to ease my wret
chedness for even one short hour.

  In some nameless hour of a nameless day in a sultry, stifling month of my second spring—I had lost track of the exact days in the hazy horror of the time after losing my arm—I was awakened by the bellow of an unfamiliar dragon. I did not seek shelter in the more protected corner of my hut, but lay where I was and prayed that my father had at last decided to sacrifice me and destroy the cursed Gondari. But it didn’t sound like an attack. It would take a legion of at least fifty dragons to attempt Gondar Lair itself. The noise would be unimaginable: the murderous thunder of so many wings, the continual bellowing and roar of flames. I would have heard the Gondari legion take flight, leaving only three Riders to protect me from the two monsters left behind to hold me captive. And the Riders would have come to chain me up in case they would be given the order to execute me. But as I lay on the filthy straw and listened, I heard only the single, strange bellow and the torrent of fire that accompanied it. Then the Gondari dragons answered with a monumental trumpeting unlike any I’d ever heard. Screamer first. Then Volcano.

  I crept across the dirt floor and peered out the door. The afternoon was hot and oppressive, thick, gray clouds hanging low over the lair. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary until I looked to the south and saw a sheet of flame so white it hurt my eyes. Again came the fierce cry that raised the hair on my neck. Two dragons flew out of the fire, circled the lair, and vanished into the clouds. The Riders atop the nearest guard tower gestured frantically toward the eastern quarter of the valley. Another white firestorm, another eerie, trumpeting bellow, and again two dragons flew. Three Riders appeared from the south, running madly toward the two on the guard tower. From the west burst white flame and booming thunder and the screaming triumph of a dragon.

  Something extraordinary was happening. Anything that left the Dragon Riders in such frenzy was worth knowing more of. I climbed up on the sod roof of my hovel so as to see better, but that looked to be the worst mistake I had ever made. From the east swooped one of the largest dragons I’d ever seen, wings full spread, flames pouring from its snout ... and it was going to pass right over me. I flattened myself to the weedy roof, trying not to get blown off by the hurricane of its passing. It wouldn’t kill me. Its Rider would never allow it to kill a hostage so easily. I’d scarcely sat up again, wondering why a Rider would deliberately make his mount harder to control by riding it through the ring of bloodstones set up to keep me captive, when I heard thunder from behind me. I turned and saw the same beast coming back again. I would have sworn its red eyes looked right into my own.

  I had thought myself become dead to fear. For almost two years, fear had been my whole existence, and Devil’s hate-filled eyes blazed red in every moment of my sleep. But when the dragon made a tighter circle and started its third pass, talons the size of small trees fully extended, I begged Jodar to give me strength not to bring shame upon my father and my people. I had once seen a dragon allowed to rend a traitor with its claws. It had taken two days for the wretch to die. Burning was a desirable ending in comparison.

  I did not hide—no use in that—but knelt upon the earthen roof watching him come, my horror mounting to a fever as the five claws on one foot opened wider, then snapped around me, dragging me into the gray morning, enclosed in a cage of tissue and bone. I did not scream. I would give no watcher the satisfaction of it. In truth I don’t know that I could have forced any sound from my throat. My knees plugged the gap where the tips of the claws came together imperfectly, and my left side was braced against one of the massive talons. Dragon claws were like razors, and with every jolt I expected to feel them slice through my flesh, but strangely enough I remained undamaged. I tucked my remaining arm tightly to my chest. The consideration that I might lose it and survive long enough to know of the loss was almost beyond bearing.

  Wind blasted through the gaps between the claws, making my eyes stream with tears, and it took a considerable while before I convinced myself to move enough to shield them so I could see. But in the instant I did so, I understood why my flesh was intact. Thick pads of tough gray tissue were extended from the dragon’s foot and curved along the inside and around the inner tip of each claw. I scarcely dared breathe. Perhaps it didn’t know I was there. Perhaps it thought I was ... I couldn’t imagine. I couldn’t think at all.

  A monumental cry blared from just above me, ripping into me like the claws I expected, so dreadfully loud, so awesomely immense, I thought I must go mad from it. Yet strangely ... incredibly ... hidden in the rise and fall of the dragon’s wail and in the timbre of its voice was a combination of tones that was eerily familiar.

  How could it be so? I covered my head with my arm, slowed my breathing, and told myself that if I worked at it hard enough I would surely wake up on the floor of my hovel. But I lived on unharmed, the passing moments and the whipping gray clouds cooling my fevered terror, so I was able to listen with all of myself when the dragon cried out again.

  No Rider flew on that dragon. My bones resonated with that truth. The beast was uncontrolled, free, and when I again heard the music in its cry of exultation, I began to tremble with something far beyond fear.

  My stomach, which had not weathered events at all well, gave a fearsome lurch when the beast began its circling descent. Gingerly I leaned on one of the padded claws, grasping hold of it and peering out as we dropped below the clouds into gray daylight. We were approaching a sweeping, grassy hill, gently sloping on all sides, embraced on the south by a broad, glassy river. Once, twice, three times we circled, each time lower, until five dark blotches I’d thought were trees were revealed as two men and three horses. I dared not even think for the hope that welled up inside me, not even when we swooped low, the talon cage opened, and I tumbled gently onto the thick grass.

  For a moment I lay crumpled in a ball, my face pressed against damp—oh, Jodar—such sweet-smelling grass. If I am to die, then let it be while the soft earth holds me. But the brimstone-laden wind of dragon wings drew my eyes to the sky. Though dizzy and half-sick, I stood and watched the dragon soar heavenward until it disappeared into the clouds. “Thank you,” I yelled, as if it could understand words. Then I turned toward the brow of the hill where the men and horses were silhouetted against the sky. In my deepest heart—for no explainable reason—I believed I would walk up the hill to meet Aidan MacAllister, but in truth it was an exceptionally broad-shouldered Elhim and my weeping father.

  AIDAN

  Chapter 33

  As prisons go, the bondage of Narim’s poison was not terrible. Other than the initial nausea when he administered it every morning, little discomfort was involved. I was tired enough that a few days of immobility didn’t seem cruel. The Elhim fed me and made sure all normal bodily needs were taken care of. The only thing they didn’t know and I couldn’t tell them—since I was quite incapable of speech—was how wickedly I itched all over once my hair started growing in again. Nothing much to do about that, even if I’d had control of my own muscles. I probably would have scratched myself to ribbons.

  My mind was limp as well. I slept most of the days as we traveled. Only when the poison started to wear off could I apply any logical thought to this latest detour in my life’s peculiar journey. What was Narim planning? Was it truly to speak to the dragons? To get reassurance he could not accept from me? I couldn’t believe it. Nien’hak ... that was the key. According to Davyn, Narim had been poking around in it, and according to the journal map, it was somewhere in the mountains of the Carag Huim. But I couldn’t remember what it was. I tried picturing the journal entry, the lists of names and numbers, and I tried remembering where I’d heard the name before. On the third night of our journey, as I lay paralyzed and staring into the dying coals, my thoughts drifted to Cor Talaith, the Elhim’s green valley left in cinders by the Ridemark. That led me to Iskendar and his dying words ... and there was Nien’hak again. “Ask him what he found in Nien’hak,” he’d said. “Ask him why there is an Elhim named for every dragon.”
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  It was so hard to think. A spark snapped and flew up from a crumbling log, shooting across my vision like a miniature dragon. The names in the journal lists were Elhim names. No dragons, though. Narim didn’t know the dragons’ names except for the Seven. The second list was tools—unhelpful. The third list was place names. My thoughts flitted away with the swirling ashes of the fire, and for a while the focus of my being was how dearly I would love to rub the grit from my eyes and take a hay fork to my itching legs.

  What did barrows and picks have to do with dragons? And what were the place names in the journal list, and what did the numbers attached to each place mean? Vallior—32, Camarthan—12, Aberthain—3 ...

  The truth struck me like a tower toppling on my head. In the span of a heartbeat all of it was clear: why it was so important that the dragons come to the lake, how Narim planned to rescue Lara, why he had to kill me. I thought I would burst with the horrifying certainty, and indeed I must have groaned aloud, for Narim was soon standing over me as I struggled to move and speak.

  The place names were the locations of dragon lairs. The numbers signified how many dragons were in each lair. “An Elhim named for every dragon,” and Narim knew exactly how many dragons there were. And the shovels and barrows were to use in Nien’hak—Nien’hak, the “pit of blood,” the mine near Cor Talaith where the Elhim had dug out the bloodstones. What had Narim found in the pit of blood?

  Narim called for Kells to hold me still as I writhed and croaked, “You can’t—” That was all I managed to get out before they poured more poison down my throat.

  “I was trying to keep the doses small enough so you could have some control of yourself,” said Narim, “but I can’t have you gathering any semblance of your wits. Certainly not enough to speak to Roelan.”