“And she’s Water.”
“Yes. Water. She’s Earth’s sister.”
Though he hears musical agreement in the background, he makes a face. “Nah. Can’t be. I mean, look at ’em. They don’t look anything alike.”
Instead of snapping back at him like usual when he doubts her, she seems to go off on a thought of her own. “I know. Isn’t it peculiar?”
N’Doch laughs. Does this mean the girl has a sense of humor? “It’s all pretty damn peculiar, I’d say.”
She nods, serious again. “But you get used to it.”
“Okay. So there’s these two dragons . . .”
He’s interrupted by a bugle of music, not urgent or angry this time, but eager, as if the sea dragon’s just thought of something she’d meant to tell them all along. The girl’s deadpan face blooms with amazement and delight.
“She says there are more! She remembers four! Oh, a wonder! Isn’t it, N’Doch?”
“I’m having enough trouble with one.”
“Oh, but four!” She turns to Water. “Where are they? Do you know?” The sea dragon looks glum. The girl turns back. “She doesn’t know.”
“You’re a one-woman conversation.” N’Doch wants to get back on track. “Now listen up, okay? There’s these two dragons—and maybe more—and then there’s you and me, and we’re supposed to help them do something, only no one knows what it is.”
She resettles herself, but she’s having a hard time restraining her glee. “It’s their Purpose. We have to help discover it. Four!”
“Yeah, okay, four. But couldn’t they just, you know, be here, like on vacation?”
She frowns. He can see she doesn’t appreciate his levity. “All dragons have a Purpose. They wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
“Hah,” he mutters before he can stop himself. “Wish I could say the same.”
Her sudden smile dazzles him. “You can, now.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
She spreads her hands, palms down, like she’s calming a riot. N’Doch notices how they’re large and long-fingered like his own. He wonders if she plays an instrument. Maybe he could teach her one. “Earth woke from his long sleep under the mountain because Someone was Calling him to his Purpose.”
“Oh, yeah? Who?”
“That’s what I keep telling you! We don’t know!”
N’Doch hears for the first time the big dragon speaking in his head, and understands that a further level of connection has been achieved, probably because he hasn’t been fighting it so hard. The big guy’s voice is not the basso profundo rumble you’d expect from a dragon. It’s more like a young voice that will be deep when it grows up. And N’Doch can hear humor in it, a wry, self-deprecation that matches the sad-sack expression the big guy often wears. It’s almost playful. Nonetheless it shakes N’Doch to his very bones and sinews to hear someone else’s words forming between his own ears.
—I did not even know my name when I woke.
—I knew mine. Water chimes in busily, like the mezzo making her entrance late into the quartet. —But I am older.
“Gaaaghhh . . .” is all N’Doch can manage. His brain rocks with sound, words, music, meaning. He thinks he might just pass out.
“We tried to figure out who was Calling him,” continues the girl, like nothing out of the ordinary is happening, “I told Earth we’d find a Mage to tell us, but we were having these awful dreams and being chased all over by my father and the terrible priest, and the Summoner was calling him all the while! If it wasn’t for Sir Hal . . .” She’s stopped by the look in N’Doch’s eyes. Even she can tell overload when she sees it.
He’s grateful for the momentary silence, but he wants to look like he’s up to the challenge. He can keep up with a girl from Mars, even though she’s got a lot more words in her than he’d thought. He takes a long steadying breath. “Sir Hal?”
And she’s off again. “Yes! He found us. Saved us. Taught us how to get along in the wilderness. He’s a famous scholar of dragon lore, well infamous, really—most people don’t approve of dragons, you know. And he’s a King’s Knight, one of the few still loyal to His Majesty.”
“His majesty who?”
“Otto, High King of all the Germanies.” She looks crestfallen. “Have we come so far south that you haven’t heard of King Otto? Oh dear! Have you even heard of the Germanies?”
“Well, Germany, yeah. A way while back, there was East and West, but now there’s just one. Germany.” He’s always amazed by how thoroughly these regression cults indoctrinate their members. “I’m no history geek or anything, but I’m pretty sure they haven’t had a King of Germany for at least two hundred years.”
He watches the girl absorb this one. When no trace of guile shows through her confusion and dismay, he asks her casually as he can, “So, tell me something. What year do you think it is?”
Her chin lifts, hardens. “Think? I am no ignorant peasant! I am a baron’s daughter. I can read and write and tell the hours. The year is 913 and it’s September.” She squints out into the sun. “But I can’t really tell what time it is. It’s different here, somehow.”
“I’ll say it is.” N’Doch sucks his teeth. “Well, here’s the thing: You got the September part right. And you’re in the People’s so-called Democratic Republic of Maligambia. That’s in Africa, which is pretty far south of Germany. But, girl, let me break it to you gently. The year is 2013.”
“It is?”
“Uh-huh.”
To her credit, she doesn’t launch right off into one of those twisty rationalizations the cultists always trot out to shore up their most ridiculous beliefs, like how God put the fossils in the rock to test the faith of Christians. She just stares at him, and the music in his head starts sounding more like bees swarming. She’s having a silent confab with the scaly duo—no, not fair—neither of them are scaly, certainly not his silky blue monster, his lovely Water. Another cliché down the drain. N’Doch scolds himself. He knows he’s just feeling miffed at being left out of a conversation moving too fast for him to handle.
“Hey,” he says. “Can I get into this discussion?”
The girl turns a long, long gaze on him. He can see the years themselves in her eyes. “2013? Then we have traveled far indeed.”
* * *
The future was something Erde had few thoughts about, other than the most immediate variety such as, “What’s for dinner?” or “What can I possibly make for Grandmother’s Name-Day?” Occasionally she would wonder which baron’s son her father would marry her off to or what castle she’d live in when she grew up, but such thoughts never bore the weight of reality. Not like actually being there, feeling the truth of it all around you.
She had no problem believing that she was indeed in the future. Magic can make anything possible. She just wished the dragon had warned her. But perhaps he hadn’t known either. Dragon time was less linear than her own, she was learning. Her sense of it was that time began now and ended then. After all, didn’t you live one day, then another, and so on? But for the dragons, it seemed, time just was, and you could go anywhere in it you wanted to if you had the right directions.
Which of course for Earth meant the right image.
Which meant that if, in transporting to the place they’d seen in their nightmares, he’d brought them to the future, then they’d been dreaming the future all along. Erde decided not to tackle the mystery of how you could dream something that hadn’t happened yet. She supposed it was something like the gypsy women and their picture cards, or Hal’s lady Rose and her Seeings. Rose claimed to be able only to See what was now, but the dragons said all of time was now, happening all at once, which would explain why Rose occasionally seemed to See the future. Erde couldn’t quite get her mind around it, but the dragons were magic and they knew best, so she’d just have to take their word for it.
The notion that she couldn’t ignore was that the world might not go on as it was—as she knew it—forever and ever, that the pa
ssage of time might automatically equal change. Therefore, the difference of N’Doch’s world might not be due simply to her having traveled far, far south into exotic lands. Instead, the whole world, from north to south, might have changed, might be like it was here in what he called Afrika: hot, dry, dusty . . . unrecognizable. So if she went back north, there might be nothing familiar there either. This was more frightening than any breakdown in her definitions of Time. She’d always been proud to be able to say that Tor Alte and its surrounding lands had been held in the von Alte name for three hundred years. But eleven hundred? Suddenly she wanted more than anything to go there and see.
N’Doch was watching her carefully, as if he’d expected some desperate reaction to his news. But even if she did feel desperate, she’d try not to show it.
“Is . . . uhm . . . German-y . . . like this now?” She gestured around vaguely. She didn’t want to seem to be judging his world too harshly.
“Now? As opposed to when?”
She thought they’d been through that, but maybe he wasn’t listening while she discussed it with the dragons. If he didn’t start making a habit of listening, it was going to be hard to keep track of who understood what.
“As opposed to when I come from.” She liked the sound of that, how easily it came out. Not “where I come from” but “when.”
N’Doch sighed explosively. “All right, look—enough is enough. It’s none of my business but somebody’s got to clue you in sometime, might as well be me. So listen: whoever’s told you the year’s 913, your parents, this King Otto, whoever, they’re just pretending you all live in the past, ’cause they can’t deal with the present. You get it? It’s all a big fat lie. I’m telling you that here and now, and you just gotta accept it. Okay?”
She let him finish and then calm down a bit, for he was getting rather heated about it. She guessed that the fact that, as young as she was, she’d been born eleven hundred years ago was a hard one to swallow.
“I don’t mean I’ve lived that long,” she reassured him patiently. “That would be impossible. Only dragons and the Wandering Jew live that long. I mean I just came from there yesterday.”
* * *
She says it with such simple conviction, it makes his hair stand up on end. Not from Mars after all, but from the past. A time-traveler. And she’s so sure about it, he can’t think of a way to refute her. Especially when he’s asking himself: If dragons can move through Space, why not through Time?
Abruptly, he’s tired of it, all of it. Tired of having his brain crowded with other people’s thoughts and voices and concepts, of having his reality stretched beyond all reasoning. And no wonder. He hasn’t slept in twenty-four hours, except for being down for the count while they cured his fever, and that can hardly count as rest. It’s only that he’s eaten better than usual that’s kept him going. It doesn’t really matter, he realizes, if she’s from now or whenever. She’s here and so are the dragons, and somehow, he’s got to deal with them.
“Okay, I got it. You’re from the past. Fine. I’m gonna get some sleep now.” He lies back and folds his elbow over his eyes, sealing out girl and dragons, the whole preposterous vision. “When it’s dark, I’ll go talk to Papa Dja.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Erde told Earth that she’d never in her life met anyone so badly brought up.
—Ending a conversation without so much as a by-your-leave!
—He’s tired. He’s had a lot to think about today.
Water stirred from her doze.
—I think we could all use some rest.
—But he was so rude! And we were actually talking about something for the first time ever!
—Remember, you’re not a baron’s daughter here. He owes you no fealty.
—What about simple courtesy?
—His definitions are different from yours.
—Rest now, child. I feel great things are about to happen here.
—You do?
—Rest.
The dragons were the ones who really wanted to rest, Erde decided, so she’d better let them. Forcing her petulance away, she studied N’Doch as he plunged into sleep beside her. He didn’t ever seem to worry about how he should behave. He did whatever he felt like at the moment. Erde found this both enviable and infuriating. Did everyone just do what they felt like in this world of 2013? How did they get anything done without fighting about it?
She resisted sleep for a while. She thought she should stay awake and keep watch. But the hot close air in the shadow of the rocks made her drowsy, and neither N’Doch or the dragons seemed concerned any longer about the possibility of attack. She stared out at the brushy horizon until her eyelids drooped. Then she seated her dagger more comfortably against her waist, laid her head on her pack and fell asleep.
* * *
When the dream came this time, it was not like the old ones. It was not on alien ground, or wracked with deafening noise and odious smells. She was home again, not a specifically known location but an easily comprehended one: a wide, frost-seared grassland backed by fog-shrouded mountains, a dark forest of pine and fir flowing over the waves of foothills down to the edge of the plain, a chill, thin river. It was early morning, just coming light, of a dull wet day. Along the meeting line of grass and trees, an army was camped.
Erde found she could approach the camp, slowly, at eye level, as if riding along the rutted path and in among the silent tents on horseback. The illusion was so real that she started in fright, in the dream, when the door flap of a nearby tent was suddenly thrown aside and a man stepped out, not ten feet in front of her.
He was solid and blond, with the hard-muscled body of a warrior but sporting a courtier’s close-cropped beard. His breath made smoke in the icy air, a chill Erde could not feel. The man stretched and shivered, shrugging his wool cloak more tightly around his naked chest. He tested the wind, listening intently, then frowned and looked toward Erde. She recognized Adolphus of Köthen, and wondered if he would remember her. But instead, he stared past her, as if surprised by not seeing the something or someone he’d expected. He turned away, then glanced back again, quickly, as if trying to catch that someone in the act of being there after all. Erde knew in her dream that he could sense a presence, maybe even her own specific presence, and that this puzzled him. It puzzled her, too, since they hardly knew each other, and why should she be dreaming about Adolphus of Köthen? But she was glad it was only a dream because this formidable, intelligent man was officially her enemy, the ally of her father and the terrible priest. She wouldn’t want to be this close to him if he could actually see her.
And yet she lingered, because the dream gave her the power and because, she realized guiltily, she liked looking at him, liked his interesting combination of toughness and reserve, liked how his thick, straw-gold hair bunched along his neck like pinfeathers, liked even his oddly dark brows and eyes. His alert scowl reminded her of her father’s favorite peregrine, Quick, except Köthen carried himself with an easy confidence unlike the posture of any bird of prey. Much else about Köthen reminded Erde of Hal, though this was no surprise since Hal had fostered him as a lad, and by Köthen’s own admission, taught him everything he knew. Erde thought it a great human tragedy that Baron Köthen felt called upon to go to war to usurp the King, thereby pitting himself against his beloved mentor. For there never was a more loyal servant to His Majesty than Heinrich Peder von Engle, Baron Weisstrasse, known to his friends as Hal. Except, now that she thought of it, Köthen had invariably called him Heinrich. A mark of respect, or a way of distancing a man whom he honored far more than was convenient for him?
Now Köthen looked the other way. Armor clanked. There was a stirring of men and horses outside a black-and-green tent flying the von Alte battle standard. Her father’s tent. Past it were a quartet of white pavilions, each guarded by a stout, white-robed monk. Other monks were lugging heavy pails of heated water into the largest pavilion.
Erde felt a chill at last, and a sudden urg
e to scurry away, as if some roving eye searching a crowd had picked her out with evil intent. She stared with Köthen, then after him, as he turned abruptly, his scowl deepening, and stalked past her, away from her father’s awakening and the tents of the priest, away from the camp and the new smoke rising from cook fires, into the morning darkness under the trees.
* * *
When she woke in the thick heat of a far century, she knew it was not precisely a dream that she’d had. A profound sense of home lingered. Somehow she had been there, had returned to the preternaturally early winter of 913, and been privy to a true event, however insignificant . . . or probably not. Only time would tell that. But why Köthen? She scanned her mind for the dragon to tell him the news, but he was still sleeping off his bellyful of fish. She opened her eyes, slitted against the late-afternoon glare, so bright even in the deepest shadow of the rocks. Once again, N’Doch was gone.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
On the way to Papa Dja’s, N’Doch rehearses his explanation for showing up out of the blue after all these years of ignoring his grandpapa entirely. How long?—he counts backward—eight years, it has to be, and five since Sedou’s funeral, when the old man walked all the way in from the bush to sing the ancient death rituals behind the imam’s back. He wouldn’t take a bush taxi. Wouldn’t even take the public bus.
N’Doch would never admit it out loud, but he misses his older brother. More than, say, his little brother Jéjé who died so young the family hardly had time to get used to him being there. Or Mammoud, the eldest, who was out of the house and into the army at fourteen, when N’Doch was just learning to walk, and dead a year later. With Sedou, he’d actually had a sort of relationship, a rocky one for sure, with Sey always yelling at him to stick around home and mind. Sedou was the righteous one, of all his mama’s sons, the one who did his schoolwork and worked extra hours at odd jobs to help feed the household. Of course that righteousness also made him pigheaded and fanatical, and got him killed for speaking his mind. N’Doch thinks writing songs is a smarter way of saying your piece then getting involved in politics. It’s true he hasn’t written any songs about “issues” yet, but he keeps thinking he might. He hasn’t written any about Sedou either, though he’s got a lot in his mind. Probably the songs about Sedou will end up being about politics, so he figures he’d better just get famous first. If you’re famous enough, they pretty much let you say what you want.
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