by Marc Secchia
Chymasion leaped fifty feet upward in fright, before firing an angry fireball to express his feelings.
The young Dragon Rider laughed. “Sorry, Chymasion. Overexcited. But I have an idea. Actually, it’s Nak’s idea. Total genius.”
Nak swelled like a bird fluffing up its feathers.
Oyda rolled her eyes. “Arosia, do you have to? Honestly?”
Arosia winked across at Oyda. “Nak is awesomeness with trumpet fanfares wrapped in a kingly cloak! He’s the rajal’s pelt, the fantastical finch’s tail-feathers!”
“Well, I say!” spluttered Nak, blushing like a village maiden.
“Nak’s brilliance outshines rainbows overlapping over the Islands! Who else beneath the twin suns–”
Emblazon growled, “Enough, Arosia, or he’ll simply explode, which would make an ugly mess on Shimmerith’s scales. What is this idea?”
Arosia pointed. “Moving pictures. Overlapping–Pip and Chymasion, can you overlap, let’s see, that page and that one? No, not the fourth, I meant the fifth one over. Good! See?”
Pip was rather pleased it was someone else’s turn to squeak with excitement. For as she overlaid the images, new patterns began to emerge. Roots. Vines. The heads and backs of Oraial Apes. Everyone was shouting at once, but she blocked them out, summoning and discarding images at the speed of thought. Blurring. Faster still. Reordering. Commanding a touch more transparency from Silver and Chymasion. The Dragons’ fires rumbled and fulminated as she drew heavily on their strength. Who else kept ridiculous cupboards-full of information in their heads, perfectly preserved for recall? The trick was synthesizing the content of her memories, which was where Silver and especially Chymasion came into their own …
“There!”
“Holy Ha’athior, Pip,” breathed Kaiatha.
“Ha’athior used to be holy. It’s a Human Island now,” Emblazon corrected, but his mind was clearly a hundred leagues from the subject of Fra’anior’s fabled Island home. “By my wingtips …”
Pip said, “It tells a story. Look. On these Islands, clearly somewhere in the Crescent, we have Pygmies speaking to Dragons. Receiving gifts. Here, we appear to have an oath–”
“An entry spell,” Shimmerith and Jyoss chorused.
“Dragonish portal magic,” the Sapphire clarified. “We’re rather fond of protecting our treasures in a wide variety of creative, fiendishly draconic ways. Judging by the complexity of that construct, I’d say one’s chances of reaching this treasure without the information contained in these pages would be vanishingly small.”
“Or fatal,” Jyoss added.
“However, the spell’s deliberately been left incomplete,” said Cinti. “Go on, Pip.”
Roaring rajals, her head was spinning afresh. Pip willed her heart to quieten down. Too much adrenalin and excitement.
She said, “Together, the Pygmies and Dragons crossed these seven Islands and then climbed down into the Cloudlands, taking these Ape Steps–look, you can clearly see an Oraial leading this party of Pygmies. Here, they appear to descend into the earth. One Pygmy, travelling alone, is shown placing the treasure in this narrow cave, which is marked ‘beneath the Cloudlands’. How’s that possible? How would they breathe down there?”
Silver said, “It’s a place no Dragon could reach.”
Of course. That was the whole point. Where in the Island-World could one hide the knowledge of the Word of Command, that Dragons could not find it? Did that mean any Dragon could use this power? That it was treacherous or corrupting or deadly? Pip shook her head slowly. All three? And if she read this treasure-trove of knowledge, a list of Words for example, that would effectively turn her head into the greatest prize in the Island-World, bar none. A prize a Marshal of Herimor would stop at nothing to gain. Surely, territorial conquest alone had not drawn him to the North? Silver had talked about the ‘elevation of Shapeshifters’. Did that mean he desired elevation to the status and power of the Ancient Dragons?
Perhaps all she needed was to get close enough to the Marshal to use a Word on him …
Now every person and Dragon in their group had seen the map. Could Marshal Re’akka steal that information from unguarded minds? Weariness stole over her. Pip let the images vanish. Confounded knowledge, better that it did not exist at all!
Silver. I need you to protect us. All of us.
After a long, irascible discussion, the group agreed to having their memories modified by Silver, even Silver himself, for they saw no way around the problem. All except Pip. All except for the littlest pair of shoulders.
She had to carry this burden alone.
* * * *
All that morning, Pip watched the air ahead grow grey with cloud and moisture, and eventually a small squall swept in from the easterly quarter to dampen hair, clothing and scales. She welcomed the beating of water upon her fevered brow. Cleansing the soul. Washing away any fear. From water and spirit a Pygmy warrior must be reborn. To Tazzaral and Kaiatha’s vocal surprise, she unclipped her saddle buckles and walked out onto the Dragon’s shoulder, spreading her arms and throwing back her head to let the suddenly driving rain pound against her head and shoulders.
With a jealous snarl, Silver slipped out of formation, snatched her off Tazz’s shoulder and placed her firmly upon his own. You belong here.
Pip sent him a mental hug. I concur, thou monster of green eye-fires.
Grr, he agreed, apparently putting the matter beyond contention.
Her bare feet flexed against warm, rain-slick Dragon scales. Her curls plastered her forehead and neck. On an impulse, Pip drew her long daggers and moved into a series of Pygmy warrior-forms Master Adak had helped her to polish. In Ancient Southern, she whispered, ‘Scything the raindrops. One with the storm. Flying amidst jungle boughs.’ Her limbs performed the flowing steps and sweeps, cuts and thrusts, while her mind drifted afar. The Crescent could teach her oneness. Pygmy-body and Pygmy-soul. How her destiny could be rooted in the reality of home. How she might come into her Pygmy battle-name. How a mind, honed and attuned to perfection, might even learn to cleave raindrops.
The rain abated. Ahead, the cloud-veils parted as if drawn aside by invisible drawstrings.
“Quite barmy,” said Nak, shaking his head dolefully.
“I know,” said Silver.
“Several leagues short of the Island,” Oyda agreed, crinkling her nose at Pip, who glanced across, startled. “Eyes to the front, jungle girl.”
Rainbows. Dazzling sprays of rainbows arched across their path, intersecting playfully, cast by the double refractive effect of the twin suns. Pip gasped. Those rainbows curved over great bowed canopies of jungle foliage which crowned the Islands lying ahead of the Dragonwing like gigantic, untamed mounds of curly Pygmy hair. Even from a distance of two or three leagues, these Isles proclaimed their uniqueness. Boughs a quarter-mile long and more overshadowed vast, grey-black cliffs. Vines and fronds trailed almost into the Cloudlands, miles long. Massive vine-hawsers, thick enough at their bases for a full-grown Dragon to make a comfortable landing upon the upper surface, linked the Islands–the famous jungle ways, which young Pygmies walked as a rite of passage.
The Dragons swept toward the majestic scene in silken silence, as though every creature could not speak for the glory of what awaited. Life teemed. It burst forth, wild and vigorous and verdant. It crammed into cracks and competed endlessly for the abundant rain and suns-shine, thriving in the towering jungle canopies and rising from the leaves in dense clouds of insects and darting specks of birds. Everywhere, there was damp. Dripping foliage. Slippery, gleaming rock, that which could be seen. Loamy stacks of fallen, rotting leaves and vegetation surrounded the bases of some Islands, surmounting the Cloudlands, supporting the growth of a second layer of dense, dark green brush and trees, as if deliberately planted by a draconic paw to create the effect of a decorative garden.
Then, Hunagu’s crashing, chest-pounding male Oraial challenge resounded over the deeps.
Pip wan
ted to laugh or cry, but could manage neither. She breathed so deep, it seemed every fibre of her being had lungs to imbibe the essence of this jungle. This was a place of ancient earth-magic. This was the nourishing, sheltering Mother jungle.
This was home.
Chapter 14: The Ways of Apes
THE CRESCENT ISLANDS stretched south to southeast in a long, gentle curve that legend told comprised half of Fra’anior’s smile–at least, so the balladeers opined. Most Dragonships accomplished the twelve to fourteen-day haul along the Crescent without stopping, Nak averred, save those who knew a little-known halfway stop called Well-Hole, a word-play on ‘hellhole’. There, a knowledgeable Dragonship Steersman might enjoy safe harbour beside a small natural lake and take on a load of abundant giant catfish. Slavers were more adventurous, taking small, manoeuvrable Dragonships in amongst the jungle giants as they hunted their victims. Dragons, too, required a rest-stop every day or two, but they could make the same journey in less than half the time, if pushed.
The major issue would be finding the right tribe of Pygmies and hopefully, Hunagu’s Ape tribe as well, without running afoul of the Marshal and his minions. Nak explained that Master Balthion’s best intelligence placed the northernmost Pygmy tribes about a third of the way along the Crescent, from which point they were widely scattered amongst the official number of one thousand, four hundred and eleven Crescent Islands all the way to a point fifty leagues shy of Germodia. But Pygmies were shy and reticent. They were not known to emerge to wave at passing Dragonships. Tracking them down would take time and tenacity.
As they passed close by the first lush Island, Pip called to Hunagu, “Air smell nice-nice?”
“Air smell stinky-wrong,” Hunagu grumbled. “Go further.”
How her feet itched to put down! But Pip had to submit to Nak’s pronouncement that they would fly on for the balance of the day, before finding a place to put down. Tomorrow, the search would commence in earnest. She gazed at each Island curiously as they sailed by. None matched the descriptions in Kaiatha’s diary. All called to her heart with desperate, tangled emotions that knotted like prickly vines in her chest. And the Marshal searched for the same knowledge. Could her people escape genocide at the paws of thousands of rapacious Dragon Assassins?
Even an endless day had to end. The twin suns peered through the humid atmosphere like great, trembling fruit afraid of sinking into the horizon. All became golden. The vast, Cloudlands-overhanging boughs gleamed as though dipped in the light of a blazing furnace. The clouds below rippled like a vast terrace lake lapping against forbidding cliff shores; Pip almost expected a brace of Land Dragons to arch out of the deeps like lake trout fleeing a Dragon hunting underwater. In the early evening Shimmerith and Emblazon ascended until they vanished from sight, intending to spy along the Crescent with Dragon sight, but they returned with grim, negative headshakes. No sign of the Marshal. How did one hide an entire floating Island and thousands of Dragons? No-one wanted to propose an answer.
When Tazzaral recommended a large cave a mile beneath an Island as their roost for the night, a simmering Pygmy was not long in making her voice heard.
Pip said, “Not on the Island?”
Tazz said, “This is an excellent location, protected and large enough for all of us–”
“But I need squidgy mud between my toes. Leaves! Vines and trees. Dirt …”
The huge Copper Dragon blinked as he often did when Pip confused him. “By my wings, Pip–why?”
“Because Pygmies need mud between their toes like Dragons need air beneath their wings,” Nak explained, with a wink at Pip that raised her temperature to melting-point.
She exploded, “Rider Nak, I take exception–”
Cinti, returned to her Dragoness-form, crashed out, “Family outing, Pip?”
“No! Yes! Er … what do you mean?”
“Just say yes,” said Dragon-Silver, putting down in the cave mouth a couple of inches from striking Emblazon’s tail. Had he touched one scale on that proud Dragon’s tail, the likely response would have been to collect a paw in the jaw.
Less than a minute later, with all Dragons and Riders accounted for, Pip took Tik on her lap–the child acting as if leaping from Dragon to Dragon was as natural as climbing trees–and Silver blasted back out of the cave, following his shell-mother’s lead. A vertical mile for a Dragon was the merest flip of a wingtip. They shot upward past broad curtains of jungle vines and creepers, scaring thousands of twittering birds into momentary silence. Silver took the lead. Pip rather suspected he wished to show off, for his flight path traced the underside of a massive bough deep beneath the forest canopy, using it as a kind of living highway. He kept his form compact. Dragon reactions flicked his wings in and out, dodging secondary and tertiary branch growth with apparent ease, but the tangle quickly became too much even for a Dragon. He burst through a thicket of creepers with an angry snarl, chopped off a few thin branches with the leading edges of his wings, and burst into what Pygmies called the jungle’s underbelly with a fiery snort of discontent, blowing charred leaves out of his mouth.
“Taken to chewing plants, Silver?” Pip teased.
He thundered furiously!
Pip clutched Tik to her chest. “Ancient One annoyed at self. No worry.”
“Silver good-good Dragon.”
Tik’s laughter trilled around the gloomy bases of the forest giants. Here, beneath the dense layers of forest canopy, it was already night-dark. Gigantic tree-trunks, several Dragon wing-lengths wide, loomed in the gloaming, but Silver avoided them easily as he found a place to put down. His splayed paws touched down softly upon a layer of deep, centuries-old loam. A few breaths later Cinti joined them, having taken a gentler approach. Her fire-eyes were bright enough to create a pool of radiance between those hoary, deeply striated boles.
Pip skidded down Silver’s shoulder, whizzed along his half-raised forepaw, and plopped down in the muck with a sigh. She wriggled her toes happily, as did Tik. She began to laugh. Great, gasping sobs of laughter seized her diaphragm. Pip did a crazy dance, bringing a further round of giggles from Tik.
After a few minutes of this, Silver said, “Pip, you’re hugging a tree.”
She wiped her eyes. “And?”
“It’s–” he struggled for words, “–a tree. Shell-mother, is this what it means to have a family outing?”
“We used to climb trees constantly.” Suiting actions to words, Pip set off, finding no trouble fitting fingers and toes into the wide cracks in the rough, stubbly bark. No masses of moss or lichens could slow her down, but she had to climb around broad plates of fungi in places.
“Wait for me!” Tik swarmed upward.
After a few minutes, the Dragons followed, digging in with their talons to walk vertically up the trunks. Their burning eyes followed Pip and Tik up into the first layer of branches and foliage. Suddenly, the light improved. Cinti and Silver joined them atop a branch wider than Silver’s wingspan at the base, where it jutted away from the tree.
“I’ve never climbed a tree suitable for Dragons before,” said Cinti, glancing about.
“I’ve never had a family outing before,” said Pip. “Pygmy children are trained by the elders and warriors rather than by their parents. It’s supposed to make us better, tougher fighters.”
“Your father never taught you to hunt?” asked Silver.
“No. That would’ve been shameful.” Pip chuckled as Tik decided Cinti’s nostrils needed internal investigation. The Dragoness jerked and twitched, clearly trying to suppress a sneeze. “Tik, no tickling. Dragons sneeze fire.”
Having whisked Tik away from danger, she paused. “Cinti, your scales are changing.”
The Night-Red Dragoness froze. For a moment Pip thought she had no answer, then she sneezed violently aside. Gouts of fire bathed the trunk twenty feet overhead, charring a large patch.
Tik giggled, “Tickle more?”
“Ask Silver,” said Pip. Cinti, I’m serious. Here by your e
ye, where the scales are smallest, there’s a definite change in colour. I’d love to see this in the full suns-light.
She sighed heavily. Perhaps all is not irredeemable.
Perhaps Balance may exist in many forms, said Silver, tossing Tik from one paw to the other. She demanded a repeat. Pip, I don’t understand. You said your parents are Pygmies. Who, then, is the Dragon in your heritage? A grandparent?
“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” Pip said. “I’ve never heard of a Pygmy Shapeshifter. According to Master Shambithion, there were none recorded in the lore-libraries at Ya’arriol or the Academy. Even if there was some so-called special relationship between the Ancient Dragons and my people, what exactly does that mean, Silver? I’ve learned there are spontaneous Shapeshifters. Where does the magic come from? Is it like a magical infection? I mean, you two are clearly the generational sort of Dragon; magic runs in the bloodline, shell-mother to shell-son. What about me? I can’t be the only one, can I?”
Cinti said, “If only we knew the answers! Ay, little one, spontaneous Shapeshifters are perfectly possible. They arise in Herimor too. Usually scare the living pith out of everyone involved.”
Pip appreciated Cinti’s toothy grin. Tik was now rolling over Silver’s knuckles, playing happily. Pip said, “Did it truly all start with Hualiama Dragonfriend? What did she do? How did she come by this great Shapeshifter magic? How did it cross the Rift to Herimor?”
Silver rumbled, “How’s about you ask a few questions we can actually answer, Pipsqueak?”
“Apparently asking the unanswerable is what family outings are all about,” Pip shot back. “Sorry, Cinti. Maybe I should stop babbling and you tell me what you do know.”
Theories abounded, mostly centred around magic. Some said Shapeshifters were Humans who caught a hint of starlight in their souls, learning to become Dragons. Some Dragons called Shifters ‘the curse’. Cinti knew of Dragons who had learned to shift into Human form, as well as the opposite, Humans who became Shapeshifters. If there was a Shapeshifter in a bloodline, that ability would often repeat down the generations, leading to a worldview she believed Marshal Re’akka subscribed to–that Shifters could breed their way into all Human and Dragon bloodlines, until all merged into one super-race–Shapeshifters, of course. That had long been his goal.