by Jo Clayton
the sixteenth day—more dragons
Hern stood in Serroi’s spring scrubbing himself with a handful of sand, whistling cheerfully, Serroi could feel the abrasion of the sand against her skin as she lay stretched out on a patch of grass, her hands laced behind her head, smiling lazily up at a cloudless sky. A shimmering form drifted into view, a glass dragon undulating in vast loops, delicately etched against the clear blue of the sky. More of the giants floated past, singing intricate silent chorales of colored light, the faceted bodies pulsing with light, winding about each other in knots of celebration.
The tiny dragons continued to dart about Hern, weaving their small sparks into a spirited capriccio. Slowly Serroi stood. Slowly she walked to join Hern in the water. Without interrupting their jubilant song, the tiny dragons split apart to let her through their shell. Hern dropped his arm on her shoulders, she pressed herself against him; both seeing through both eye-sets, they watched the play of the giant dragons through the quicker shimmers of the small ones.
As the days passed Hern and Serroi ceased to search for food, ate only what the fliers brought them and what the small dragons gave them (not food exactly, more like bee stings, not as unpleasant as that, little jolts that gave them energy with each touch of the cool smooth bodies). Hern and Serroi walked hand in hand as a beast with four feet and two heads. The great glass dragons drifted over them singing their soundless songs in praise of the day, winding in slow dances one about the other. Each night Serroi-Hern called water and watched their companions play in it, the tiny dragons bits of sun and sky, the flier kits noisy and funny, filling them with another sort of joy, a laughter that celebrated the earth and the things of the earth, love and friendship and rollicking delight.
When they slept they dreamed, most of those dreams memories good and bad of childhood and adolescence. They didn’t speak of them, for one thing it was very hard by this time to separate one from the other enough to be aware that another spoke. They did speak sometimes, but it was more like one who takes a leisurely walk to mull over some problem and talks aloud to himself.
The days passed and the miles crept past unnoticed beneath their feet. They forgot everything but the present moment, they were children of the present moment, bound to the now, all anxieties washed away with memory, all agonies gone except in now-and-then-dreams and those were distant things like reading a story in a book. They played with the days like happy children, all sadness exorcised into the night.
Unnoticed, the miles did pass. One morning there were no more glass dragons in the sky to celebrate the dawn. One night there were no small dragons to dance in the newborn spring.
One day Pa’psa circled about them, chattering his distress, the little brown females flew around them singing a high sad song—a song of farewell.
One day Hern and Serroi woke and looked at each other and saw the other as other.
Aches and pains came flooding back, the old tensions and urgencies came flooding back. Hern rubbed at his jaw, his hand rasping over the short stiff beard that blackened the lower half of his face. He started to jump to his feet, grunted as his knees threatened to give, pushed himself up more cautiously to stand looking west across the plateau. “How long?” he whispered.
Serroi crooked her leg, inspected the leathery dusty soles of her feet, fingered the tattered bottoms of her trousers. “You know what I know.”
He swung around, stared at her, gave a short bark of laughter.
Chuckling a little at her unintended double meaning and at his appreciation of it, she got to her feet. “We manage to bring the spears with us?”
He looked around, saw them thrown down beside the new spring. “Seems we did.” He bent carefully, picked them up, stumped back to her. “Just as well. I’m hungry.”
They were both reduced to rags. All excess flesh was burnt away though they suffered few of the debilities of extended starvation. Serroi nodded when she felt her stomach knot at Hern’s Words. She took the spear from him and started probing about for tubers and tulpa. A moment later he joined her. “How far to the end of this?” He pushed his hand through his hair. She saw with a touch of sadness that the streaks of gray in the black had broadened into bars and his face looked lined and weary. Involuntarily her hand rose to touch her own hair, wondering if the sorrel was peppered with white. She thought of asking him, glanced at him and changed her mind.
“Don’t know,” she said. She pointed east. “Where that cloudbank rises, I think.”
The next three days were painful. They quarreled a little, not much, it was too dangerous, there were still empathic links between them that were activated by strong emotion. They made love and that was difficult also, the feeling went too deep and their bodies were to feeble still to contain the emotions unleashed. And from the shared dreams they knew far too much about each other’s vulnerabilities. If they lost control each could wound the other too deep for healing. It put a constraint on them that only gradually wore away as the soreness scabbed over and they rediscovered the safer uses of tenderness and affection.
About midmorning on the fourth day they stood on the eastern rim of the plateau.
Far to the east there were brilliant flashes of blue, the Ocean of Storms. In the south they saw a dark mass that had to be the walls and towers of Shinka-on-the-Neck. Directly below them, stretching to that distant coast, the land was a patchwork of fields and a dotting of dark blotches that were living compounds scattered along a yellow road that led to a larger blotch nestled in the loop of a large river winding down to Shinka. At their feet a path zigzagged down the steep slope of the scarp.
Serroi moved her shoulders, rubbed at her neck. “Holiday’s over once we’re down there.”
Hern touched the ragged curls a handspan longer than she liked to keep them. He was silent a long time, then he moved away from her and turned to gaze, across the plateau. She looked around. From this edge as from the other it seemed an arid and uninteresting landscape, some brown and yellow clumps of limp grass, some patches of short scraggly brush liberally powdered with a grayish dust, scatters of rock and gravel. “Eerie,” he said. “I don’t know what to think of that time.”
“Nor do I,” she said. She moved her shoulders again as if she were trying to free herself from the burden of those memories, pulled her boots from under her belt, sat down on the sandy stone. Hern walked past her to stand on the rim of the scarp looking out at the land below, frowning, a degree of tension hardening the muscles of neck and shoulder, at least what she could see of them as his heavy long hair blew about in the strengthening wind. She upended the boots one after the other, knocked on the soles to drive out the last grains of wild seed or any lingering purple berries. He was thinking about what lay ahead of them, she knew, and what lay behind. She set the boots beside her and pulled open the neck pouch. As she pushed out the silver box, she watched Hern watching the land. What changes in me? she thought. What happens now? She rolled her tattered trousers above her knees and pulled on her boots. He kicked a pile of broken rock over the edge and watched the stones bounding down, striking now and then with a flatter tone on the turnings of the trail. Serroi drew her thumb across the tarnished silver of the box, firmed her mouth and opened it. She took out the tajicho, held it in her hand until it warmed and began to glow. It had already saved life and sanity, it seemed to her, half a dozen times, yet she was slowly growing to be afraid of it, afraid of what it might be shaping her into. She could feel its radiance creeping into her bones, could feel an odd flutter in her head. Hern left the edge of the scarp and came back to her. “It’s a long way down. We’d better get started.”
“In a minute.” She tucked the tajicho into her boot pocket, the spear under her arm, looked at the silver box, extended her hand to Hern so he could pull her up.
When he started down the crumbling path, digging at the stone ahead of him with the point of his spear, she looked again at the silver box, shrugged and flung it away from her to sail with vanishing sheen toward
the rolling hills far below.
The descent was more tedious than difficult—hot, straining, and slow; it was late afternoon before they reached the bottom of the scarp. They started east through brush-covered swells that weren’t quite large enough to be called hills, the land dipping with some haste toward the intensely cultivated fluvial plain.
They walked in silence separated by a small space, neither touching nor speaking. Hern was struggling to fit himself back into the man he’d known for thirty odd years, the self he was uncomfortable without, trying to tuck in his growing outreach like a woman pushing flyaway curls back under a cap.
By the end of the day they were well into the swells, hungry, thirsty, tired. While Serroi slipped off her boots and kicked about feeling for water, Hern went off with his spear, stalking lappets or wild oadats or whatever small game he could find. She had to reach very deep for the water and expend more energy than she liked to pull it to the surface. Kneeling beside the cold little spurts, she drank until she began to feel bloated, splashed the icy water on her face, pulled her boots back on and went poking desultorily about for edible roots, wondering as she did so if her vegetarian existence was finally over. Her mouth watered at the thought of a hot oozy chunk of roasted lappet.
After unearthing a few withered roots, she found an old oadat’s nest, blown out of a clump of brush, no eggs, it was much too late in the year for that. As she touched it with her toe, she heard oadats scratching in the brush and gabbling at each other in their high nervous voices. She straightened, rubbed slowly at the small of her back.
The small flock ambled out of a clump of brush a short distance to her left, a dozen oadats, four smaller than the rest, all of them kicking the covering grass aside with one-two jerks of powerful hind legs, scratching busily with smaller forefeet through the debris of bark, dead leaves and small sticks, hunting for grubs, worms, seeds. She watched them work their way closer, watched them shy skittishly as they moved past her, though since she was standing very still, they didn’t scatter in panic-flight. Several tilted onto stubby tails, skinny forearms tucked close to their sides, taloned feet pressed against bulging keelbones, heads, wobbly on scrawny naked necks, turning from side to side to look at her with one beady black eye then the other, leathery beaks opening and closing without sound. She stared at them and started sweating. She moved her leg in her boot until the calf muscle was pressing against the slim outline of the knife. She stared at the oadats, swallowed painfully, stood without moving, watching them scratching past her, her hand sweating, aching, curled tight about the spear shaft. Her hands wouldn’t move. She couldn’t move her arms. She could have killed one oadat, two, more, easily, but her arms wouldn’t move. She watched the last swagger of the last stumpy, grey-furred tail as the last half-grown oadat disappeared around a scraggly grey-green bush. “No sense,” she whispered. “This is stupid.” She touched her forehead, drew her fingertips around her eyespot. Her fingers were shaking. She flattened her hand under the arch of her ribs, swallowed. “I’m going to eat meat, whatever Hern kills.” She said it tentatively, listening to her body, listening, as she had expected, to nothing, there was no reaction to her intent. “So I can’t kill, but I can eat what someone else puts before me. No sense, no sense.” Her stomach knotted and unknotted. She sighed, a long shaky miserable sound that made her laugh at herself, then start poking about for some more roots.
Midmorning on their third day down from the plateau they reached the rutted road that led toward the river.
Hern stepped on a stone, winced. He crooked his leg, braced his ankle on his knee, glared at the sole of his boot. “Thin as paper.”
Serroi touched his arm, feeling a nip in her own flesh. “Want me to.…”
He let his foot drop, shrugged. “Stone bruise. It’s nothing.”
“Don’t be a hero, Dom.”
“Don’t be a heroine, Domna.”
She took her hand away, smiling rather wryly. “Point taken.”
He dropped his hand on her shoulder, then stepped away. “We’re a disreputable looking pair.”
She looked him over, then gazed down at herself, grimacing as she did so. His black trousers and tunic were not quite filthy; water cleaned out body smell but didn’t do much for ground-in dirt and assorted stains. The rubbed spots over elbow and knee were almost transparent, as was the seat of his trousers, more like cheesecloth than the heavy wool they’d once been. Her own ragged trouser legs were tucked into her boots, that was one touch of neatness. There was a long tear beside her right knee, a smaller triangular tear by her left. The fine white cloth of her shirt was stained with blood and sweat and a dingy grey now, all over, holes over her elbows, cuffs frayed to threads. The seat and knees of her trousers were worn thin, thin enough for her to feel acutely the chill wind sweeping down against them, a north’ wind that tried to push them off the road, that whipped her hair into eyes and mouth. “Just as well we’re getting back to someplace we can get more clothes.”
He nodded. “Though how we’re going to pay for them.…”
“Services, Dom. I’ll heal and you heave.”
He raised his brows. “Heave?”
She laughed. “Use your muscle.”
“Hunh.”
They walked on, moving slowly and rather painfully along the road, worn, tired, and more than a little hungry. Walked side by side, not touching yet still companionable, friendly, feeling more comfortable with each other than they’d been for days.
Rounding a bend and a thick stand of cane they saw a man kneeling beside a rambut, holding its foreleg folded up, resting on one of his knees, prodding at the hoof with a long bony finger. He was a short wiry man with a fringe of coarse grey hair like steel wool running around the back of his head at ear level, the dome of his skull rising above it like a tight-grained shell of a wanja nut, shiny and dark brown. The rambut moaned and jerked its leg but couldn’t pull free from the powerful grip of the old man’s fingers.
Serroi walked away from Hern and stopped beside the old man. “Stone?”
He looked up. Grey fuzzy eyebrows flicked up then down as he held onto the beast’s hoof with an absentminded strength, then scrunched together, his mouth pursing with them. He stared at Serroi, visibly disconcerted by the dusty green of her skin. His lively brows straightened with relief as he looked past her at Hern, reassuringly normal though a stranger here. His eyes flicked to Serroi again, then away until he was looking past her with the careful politeness of one not-staring at some blemish inflicted on another person. “Stone,” he said, his brows moving up and apart. He used them to punctuate his thoughts, his words, the way another man might use his hands.
She knelt beside him, reached out a hand. “May I?”
After his brows contorted themselves again, he nodded.
She took one of her lockpicks from her boot and with a quick twist of her wrist had the stone out. She stroked her fingers across the bruised frog and the rambut moaned. She closed her eyes, kept her fingers on the bruise, soothed the nervous beast with a touch of her outreach, called upon the healing force that flowed up through her knees from the Mother. It was easy, almost quick now. She had a feeling of unfolding, something growing in her, a sense of something huge and perilous just beyond the veils of her mind. She felt the warmth rising in her, passing from her into the rambut. She used no mystic passes or esoteric chant as did fenekeln witchers and felt the old fenekel’s puzzlement because of it as she knelt quietly in the dust of the roadway, her small green hand resting gently on the rambut’s foot, her eyes half-closed, a half-smile on her too thin face.
The old fenekel’s eyebrows changed position a dozen times to express curiosity, impatience that only politeness kept silent, more curiosity as his black eyes shifted from Serroi to Hern who was leaning tiredly on his spear, watching without surprise or even much interest, darted back to Serroi, then to the rambut’s frog—and finally the mobile brows went high and round with wonder as Serroi took her hands away, touched his hand
so he would let the beast’s leg go. While Serroi knelt weary and silent on the road, the rambut stamped his foot vigorously against the road’s hard soil, whistled with pleasure at the absence of pain, then curled his head down to nuzzle at her tangled oily mop of dusty russet curls.
The old man turned to Hern, more comfortable dealing with him. “Tis a wonder,” he said gravely, but his black eyes twinkled and his brows wriggled energetically, telegraphing amusement and delight.
“My lady is a healer,” Hern said then stopped, rather surprised that he could understand and speak a tongue he’d never studied. He looked at Serroi, smiled at her smile as he realized where he’d gotten the language.
The old man’s brows scrunched together. He whipped his head around to examine Serroi. “Lady?”
Serroi rose wearily, gave him a one-sided grin. “Though appearances be against me, that I am.” She moved to Hern’s side, looked up at him. “Diplomacy’s your forte, my friend.”
Hern laughed. “Eh-viper.” He turned to the old man. “A good day to you, fenekel-besri.”
“A better day than most, thanks be to the lady.” His eyes projected worth and self-respect. “There is a debt.”
“A very small debt. The lady heals without thought to payment, though.…” One hand swooped down to point out his rags, over to indicate Serroi’s tattered state. “If your gratitude would run to helping us repair some of our deficiencies, our blessings on you.”
Brows butted together, exuding shrewdness, the old man smiled tightly. “We always got a need of this and that in the holds. The lady heals.” His voice still laid a slight question on the word lady. “And you?”
“I serve my lady. What I know is beast and weapon.” He kept his face straight when Serroi pinched him.
“Umphm.” The old man gazed past them at the distant line of plateau, his brows shot up, his broad forehead corrugated into deep wrinkles. He took in their tattered grimy appearance, glanced at the frisky rambut whose leadrope kept jerking in his hand. “Were it not wholly discourteous, I would be asking what your road is. There are no holds back along there.” He waved toward the west. “Only fields and pastures. Be that so, that it would be a sad reply to the courtesy of your acts, I will not ask.” He cocked his head, bright twinkling eyes traveling between them, eyebrows in high inquiring curves. “But ’tis plain to the eye that you’ve had no easy traveling.”