Ice formed and shouldered against ice, grumbling, sometimes splitting with enormous shrill cracks.
As he ran, Anlut looked often about him. He had been taught to search like this, for the Kimolaki did so, checking the terrain for pitfalls, thicker ice or thinner, or for the danger of predators other than themselves. Once or twice then, he saw the deer streaming away along the land’s edge, and once two lone wolves, or a white bear shambling far off in mist, and, on the limit of the horizon, the great bear-like bergs, lit with unreal blue lamps inside. The sun began to be only an eighth high along the sky.
It was again winter’s time.
The season of the ice dragon. Ulkioket.
MEN think, even when they pursue something, hunt prey, an enemy, the mystic beat of a signalling heart.
Did Anlut think? Consider? Remember?
For sixteen years, he had grown up among human men and women, who nurtured him the best that they were able. Lovelessly, naturally, nothing else could be expected, and often fearfully too—as with Nuyamat in her gloves, forcing the bone reed of milk into his mouth. And mostly with a fearful lovelessness demonstrated by the manner of not approaching him, of keeping distant physically, and in all other ways. Yet they taught him their skills. Otherwise, they believed, he could not have survived, and their code was always to extend the techniques of survival.
But Anlut was not like them; as the shaman had first said, probably he could have survived without any help or teaching at all.
As he ran in pursuit of the dragon, his Fate, Anlut’s thought was only of the route he must follow, which intuitively now he knew, and his consideration only of the most immediate issues—such as when to take out a strip of dried seal-meat and chew it. His remembering was a sort of void, cold and iron and misty, like the landscape all about. It did not offend or trouble him, how mankind had behaved towards him, neither their bleak care nor their dislike. To him, they were ghostly things. Even Kulvok had been like that, though he had seemed more significant than the others. But, Kulvok, to Anlut, was less a mortal man than a kind of spiritual time-telling device. And on that night when the lights of the Northland began to weave again, Anlut had heard a soundless chime, like the clash of two slender stars striking one on another. The moment had arrived. Next, Kulvok had proclaimed it. And so the next stage of life started, vital, irresistible, and expulsive as birth.
New-born at last then, out here Anlut had begun to live and to become.
Always alone among others, now he was alone in the vast, cold world. Where men made walls and lamps against that world, Anlut required no shelter and took all the light he needed from the low sun or the moon and stars. Even when the clouds blotted them up or the mists closed round, Anlut needed nothing else. When thin ice shifted suddenly beneath him, he only leapt free of it with an agility not common to men. One sunrise, sleeping his minutes on the ground, he woke to find the ice-sheet had moved and transposed him. He had slipped twice his height down into a funnel in the ice. But he merely put his hands and feet on the sides of it and hauled himself rapidly up and out. Unhelped, no man could have done this. Any other man must have died. Anlut grasped as much, and completely and unarrogantly knew his physical superiority. He had not been afraid or puzzled.
Perhaps nothing could stop him.
In his mind, the dragon waited at all times, maybe even when he slept, though he did not exactly dream of it, let alone think of, consider, or remember it.
Ulkioket, given him from the very start as his reason for existing, had grown right into Anlut and was now welded among the hero’s icy bones and cool, peculiar blood. He was a part of Anlut’s brain, not an image or aspiration there. He was not even a goal. Your Fate could hardly be a goal, after all. It was instead only a destination. Like the actual east to which Anlut ran, in order to meet it.
MONTHS of the winter passed, all one timeless era. And then the spoor appeared, there on the white earth, the engraved marks of the footfall: Ulkioket. They were beautiful. To Kulvok, once, they had been. And to the hero, always. In shape, they were like the long and broad-bladed leaves that stood out stiffly on certain shrubs in summer. The thorns of claws spread from them, some of them more sharply or deeply signed than others. But this varied. No injury had caused the unevenness, only different sorts of ice or snow underfoot. They were, however, much larger than any leaves. Each footfall was some three feet in length, about half that length across. Like a lamp-flame from a stone lamp.
The originator had never been seen close to. From the prints, you could hazard the size of him.
If he did not brush the roof of the sky with his crest, nevertheless his back must rise at least twenty or twenty-five feet into the air, his neck and head rather higher.
His winding tail, often held clear of the earth, still left its own track in places, frequently then wiping out areas of the other signs. The spoor of the dragon’s tail was like the narrow passage of a cruel storm wind, that kept low, attracted to some element in the ground-ice, scratching and tearing to come at it.
Anlut, having found the first definite signs, stayed there a while, examining them. Like Kulvok, and yet not like, Anlut put his bare hand into a pad-mark.
To Anlut, the dragon-cold felt like lightning—galvanic—yet it did not burn. Gazing at his palm and fingers, Anlut noted no change. But for an hour after, his skin there sang and prickled. As he had been told the chilled, numbed skin of a man did, held out to the warmth of fire.
That evening, Anlut went by a frozen jumble like a fall en hill. It had been a village, and the dragon had seen to it.
TWO sunpasses later, the hero saw his quarry.
It was a cloudless night, stars like splashes of steel and silver flung out across it, so that even without any moon as yet, to Anlut the world seemed bright as a morning at winter’s end.
He had climbed to the top of a cliff, and below lay the ice-sheet of the tundra. It too looked made of silver and steel.
And on it there walked a black-blueness that was also a glowing, molten light, and it brushed the roof of the sky with its crest …
Despite everything, despite having glimpsed the dragon before more than once from far away, despite its constant fateful residence in his own life, body, and brain, Anlut ceased to breathe. He stood on the cliff-top, motionless, and, for an instant, barely conscious.
Just as it had years ago for the shaman, in that instant too Ulkioket half turned his head.
This was like the flirtatious gesture of some girl, something never offered to Anlut, this partial looking over a shoulder—
The hero saw the human eye of Ulkioket, black in its star-sparkling white, and the slanted lids holding it. Anlut blinked his own unhuman green-blue eyes. He let go his breath and drew in another. No smoke came from his mouth as it would have had he been human; he was not warm enough to cause it.
On the cliff, he watched until the dragon turned away and walked on over the tundra.
Then he hurried down the cliff-face and began again his striding run, going much faster now, following the interrupted pattern of the pad-marks and the storm mark of the tail.
Now he seldom glanced to either side. He stared ahead after Ulkioket.
He was midnight blue, the dragon, and the starlight streamed over him like rushes of summer water. The plain went on and on, and for some hours Anlut had a perfect view. Never before had he been afraid, but now the hero was. He was afraid he might lose sight of Ulkioket around some twist of the land, might lose him even. Faster and faster Anlut ran, till even he breathed swiftly, and in his own ears he heard the drum of his heart—Umb-umber umber umber—
A memory came while he was running, when the full moon rose, from nowhere, moon and memory together. The memory was of being in the hot womb of his mother and how he hammered there and shouted, not knowing what he did. Probably, he thought, he was demanding to be born.
Then the cold breath blew. The cold was not horrible. The cold did not frighten.
After the remembering, c
ame thought. The thought suggested that he had cried to and for the cold, it was the cold ness which let him be born, and otherwise, without it, he might have died, for the woman who carried him could not have borne him successfully, she was not strong enough. Both she and he would have perished. But instead the ice came. And he lived though she did not.
After remembering and thought, he considered.
He considered the long, sharp knife and the spear and his own great strength. His heroism and destiny.
Exactly then, the twist appeared in the landscape, mountains of snow and ice, and the dragon moved around them. Was gone.
THE shadow fell all along the ice. It was not cast by the curve of the mountain around which Anlut had just sped. The moon was lower now. It flamed like a pale, ancient ruby, just behind the gigantic crest of the dragon, which sat there almost wolf-like, its front legs stretched out, head raised, regarding him from its human eyes. Now those eyes looked very large indeed. And the clawed, scaled forefeet rested on the shadow and the ice not thirty feet away.
Anlut could easily have slid one of his hands between any two of the steely claws.
It was clear that it beheld him. It regarded him.
And he regarded it. Him.
Ulkioket. Winter. Enemy.
The hero sensed that his adversary watched, thought, considered. Perhaps even he remembered—other men he had glimpsed in the moments of slaughtering them.
Anlut waited.
But Ulkioket waited too. Had even sat there, it seem ed, to wait until Anlut might catch up to him.
Anlut raised the spear and the long knife, to show Ulkioket why he had come.
And then Anlut sang, in his lean, metallic voice, one of the old songs of the tribes, about the winter and man’s constant war with it. He did this also to demonstrate, should the ice dragon be in any doubt, why he was here. And to honour the dragon.
Thus man, from pass of sun to rise.
From rise to passing, fights with iron blood
And heart of fire.
To win each battle in that never-ending war
That winter is, till life is laid to sleep among a mound of stones.
And snow wipes out all trace
Of tears or songs.
The song continued some while. The dragon sat, seeming to attend.
Under all, a piping, a faint drum, the wind melodiously provided accompaniment.
When Anlut completed the song, the stars were more sparse, and the moon was just a copper smudge. The colossal shadow had spread across everything. Ulkioket reflected a glittering black, and Anlut himself a type of twilight colour.
Silence filled the world.
Then the dragon got up. Yes—his great head must have touched the roof of the sky for stars, scraped off per haps by accident, all at once hurtled down, gleaming and noiselessly spitting, fading, dead.
Anlut saw the vast expansion of the dragon’s sides as the bellows of Ulkioket’s lungs sucked at the air, swallowing it, in and in. Anlut heard the sound where no other sound was to be heard. Ulkioket was filling himself with breath, which in a few moments he would breathe out again upon the hero. It was the ice-breath that killed all living things, froze them and mounded them over, not with stones but with ice.
Did Anlut wonder then if even he, born out of the blast-ice-breath long before, could withstand this attack?
Never. Or rather, it did not occur to him.
In amazement, almost a curious kind of religious awe, he observed what Ulkioket did.
Then: an instant of stasis. The dragon was replete with air.
And after this—
Ulkioket breathed outward.
It was nothing like storm or gale, not even like the freezing clutch of liquid winter sea, or the funnel through the ice up from which Anlut had climbed. No, no, nothing like that.
The breath passed over and through Anlut. His outer skin received it, and his inner body too. It dazzled and burn ed in his nostrils, in his lungs, his belly, his blood and arteries. His clothing changed instantly to glass which—equally quickly—grew brittle, shattering and falling off him like the stars knocked off the sky by the dragon’s crest. His spear became thick with ice and broke as well, and the knife—the knife melted, as if in the fire of its making, and curled right up in a serpentine shape, with melted droplets hung there in its new sheath of ice.
But such triumph tore through Anlut too that he shouted aloud. And his voice came out with no difficulty. And when he raised his arms, they rose without trouble. And when he began to spin about and dance in the moon-gone dark, his limbs and body obeyed him. Laughing and leaping, he pranced before the dragon of ice. Which watched him then, only sitting back again, paws outstretched, head lowered a little now on the long neck, possibly to see him better.
Eventually, Anlut ran forward and jumped up to balance on the huge right fore-paw. He stood there, laughing and naked, his white hair flying. And he called upwards into the wise, unthinking, thinking face with its human eyes.
“You created me. You’ve fathered your own death in me. Here I am, unkillable by you. Now I need only find a way to destroy you, Ulkioket. But breathe again, dragon. I liked it. To me—your ice is a hearth-fire. It makes me warm.”
LATER, the dragon shifted himself. And as though by prior agreement, Anlut jumped down from the foot he had stood on. There had been no observable response.
When the dragon rose, Anlut gazed up and up the height of him. The sky was black by then and the stars also setting. Without prelude, Ulkioket turned and resumed his inexorable march along the world. In fifty heartbeats, he had climbed far up among the mountains of ice. And in less than thirty heartbeats, Anlut was following him, moving at his trained, unflagging, striding trot.
Like this then, naked and barefoot, unarmed, and now even unsleeping, the hero chased the dragon, as night turned to sunup and sunpass passed back to night, over and over again.
Anlut did not need to consider anything now, save some way to slay Ulkioket. To journey so fast, endlessly, tirelessly, without any protection from the winter, was no problem for him. Presumably he had only worn clothes or carried weapons from thoughtless custom, one more learned thing that was actually useless to him. Nor did he need to eat, which at first faintly surprised him when he remembered it. Nothing then, truly nothing but the chase mattered. The chase—and any weapon that might survive the dragon’s blast of breath and penetrate his scaled surface.
That Anlut’s garments and knife had been obliterated or ruinously transformed, as such items never were in the case of any of the dragon’s victims that Anlut had ever before seen, appeared to be the result of Anlut’s own total resistance to the ice-blast. Caught between him and the dragon’s force, they had become a sort of sacrifice, like driftwood in flames.
As the sunpasses and darknesses uncoiled in months, the terrain altered, grew similar to earlier terrain, became different again, familiar again. But one last idea stayed fixed in Anlut’s dragon-occupied mind.
He and the dragon were equal.
Therefore, something must come from this. The answer must come from this.
Whenever the dragon rested, then Anlut rested too. He lay about a hundred feet away, or a little less perhaps. He did not sleep; neither, he thought, did the dragon. Yet sometimes, though awake, Anlut seemed to himself to have left his own cold, hard body, and to be standing right beside Ulkioket. Then, in his trance-state, the hero examined his quarry.
All the while. Through his shining, unreadable, human eyes, Ulkioket in turn watched Anlut, or his dream-ghost, moving round him. Never at this time did the dragon use the blast of his breath against the man.
Nor did the dragon ever apparently attempt to out distance Anlut by any major amount.
IT was midwinter.
The Northland lights blazed in the sky, wild purple and bronze and wolf-eye yellow.
And coming over the hill, down which the dragon had preceded him, Anlut saw a village below, there against the frozen edges of the s
ea.
Anlut’s heart seemed to stop.
Then it shouted to him: Umber! Umber! Umber!
Maybe Ulkioket walked more leisurely now. His tail moved after him in shimmering riverine eddies.
Anlut broke into new speed. He raced. He flew.
Down the hill, over the ice, running till he ran beside the river of the tail, leaping it over and over as it lashed across his path.
By the huge feet of Ulkioket, Anlut sped. Up level with the tower of the breast and head and neck. Then past him—past the dragon, forward along the plain. Anlut bolted to the open snow about half a mile above the village.
Here he turned, breathed in the bitter crystal of the night, sucking up breath to yell.
“No further!” he ranted to the dragon, as it stepped and swung nearer and nearer. Holding up his arms, Anlut bellowed through the dome of lights. “No! Let them be!”
His voice came sure and loud; even in the distant misty village of ice-towers, where smokes must rise as women cooked, and the men were mending, and the sled-wolves waiting for cuts of meat and bones, and the boys playing with a rag ball, even there, they must hear the curious sound, not knowing what it was, or that it cried to save them.
The dragon too came to a stop.
He gazed at Anlut, and in the dragon’s eyes, the hero noticed, for the very first time, a strangeness, perhaps great intelligence, a sort of compassion—pity.
While the huge body swelled, Ulkioket’s lungs filling up and up with the crystal air that Anlut had already dragged into his own.
The blast-breath was being prepared. At any second, it would be unleashed. The village would freeze, dead in three seconds. All those lives—
Anlut hurtled forward. He was springing to tear out, with his bare hands, the dragon’s tongue—its teeth—the tender, merciful eyes—when the gust of murder erupted.
Dragon Book, The Page 42