A few more discreet flybys and she decided the hut was empty. When she landed to peek in the window, though, she found that there was no window. What she had thought was a window had been covered with an animal hide from the inside. The doorway was clear, but it was too thin for her to see and putting her eye up to the slit blocked all the sunlight. dTserra would have snuck in and looked around for her. She’d been very descriptive whenever they’d snuck into other empty lander homes. Sophie was disappointed, but she learned what she could from the outside of the hovel. The blocked window, thin doorway, and possible smoke hole made her think it was a temporary shelter built for winter. The poor landers couldn’t fly away to warmth in winter and they weren’t particularly adapted to building underground, although Sophie thought their huge stone homes like the one by the five lakes to the north must take more work than just digging down. She’d seen them working on the little fort that used to mark the western boundary of their settlements and wanted to help, but even dTserra had nixed that idea.
Still the little hut was very interesting to Sophie and she decided not to report it to Konifer. He was never nice to her and he wouldn’t listen to any of the good things she had to say about the people, so why should she report to him at all? In her belligerence she decided it would be best if she also hid the hut from any other roaming dragons. She could weave the trees over it and plant the branches with the yellow vine flowers which would attract the red butterflies which would mark the covered bower as hers. As long as the butterflies and flowers were around, no other dTelfur would disturb the shelter. And no one would find the lander hut to report to Konifer.
After weaving a few of the more heavily leaf-covered branches over the hut, she recovered her bundle of fruit and leaped into her return flight with considerably more energy than she had previously had. Now she had a project and a secret. It could be enough to keep her going until she found out why her soul was important. That was really what had been bothering her this whole trip. With dTserra around, she hadn’t cared what her purpose was. But now that dTserra was gone, she was beginning to believe that she’d been hatched by mistake.
Nahni was clearly proof that the symbiosis between the dTur and the telfs was developing and Deg was behaving like she might be the soul to replace him as advisor. Akai blasted sand drawings so beautiful and inspired that everyone wanted her to decorate their bowers. Nyah nearly worked Nature with her healing hands. Ahnari was the only dragon who could lead the younglings in their first flights. Danny was the most gentle nurse to the newhatchlings and the ancients. Of course, dTserra had been an almost eerily capable hunter, regularly bringing in food for all the ancients and nurserybound.
But Sophie didn’t have any particular skill that someone else couldn’t exercise better. She was a decent hunter and she liked to blast sand paintings and had enjoyed herself the few times Janen had asked her to help with the excavation of the newer sections of the telfs’ underground bower. But there was nothing particularly special about her which would justify her shell shards adding to the sands of the hatching ground. Unless, she barely dared dream, she was the soul Konifer had told Deg to hatch.
After dTserra’s death, while Konifer had directed dTelfur to their tasks, Deg had been quietly discussing with Danny and Nyah the possibility of opening communications with the landers. Konifer had overheard this conversation and the last thing he said to Deg before he took off to cage the fire was, “Then get to your eggs, Deg and hatch us a soul who can understand these mammals.”
Sophie thought herself foolish but still she hoped with all her secret heart that she was that soul.
She’d gotten lost in her thoughts again as she cruised over the rapidly shifting landscape beneath her and before she knew it, she was approaching the river. All the dragons tended to overfly the bridge even though it made no difference to their crossing. Traditionally they offered any telf crossing the bridge a ride back to the village although the telfs were supposed to traditionally refuse. It had something to do with the first contact between the dTur and the telfs but even Deg had no idea what.
Nobody was on the bridge as Sophie approached and had she not shaken her head in unconscious imitation of the way dTserra would clear her head of unwanted thoughts, she might have missed seeing the body in the river far downstream. It didn’t appear to be flailing or in any kind of danger. Nor did it appear to be swimming anywhere. It was just floating in the river, face up, gently bobbing towards the waterfall. Sophie flew down to get a closer look. Though the dTelfur were a very small community, she couldn’t tell who the telf was. So she drifted down on the cool air over the water, enjoying her slow descent, to get a closer look. The male had his eyes closed and was almost entirely naked. His features were odd but water was lapping up over his face as he drifted downstream so it took Sophie a few moments to realize that she didn’t recognize him because the man was a lander. As soon as she did, her wings folded involuntarily in reaction to the shock and she fell straight into the river.
Two
∞
A biting chill in the evening air nipped at Hardt. It worked with the lapping water to bring him slowly around to consciousness. He couldn’t remember at first where he was or when he had gone to sleep. But soon the debris banging into his legs with the force of white water brought back images to his mind of rocks and a rushing river at the top of a waterfall. He’d been floating in the current, relaxing after getting the dirt out of that nasty gash in his calf. The sun had been high and the cool water felt good on his tired legs. He was almost dozing when some great splash had submerged him and thrown him further down the river.
When he managed to reach the surface, he found himself surrounded by rocks and the water was moving with much more purpose than it had been further upstream. He’d almost anchored himself on a rock when he saw the dragon. It was floating along on the water behind him, its wings gently spread. Its long neck was dipped down into the water and Hardt immediately got a picture in his head of the creature’s great huge teeth searching for him under the surface. Scrambling to get his whole body out of the water and onto the rock, he slipped in his panic and fell back into the rushing river. The fall knocked the wind out of him and he only remembered hitting a sharp rock with his ribs before the river fell away beneath him.
But he’d been caught. He’d felt his body leave the water before the river roared away over the waterfall. Something had grabbed him about the waist and lifted him into the air. But then they’d fallen anyway.
Hardt struggled to clear his head. The memories were jumbled and he was starting to feel the bruises all over his body. His ribs ached and his calf was throbbing. He also realized that he was shivering from cold. But when he tried to sit up and climb out of the water, the effort made him nauseous. He thought at first that he was too weak to move and that’s what made it impossible to sit up, but when he did a mental check of his body, he found that he was pinned down. The surface he’d been lying on was soft and warm, but uneven, and he was pinned to it by something wrapped around his waist.
That was it. The dragon had grabbed him around the waist with its tail and set him on its back. He’d thought the creature was going to fly over the edge of the waterfall and soar away, but after coasting over the edge out past the sheer descent, they’d been jerked sideways and fallen through the air to the white water below. Hardt must have passed out when they hit the surface and now they were beached just downriver of their landing.
Opening his eyes took an effort. Any motion made his head pound and blood swim before his eyes. He could swallow back the nausea with deep breaths but couldn’t get his beaten muscles to respond. When vision reluctantly returned to him, he regained his bearings and saw that he was already sitting up. His head and upper body were resting on the tail circled around him. The dragon was facing the eastern shore, but most of its body was still underwater so they must have gotten stuck in a shallow part of the riverbed. Hardt was facing the falls which weren’t much farther than a dragon
length north of where they were grounded. With more effort, he dragged his head around and rested his chin on his still non-functioning arms so he could look towards the shore. The dragon’s long neck and head were completely out of the water, laying on a small patch of sand. A pool of liquid blue spread slowly from where its head lay, oozing much as blood would from a large wound.
The instant the parallel image occurred to Hardt, he forgot his nausea and the pain in his head and pushed himself out of the encircling tail. His muscles were stubborn, but somehow he got himself out and slid down the side of the dragon into the water. The shock of the dunking was too much for him despite the adrenaline pushing him onward and he retched as he dragged himself onto the small sandy inlet. When the muscles of his gut stopped heaving and the blood cleared from his vision again, he crawled up toward the head of the unconscious dragon.
Its body had indeed been beached in the shallow waters, but Hardt couldn’t say if they had landed there or if the force of the water at the base of the falls had pushed them to the eastern bank. Hardt had slid into the water near the dragon’s right three-toed foot which was submerged nearly up to the shoulder. He crawled up along the long neck which curved up to the cottage-sized head which was lying sideways in the sand, facing away from the waterfall. Crawling around the muzzle, he pushed past the dragon’s goatee of bluish-green fur. It was unexpectedly soft though crusty with sand and water at the moment and he used it to help him up to his feet where he still wasn’t tall enough to see over its mouth. Hanging onto the goatee with some trepidation, he made his way around the snout. Sand was blowing lightly back and forth near the huge nostrils and Hardt paused to scoop the accumulating pile of sand out of the path of its breath so the dragon wouldn’t inhale the stuff.
As he passed around the top of the snout, he saw that the blue liquid was coming from a massive gash just above the dragon’s eyes and it was spurting in time with the very slow beat of its heart. This gave Hardt courage. He didn’t know how else he would have checked for a heartbeat. With as much speed as he could manage, he unwrapped the short sleepskirt he’d been swimming in from about his waist, reached as high as he could reach up the dragon’s forehead, and pushed the fabric against the wound. For pressure, he turned and leaned back against the fabric and the wound with all his weight.
That accomplished, he shut his eyes and rested again. He tried to breathe into his own wounds and slow his racing heart as Vyck had taught him to do. The nausea dissipated, but the shivering returned. The sun was gone now and he wouldn’t be able to stand naked against the cold night for very long. If he could stabilize the dragon, he might be able to climb up the bank and go for help. Surely more dragons would fly by this way before too long. He could wave one down, explain with his three words of dTelfur what had happened and convince the dragon to follow him, a naked lander, to the spot where his wounded would-be savior lay bleeding to death in the water.
Hardt opened his eyes again and tried to clear his head of the despair encouraging him to surrender to the unconsciousness that was creeping up on him. Instead he looked around their small cove for a solution. Looking at the steep bank, he knew he couldn’t climb it in his condition. The western bank was not as unscalable and an easier route to the dTelfur village, but he doubted the wisdom of trying to swim across the river to reach it. The answer was to find a way to get help to come to them. A sign. He’d seen dragons overflying the river before he’d ever reached it. But they all flew over further upstream for some reason which is why he had chosen to bathe where he had. So a new problem was how to get the dragons to come searching downriver of the falls.
If this dragon would wake up, perhaps it could call out to another dragon flying by. Also if it was awake, it might be strong enough to fly upriver to where someone could see and help it. Of course it might waken frightened and confused from the head wound and try to hurt him, but Hardt kept that thought to the back of his mind. He tried to wake the dragon by yelling and slapping it about the muzzle. He didn’t want to shake it for fear of hurting it more but he tried tapping on its thick eyelids and waving its floppy ear flaps. His efforts garnered no reaction whatsoever.
He considered writing “Help” with rocks on the small beach. Then reconsidered that if the random dragon he was hoping would fly over could read, it wouldn’t be able to read lander, and if it were in a position to see the word “Help” written in rocks, wouldn’t it already have seen the huge unconscious dragon in its pile of blue blood? Looking over the wound again, he saw that the flow of blood did seem to have staunched a bit. Hardt fervently hoped it was due to his application of pressure and not due to a diminishing supply of blood. But the dragon still wouldn’t respond to any stimulus. It lay there as if it were already dead. He could see its breath and feel the heart beating, but feared they would soon slow to a standstill if he didn’t find a way to help it.
In the end Hardt made a large circle of stones dipped into the blue, told the dragon to hang on, and tried his luck swimming to the opposite bank.
“Deg!”
The old dragon raised his head. He’d been sleeping soundly, a rare occurrence these days. There was no smell of danger in the night air and all the eggs felt solid. None were rocking. He wasn’t aware of any females in fever so none should be laying now.
“Deg, it’s Sophie.”
He turned his head and realized he’d been woken by Nyah, one of the dTelfur’s finest healers. The telf was one of Danny’s first hatchlings, a lovely girl with black hair and green eyes. She was a marvel with sore wing joints. His clouded mind registered that she was standing just beyond the hot sand waiting patiently for him to shake off the seduction of sleep and pay attention to what she had to tell him about Sophie. Her sleeves were rolled up, her hair pushed untidily behind her ears, and she was wearing her healing apron which was freshly stained with dragon blood.
“What’s happened to Sophie?” His brain quickly caught up with his eyes.
“She’s dying, Deg.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s in the river down past the falls.” Nyah held her hands out to forestall him. “You couldn’t get to her if you wanted to. And that’s not why I woke you.”
Deg took a slow breath and pushed his sorrow to the back of his mind. “What is it then, Nyah?”
She paused uncomfortably as if what she had to say were harder than telling him that Sophie was dying. “Deg, Konifer is gone for a while, right?”
“He’s looking into new farming soil in the west.” The old dragon nodded. “He won’t be back for many moons unless we send for him.”
“Deg, we wouldn’t have found Sophie, not for a while at least, but someone came and showed us where she was. We’ve put him to bed in Dorat’s rooms in the burrow and I think he’ll be fine after a long rest and some gentle care.”
“But?”
“What?”
“But what? Who was it?”
Again she hesitated. “We don’t want Konifer to know about him. Can you agree to that?”
Deg realized instantly the only kind of person they’d want to keep from Konifer. “He’s lander?”
“Yeah…. and,” she took a deep breath.
Before she could continue, they both heard Dorat running towards them, trying to scream and whisper at the same time. “Nyah! Nyah, he’s regained consciousness and I can’t keep him in bed. I thought he was afraid so I brought him up to the surface and he started walking away. Akai is walking with him, trying to hide him with her wings. I think he’s headed back to the river. You have to come help us.”
Deg nodded at the healer, “Go. Come tell me everything when you can.”
Nyah, not heartless in matters of death, gave him what little comfort she could before she ran off with Dorat. “Nahni and Edwarg are both with Sophie.”
“Thank you.”
He spoke to the healer’s back as she ran off to see to her lander patient. Laying his head back down over his eggs, Deg wasted a few moments with idle specu
lation as to what could have happened to Sophie. Before sleep overtook him again, he was comforted with the thought that she hadn’t taken herself in despair over dTserra. To do that, she would have gone off to one of her bowers to die alone.
Dorat and Akai had been helping Nahni learn how to fly with a telf on her shoulders. Neither of them was an attached flyer but they knew that the poor little dragon had been overwhelmed by her lessons with those telf and dragon pairs. Partner flying came naturally to the attached ones, telf and dTur alike, so they had no patience with Nahni. One of the dragons had even called her a wasted shell and said that her soul’s only purpose was to give the dTelfur a good laugh.
But every dTelfur had to learn how to partner fly in case of an emergency. So the friends had decided to offer their very unprofessional help. Dorat, a seamstress, had never been comfortable adragonback and Akai, an artist, rarely had occasion to be mounted. They told Nahni that they would all be learning together and had chosen to do it on a dark night and south of the village where there was less chance of being seen.
Nahni and Dorat were flying so well together that all three were in fact laughing when they saw the naked man stumbling toward the village from a most unlikely direction. He began waving his arms wildly as soon as he saw them so they glided in and landed near him. Well, Akai landed near him. But Dorat slid off Nahni’s shoulders and ran over to the man who was shouting some gibberish and pointing towards the river. Akai and Dorat knew he was a lander right away and were too concerned with that to pay attention to his gestures. But Nahni, slower on the political uptake, understood his pantomime as soon as she walked over to them. A dragon had been hurt by the waterfall.
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