When the child was clean and his hair drying in the cool morning breeze, one tiny fist tangled painfully, negligently in the hair on Hardt’s chest, Hardt looked up to Deg and asked about the name.
“Who will name him?”
“I get to name some hatchlings. But not this one.” The dragon looked at Sophie who still couldn’t take her eyes off the telf. “This one was named by his dam.”
“Who is his dam?”
Sophie answered. “His dam was dTserra.”
Hardt turned his shocked eyes up to see a tear welling up in her eye as she reached a wingclaw up and stroked the hatchling’s cheek.
“Welcome, Mobious.”
Eight
∞
“Nahni thought of this?” Deg reached out and snagged a sideways growing tree on the shoreline with his tail and let Sophie float by him on the current. At the last moment he flipped a wing up, spraying her with water.
She sputtered and dipped her head in the river, distracting him so he didn’t notice her rising tail. When it hit the water, he was drenched.
“She’s been thinking about it a long time.”
The two old dragons were floating down the river playing like hatchlings. They had started far up north and were now approaching the swinging bridge. The wind was up and Sophie watched fascinated at the thought that the telfs actually traversed that rickety old deathtrap. Flying was a far better way to travel. She turned back to Deg who had released the tree and was shaking water from his earflaps.
“You told her you wanted to float down the river after dTserra went but didn’t know how you would get airborne again. So when I mentioned my trips down here to get over my fear of the falls she put the pieces together and found a way for you to catch air from the water.”
“And you’re sure there is enough room for my wing spread?”
“As long as you follow my path exactly, you’ll have plenty of room. It’s the underwater roots and rocks you have to worry about.”
“Well it is a beautiful day for it. And I expect you could tear Hardt away from Mobious long enough to heal me.”
“If you were hurt, I expect we could get Konifer to return to the village to heal you.”
They floated under the bridge, both dragons craning their necks back to watch it pass overhead. Deg leaned his head back and curled his tail up catching the tip in his mouth for a bit to create a circle as he used to do as a hatchling. He and his boyhood friend, Weigety, would hold their tails and pinwheel through the sky. They performed all sorts of ridiculous maneuvers to entertain the stuffy elder dTelfur. How many times had they almost killed Jumia when the telf begged them to let her play with them in their mid-air circuses? Both Jumia and Weigety were gone now and acrobatics were best left to the youngsters. Now he was an elder on the ground, waiting to be entertained.
Reluctantly Deg admitted to himself that the past few years had been a relief. Konifer was a good man at heart, but he was an exhausting friend. His father dTarent had not been a good teacher. He never trusted Konifer and told the young vizet so. When the power passed to Konifer at the dawn after his hundred and fiftieth shedding, dTarent had bitterly abandoned the village with his powers, his right to command Nature passed down to his disappointing get. He’d refused to help his son even for the first few years as was traditional.
Then, the Landers had arrived and dTarent had died and dTserra had rejected Konifer. The man was understandably angry and unsure of himself. But as much as Deg always tried to support the Vize, he was thankful to have some time off. Perhaps Konifer would develop some self-confidence and patience during his time away. Deg hoped he would return, when he was ready, a stronger and kinder man. He never feared, as everyone else in the village did, that the Vize wouldn’t return at all.
Out of a corner of his eye he saw Sophie catch a rock and pull herself up on it. He did the same with the next protrusion that he saw. She had no patience at the moment herself, waiting restlessly for him to respond to her hint about the Vize’s unappreciated absence.
He settled himself comfortably on the rock before he satisfied her. “Is that your plan, my friend?”
Sophie turned her head to look at him with wide, innocent eyes. “What? To hurt you just so our Vize returns? How can you think that?”
“Don’t give me that. I know you’ve brought me out here for more than my own enjoyment. You want to talk about Konifer, let’s talk.”
“I want to talk about Mobious.”
“That follows.”
“Deg,” She broke straight to the salient point, “is he the Vizet?”
He sidestepped. “It often follows the bloodline. But we can’t know for certain that it always does.”
“Konifer has no other offspring?”
“None.”
“I only ask because of the raspberries.”
Deg sighed . He’d been waiting for someone to ask him about this. Best that it was Sophie he guessed. She was the only other dTelfur to know Mobious’ full parentage.
“I haven’t heard about the raspberries.”
Sophie glared at him skeptically but recounted anyway the story which had been making the rounds of the nursery.
A group from the nursery were going on a southern hike. Hardt had bundled Mobious up in a cloth tied to his chest and joined them. All along the walk, Hardt named animals and trees and flowers for the infant. He identified a bush covered with tiny new black berries as a raspberry bush and Mobious who, at three sheddings, was already familiar with and fond of the taste had reached for them. But Hardt had pulled his hands back, explaining that the berries weren’t ripe yet and wouldn’t taste any good. Mobious had pouted and reached for the bush again, but Hardt had walked on, trying to distract him with a copse of flowering trees.
An hour later, when all the small groups were gathering together for lunch, Kiely and Kahrier and the few others in their group showed up at the meeting spot covered in berry stains and carrying large leaves filled with beautifully ripe raspberries picked off a nearby bush. Hardt was stunned but a very happy Mobious got to eat his fill.
When Sophie was finished with the story, Deg dipped a wingtip in the water, making patterns and avoiding her eyes. “Could’ve been a different bush.”
“Deg. It was way too early in the season for any ripe bushes. Shouldn’t Konifer know?”
“Mobious has only three sheddings. And it could have been a different bush.”
“Shouldn’t we at least tell Hardt?”
Deg sighed. That was a good suggestion. A young vizet could cause some very unusual incidents. Hardt might be safer if he knew Mobious was going to inherit the full powers from Konifer later in life and spurts of unusually satisfied desires were to be expected. But, he might not be comfortable knowing Mobious was Konifer’s get. He would want Konifer to know. And once Konifer found out, the Vize would have to dominate the majority of his protégé’s time. Better that Hardt influence the child’s early years alone. Mobious would learn how better to deal with the lander problem and he wouldn’t suffer from the poor example of fatherhood that dTarent bequeathed to his get. Also Konifer might then easily find out that Mobious was of dTserra and even Deg couldn’t foresee how he would respond to that.
“No, Sophie. Let them both enjoy their innocence for now.”
Sophie took a breath to ask him once again if Mobious was truly the vizet and then decided she didn’t need his answer. Instead she slipped back into the river and grabbed a mouthful of water to spit at Deg as she passed his rocky perch.
Mobious performed no other unexpected feats of Nature before Konifer returned four years later. The boy had settled down into the understanding that he couldn’t have everything he wanted. By some chance Konifer had come to the same realization.
The Vize didn’t meet the child. He heard of course, had heard from outland dTelfur, that the lander was atchs with a telf hatchling but knew none of the reasons he might be very interested in meeting the child. He’d also heard about the lander’s
on again, off again love affair with the hunter, Tareay. That romance was being followed with great interest by the villagers. Everyone had rumors to spread about the lander’s attributes and his techniques but no one had facts since Tareay wasn’t sharing.
The truth was that the relationship had really become nothing more than an intimate friendship. The age difference being too difficult for either of them. When they met, Tareay had been six times Hardt’s age which had been mind-boggling but he was an intense and energetic young man rather than the two and a half foot all-questioning child his chronological age should have made him so she trusted her instincts and forgot about his youth. And for a while they were well matched.
What had doomed the romance was having to watch each other age. Tareay’s body stayed the same. Her tan came with summer and went with her sheddings. Her muscles shifted as she took to hunting mountain lions and gathering ecological samples from deep valley caves for Odrine. She grew her hair long and let her toe claws extend but otherwise looked the same.
Hardt, on the other hand, appeared to age fifty years in the ten since they’d met. His thick black hair was longer, but more significantly it was speckled with white strands. His face had developed some fine wrinkles and his body wasn’t as tight as it had been. She initially put it down to his abandonment of hunting and adoption of a more sedentary life raising Mobious. But then she’d woken one particular morning to find him staring at her and had realized that he didn’t just look older, he was behaving older. So much so that she now felt like the young one in the relationship.
Their nights together had not become less frequent since that morning, as they’d never made a regular habit of the dates, but they both admitted that the friendship wasn’t going to develop into anything more. And as long as they were honest with each other about their emotional limits, they agreed, there was no need to pretend the basic attraction and cross-cultural fascination didn’t exist. So they learned from each other and supported each other in a physical friendship which grew more complicated with every passing year.
Hardt’s time was generally commandeered by Mobious in any case. They’d moved out of the nursery, though many of their days were still spent there. Most dTelfur children remained in the nursery bower and burrow until they had about sixty sheddings unless they attached an adult. The hatchlings would also move out of the nursery earlier if an adult took them as a favorite for a short time such as when Sesche took Kahrier and Kiely into his bower right after Hardt’s dramatic introduction to the village.
The hatchlings played together and took classes or private instruction from the adult villagers who all dropped by the nursery from time to time. Even the reclusive outlanders returned to the village regularly to put in time at the nursery. No adult was required to give time to the nursery barring of course the heavy pressure on immediate post-labor dams to spend their lactating year providing for the hatchlings. Pure milk was rarely drunk by the hatchlings as most came out of the eggs ready for heartier foods but the dams’ milk was mixed with carefully chosen grains to make gruels and rich breads which were considered the healthiest foods for the very young dTelfur. Akai willingly gave her year after laying her second egg just after Tian’s festival and enjoyed the younglings more than she’d imagined she would. After her first laying, she hadn’t spent the year in the nursery because she hadn’t lactated. She hadn’t regretted not having to fulfill the obligation because she didn’t particularly like youngsters, but now she was learning that there was more to them than filth and screaming.
Spending so much time with them imbued her with broader fancies and they with a variety of disciplined outlets for their boundless creativity. When she’d assigned a group of over thirties to go paint each other they hadn’t returned with portraits, they’d returned covered in beautiful swirls and stripes and swaths of color. She’d immediately invited them to climb all over and paint her and then led them on a parade through the village.
For his part, Hardt taught all the kids in the nursery the lander language and set the older little ones, the ones who were about his age he realized, to the sort of tasks Vyck used to assign him. She’d always encouraged him to figure things out for himself and he followed her example in the nursery. There were times, when Nahni was behaving particularly like Hundred Mytree or when Tareay came by the nursery after a hunt smelling like sweat and blood and fear and wood and triumph, that he wanted terribly to see Vyck again and wondered what she was doing. At these times he also fretted that he should already have left the dTelfur and gone to see the Kimoet in Voferen Kahago to tell them the dragons were harmless. But then Mobious or Sophie would need him and he’d reason that he’d better wait until the boy was older and he would let himself be swept up again in the rushing current of his dTelfur life.
Two more years passed. Sophie and Hardt moved their quarters from the village bower out to the falls side bower, still marked with Akai’s colors. Mobious flew with Sophie as willingly as he toddled with Hardt but it could take the trio hours to get home at night or to the village in the morning if they let the kid walk on his own as they often did. It gave them a chance for quiet time together. The dtur and the lander would unwind from their days, share stories of the week’s adventures, swap tales of dTserra and Vyck, discuss the future, or just walk in companionable silence enjoying Mobious and each other.
It was on one of these walks, not long after his ninth exhausting shedding that Mobious again bent Nature to his will.
The three were strolling back to the bower after a long day. Sophie had once again been conscripted by Deg to train Nahni and, taking liberties with Konifer’s still standing injunction against overflying landers, had taken the girl on a surreptitious tour of the settlements. It was the first time she’d flown east since Hardt had joined the village and she’d been amazed to discover that the settlements and the people’s activities were no longer as strange and mysterious as she’d used to think. She and Nahni had returned and gone directly to the nursery to find Hardt.
The two curious dragons had amassed a volume of questions for the lander but he was off in the woods with Gyari’s apprentices and some other nursery children observing the animals. The kids didn’t know that he was actually teaching them concentration and observation skills. They thought that they were learning how to be spies. Mobious was very good at spying. He, like Nahni, was always watching everything around him. Unlike Nahni, and perhaps only because he had minimal language skills, he also knew how to keep his mouth shut. Still, being quiet for a whole day had been a momentous achievement for the infant and he made every effort to make up for all the time lost by babbling non-stop and non-sensibly at Sophie and Hardt for the entire walk home.
The river was in sight by the time Sophie got a word in edgewise. Mobious had spotted a flock of birds up ahead and took off at a brisk totter to catch them. Sophie grabbed the opportunity to tell Hardt that Nahni would be coming by for dinner to grill him on all things lander. She started to tell him about the new settlement of landers and the dragonbed she and Nahni had dug one night to give the people a closer quarry of stone, but at the same time she and Hardt both saw a young snakecat dash out from a bush at Mobious. Sophie screamed and leapt into the air. Hardt silently gripped the rock he’d been worrying and snapped it at the snakecat’s head.
As Sophie grabbed the stunned snakecat baby with her talons, the sharp middle claws extended, she saw Mobious falling backwards. Before she could toss the cat and grab at the infant, a little bitty lake appeared where the ground had been and he fell into it with a splash. Hardt, just an instant too late to catch the boy himself, lost his hurried footing in the unexpected water and fell forward. Instantly the lake expanded so that Hardt too landed with a harmless splash. He caught a mouthful of water and coughed, floundering a bit as he tried to find the bottom. Meanwhile Mobious who, thanks in part to his gills, adored swimming, splashed about gleefully and continued his conversational babble.
Sophie landed and stuck her head out ove
r the water in case the oblivious infant needed any help. Hardt swam to the edge of the new three-greg wide lake and hauled himself out to sit on the edge. There was no gradual ascent from the water. The edge dropped straight down to the little lake’s full depth. With Sophie overseeing Mobious’ safety, Hardt stayed where he was after coughing out a surprising amount of fairly clean water.
“Sophie?”
“Yes, Hardt?” She spoke slowly and didn’t look at him. The old girl was desperately trying to think of how she could explain this or if she should just go ahead and tell him the whole truth of the matter.
“Is there anything I should know about dTelfur infants that other people would just assume?”
She hazarded a peek at him. He was slipping out of his backsac with his legs dangling in the water. He appeared to be taking the sudden dunking with great aplomb but then Hardt had often demonstrated a tendency to show no surprise at anything so she couldn’t be certain what he suspected.
She offered the weakest possible truth. “Some children show special abilities.”
“The ability to protect themselves and their loved ones by rearranging the landscape could certainly be considered special.” His voice betrayed only a hint of dry amusement at the situation as he wrung his hair out over the water. “Is there anyone we should notify or would no one but me be particularly surprised?”
“Well, we could tell Deg tomorrow. But probably it would be just as well if we didn’t tell anyone else.”
“So this kind of special ability is kind of like his wing stumps and three feet claws; inexplicable, but not wholly unexpected.”
“Well, it’s more like the kind of thing Konifer would be required to take an interest in.”
“Ahhh.” Hardt had been peeling off his clothes. He stopped and looked Sophie in the eyes. “And Mobious is already compromised in Konifer’s eyes because he has attached with me?”
Hardt's Tale: A Mobious' Quest Novel Page 19