Hardt found one of the sleeves wrapped about a badly tended wound on the vizet’s left hand. The wound had tried to scar over the fabric and blood poured on the thin sleeping pad as Hardt tore it off to wash the red and swollen hand. Only a swallow of dirty water remained in the oft-repaired water pitcher set a few greg away from the shelter at Kerander’s toes. So Hardt used the fresh water remaining in his own canteen to flush the wound before he searched around for some evidence of any recent meals. Finding none, he determined to wake the boy and walk him in to the infirmary.
An hour later he found Edwarg and the astronomer, Sesch just as unconscious in Dorat’s old rooms. Edwarg was asleep in a chair, his head on the worktable in front of him. Sesch at least was on a sleeping platform though fully dressed with his hand resting in a bowl of herbed water, grasping a cloth. On the platform beside this Kahrier lay resting with her eyes open.
“Hi.” She whispered when she saw him. “Is Mobious sick?”
“Just hungry and tired, I hope.” Hardt whispered back, leaving Mobious leaning in the doorway as he went to bend over her bed.
“So are they.” She gestured at Sesch with a nod of her chin.
“Is there food around?”
She nodded first, gathering strength to speak again. “In the sewing room.”
For a moment Hardt’s mind was filled with morbid images and fantasies of what horrors had happened in his absence. But then he recalled that these were Dorat’s rooms and as a seamstress, she had a room set to that purpose.
“Thank you. I’ll settle Mobi in another room and come back to check on you.”
From the doorway, Mobious wearily asked Kahrier, “Are you hungry? Can we bring you something to eat?”
“No. Just water. I’m sorry I didn’t take care of you.”
The rail-thin vizet with his filthy tattered clothes and bleeding hand, opened his eyes. “I’m fine.”
Hardt found himself nursing everyone in the infirmary through the growing season. Edwarg and Sesch had worn themselves out fighting Kahrier’s fever day and night until the strange illness broke on its own and released a weakened but cheerful Kahrier. As she got stronger, she helped out where she could to prevent Edwarg, their only healer, from wearing himself out completely. Cotts, the energetic hatchling Edwarg had snagged as an apprentice early in the moons of panic following the battle, showed up a few days after Hardt’s return to deliver herbs and roots and berries and to gather supplies for the villagers trying to plant Pelty’s distant farm.
Too many of the would-be farmers were weak from the rough winter when they headed out to Peltine’s for Edwarg to feel safe letting them go, so Cotts had volunteered to go and watch after them. The boy had witnessed and been responsible for the repair of many accidents since then and when he walked into the infirmary it was with the heavy steps of a long-weary adult rather than with his old indomitable bounce.
The hopelessness of the village came as a shock after Hardt’s year experiencing the Pacere settlers’ success. Almost instantly he felt as tired as everyone else looked and nearly as quickly decided that he couldn’t stay in the village. So it was with regret that he heard too late in the summer that everyone else wanted to move out of the village as well. They elected Janen as their spokesperson and sent her to tell Hardt that they wanted him to lead them to his Stray where they could help build the castle the dTur had seen being constructed there in return for homes and food.
“Janen! When was this decided?”
“We knew last winter that we couldn’t stay.”
Janen had bearded Hardt in the food caverns where he was again trying to discover the centuries-old freshness preservation secrets which had died with the storeskeepers in the Lost Battle, as the landers of Pacere had called it. It was bad timing on her part as he was already despairing of their ability to keep the village fed with the meager success of the farms and gardens. All of the really able hunters had gone to Pacere and none of the remaining hatchlings were suited to the killing required. He and a few of the other elders had gone out and set traps all summer, but without a good way to cure and store the meats, they’d be subsisting on dead season berries long before the final thaw. Janen’s announcement lain atop this desperation stripped away the last of Hardt’s patience.
“Why are you telling me only now when I have been back since early spring?”
Janen was surprised at his anger. “We wanted to give you time to rest and settle back in to our lives.”
“But now it’s too late to set out!” Hardt took a deep breath. He knew that they could make it if they weren’t so old and so young. Janen was perhaps the only middle-aged dTelfur in the decimated community and her skills were limited strictly to architecture and not the architecture of food storage caverns. Inhaling slowly, he forced himself to speak calmly. “We wouldn’t make it across the plaines before snowfall.”
“We have to go, Hardt. We can’t stay here if Mobious can’t wake the dTur.”
Hardt brushed past her to the entranceway before ending the conversation. “We’ll go. When the dead season has passed.”
Winter was as difficult as any could have not wished. Two of the older dTelfur didn’t make it through and as neither had been old enough to expect death, their passings spurred the telfs to prepare more vigorously for spring’s scheduled departure.
Mobious was the only villager loathe to leave. He was the only villager who made no preparations. Instead he studied every scrap and hint he found in the Vize Bower, foregoing sleep and food to stand at the foot of every assailable dTur, trying to reach their drowsing minds. He was determined to never leave the village until his sire’s crime, for so he’d come to see it, was erased.
But Hardt was equally determined that the boy should not kill himself attempting the impossible and when the first crocus peeked its tiny bud out from the melting snow at the edge of the forest and the villagers piled their belongings on their backs, Hardt sought Edwarg’s aid to drug the vizet’s food. Cotts and Kahrier took turns with two other older hatchlings carrying Hardt over the dTur, across the river, and through the plaines into the first night free of the sleeping dragons’ shadow.
Mobious was kept mildly sedated for the first eight suns of their journey. At night, Hardt ordered the posted sentries to watch as much for Mobious’ escape as for outside dangers. Then, at sunrise of the ninth day, winter returned. The snowstorm should have been predicted, Hardt thought later, by the constant complaints of aching joints and stiff knees by the worn-out old telfs.
Mobious, awake and thinking of ways to get back to the village, was among the first to see the storm approaching. By the time it hit, he, Kahrier, and Cotts had gathered all of the nearly three dozen people into four tents and buried any supplies that couldn’t be thrown in with the travelers. Thanks to their quick thinking, though nearly everyone was suffering from some fever or flu as well as hunger at the end of the three-day storm, not one dTelfur was lost and all the supplies were eventually found right where they’d been buried.
All thoughts of returning to the village were forgotten over the following moons as Mobious struggled for survival with the few other hatchlings who quickly recovered from the storm-engendered illnesses. The plaines were not a safe place to stay but most of the travelers were simply too sick to move. The best that could be done was to prepare for the possibility of another storm by building up the snow as a wall around the small encampment and keeping an eye on the skies.
The sick all slowly improved and the well or at least healthier dTelfur took turns sleeping and nursing and hunting and cooking and gathering and keeping the melting snow from flooding the tents or the fire. Uncountable suns rose and set until one evening Mobious woke to find the snow was all gone and more than half the travelers were ambulatory. He gathered the healthiest around him and together they devised a plan to get them all off of the open plaine.
A pair of scouts were sent out to find the nearest forest. As they made their way back to the encampment, they dug
a firepit each time they stopped to eat or to rest. Within sixteen days they were back at the plaine, thirty-six firepits from the edge of the forest. The next day they led ten of the healthiest back to the first firepit where they set up tents and built a fire and then hunted and cooked as the ten went back to fetch the patients. The sickest didn’t arrive until well after dark that night on hastily-built stretchers carried by teams of exhausted dTelfur. The following morning the two scouts returned to the original encampment with a few others to break down the remaining tents and gather everything left behind. After a couple days of rest and recovery at the first firepit, the entire sequence was repeated to transport everybody to the second firepit and a fraction of a megg closer to the cover of woods.
The living season was in full bloom by the time they reached the forest with every traveler able to move under their own power. One further week of slow travel under the cover of the trees found them on the shore of a lovely clear lake and it was decided that here was the perfect place to stop and rest for a short while. Within hours of setting up the tents Cotts found a massive raspberry patch and Sesch and Kahrier speared a large wild unicorn in their first successful hunt. Hardt caught a fish which pulled him right into the lake and every other fisher was equally as successful without the soaking. Such sudden and overwhelming wealth of provisions put everyone into a good mood at dinner and soon instruments appeared and games were broken out and a small festival erupted right there at the lakeshore.
The commotion attracted some unexpected attention.
Hardt had stepped off farther into the woods to relieve himself when he heard the small band approaching from the south. A guiert, a marching drum, pipes, and several singers, and possibly a loate were crashing through the underbrush towards him. Landers… who would be a little surprised to find him so exposed and even more surprised to find themselves crashing a dTelfur festival.
As soon as was prudent, Hardt picked his way as fast as his knees would carry him back through the trees to the lakeshore. “Cotts!” The boy was wearing his old dTelfur clothing, having stained his lander outfit falling into the berry patch. “Cotts! There are landers coming. Go find something else to wear.”
Without a word the boy left his game and dashed off to the tents, clearly passing the word as he ran. Where he passed games and conversations stopped, the people standing to shout questions after him. Hardt grabbed another boy, a young hatchling who’d been playing Swipes with Cotts, and sent him to the performers’ circle with the news of the approaching lander musicians then he searched out those folks who were wearing dTelfur outfits or whose lander outfits were revealing bits of unusual physiognomy.
The lander music was easily overwhelming the small dTelfur band when he caught sight of Mobious turning the great unicorn carcass over the cooking pit under Edwarg’s supervision. Edwarg was fully dressed in lander gear, sitting clean and neat on a nicely carved wooden campstool. The boy however was covered in filth. He was doing all of the physical labor, sweat running down the newly defined muscles of his bare back as his lander-style shirt lay covered with soot in the mud beside the pit. The scaly gills on his chest were obscured with dirt, but the wing ridges on his shoulder blades flexed out each time he bent over the spit’s handle.
“Landers are coming! Put a shirt on!” Hardt tried to struggle out of his own shirt and offer it to Mobious, but the kid had already scooped his up and run to the lakeshore only steps away.
As he swept the cloth through the water, trying to work out the worst of the dirt, he chided his attached. “You’re speaking dTelfur.”
Hardt switched to his native tongue and returned the jibe. “As are you.”
“Here they come.” Having finally succeeded in getting his old creaky body out of the campchair, Edwarg was facing the woods, bouncing like a child on the balls of his feet.
Hardt laughed. “Well go ahead. What says I should greet them first?”
But Edwarg instead turned to Hardt and held out his hand, palm up. “Thank you, Hardt. We would have nowhere to go if it weren’t for you.”
“That’s not true, Edwarg and I fervently wish you didn’t have to pretend to be what you’re not.”
“Someday. Mobious will find a way for us all to be honest neighbors. Until then, your friendship has given us a way to survive.”
“You’re expecting too much from Mobious.”
Edwarg shook his head and pulled his friend closer, glancing over to where the vizet was pulling the soaking shirt over his head. “Not me, Hardt. Annie told me he’d find a way. When I helped her lie down at Deg’s side before they went to sleep, I asked if she was afraid and she said yes, but that it would be better when we could all live together. She said that our Vize would find a way. At the time I assumed she meant Konifer, but now… I think she knew.”
Hardt recalled Annie’s portentous birth and Mobious’ insistence that she was afraid to hatch because she didn’t want to be alone. “Do you think this sleeping is the loneliness she was afraid of?”
But at that moment, Mobious sloshed up to them and the three joined the rest of the uncertain dTelfur in welcoming the revelers who’d come from a nearby forestshale to join the merrymaking.
The festival lasted far longer than the dTelfur had planned as winter-starved revelers appeared, drawn by the music and the laughter and some simply surprised by the crowd as they arrived at their favorite watery get away from scattered lander shales throughout the forest. The landers brought with them new styles of clothing and jewelry, fresh grains, and skilled healers. The cough Hardt had been unable to shake from the second winter was cured with a few droughts of a healer’s brew, whipped up within the hour the skilled woman arrived. Hardt watched carefully as the healer examined and proffered remedies to others in the dTelfur party and was greatly relieved to find the medicines to be generally effective.
The forest festival wasn’t as successful a blending of the species as the Pacere settlers had achieved, but all irredeemable disasters were forestalled and at the end of a week of days, the dTelfur were alone once again, though short nine travelers.
Seven older dTelfur had met landers they liked and instead of enduring another four moons of trudging through the wilderness they went off to join the more immediate lander communities. One young girl had been brought to the festival from a secluded forest shale to distract her from the depression she’d been stuck in since losing her parents and little brother to a wild boal attack three season before. Yelorn, a four centuries old woman who’d spent her life in the nursery, took on the challenge and had the girl happily playing in the river by the time her uncle’s family was ready to leave. Neither the girl nor Yelorn wished to be separated, so Yelorn had bullied two younger quatrecenturian friends to join her in setting up house with the little girl in her shale.
Janen was furious at such desertions, but Hardt and many others were glad to see their friends finding happiness in new homes. Good-byes were said all round and the lake reluctantly abandoned. The smaller group was well rested, well provisioned, and hopeful as they hiked through the forest towards their new home in the east. Hardt, though being one of the reasons for the slower pace, was frustrated at the lack of distance traveled each day and privately worried that he was leading them in the wrong direction. The astronomer, Sesch lost sleep sitting up with Hardt at night, conferring on the positioning of the stars so they would not have to rely merely on the rise and set of the sun and other such general directional indicators. Each time they stopped in at lander shales to practice the language and resupply themselves with the exciting new lander treats they’d been introduced to at the festival, Hardt would confer with the locals and be redirected to a severely more northern or eastern route. At each of these stops, summer wearing quickly into fall, Hardt lost more faith in his sense of direction even as the group shed more dTelfur. Soon it was Mobious who was conspiring with Edwarg to sedate Hardt so the man could get some sleep.
Hardt had been supportive of each dTelfur’s decision
to settle in the various lander communities but rebelled furiously when Sesch decided to abandon the group to settle on a secluded lander farm. The farm was isolated just about a megg south of Tyurae, the nearest shale of any size and provided food and a central meeting place for the scattered folk who belonged to no shale. The single woman who greeted the dTelfur told them that she’d grown up on the farm and had run it with her brother after her mother finally died until her brother ran off to Voferen Kahago to train in the guarde. Sesch fell in love instantly. And despite Hardt’s objections, when the travelers moved on, heading directly south at the girl’s suggestion, they left Sesch and his favorite hatchling, Kahrier behind.
The dTelfur had only just reached the burntbos plaine when the first snow of winter started falling. Camp was quickly made and a conference begun on what should be done. Neither Hardt nor any of those who had helped Konifer battle that fire after dTserra’s death could judge how far they were from the eastern edge and the eastern edge of the burntbos was still six megg from the edge of Stray. If a storm hit, he would vastly prefer not to be caught on open ground again. A cold night spent at the edge of the burnt forest convinced him and most of the others that they would be wisest to build a shelter for the winter and arrive in Stray in spring when they would be happy of more hands for planting and hopefully for building.
The few detractors were convinced by the bitter cold morning and the small group backtracked to a natural grassy clearing in the trees near a trickling brook. Janen quickly set to work ordering people about on tasks and everyone did as she demanded without argument because they saw her transform before their eyes from a bitter, snippy hag to the brilliant, witty, happy woman she’d been before the Lost Battle.
The truth was that she found a focus in the work which allowed her brain to forget the horrors she had witnessed in those few hours on the battlefield. Others grew bored with the digging and let their minds wander through the dark tunnels of their most morbid thoughts, but Janen was freed by the monotony. As she dug, she didn’t bemoan the lack of dTur, she remembered their joy of digging and embodied it. She envisioned a beautiful burrow hardened with ingenuity if not with dragon breath and her visions drove her through the winter. Even when the burrow was big enough and stable enough and warm enough for every dTelfur, Janen kept working.
Hardt's Tale: A Mobious' Quest Novel Page 31