Days of Blood and Fire

by Katharine Kerr

  “My father often told me that in the end, the grass and trees take back the land from a fire mountain. It must be happening here.”

  “Truly, and look, there it is.”

  At the north end of the valley soared a mountain the like of which Rhodry had never seen. Just like the multiple brochs of a great lord’s dun, it seemed formed of three peaks fused together—the highest, a truncated cone, rising snowcapped between a much lower, shambling pair, which looked as if their tops had been bitten off by some unimaginably huge beast. The slopes rose dark, striped here and there with trees, here and there creviced with shadow. A thin mist hung at the apex.

  “Smoke?” Rhodry said.

  Enj merely shrugged, staring fascinated at the volcano.

  “I think your dweomer did lead us here,” he whispered at last. “Even if I should die tonight, seeing this mountain would have made the journey worthwhile.”

  It was, Rhodry supposed, very beautiful, but still, he couldn’t understand Enj’s fascination. He himself would have preferred a view of the High King’s palace or suchlike any day.

  “I see water over there,” Rhodry said. “Let’s hope it doesn’t reek of brimstone, too.”

  They camped that night between the mountain’s feet. For the first time since Othara had given him the talisman, Rhodry dreamt, these long and vivid dreams of flying far above the earth, of seeing trees and mountains swoop by underneath as his vision wheeled and soared. Yet along with the delight worry touched the dreams, a faint dread, a wondering if danger lay nearby. He woke suddenly at dawn and lay in his blankets, hands tucked underneath his head, while he stared at the peaks rising above. As the light brightened, deepening the shadows, he could pick out fissures and strange long formations of rock, twining down the mountainside like rivulets of black water between green-gray banks of trees. Here and there the rock pooled as well or made boulders shaped like drops, the record of ancient splashes from a time when the mountain had spilled liquid rock like metal from a blacksmith’s spoon. As he studied the slopes, he felt the earth tremble under him, just for a few beats of a heart before it stilled.

  “The land of blood and fire, he whispered.

  Rhodry sat up and began to study the two side cones. Not only were they lower, the left somewhat more than the right, but they were far more deeply eroded, with the leftward the most heavily forested of the three. The left, then, would probably offer the easiest way up. Given how tired they were, and how little food they had left, it would be best if their first choice were the correct one. He considered calling the dragon to see if he could form some impression of its direction, then realized that to do so would warn it.

  Enj woke soon after, and he’d also been worrying about their route. After a scant breakfast of squirrel caught and roasted the day before, they discussed which of the two lower peaks to climb.

  “Or should we climb either, for that matter,” Rhodry said. “I feel in my very soul that the dragon’s up there somewhere, but that’s not a rational thought or suchlike. I’d hate to have you depend upon it.”

  “What else do we have to depend on? I think, Rori, that if you’re meant to have this wyrm, then we’ll find it easily, and if you’re not, well, then, we’ll die no matter which way we go.”

  “Imph. An unlovely thought, that, but I think me you speak true. What we need is an omen. Too bad Otho’s not along to cast us a geomancy.”

  Enj laughed, then went back to studying the mountain. Even though the day was growing sunny and hot, the gray mist still hung at the highest peak. Rhodry rose to his feet and walked a few steps away.

  “Well, if there’s truly dweomer at work here, then we can invent our own way to take omens, and it’ll be good enough. If there isn’t dweomer at work, well, then, we’re doomed,” Laughing, he drew his silver dagger and held it up, “May the gods look down and decide!”

  Remembering a chance remark of Jill’s, he made sure that he was moving deosil, then spun round and round like a child playing a game. When, after a few dizzy-making turns, he saw out of the corner of his eye the high peak flashing toward him, he let the dagger fly. It arched up, winking in the sun, and fell pointing straight at the leftward of the two low and broken peaks.

  “Done, then!” Enj called out. “Well see what the gods have in store for us.”

  It took them all day to work their way up the leftward slope. The morning, or so Enj said, they spent learning how to climb, inching from crack to crack, from patch of scrub wood to fissure. Much to Enj’s relief they did find decent water, tinged with sulfur and warm, but drinkable, in the occasional pool or cranny. On the lower slope they could make steady if slow progress; by noon they could look back at the plain below and see the trees as tiny marks on barren ground. They rested crammed into a more or less horizontal fissure where trees as gnarled as gnomes were breaking black rock apart, and moss and lichen lay thick, a green if slimy carpet.

  After a scant meal they started again. The upper slope rose so smoothly that it seemed they climbed for hours yet traveled not a mile. Up and ever up they went, bent double against the angle, eyes fixed on the next barren streak of black rock, the next patch or pocket of thin soil, slippery with dead grass. All round them the wind gusted this way or that, tainted with brimstone and ancient ash. At last, just when Rhodry’s legs seemed to be melting into water, he glanced up to see a horizon of sorts hanging above him— the blackish line of the rock face against blue sky where it lipped over to flatten. When Rhodry hauled himself over, he found another slope ahead, but this one slanted down,broken here and there with flattish spots where a scrawny tree or two lifted its bare branches.

  “Almost there,” Enj panted. “Hang on.”

  They rested for a few moments, blowing for breath, pushing back sweaty hair from their foreheads, then settled their packs and moved on. As the slope became a proper cliff top, Rhodry got a glimpse of what lay ahead, a huge rise of distant cliffs, as flat and circling as Lin Serr’s wall, with the snowy peak beyond catching full sun, but it wasn’t till they reached the edge that he could see the entire view.

  “Ye gods,” he whispered. “Ye gods.”

  In front of him the ridge they’d been following dropped away for hundreds of yards to a vast valley floor, unrolling on and on to the distant rise of precipice that had once been the inside of a mountain. These cliffs formed a semicircle, just as if they were the rim of an enormous drinking bowl made of clay, but one ruined on the wheel by a slip of the potter’s thumb, that is, the depression where they’d crawled over. Rhodry shook his head, trying to imagine what had made this crater. Over the lip of cold rock on which he now stood fire and liquid rock had once run like wine spilling from the deformed bowl, and the rock had bubbled, too, just like boiling water. He found it hard to believe, yet he knew that Enj’s father had taught the truth of the matter. The bottom of the bowl now formed the living valley, covered with grass in places and dotted with trees that flamed red and gold, as if in homage to their home’s fiery birth. Autumn came early, he supposed, at this height.

  “The God’s Soup Bowl,” Enj said, grinning.

  “It is! Avain was right, after all.”

  “Good name for it, truly. Lacks a certain poetry, mayhap.”

  “Whatever we call it, it’s huge.”

  “A fair two mile across at least, I’d say.” Enj held up a thumb at arm’s length to help himself gauge. “Hard to tell. And those cliffs there at the other lip must stand a good mile above the floor. That be a wretched piece of luck.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ve got to get over them, that’s why. Look, you can just see the apex, rising behind the far cliff. The fire must have burst out partway up the mountain’s side first, and as for how long ago, I don’t know if we have a word big enough. Then it would have burst out on that other cone, a little closer to our own day.”

  “And now we’ve got the peak itself to worry about.”

  “Worry? I—er, truly. If that thing should blow while we’re
here …”

  They stood for a moment, staring at the peak with its scarf of gray mist, whether smoke or cloud, they couldn’t tell.

  “If we need to be round, hadn’t we best just go round?” Rhodry said. “Not go down to the valley at all, I mean.”

  “Use the cliff tops as kind of a road? You be probably right enough, but I don’t fancy camping out here tonight, clinging to this slope like a fly on a tankard.”

  “Why not? We’ve slept on worse.”

  Enj hesitated, staring up at the clear sky while he chewed on his lower lip.

  “We’re dead tired already,” Rhodry said. “If we start down now, and slip or suchlike—”

  Enj went on staring at the sky and said nothing. Rhodry waited in silence.

  “I was just thinking,” Enj said at last. “Suppose the creature be out hunting, and here we be, out walking, where there be neither tree nor overhang for a good mile.”

  Rhodry started to speak, then merely laughed. Enj winced.

  “Ye gods, Rori, when you laugh like that it does creep my flesh. Now, if we head round to the west here for a ways,we might be able to take that slope down. See over there? There’s a fissure, like.”

  In the direction of the fissure, the cliff top seemed to be sloping down somewhat, shortening the distance they’d have to climb, or so Rhodry hoped. Although he’d rested enough to keep going, he could feel his legs and feet aching in stripes of pain along every long muscle. Up in the lead, Enj suddenly cried out and threw up an arm for the halt.

  “Now that do be what I call a dropoff! Come up and have a look.”

  Down at the bottom of an enormous shaft lay a lake, at least a hundred yards across. The pit looked like a giant finger hole, poked by a god, perhaps, into wet earth that had then turned to rock round the poke and caught the rain. From the rim where they stood, cliffs of the usual dark gray stone fell straight as a plumb line down to the water, some hundred feet below. Wisps of steam rose and floated on the surface.

  “Somewhat nasty lives in that, I’ll wager,” Rhodry remarked. “A demon, most like. A pack of evil spirits at the least.”

  “We’re not going to hang about long enough to find out. Quick march.”

  Once they reached the crack in the cliff face, the eroded slope within its walls did seem more forgiving, a possible though not gentle angle down. Enj studied it for a long moment, then turned to Rhodry.

  “What do you think?”

  “You’re the leader here.”

  “I think we can manage if we start right now. It’s needful that we reach the valley floor before it turns dark.”

  They did, but only just. They climbed roped, with Rhodry in the lead and the experienced Enj at the rear to anchor the team should he fall. Every yard gained was a matter of careful thought, of a long look down to gauge not only the possible hand — and footholds at the particular spot but whether or not other holds existed farther along the proposed route. They only had to retrace their route once, and even then, if Rhodry hadn’t been along, the dwarf might have managed to inch himself past the bad spot. As it was, with a cheerful “better delayed than dead,” Enj ordered them back and round to a safer, if slower, route. About halfway down they passed from sun into shade. By the time they stood safely on the flat, the valley floor lay in night, though the very tops of the caldera walls jutted into the gilding sun. Beyond them the volcano’s peak, just visible from this angle, shone gold tinged with pink.

  “I see a stream over yonder,” Rhodry said. “Judging by all those trees. What are they, anyway?”

  “I call them mountain larch, but I know not what a loremaster would say to that. I be ready to camp, I tell you. We might be able to scrounge enough dead wood for a fire.”

  “I wonder if we dare light one.”

  “True spoken. Well, a summer night without a fire never killed a man.”

  As they walked on, heading straight toward the center of the bowl, they both kept a good watch, turning their heads constantly, glancing up at the sky often, but the valley lay in the deep silence of coming night.

  “I don’t suppose the dragon would lair right out here, anyway,” Rhodry said at last. “All the tales I ever heard said caves.”

  “In where it be warm, near the fire in what’s left of this mountain, I’d wager. Deep in its belly, most like.”

  “Not what you’d call a safe place to make your home, then.”

  “Not for us. Safe enough for a dragon. These ancient fire mountains be full of flues and passages, all smooth and round, where the molten rock poured out fast and left its skin behind like a shedding snake. That outer bit, the skin if you would, hardens to leave a proper tunnel. And heat rises into caverns. They were big bubbles in the melt once, most of them. The wyrm will have found one of those cozy spots to lair in.”

  “Maybe so, but the mountain could blow again, if it’s not dead.” Rhodry glanced round, with a cold shudder as he tried to imagine what sort of eruption it would take to gut half a mountain this way. “The dragon couldn’t trust it.”

  “The great wyrms do share a soul with the fire mountains, or so the tales say. Deep, deep in their hearts a fire of their own does burn, just as fire burns deep in the mountains, and there in their hearts they understand each other. The wyrms know when the mountain sleeps and when it’s about to rouse. The mountain itself will warn them, like, because at root they’re brothers.” Then he laughed. “But my father, he did say that the beasts have splendid hearing, that’s all, and sensitive bellies. When they plop themselves smack down on the bedrock, they can hear the melted rocks gurgling and scraping below and feel the mountain trembling under them. They learn to judge the noises, he always said, like a midwife with her ear on a pregnant woman’s paunch.”

  “I prefer your way of speaking, but no doubt he was right.”

  Enj grinned and started to speak, then fell silent, raising a warning hand. By then they’d reached the shelter of the first ratty-looking trees, stunted and half-bald as well, but some sort of cover. They froze, straining to hear, as the sound that had caught their attention came again, distant and more the impact of a sound than a noise. To Rhodry it seemed like the slap of hand on a drumhead when the goatskin cover’s got loose with age—a distant thwack, all spongy, but throbbing again and again, and closer and louder until it resolved itself into the beat of enormous wings against still air. Automatically they both looked up, peering through the branches.

  Black against the sky, its legs curled under but its tail flung out for a rudder, the dragon flew over the valley. For a dozen strokes its huge naked wings beat the air; then they held steady, and it glided, dipping down straight for the cliffs on the far side, turning a little toward a vast rock formation shaped like a pillar stuck to the cliff by its length. With a smack and rustle of folding wings, it settled. For a moment they could see it clinging to the flume like a woodpecker clinging to a tree trunk. In the darkening light, judging accurately was near impossible, but Rhodry guessed it thirty feet long, not counting its tail. With a little shake it squirmed; the tail whipped; the dragon disappeared inside some crack or cave that not even his half-elven eyes could find. Enj let out his breath in a long sigh. He looked like a man who’s just seen his beloved appear briefly at a window, then pull the shutters closed.

  “Lucky, aren’t we?” Rhodry whispered. “They must hunt by sight, not smell.”

  “So my father always said.” Enj was whispering as well. “So it be not lairing in the high peak, then.”

  “Let’s hope not, but it may have found some passageway through and up. Think we could climb to that hole?”

  “Mayhap, but I’ll tell you this, Rori. I don’t much like the idea of crawling right in after it.”

  “I’ve never agreed with a man more. What about a back door, like? The base of those cliffs look as full of holes as a wormy cheese.”

  “In the morning it’ll be worth a look. If we work our way from tree to tree, we’ll be safe enough. Maybe.”

 
It was late that night before either of them could sleep. Even though it was quite likely that the dragon had just fed, since it had flown home to lair, this was not a probability either wanted to put to the test. For some time they sat under the trees and talked in low voices about the problem of getting near enough to the beast for Rhodry to enchant it.

  “You’ll need a few ticks of a heart at least,” Enj said. “To call its name in the right way and all.”

  “Just so, and a place to sit or stand where I can get a good lungful of air, too.”

  Enj considered for a moment.

  “Since they hunt by sight, we should make a run for the base of the cliff now.”

  “Good thinking,” Rhodry said. “Here, we’re going about this the wrong way. We keep thinking we’re hunting a dragon, when we should be saying we’re hunting a dragon. I’m not the woodsman you are, but I’ve brought down my share of game in my day.”

  In the starlit dark he could just see Enj grin.

  “So have I,” Enj said. “A beast like that will be leaving tracks and signs of its passing you’d have to be blind to miss.”

  Carrying their packs they dashed across the caldera floor to the rise of cliff, which turned out to offer a wealth of hiding places for two men. They found a shallow cave whose entrance was just big enough for them to squeeze through one at a time. While a dragon might have managed to pry one paw in, they were safe enough from the rest of it. Still, they spent a less than settled night, dozing in turns rather than sleeping straight through. As he sat up with his back to the cavern wall, Rhodry thought he might feel, just every now and then, a trembling as if the rock behind him breathed. When he did doze off, he dreamt of fire that oozed like water through the dark places of the world.