Trace the Stars

by Nancy Fulda

  They would have to go under the cover of darkness, Anduval realized, when the creatures of the forest ventured out to forage. She would want to go in secret and hide her heat signature from cycor ships.

  The holy maiden riveted Anduval with a look and said, “Go and tell the magus what you have heard.”

  Angar was drunk by midday. He went to the pub and told the town about his dragon, and as the tale spread, many an oaf just like himself came and offered to pay for rounds.

  By early afternoon, the size of the dragon had grown enormous in the telling, and many a man gaped in disbelief at stories of a talon a yard long and a wingspan of a hundred feet.

  There were offers to buy teeth. “I’m the best scrimshaw artist in Moonravis,” one fisherman boasted. “Lend me the ivory, and I shall double its value!”

  But Angar did not like the man’s work. It was true that he was the best in town, but with a find like this, the ivory should go to the best carvers on Danai.

  “I’ll bet I could make fine boots and belts from its skin,” the cobbler suggested in a wheedling voice, his hands making little groping gestures.

  The innkeeper offered, “Five gold rings for a tooth—and all the beer you can drink for a year!”

  “Two years!” Angar demanded.

  “Sold!” the innkeeper shouted instantly, and Angar rued the bargain.

  “I should have demanded more,” he grumbled.

  But the innkeeper forced a mug of his finest into Angar’s hand, and in moments Angar was so happy that he was dancing on the bar while the other guests serenaded him with drinking songs.

  “You know,” a blacksmith called out in the midst of the song, “that it is not the teeth or hide that is the greatest treasure of a dragon. It is found in the dragon’s skull!”

  The blacksmith pointed to his own skull and nodded wisely.

  Angar’s head was reeling by then, but somehow the blacksmith’s image, his message, kept whirling about in Angar’s mind. It was like a piece of oat straw caught in a dust devil. It spun around and around.

  Suddenly Angar fell from the table, and several peasants leaped to be the first to help him up.

  “Leave me, leave me alone,” he said. “I’ve got to go get that dragon out of the bog.”

  With superhuman effort, he hauled his massive belly off the floor and began to weave in the general direction of his home. But the patrons of the bar all shouted, “We’ll come and help!” and Angar was still sober enough to realize that he would be grateful for twenty strong hands.

  So the townsmen went to the edge of the bog and, with picks and shovels and pry bars, they dug into the mud and freed the dragon, pulling its half-petrified corpse into the sunlight on the riverbank. Flies buzzed around it curiously for awhile, then rejected its ancient flesh as an unworthy home even for maggots.

  The townsfolk gaped in amazement at the dragon’s size. Surely it would have had an eighty-foot wingspan. And its talons really were over two feet long.

  But the leather did not look to be worth much. Most of it had been devoured by worms and discolored by the tannins in the peat, it seemed.

  Meanwhile, the ivory in its teeth was discolored and had gone soft with age. Angar feared the innkeeper would rescind his offer of two years’ free beer.

  One of the townsfolk even laughed at Angar, saying, “I would not like to have to bury that thing!”

  As Angar fell into despair, a skraal warrior came to the bog and ordered the people not to disturb the dragon’s remains.

  “The holy maiden will pay well for a skull that is still intact,” the warrior offered.

  So Angar shooed the townsfolk off his property and stood guard over the rotting corpse. He settled in the shade of a hazelnut tree and lay in the tall grass for a long while, trying to figure out how to make the most money from his smelly prize, when he fell asleep.

  Two full moons were up when he finally roused himself.

  “The greatest treasure is found in the dragon’s skull!” he recalled, the thought whirling about him like dry autumn leaves.

  He wondered at that. Angar was not an educated man. Education was for skraals; farming and petty labors were for humans. But Angar knew a bit of folk wisdom.

  Sometimes, when a large bird died, it would leave piles of small stones as its craw decomposed. There was an old wives’ tale he had heard about a farmer who discovered diamonds amid such remains, and a further search revealed that a nearby hillside was covered with them.

  Perhaps dragons did the same. Maybe dragons swallowed rubies or emeralds, or maybe such gems just formed naturally in a dragon’s skull!

  Why should the skraals get all of the treasure? They got the best that men had to offer, and what did the hardworking people get in return?

  With that in mind, he staggered home to find his ax.

  “Magus Veritarnus, my name is Anduval. I am to be your apprentice.”

  The magus shot Anduval a dark look, hesitated for an instant, and said, “I can’t waste time on such nonsense.” He turned his back on the boy.

  Anduval had found the magus in his operations center. The magus was a tall man with a lean physique and a haggard look. His skin was as midnight-black as Anduval’s. He had his long hair braided in cornrows and slung over his neck onto his chest. The magus peered up at a glass wall where squiggly chains made from green, red, yellow, and blue were wrapped into cords. The magus had a crystal wand, and when he pointed at one of the rods, he would speak, and the chains would break. The colored blocks would then rearrange according to his command.

  “Let’s have a look at chromosome twelve, gene one hundred eleven, marker four, shall we?”

  The image on the wall shifted, rushing down the coiled chains, until it stopped. The magus squinted at the image on the wall, ignoring Anduval.

  Anduval prompted, “It is the wish of the holy maiden that I be your apprentice.”

  “Go and tell her to mind her own business,” Magus Veritarnus shot back. “We are in a state of emergency.”

  “The holy maiden seems to think that I can help.”

  The magus turned, looked down. “Time that I spend with you is time taken from more important duties. Do you understand?”

  Anduval understood far more than most adults thought he should. For weeks now he had been gathering bits of information overheard in palace halls and in the markets outside of town.

  “You are preparing for the cycor attack,” Anduval said. “You only have a few years to do it. You’re gathering seeds and spores, and hiding them here beneath the fortress. I know, because I know of the children that you’ve hired to begin the work.

  “You hope to weather the attack, as our ancestors did. But you are afraid that it won’t work. Six thousand years ago, the cycor hit us with planet killers. But that didn’t work, so you’re worried that they’ll be more thorough this time.

  “You’re trying to save what you can, the seeds of humanity. But you are doomed to fail, for there are hundreds of millions of people who will die. There isn’t room to protect them all, down here in the depths of the palace.”

  The magus straightened his back, sighed, and peered down at Anduval as if in defeat.

  “You’re damned smart for a twelve-year-old.” Anduval hadn’t told the magus his age, but then, the magus was rumored to have phenomenal powers of observation. “I wasn’t that smart at your age.

  “This isn’t a palace, you know. It is a bunker, designed to withstand cycor attacks. That is what it was built for.”

  He studied Anduval as if weighing him; Anduval realized that the magus needed time to make up his own mind.

  “I was told to inform you that the body of a dragon has been found.”

  “Frozen?” the magus asked hopefully. “Preserved in ice?”

  “No, it was found in a peat bog. I hear that it has not decomposed. The holy maiden has asked that I lead you and her to it.”

  The magus stopped for a moment, breathless, riveted by the news. He nodde
d slightly, eagerly, black pupils shining.

  Then a look of defeat entered his eyes once again, and he said softly, “Let us hope that it is whole.”

  Anduval had to sprint that night to keep pace with the quicker skraals.

  Their entourage was small—the holy maiden, a pair of guards, Anduval. Magus Veritarnus ran at the tail of the group, his black cape flowing behind.

  Anduval led the way. The light of two small full moons, the angry twins, shone red and glaring on the fields of dry grass, bathing the night in blood. He ran, and in doing so he tried to hide his humanity. He dared not slow or stop. He could not beg for rest. Anduval wanted to prove that he could move as swiftly and effortlessly as a skraal.

  So he sprinted through the fields, his heart pounding, lungs heaving like bellows, until he was dizzy with fatigue. His feet winnowed the dry grasses, knocking ripe grain from stalks of wheat.

  The scent of grass and stinkweeds carried on the warm night air.

  The others raced behind him. They did not have far to go outside the great forest, but the stars overhead seemed threatening to Anduval. At any moment, one of them could turn and dive—a cycor warship that would explode like the sun, washing the planet in fire.

  It is only a matter of time, he told himself. They will come, and the world will become void in a flash.

  A wind came from the deserts in the east, blowing a thin veil of red dust high into the air. Lightning flickered in the empty heavens, and the skraals, agitated, ran faster.

  The skraals moved swiftly and effortlessly, and Anduval knew that they wished his small legs would go faster. But Holy Maiden Seramasia did not condemn him. She jogged at his back, sometimes whispering words of gratitude and encouragement.

  Thus they reached the cottage where the farmer Angar lived. The house was made from squares of sod, with poles angled up at the top. Bundles of cattail reeds served as a roof.

  The girl Tallori answered Anduval’s call at a door made from scraped sheep’s hide, her mother being too weary to rise, and the child led the way to the dragon’s corpse, racing through the tall cattails.

  There, beside the slow-flowing river, they found Angar under the starlight, standing upon the dragon’s skull, his ax raised overhead.

  Magus Veritarnus saw what he was about to do, and let out a cry of shock.

  Putting all of his bulk and might into it, Angar let his ax fall.

  The dragon’s skull split easily, the rotting bone breaking with a sound like a melon.

  What happened next, Anduval could never clearly describe.

  Shimmering lights rose from the dragon’s skull, as soft as fog, as bright and sparkling as opals. They gave off no sound, no smell. Instead, they only glittered, rising up like thistledown.

  “Catch them!” Magus Veritarnus shouted, and the holy maiden leaped magnificently, bounding perhaps twenty feet in the air and seventy feet in distance, so that she seemed to fly over Anduval’s head.

  He raced forward, seeking to catch a light in his cupped hands, but the lights did not move on currents of wind. They seemed to be alive, darting about of their own volition. Angar the drunkard stood, eyes wide with amazement, and Anduval saw lights pass right through him, then circle back around his head, as if seeking entrance and finding none.

  One of the coruscating lights drew near, and Anduval reached out and caught it in both hands. Strange currents passed through him. He felt his hair stand on end, and the light rose up. It was as long as a small serpent, but its body was flat and eyeless, much like ribbon, yet it waggled a tail to propel itself through the air.

  Opening his mouth in amazement, Anduval was about to shout a question when the light burst upward and into his brain.

  In the way that sometimes happened with Anduval, he dreamt two dreams simultaneously. It was a gift he had, a gift that he had only recently discovered.

  Anduval was a dragon, hunting beside the river. His scaly hide was the tan of dying reeds, with stripes of dark green and silver. With such camouflage, he could easily hide among the rushes and ambush the hippo-like creatures that waded near.

  He looked up and spotted wings in the sky. Another dragon with a soft-blue underbelly soared above the clouds.

  A thought struck him, an argument so lengthy and complex that a human could take months to unravel and comprehend it; yet Anduval recognized that it was an argument over territorial boundaries and disputes.

  The dragon vocalized, sending loud clicks in the air so swiftly that no human could have decoded their meaning.

  A second dream struck simultaneously, in which the dragon piloted a starship. The creature was hanging upside down in a cockpit, sending his mind out among the stars, feeling ahead for meteors and bits of space debris, then weaving a safe path through the void.

  The cycor were following his ship doggedly, and he glanced back in anger. He so desired to turn the ship and face the enemy . . .

  Anduval found himself lying flat on his back, blinking up at the stars, while the girl Tallori knelt at his side. Magus Veritarnus hunched over him, two fingers pressed against Anduval’s neck, checking for a pulse.

  “You will be well, child,” the magus said. Those were the first words the man had spoken to him all night.

  Tallori was weeping. Anduval could not be sure if she wept from fear for him or in awe of the holy maiden or simply because the combination of events left her overwrought. Humans that lived outside the palace were simple creatures.

  The magus turned aside, as if listening for some inner voice, and then whispered. “It is not for humans like us to touch a dragon’s dream. Doing so was unwise. The dragon’s memories, its hopes and lore, all are stored in a brain that is nothing like ours.

  “The dragons came from a far world, you know. Humans cannot even pronounce the name of their species—much less speak their tongue. So our ancestors called them dragons, after creatures from legend.

  “We cannot even begin to comprehend the math they understood, their mastery of flight. Perhaps if we had a floccular lobe to our brain, as birds do, we might understand some of the things that are innately known to dragons.

  “The skraals can sometimes unravel it.” The magus jutted his chin, and Anduval peered a few yards away. The holy maiden stood atop the dragon’s body, and the lights were circling her, as if greeting an ancient friend, their opalescent hues sometimes bursting into colored sparks.

  “The creatures that you see are called piezoelectric life-forms. They’re symbiotes. They grow and reproduce in the minds of dragons. Our thoughts and memories are stored in twisted strands of DNA—which is so much less efficient than the crystalline structure of a dragon’s brain or a skraal’s brain.”

  Holy Maiden Seramasia stood for long minutes, and one by one the dragon dreams entered her. As they did, her eyes filled with tears, and her thorax trembled as if she might shatter.

  Anduval worried. “Should we stop her? It looks as if it hurts.”

  But the magus shook his head. “She does not hurt. Those are tears of joy, tears of revelation. The dragon dreams must find a home quickly, or they will die. So they are lodging within her skull. Like hermit crabs, they need a place where they can survive. A skraal’s brain is not exactly like a dragon’s either—the dreams will not survive there for long, a few years at the most—but our holy maiden is learning things that none of her kind have been able to comprehend on this planet for more than six thousand years.”

  The magus turned to Anduval, looked into his eyes. “You’re right about my fears. The cycor will make sure that nothing on this planet survives the next attack. They’ll hit us with a sunbuster, send a missile to the planet’s core, and let it explode so that we are shattered into fragments.”

  Anduval was horrified. He knew of border disputes that sometimes happened among human tribes, but that was all that he knew of war. “Why would they do that? I mean, if they wanted to take over, that I could understand. But killing everything—that seems like such a waste!”

 
A few feet away, a snoring sound arose. Angar had sat down in some thick weeds and fallen asleep, too drunk to keep his eyes open any longer.

  “The cycor don’t need plants and animals to feed upon,” the magus said. “Biological life forms evolve, and highly evolved creatures are a danger to them—so all life represents a threat.

  “For millennia, we have hoped that a dragon would come to our world. We’re trapped here. Oh, we could build little ships that float through space like rafts upon a lake and try to escape, but the cycor would only find us that much sooner. The dragons alone have the knowledge necessary to build the fast starships that we so desperately need if we are ever to escape.

  “But I fear that the last of the dragons have been hunted to extinction. Indeed, this world may even be home to the last vestiges of humanity. The center of the galaxy is nothing but a void. The stars have all gone dark, and the planets that whirl around them are destroyed. The home world of the dragons is gone, along with the ancient home of mankind. Perhaps some of our brethren have fled the galaxy, but if so, we may never reunite with them again.”

  Magus Veritarnus glanced down, the whites of his eyes reflecting the lights of the piezoelectric creatures.

  For long hours, they waited in silence as the moons slid inexorably down to the horizon and beyond the shadowed hills. The stars had begun to fade, though the sun was not yet up, when the last of the opalescent creatures entered Seramasia.

  Anduval could see them there still, deep within her crystal skull, their lights sparking from time to time.

  He could not understand completely what was happening. Perhaps such things were beyond the comprehension of mere humans. But Anduval peered up at Magus Veritarnus and saw a change in the man. He had always walked about with hunched shoulders and a careworn look.

  Now he had hope in his eyes.

  When the last of the creatures had burrowed into her skull, the holy maiden looked around at her small crowd of followers.

  “It is done,” she said. “I know how to escape, but time is short if we are to build a worldship.”