The Black Beast

by Nancy Springer

  “Melior is still standing,” I scoffed. I was frightened, scarcely able to comprehend that he, the seer who had guided me as a child, had changed. Even though I was changing myself.… Frain seemed frightened as well.

  “Grandfather,” he said sharply, “what do you mean?”

  “Just what I said, lad. I am nothing more now than a silly old man who happens to be related to you. You should have saved your strength.” He smiled, but he was not entirely joking. I had never heard him say anything so harsh.

  “He loves you,” Fabron remarked reasonably. I could not speak of love. I got up to pace.

  “I don’t need you to topple Melior for me,” I barked at Grandfather. And that was the closest I could come to telling him that his worthiness to me did not depend on his lost powers. But in my hidden depths I felt ardently glad to have him with me again, and frightened of that gladness as only a madman can be.

  Chapter Two

  We stayed in the cave for several days, until our meat was gone and Frain and Daymon were reasonably strong. The dragon left us after the first day, but another one slithered in to take its place—a really purple one this time. They changed off regularly all through our stay. One was columbine pink, one vermilion, one saffron, and they all were so big that they scraped their way through the strait passage that loomed like a catacomb to us. The horses would not come near them, but the black beast accepted them much as I had. It was usually to be found nestled next to Daymon or Frain.

  Long before the first week of our confinement was up I took to pacing the cave in vexation, striding up the long corridor several times a day to watch the snow piling ever higher outside. It looked as if we were going to have to winter in our cave—and why not, with a bunch of aloof but benevolent dragons feeding and warming us at no expense of our own? Still, I chafed and fretted, longing to be on my way toward Eidden to seek Oorossy’s aid against Abas. Inaction galled me, the more so because it left me time for thoughts I would rather avoid.

  “A person would have to be mad to trek toward Eidden in that snow!” I fumed at our group one evening. They stopped their chatter and looked at me with mouths agape, as if I had indeed said something quite ridiculous. Only the dragon seemed to understand.

  Take the inner ways, it said. Its voice sounded right inside my head. Certainly its mouth had not moved, but I knew it was the dragon just the same. I stiffened to attention, staring at it.

  “What?”

  Take the inner ways through the mountain roots. We will lead you and feed you, king that will be, it said. I walked straight up to it and gazed hard into its amber eyes.

  “Why?” I demanded.

  By way of reply the creature gave me the riddle again. I found my way out of it more quickly this time, albeit painfully. “I am what I am,” I said.

  That is why.

  “Because I can answer, you mean?” I scowled in exasperation. “And you could have talked to me all this time, and kept silence?”

  Surely it was plain to see that you wanted no talk, scion of Aftalun.

  True enough. But my companions seemed to be hearing only one side of the conversation; they were staring at me in consternation. “What is going on?” asked Fabron.

  “The dragon says we are to follow it through the mountains. There must be more passages like this one.”

  “Riddleruns, the people call them in these northern parts,” Grandfather said. “They go on forever, as twisted and tangled as those knotwork woods where I left you.” He shook himself mildly, shaking off folly. “Or at least they go as far as northern Acheron.”

  “I only need to get as far as Eidden,” I muttered.

  It was a hard decision to make. We had to leave the horses, steeds we had clung to even on the most absurd terrain, clinging to remnants of rank. But Grandfather was too old to ride, even if we had found a mount for him, and how were we to feed the animals through the winter? They would not come near the dragons anyway. So we ended up turning the horses loose, sending them off with a whack and trusting that they would find shelter, for they were valuable animals. I hoped the Boda would be puzzled by the strays.

  The black beast did not leave, of course. “What about this one?” I asked the dragon of the moment.

  Does it eat meat?

  I shook my head doubtfully. The beast ate many odd things, twigs and thistles and all sorts of fuzzy moss and prickly things in addition to grass. But I could not imagine it eating meat.

  We’ll feed it, said the dragon, reading the required items from the images in my mind.

  So we spent the next two months, maybe more, winding our way through the incredible riddleruns of the Lorc Dahak. Our progress was slow, because the passages wandered up and down and in any direction and because Grandfather walked, as he did everything, sedately. We all had to walk, lugging our gear, following a dragon’s waddling hind end and flanking an impressive length of tail. But I did not complain too much about our crawling pace. At least we were not sitting still, and I had the dragons to thank for that.

  We did not learn much about them, not even names, if they had names. They were even less talkative than I. Inscrutable, unpredictable, they were at once a threat holding itself at bay and a vital, useful ally. We trusted them out of necessity, and at the same time we knew we were insane, living in a madman’s world, to do so.

  They were uncouth. They would do odd things without warning—flop down and go to sleep, or scuttle off to relieve themselves, leaving us stranded in the most profound of darkness. But they cared well for us in their offhand way. They brought us meat, even cooked it for us, scorched it rather, with blasts of their hot breath. They intuited that we also desired other food and brought us sundry offerings: bundles of hay for the beast, tree branches (not much use, unless they happened to have fruit on them), cabbages, a wicker basket of eggs, and once a freshly baked loaf of bread, delicately presented between two saberlike ivory claws. Grandfather frowned at all this.

  “People will be more likely to shoot at us than welcome us in Eidden,” he said.

  So I asked the dragons to please be discreet. But they could tell my heart was not in it; I had no desire to starve! They restrained themselves to the degree that they did not bring us domestic animals, only wild game. But I had to be careful not to think of chicken. One night—or, at any rate, on one occasion when we were sleeping; we all lost any sense of time—I dreamed about cheese. The next day a whole wheel of it appeared, skewered on a dragon’s spiny wingtip.

  “They’re fattening us for the slaughter,” Fabron declared nervously.

  “Why would they bother?” I grumbled. “There are villagers enough about.”

  “They’re so remote,” said Frain. “Why do they bother with us at all?”

  We all wondered that. I had only the answer the riddle had given me, that I was what I was. And the same applied to Grandfather, I surmised, since they were nursemaiding him when we arrived. He had been a seer, and I was of the royal blood … But, talking with the dragons from time to time, cautiously, I found that they cherished no great reverence for kings, seers, Sacred Kings, or Aftalun himself. More and more I came to believe that they tolerated me because I was, like them, a cramped, convoluted, and hidden thing, a wanderer of the inner darkness. With my black beast I was their brother in some sense, those dragons.

  “If they mean us no harm,” said Frain morosely, “it is on your account, or Grandfather’s. They’d chomp me in a moment.”

  He was right. Grandfather was a wanderer too, a stray, as he had said.

  We never found out much about what had happened to Grandfather—where he had been, how he had become ready to die. He refused to pity himself or burden us with any guilt on his account. “Blood of Aftalun!” he would grumble when Frain questioned him. “It’s no more than I expected, lad.” There were no marks on him; I can at least say that. I could not bring myself to ask him any of the questions that lay nearest my heart.

  And as for the rest, he could tell me nothing. Not w
hy Raz had so willfully refused me entry, or how Abas spent his days, the number of his troops, the nature of his preparations.… He did tell me that Abas was thought to have invaded Vaire. That was the rumor in the countryside. He could not say whether my mother, his daughter, was alive or dead. Not that I asked. But he told me he could not say.

  We plodded on. It must have been about midwinter when we reached the large, central dragonworks where hundreds of the creatures lived in a great chamber hollowed out of Lorc Dahak. Not all of them were flying dragons. Some were crimson delvers that seldom ventured out of the mountain roots. They treated us not ungently, but their courtesy held a quality even more forbidding than that of the others, as inexorable as the mountains themselves. Flyers and diggers alike, they lived lazily, amusing themselves from time to time by melting a rock with their breath to see what was inside. If they found something pretty, they were likely to plaster it onto themselves somewhere. That and an occasional twilight foray into the outer air in search of venison seemed to be their only pursuits.

  I decided I would not ask them for aid in my impending war. How could I ask such impersonal creatures for aid in a merely human affair? I might as well have hailed the wind. Still, they must have heard my thought. Or perhaps Daymon asked them. But I did not know that at the time.

  We spent a while, perhaps a few days, in the dragon-works. Then we journeyed on toward Eidden. I am ashamed now that it took me so long to realize how hard all the darkness was on Fabron. I rather liked it, but he only bore it, and it wore him down. He started whimpering and thrashing in his sleep, and he lost his appetite. Frain started worrying about Fabron, which caused him to droop as well. Grandfather fretted about both of them, and none of the lot of them would bring their trouble to me. I marched along bullheadedly for a few days, letting them all be noble. But finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I spoke to our dragon of the day.

  “Is it still snowing outside?”

  Not snowing any longer, but no thaw yet, either. Still toothy cold.

  “Well—” I frowned. I knew that if I took the others up to have a look around there would be no getting them back down. But maybe part of me was yearning for fresh air and open spaces too, by that time. “Lead us toward the outside,” I said at last.

  It took a week or thereabouts to get out. When we finally saw a glimmer of light that was not dragon glow, each one of us caught breath and hurried toward it. Our guardian dragon left us without a word, slipping out of the mountain and taking wing into—what? We faced a black void aimlessly splattered with white. A patternless jumble of black and white loomed below. We all stared, wondering what had become of the world during our absence; then we all started to laugh. We had emerged into night, a frosty, moonlit and starlit night, and we looked down on snowy; wooded slopes.

  “Do you feel better, Fabron?” I asked. He glanced at me in surprise, for he had never complained.

  “I hope the Boda have been thrown off our track by our little—er—sortie,” he replied.

  “And I hope spring is near,” Frain added worriedly. “Look at the snow! We are going to miss our creepy-crawly friends.”

  “If not warm of heart, they were at least warm around the mouth,” I quipped. “Should we go back inside?”

  “I can stand the cold,” snapped Grandfather, and that seemed to settle it. We were done with the riddleruns.

  Chapter Three

  The thaw began within a few days. The many streams of Eidden, the freshets that fed the Chardri, bulged with springtime floodwater. They flowed so deep and swift, even the smallest of them, that often we had to trudge miles through the hilly land before we were able to bridge them. Some days we scarcely seemed to get any nearer at all to Qiturel, Oorossy’s holding, a spot far south near the forks of the Chardri. I judged that, afoot and at an old man’s pace, it was likely to be midsummer before we reached it. And so it proved—the more so because we were caught in an unseasonal storm.

  It came up as suddenly as a serpent out of a well. Or rather it came down, flying and hissing down from the north, sweeping down the flanks of the Lorc Dahak, biting cold. It struck before we had time to do more than look at the gray sky. In a moment Vale had turned featureless white, a white that might as well have been the blackest gloom of night. We stood in it, instantly lost and shivering, with no shelter to hope for except groves of small trees. We had kept near the mountains for fear of the Boda. No one lived so near.

  “We have to keep moving,” Frain said, “or we’ll freeze. Perhaps it’ll blow itself out.”

  We stumbled along, keeping close together, over ground already covered with white fluff. It would not be long before it soaked through our boots and froze our feet. Grandfather didn’t even have boots, only cloth wrappings. I wished I could carry him, but I knew better than to try that yet.

  “We’re likely to go in circles,” Fabron puffed. “Perhaps if we can find a stream, follow it down to some homestead …” We all knew there were no homesteads for miles. And we all knew there was no time. It had been late afternoon when the sky blotted over. I would not say it, but already it seemed to me that the whiteness was turning gray. An early dusk was coming on.

  The black beast snorted and surged ahead of me. I understood that summons. “Follow the beast,” I ordered, “and keep ahold of each other.” We joined hands and stumbled along on feet that were gradually going numb. I was just as glad we had not found a stream. I had no fondness for water that moved—creeping stuff! Ever since I had met Shamarra I had been seeing strange things in water, the more fearsome because only half visible. I preferred the cleaner blindness of night or the snow.

  Night came all too soon. When dusk deepened to the extent that we could no longer see the black beast amid the white snow—a gray beast now, frosted with rime—I grasped it by the mane and we struggled along in the dark. Frain grunted and let go of my hand, forcing me to stop in near panic; I could have lost him in an eyeblink. Grandfather had fallen. Frain stooped over him, and I could hear the old man complaining, “No, lad, I don’t want any more of your strength. I’ve taken enough.”

  “Get him onto the beast,” I said.

  “That creature is not meant to be ridden,” Grandfather snapped. As if I didn’t know that! But I considered that in this contingency … What a cantankerous old man. I swept him up in my arms, slung him over one shoulder. The beast let out that awful bray of his, urging us forward.

  We struggled along. Frain clung to my belt and I clung to the beast. I could hear Fabron wheezing somewhere in the rear. We slogged onward, gradually wearing down, like the toys I used to make Frain out of bowstring.… He leaned more heavily on me, and I leaned more heavily on the beast. I don’t believe the beast was tired, but if it were not for him I am sure the rest of us would have toppled in a moment, like a row of stick soldiers. I remember almost nothing until the wind suddenly stopped. Then I snapped my head up, startled into alertness. We had come into some sort of shelter. I could smell animals and hear their faint stirrings all around me. I could faintly see a milky blur that was the entry through which we had come. Then it darkened, and I heard a footstep. Someone had come in behind us.

  The figure carried a faint light like a spook—no, the glow was of too warm a hue for that. It was a lantern shielded against the wind. In a moment the man slid the panel—no man, not in any ordinary sense! I staggered back a step. Wise, black-barred golden eyes met mine. A goat’s head with curling horns rose above a muscular torso clad in rough woven wool. It was the brown man of Eidden Lei.

  “My lord,” I murmured, gaping at him, feeling as if I might faint. He reached out to steady me. I tingled all over at the touch of that hand; it was warm and covered with fur. I trembled with awe. His strangeness was deity, and I felt it as I had never felt godhead before. I had not felt such awe of Aftalun or Shamarra.

  He lifted Daymon from my shoulder. “Your flock needs care,” he said.

  Frain and Fabron had slumped to the floor of the building—it was a big s
tone barn with a thatched roof, full of all sorts of beasts. I got my two charges each by one arm, hauled them up one on either side, and followed the brown man, supporting them the short distance to his home—cot? It was a sort of domed beehive of stone, cleverly constructed, with a warm hearth at the center and a hole at the apex for smoke. We set Frain and Fabron and Daymon Cein on the dirt floor. There was no furniture to speak of, and chickens wandered about, cross at having been disturbed. The fire had already been banked for the night. I stirred it and piled on sticks while the brown man brought us something to drink in wooden noggins. One sip set us all to sputtering and livened us up considerably. Fabron looked around at a raven roosting on a corbel halfway up the wall, at a fox cub peering at him over a bushy tail, at the chickens, which had settled into a dusty hollow by the door. Then he took note of our host and looked aghast. But Frain faced the brown man in his quiet, accepting way and said what I had not yet been able to.

  “Our thanks to you, Lord. We owe you our lives.”

  “It is my function to shelter strays,” the brown man said. It was hard to read expression in that unsmiling animal face or in the voice, guttural and earthy, not quite human. But I think his was not a statement of deprecation or even of pride. I think it was of essence, to comfort us.

  He took the wet wrappings off of Daymon’s legs and feet and rubbed the cold flesh with his hands, which were furred and stubby, like paws, with strong black nails. I had experienced the power of that touch, and it was with more trust than surprise that I saw Grandfather’s color return. Sluggishly I forced myself to tend Frain in like wise. He seemed very weak. He had been lending his strength to Grandfather, I realized, probably all through that long trek. Fabron got his own wet boots off. The brown man filled our cups again and pointed me toward some covered wooden bins along the wall.

  “I have various kinds of grain, and there is honey. Can you humans eat those things?”