The Book of Earth

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  PICTURES.

  “Pictures? Where?”

  Erde put a fingertip to her forehead, between her eyes.

  “Right there? Really?” The knight peered at her as if he hoped to discover a third eye. “No language? No . . . words?”

  She shook her head.

  “Interesting. I’d always imagined it would be like a voice just inside my ear, sort of a . . . well, it doesn’t matter now.” He turned on the dragon a more scholarly gaze. “Has he told you why he’s come?”

  HE DOESN’T KNOW.

  Hal frowned at the scratches on the ground, cocking his head to make sure he’d read them right. “Perhaps you’ve misunderstood,” he reproved gently.

  Erde’s headshake was emphatic.

  “How can he not know? He’s a . . . a dragon.” He hadn’t said the word aloud yet and the reality of it clearly gave him pause. For good measure, he whispered it again. “A dragon.”

  Erde added a firm underline beneath her scratchings.

  “But, milady, you know of course that dragons are the source of all knowledge. Perhaps he doesn’t wish to tell you . . . yet?”

  Erde was further encouraged. Other people might have said dragons are evil and eat virgin princesses. She smoothed the dirt and began again. HE TELLS ME HE DOESN’T REMEMBER.

  Hal massaged his eyes with one hand.

  HE HAS DREAMS. She left out “bad,” hoping to ease the knight’s distress.

  “He tells you his dreams?”

  I SHARE THEM.

  The envy on the knight’s face was poignant. “Milady, may I dare to ask? What does a dragon dream?”

  THAT SOMEONE . . . she rubbed out “one” and wrote in “thing” . . . IS CALLING HIM.

  Hal brightened. “Right! Of course. That’s why he’s here. He would only come to a Summoning. But he doesn’t know who or why?”

  HE KNOWS HE SHOULD. HE CAN’T REMEMBER. Erde cleared more pine needles. She would need real room if this conversation got much more complicated. HE IS UPSET.

  “I’m not surprised,” replied Hal dryly, finally seeing the humor in the situation.

  I SAID IT MIGHT BE THE MAGE-QUEEN. CALLING HIM.

  “The who?”

  She shrugged. JUST TO GIVE AN ANSWER.

  “Oh. Well.” He nodded. “It’s as good as any, under the circumstances. I mean, I always assumed . . . but what good are assumptions?”

  She knew what he couldn’t bring himself to say. She felt the same helplessness. A dragon was supposed to be omniscient, all-powerful, the closest thing to perfect outside of God’s angels. A dragon was supposed to be a lot of things that this dragon clearly wasn’t.

  Hal let the reality sink in a while, gnawing pensively on his lower lip as he watched the slow rise and fall of the dragon’s dusty flanks. Finally he sighed, shrugged, and spread his hands. “Then we must help him. That must be why I am here.”

  Erde nodded eagerly. BUT HOW?

  “Well, he’s a dragon, therefore he has a Purpose. We must help him discover it. Earth. It’s an odd name for a dragon, but the name often tells you . . . well, obviously I lack the proper knowledge, but someone must . . . someone will be able to read the signs.” He seemed relieved to have fastened on something he could be sure of again. “There are no arbitrary dragons.”

  She didn’t really understand what he was talking about, but his conviction, even in sentence fragments, was reassuring.

  He rose to pace before the fire with renewed energy, one hand tugging fitfully at his beard. “First find out who or what is doing the summoning. That should be easiest to trace since it will issue from some sort of directional source . . .” He stopped, finding himself even with the dome of the reclining dragon’s head. He hesitated, looked to Erde with the suddenly wide eyes of a little boy. “Will he . . . may I touch him?”

  Erde nodded. She didn’t really know if the dragon would mind.

  Hal laid one, then both hands tentatively on the fleshy folds of the dragon’s crest, and the dragon opened one giant eye. “Earth,” said Hal, a long breathy whisper. He slid his hands forward to the base of the dragon’s horns and wrapped his fists gently around them. His fingers and thumbs did not quite meet. “All my life . . .” he murmured. He looked to Erde again, and she smiled. Some things just did not need to be said out loud.

  * * *

  “Without a routine, you get sloppy,” remarked Hal later as he banked up the fire and laid out his bedroll. “Routine and discipline will get us through the hard times, when we haven’t found food or the search has been unproductive for too long.”

  Erde sensed the knight’s entire recent history packed into that simple declaration.

  “So here’s what we’ll do. You’ve been right to travel at night, even in this godforsaken weather. We’ll keep after that. But we’ll know exactly where we’re going each day and how far we have to travel. We’ll eat if there’s food and wash if there’s water, even if we’re too tired to want to. And at dusk when we wake, we’ll take an hour with these.” He patted his sword hilt, then nodded at Rainer’s blade shimmering where she had reclaimed it beside her. “Practice.”

  Erde managed to look both dubious and incredulous.

  “Why not? Why bring it if you’re not going to use it?” He reached around the fire for the sword and hefted it casually. “Maybe a little heavy for you to learn on, but . . . was it your father’s?” Her offended look puzzled him. He returned the blade to her side. “Well, anyway, no dead weight. You shouldn’t carry what you can’t use.”

  Erde wondered briefly if he’d forgotten she was a girl.

  “I taught your grandmother to use a sword, when we were . . . keeping company.” Hal smiled at her a little too brightly, as if the memory held more pain than comfort. She was delighted to hear that the baroness had encouraged the courtship of a mere knight. It sounded very romantic and sad, and reminded her of Rainer. But the notion of her grandmother wielding a sword was another thing entirely.

  “Really. I did. So you see, we were fated to meet, you and I. There are no coincidences. She was built just like you, and many a man’s no taller or stronger. But Meriah didn’t practice.”

  He became very involved in smoothing out the wrinkles in his bedroll for a moment, then settled on it with a sigh. “When I heard she’d . . . passed on, I almost came to the funeral. But that hell-priest would have burned me on the spot, so . . .” He shook his head. “Meriah inherited so young. She didn’t have time for ‘such frivolities,’ as she said. Ha. She didn’t have time for me much after that. She made a marriage that was ‘good for the domain.’ She said I lacked a proper ruler’s sense of purpose. I . . .” He laughed bitterly. “Am I boring you?”

  Erde had never thought of her grandmother’s life before marriage. Couldn’t he see she was fascinated?

  Hal went on as if compelled by her waiting silence. “Well, I never could make her understand my notion of service, you see. She said the king was all very well and good but shouldn’t I be seeing to my own lands as she was to hers?” He shrugged, smiling at Erde crookedly, though his eyes were serious. “Perhaps she was right. She ruled well and gave her people security in her own time. But she didn’t teach her son so well, did she? She knew he was weak. I hoped she’d send him to me for training, but . . . well, my guess is, she was pinning her real hopes on you.” He turned his gaze again on the dragon. “But your duty is not with lands or stronghold. It lies here before you, and I surely know my part in it, which is to pick up where Meriah left off. Why else would I be here? You will practice!”

  Erde grasped Rainer’s sword and mimed being barely able to lift it.

  “Now it’s difficult,” he agreed. “But that’s what practice is about. An hour a day. I hope you’re not one of those spoiled high-borns.”

  His tone suggested that he would know how to deal with her if she was, but Erde smiled at him anyway, liking him. So what if he was a minor lord. She wished her own father had been more like this man, and wondered how close he
had really come to being her grandfather.

  Hal’s eyes were back on the dragon. “He’ll be after us, you know, that hell-spawned priest, especially now he’s decided you’re the witch-child of his prophecies.”

  WITH MY FATHER’S ARMY? Erde scrawled.

  Hal snorted. “I heard that rumor, too. Who could feed an army in these times? No, I doubt an army, but there will be pursuit, and if I am killed, you must be able to protect yourself . . . and him.”

  A new notion. Erde had thought the dragon was protecting her. Why else return to her fire, now that he’d proven he could hunt successfully on his own? YOU DON’T THINK I’M A WITCH?

  “What if I did?”

  Her eyes widened.

  Hal grinned at her. “Never fear, milady. I’ve known a few witches in my time.”

  She stared at him expectantly.

  “Well, let’s say they’re like dragons. Never what you expect them to be.”

  LIKE ME?

  “I think that remains to be seen,” he replied cheerfully. “After all, we don’t know each other very well yet.”

  His sudden evasiveness gave Erde a chill. Was he suggesting she was a witch? She decided to pursue the subject in another way.

  WHAT, she wrote, IS A DRAGON GUIDE?

  Hal peered at her thoughtfully. “It really must pass down in the blood, for you to be here with him and yet so unknowing. How did you ever find each other? No, wait, first tell me this.” He again produced the dragon brooch out of his jerkin and handed it to her as if he’d rather not let it out of his keeping but knew he must. “Does it warm to your touch?”

  Erde frowned at it, then laid it to her lips, recalling how she had done so before. The stone was warm, body temperature, as if it were alive. Superstition chilled her. She nearly threw the brooch down but caught hold of herself and merely nodded. Together they stared at it, lying there on her open palm: deftly wrought silver, finely carved red stone, a tiny dragon rampant.

  IT HAS NO WINGS, she scratched in the dust.

  Hal nodded, and they both turned to regard the dragon asleep in the shadows. After a while, he sighed and took the brooch from her hand, holding it up to the fire.

  “Yes, girl, there is magic in the world.” He twisted the carved stone in the ruddy light. “Carnelian, I’d say. The setting, oh, probably a hundred years old at most, from the working of it. The stone, well . . . I always suspected Meriah was . . .”

  A witch? Erde glanced at him questioningly. He took her hand and wrapped her fingers around the brooch, then enveloped her fist gently with both his own as if she was something rare and precious. “Listen, dearest child, whatever we may think in the here and now, whatever our questions and confusions, our . . . disappointments or misfortunes, the truth is that longer ago than either of us can imagine, an eternal promise was made. This stone is the sure token of it. You are its fulfillment. Can you understand any of that?”

  She shook her head worriedly.

  “It will come, with time.” Hal squeezed her hand and let it go. “The token was passed down and down and down in secret, most of its bearers as unaware as you of the responsibility carried in their blood. Only through exhaustive study such as mine would you . . .” He turned his head away but it was less a negative than a warding off. Erde could read his ache and his effort to accept the evidence of his ears and eyes. Whatever this Dragon Guide was meant to do, Heinrich von Engle felt he was better suited to it than an ignorant fourteen-year-old girl. But acceptance of meanings deeper than he could perceive was part of his scholar’s burden. She understood why he focused so heavily on the random luck of lineage.

  “No one could know when the time would come,” he was explaining, “for the dragon to wake, for the promise to be called upon. The Dragon Guide must guide the dragon through the world of men while he carries out the purpose he’s been awakened for. The very purpose, milady, that we must set our lives to discerning.” Hal watched her hopefully, as if waiting for some light of revelation in her eyes. Erde could not offer him any, but the knight did appear to have achieved some pragmatic measure of resignation. He waved an arm unnecessarily. “But look, it’s dawn already, and a foolish old man with too much talk has robbed you of your necessary rest. Sleep now. The Mule will stand guard.”

  Erde nodded her good night and lay down. Her stomach was full and her brain was bursting. She’d need many nights of lying awake to sort out the confusion that the knight’s arrival had added to an already muddled and complex picture. But tired as she was, this night would not be one of them.

  An eternal promise? What if I cannot fulfill it?

  She fell asleep listening to the dragon snore.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Erde woke from a dream-struggle with a real hand clamped firmly over her mouth. She was sure her father had found her. But it was the stranger knight’s voice close to her ear, begging her to lie still. Her first clear thought was to regret that she’d misjudged him after all, then to wonder why the dragon did not come to her rescue.

  “Hush, milady, you must be still! You must be still!” Hal’s quiet persistence finally got her full attention. She stopped fighting him, and he let her go.

  “That’s better.” He sat back on his heels. “Are you awake?”

  Erde looked about. Gray light filtered through the pine boughs, hazed with pale floating ash from the dead fire, which she had kicked up in her troubled sleep. She had no idea what time of day it was.

  “You cry out in your sleep, did you know?” Hal whispered hoarsely. “Out loud.”

  Erde stared at him.

  “Truth, milady.”

  She tried her voice. Perhaps it had come back while she wasn’t noticing.

  Hal watched her strangled efforts. “Well, there’s nothing wrong with your workings, I swear it. But it’s a providence you woke me. Listen.”

  Erde heard, in the distance, the baying of hounds.

  “Picked up your scent, damn their well-bred noses. I’d hoped the rain would . . . well, no matter. We’ll have to move in full light for a few hours. Pack up, now. Time we were leaving. Quickly.” He held her attention a moment with a hand on her shoulder. “Was it one of . . . his dreams that frightened you so?”

  Erde shrugged. She remembered nothing but a sense of being unable to breathe.

  “Well, try to remember it. Whatever it was, it gave you your voice again for a while.”

  * * *

  She had no time to think about dreams. It should have been easier traveling by daylight, even as it began to fade into steely dusk, but now speed was essential and the thick pine needle mat was as slippery as a slope of glass. The low-hung branches whipped at her face as Hal urged them swiftly upward through the forest, searching for drier, rockier terrain where their passage would leave a less obvious trace. He set a punishing pace, flanked easily by the she-goat, who had taken a liking to him as a stray dog might. Though the mule now carried her pack and sword, Erde managed a mere short hour before flagging. The knight did everything but drag her along to keep her going, and finally, it was the dragon who lagged behind, as if he didn’t really understand the need for all this urgency.

  Hal stopped at the top of a rise when it was almost dark. A black sky whipped with clouds showed through the thinning trees. He seemed hardly winded, and the mule, who had followed behind the dragon as if herding him, was cool and dry.

  “They’ll have us within the hour if we can’t move faster.” Hal looked up, sucking at his teeth. A bright full moon was rising past the dark branches. “I did think he would have wings . . .”

  Catching her breath, Erde let her head loll back to stare at the clearing sky. She could not recall ever seeing such brilliant stars, as thick as daisies in a meadow. Even the moon did not diminish their sparkle, and the sharp music of the hounds cut through the night air like trumpet alarms. The pack was gaining.

  “At least we’ll be able to see where we’re going,” Hal remarked. He pointed ahead down the hillside, where a narrow stony
valley split the forest with a sudden gash of moonlight on weathered rock. A rush of water fell away in a twisted course among man-sized boulders. “No cover, but we might lose them in the creekbed.”

  He led them down the rock-strewn slope toward the surging water, past waist-high stones that gleamed as white as teeth rising from the cold dark ground. At the river’s edge, the she-goat knelt for a long drink while Hal called the mule to him.

  “He is very surefooted, milady. If you ride, we’re more likely to elude the pack.” He smiled as if it were a Sunday jaunt. “And you will keep your feet dry.”

  Erde did not argue. The mule was narrow and bony, but her legs were twisted with cramp and the knight’s worn saddle looked very inviting. She had no strength left. Only her fear of capture kept her upright and moving. Hal had been right to say she’d been lucky so far. She let him boost her up. Feeling about for the reins, she realized there weren’t any.

  Hal rested a hand on the mule’s dappled neck. “Oh, we did away with those quite a while ago, he and I. Can you manage without? Believe me, he knows better than we which road to choose.” He stroked the mule’s nose. “Swift as you can now, Mule.”

  The mule tossed his head as if he hadn’t needed to be told, then moved briskly into the shallow, fast-moving water, picking a delicate sure path among the rocks. The she-goat followed, bounding from stone to stone with weightless precision. Hal waited for the dragon to precede him, but Earth stalled at the edge and would not step into the rushing water. He stretched his neck toward Erde and swayed back and forth in misery and confusion.

  “My lord, you must,” muttered the knight, with the air of a man who senses his rhetoric to be out of date, but has no acceptable substitute.

  Clinging to the mule as it tottered precipitously downstream, Erde saw in her mind the dragon’s panic, so like a child’s—lurid, distorted images of vast horizons, of dark and rolling waves, of falling water, wrenching currents and suffocating undertow, all foreign and terrifying to her own landlocked imagination. She’d seen Earth walk into water before, but then it had been shallow and still and comfortably (for him) confined by cavern walls. She tried to project calm and reassurance, but he would have none of it, perhaps because she was as frightened as he was. She didn’t know how to swim. Court ladies were not taught how to swim. In desperation, she imaged the Mage City for him, his new goal, for which all fears must be overcome, and this convinced him at least to follow along the bank as fast as he could, slithering snakelike up and down among the boulders. Hal waded in behind, a dark silhouette against moonlit stone.