The Book of Earth

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  He retired to his bedroll and sat staring at the little cup, letting the gray morning light swell until he could make out the Weisstrasse coat-of-arms embossed on its side. He traced the emblem with his fingertip, then sighed and tossed the cup back in his pack.

  * * *

  Earth dreamed again that sleep-time, more vividly than he had since Hal had joined them. The dream seemed as real to Erde as her own life, and the Summoning took on a new urgency. Later, she recalled an endless enclosing maze of corridors, and knew it was a city, though unlike any city she had ever imagined. The walls were hard and cold and shining dully like the blade of a knife. Where the passages turned, the corners were as sharp as broken glass. The floor was a grid of metal strips, laid with spaces between, like rows and rows of tiny windows, so that Erde could see through them into the vast and roaring distance below. As always, there was the bitter smell, and the smoke and clang of the forge or something like it, so much more acrid and more deafening than the forge she knew at home.

  For the first time, she saw herself and the dragon in the dream together, as if she were watching it from outside, yet still hurrying down the corridors, her lungs aching, the metallic air sharp on her tongue, desperate to get Somewhere, only they didn’t know where. The voice of the Summoner rang in their ears like a cry of pain.

  Ahead, another razor-edged corner, then the corridor darkened and stretched away for an endless distance, as straight as a stone mason’s plumb line. They knew that the Summoner was at the end of that distance, and the dragon began to run, so fast that Erde could not keep up. She snatched at him, caught hold of the end of his stubby tail, and was jerked off her feet to be carried aloft behind him, like a battle pennant.

  In the nearer distance, the corridor bloomed with sudden brightness. A man of light on a horse of fire, an armored knight with a shining silvered lance, wreathed in glowing smoke. He wore a golden circlet on his helmet, a crown. His visor was down. She was grateful that she could not see his face, for rays of incandescence leaked through the ventings and she knew his face would blind her. His shield, a perfect circle, bore a strange emblem, rather like a spiraled compass rose, dividing it into four nested arcs like the bowls of spoons lying one against the other. Again, these spaces were like separate window openings. Through one, Erde saw trees and rolling meadows; through another, green water and foam-crested waves. The third arc showed a dark mountain ablaze with a fountain of fire, and beyond the fourth was only air, as blue and empty as the sky.

  She urged the dragon onward, to get a closer look. But as they sped toward the unknown knight, he seemed to get farther away, shrinking like a dying flame until he was only a pinpoint, as tiny and brilliant as a star. The bright circle of his crown persisted momentarily, and then he was gone. As his light faded in the darkening corridor, the Summoner shrieked and moaned like a mad thing, and the walls trembled with her grief.

  Erde woke to the rending cries of the woman she’d seen burned at the stake. Half in, half out of dream, she realized it was the she-goat, bleating in terror. Across the clearing, Hal swung upright on his bedroll with a shouted oath of surprise. A harsh red dusk was falling. The trees thrashed violently, though there was no wind. Erde thought the big oak would uproot itself. The ground heaved beneath them.

  The dragon was still deep in his dreaming. Erde shouted him awake with a barrage of thought. He stirred, lifted his head, and the ground quieted.

  Hal continued swearing until he’d gotten hold of himself, then he and Erde stared at each other across the strewn contents of the mule packs, scattered by the rolling of the ground.

  “Terra is suddenly not so firma,” he remarked at length. “Is it over?” He groaned to his feet, dusting himself off unnecessarily. He looked around, noted the she-goat struggling up on wobbly knees by the base of the big oak. “Earthquake. Must be.” He coughed, then shrugged. “I’ve heard of them happening farther south, but here . . . ? Where’s the Mule, I wonder?”

  Erde rolled over and hugged the dragon’s rough-skinned foreleg. His golden eyes were as wide as she’d ever seen them, and he was shaking.

  —Earth, you were dreaming again.

  His brain still racked with nightmare, Earth relayed an apology.

  —No, it’s all right, only . . . the ground moved.

  Earth agreed that it had.

  Erde sat back on her heels, studying him pensively. The obvious, sensible explanation was that the agitation of the ground had sparked the trembling in the dragon’s dream. But she’d been sure when she awoke that it was the other way around. She cleared a patch of dirt and tried the idea out on Hal.

  “Yeah, he was dreaming . . . And?”

  THE GROUND MOVED.

  “So?” He looked around, whistling for the mule.

  Erde added HE DREAMED at the beginning of the phrase.

  Hal licked his lips, looked at the dragon, looked at her. “What are you saying?”

  She shrugged, then put a period after HE DREAMED.

  “Oh, no. No, no, no. Not possible. The earth does not move to any command but God’s, not even for dragons.”

  NAMED EARTH, Erde scrawled, unable to stop herself. Then to keep from feeling completely crazy, she added a question mark.

  “Earth . . . quake. Hmm.” Hal grew thoughtful, then with a flick of his eyebrows, dismissed the notion as insane. “What does he say?”

  HE DOESN’T REMEMBER. HE WAS

  Hal stayed her hand. “I know, I know—he was asleep.”

  Erde nodded.

  The knight rolled his eyes and went off in search of his mule.

  * * *

  Earth was skittish that evening. First he wanted to stay in the oak clearing and not move until they’d discussed his dream in lengthy detail. When Hal insisted it was perfectly normal to walk and discuss at the same time, the dragon came along, but he stuck very close to Erde, crowding her sometimes dangerously as they moved into the dense and rocky woodlands of the upper hills.

  Erde took extra care to avoid getting stepped on, and did not scold him. She knew how anxious the dream and its aftermath had made him. It had made her anxious, too. She wondered if the sudden sharp chill in the air, like the first tang of winter, had anything to do with the earthquake. Hal was more than usually pensive as well. He had not been granted the moon he’d wished for, and the climb was getting steeper and rockier, their footing increasingly treacherous, with roots and loose stones hidden beneath a slippery layer of leaves. He let the mule lead the way, and they stumbled upward in near blackness, each wrapped in the separate silences of concentration.

  But eventually, Hal could contain himself no longer.

  “How could he make the ground move?”

  His question was rhetorical, since Erde had no way in the darkness to provide an answer, even if she’d had one to offer. She wondered why this latest surprise bothered him particularly, when he was so ready to believe the dragon capable of all sorts of miracles. In fact, expected him to be. Erde wished the knight would stop focusing on what a dragon should do, and concentrate on what this dragon could do, especially while Earth was struggling so hard to discover what his skills were. Hal was like a stern parent disapproving of a brilliant child because its gifts were not as orderly or predictable as he’d like them to be.

  Erde suspected that magic was neither orderly nor predictable. She thought it peculiar that the knight seemed to divide the miraculous into categories: this is possible, this isn’t. But she had to keep in mind Hal’s long years studying dragon-lore. When a man has devoted himself that passionately to something, he’s bound to want to see it proven right. Perhaps he just needed enough time with each new bit of information to fit it into his own scheme of things.

  Sure enough, half a mile later, he cleared his throat tentatively. “Well. Let’s say it’s possible. Maybe it is. If it is, is it something he can control?”

  She did not know, and neither did the dragon.

  And later, she could hear the ghost of a smile in his v
oice. “You think he’ll be practicing moving the earth over and over again, like he does with becoming invisible?”

  Erde did know the answer to that one. The quake had terrified Earth. He had no desire to feel the ground move again just yet, or even to attempt doing it on purpose. Mostly, he wanted to think about it and what it meant and, to Erde’s dismay, ask her a million other questions that she couldn’t answer.

  * * *

  After a rest and a meal break, their ascent grew so sharp that in places Erde had to haul herself upward with her hands. But the trees thinned and the moon at last made a fitful appearance, slipping in and out of slow-drifting veils of cloud. Their route lay over solid rock now, pale ledges each the size of a castle yard, like a vast staircase aspiring to be a mountain. Small trees huddled in hollows where soil had gathered. Tufts of brush bunched in the seams and cracks, and here and there thin grass softened the weathered granite.

  The dragon hated the climbing. His thick-limbed body was not built for hauling its own great weight straight upward for hour after hour. His gleaming ivory claws were not meant for gripping stone. He gave Erde to understand that he was sure there was a better way to travel, if only he could remember what it was. She urged him to try, but he could only picture himself first in one place and then in another, with no idea of how he might actually accomplish getting there. Erde worried that he might be feeling bad about his lack of wings—he’d heard Hal complain about it often enough. It occurred to her as she urged him up a particularly steep ledge that each of them was defective in some vital way: Earth had no wings, she had no voice. It was probably why they had ended up together.

  The thought made her sigh, and she was tired of sighing. A sigh was an irritatingly melancholy sound but the only one besides a cough or a sneeze that she could still produce. She decided she would ask the knight to teach her how to whistle, something even her grandmother had not allowed her to do.

  “Ladies do not whistle,” the baroness had always insisted when Erde expressed envy of the stable boys. They could hear a tune once, then whistle it again whenever they wanted to. Erde understood that it might not be appropriate for ladies to whistle in public, but wouldn’t it be a good thing to know how to do, to amuse yourself when you were alone? Not that she’d spent much time alone growing up in Tor Alte. That was another thing ladies did not do. If she wasn’t with Alla or the baroness, there was Fricca, or some chambermaid. There was always somebody watching, telling her what to do and what not to do.

  She thought about all this as they topped a particularly barren rise. The way they’d come spread out behind them in an endless march of nighttime hills glazed with moonlight. Far off, the ghostly shimmer of the lake—and beyond . . . ? Now that Gerrasch had mentioned a city, she was coming to believe that there might actually be such a gathering place for mages. Idly, she conjured the slim spires of her fantasy, to glow like a mirage on the horizon. She felt the dragon in her mind, imaging it with her, and saw its towers grow more real before her very eyes under the power of his belief in it. The breeze gusting across the ledge was damp and raw with chill, but Erde was conscious of how deeply she could breathe, of the sense of lift and freedom that came from being surrounded by all that open space. She felt hopeful. Like a bird must feel, just before taking wing. There were advantages to leaving home, she realized, beyond the obvious one of her survival. She doubted if Hal would ever say, “Ladies do not whistle.” Most ladies did not learn to use a sword, either.

  From the crags ahead came a sudden distant yowl. The mule’s long ears flicked, and the she-goat glanced up sharply from the bush she was eating. The mirage towers vanished, leaving only a darkly crenelated, threatening horizon.

  “Wildcat,” noted Hal. “Best stick close from now on. We’re not the only hungry creatures out prowling these hills tonight.”

  Erde shrugged her cloak more tightly about her shoulders. Free or not, she wondered if she would ever be warm again.

  * * *

  The intemperate yowl of the cat seemed to follow them, fading in and out with the rush of the wind as they struggled over ledge and through gorge. The mountain brush was as rough as the rock. Erde’s cheeks and lips were chapped from the icy gusts. Her hands stung with scrapes and scratches and the brittle ends of thorns. She had thought she was hardened to travel, but her knees and ankles ached from the constant up and down. Hal had never pushed them this punishingly before. For the dragon’s sake as well as for her own, Erde insisted they stop more often than Hal was willing to. Always he would offer a courtly apology for tiring them, then want to be off again the next moment.

  “Not much farther,” he’d promise, already in motion up the slope. “Not much farther.” He was tireless, eager, driven, a man with a real destination finally in mind.

  She knew they were descending when the wind stopped screaming in her ears, but it still felt as much up as down, and the going did not get any easier. It clouded up again and they lost the little bit of light the moon had offered. Then it began to sleet, a fine blowing frozen mist that invaded Erde’s eyes and nose like needles and melted into the layers of her clothing. Twice she lost her footing in a slide of ice and loose gravel, and went tumbling to the bottom of a slope with Hal shouting after her to grab on to something, anything she could, and the dragon wailing in her brain not to leave him out there alone in the darkness. Each time, after Hal had made his way down to help her up, he reminded her how lucky it was she hadn’t slipped beside the edge of a cliff, and she began to have some notion of how infuriating, even heartless a man can be when in the throes of some particular obsession.

  The dragon had begun to mutter, at least Erde had come to think of it as muttering, the peculiar grunting sound he made when he was fretting about something. This time it was a scent his clever nose had caught but could not identify. He tried relaying it to Erde in the same way he sent images, and she recalled how vivid the odors always were when she shared the dragon’s nightmares. But awake, her mental nose was no more sensitive or sophisticated than her anatomical one, so she was no help to him. Earth kept muttering. Obviously the smell was not going away.

  The rain tapered off as the clouds thinned again. Ahead of them rose a rank of tall stones, standing almost upright like a slightly drunken army at attention. The mule disappeared among them and the rest followed. Erde heard Hal cursing under his breath as they threaded almost by feel the narrow alley between towering walls of rock. Then a screech and a bleat behind them stopped him cold.

  “It’s that cat! It’s got the goat!”

  He whirled to race back to the aid of the she-goat, but the dragon blocked his path. As the goat’s outrage escalated into shrieks of panic, Earth struggled to turn himself around, wrenching his bulk from side to side, his claws grinding uselessly against the rock. The shadowy shape of him bucked and swayed, and for a moment, Erde was convinced she saw him blur and fade, blur and fade, then grow substantial once again. She blinked hard, several times. Perhaps she had stared too long, trying to make him out clearly in the darkness, or perhaps . . .

  —This is no time to go invisible, she warned him. All she sensed in return was a wall of desperation that also danced in and out of substance, as if Earth’s existence itself was wavering.

  Then new pandemonium broke out behind him. The cat yowled in fury. A moment later, the she-goat came scrambling over the dragon’s back, nearly bowling Erde over as she bolted past and collapsed against Hal’s legs. The cat did not follow.

  Hal knelt over the goat, feeling for damage. “Bit of a mess here . . . that’s quite a gash there. Be all right if the bleeding stops.” He tried to get her up on her feet but she kept sinking back against him. “Come on now, girl, I can’t be carrying you.”

  Earth crowded in, his great head wedged between Erde and the rock wall. Hal stood back, offering what little room he could. The dragon nosed at the goat, sniffing and muttering. In the dark, Erde could not quite tell what he was up to. She worried that he might at last be considering
a meal, if only to put the wounded goat out of her misery.

  But listening carefully, Erde realized that he was licking her, his huge rough tongue making great doglike swipes across her back, nearly enveloping her horned head and her stick-thin legs. He did not stop until he had licked her all over at least once, and her fur was damp with his saliva. Then he scooped her up in his jaws and stood there, holding her delicately, waiting for the humans to proceed.

  “He exhibits a most generous nature,” noted Hal. “Unusual in a dragon to be so sensitive to the needs of lesser creatures.”

  Erde knew he was alluding to Earth’s peculiar hunting habits, which were inconvenient if, like the knight, you wished to keep your dragon well fed. But she thought that if dragons were, as Hal claimed, the most perfect of God’s creations on Earth, they very well ought to have generous natures. Unlike Man, or most men anyway, who were—judging from her recent experience—the most imperfect. She did notice that whenever Hal expounded on the nature of a “proper” dragon, even speaking in the arcane language of the dragon-lore, it sounded more like what he’d want a leader of men to be, for instance, the king he served so loyally. High expectations indeed. But a man could not be a dragon, nor a dragon a man. No wonder the knight was so often disappointed in both.

  * * *

  They came down out of the standing stones without further mishap, beyond a few additional scrapes and bruises. The icy rain had stopped. The moon had set, but the sky seemed to be clearing at last. In between the scudding shadows of clouds, a few stars could be seen. They reached level ground, a broad grassy ledge, and Hal whistled to call back the mule. Erde heard water falling over rock somewhere in the darkness.

  “We’ll stop here for the rest of the night.” Hal tossed down his shoulder pack and stretched. “We need to get warm, so we’ll risk building a fire, if we can find anything up here to burn.”