The Book of Earth

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  When they gained the top of the cliff after an hour’s hard climbing, it was like walking out of a warm house into winter. A stiff cold wind rushed down off the mountains, as lung-searing as a torrent of ice water. Just past dawn and the sky already glowered with dark and shifting layers of cloud. Panting from his climb, Earth perched on the edge, his snout raised to the gusts as if the wind itself might bring a message.

  Hal had not looked back once since starting the ascent, but now he settled on a rock to catch his breath and faced the valley, his red-leathered back to the gale. “Rose swears it’s a coincidence of geography that keeps Deep Moor so temperate when the rest of the world’s halfway to winter. It’s like a place set apart, where the usual rules just don’t apply, where the society is humane, and nature’s always in balance. A religious man would say it’s God’s grace. A superstitious one would call it sorcery. I don’t know what I believe. But of all the places I go, Deep Moor is the only place I ever really want to be. I just . . . my life . . . well . . .” He shrugged, gave up, and rose from his rock. “We’ll unpack those woolens now. Put ’em on soon as the sweat dries. Damn unseasonable weather.”

  They retraced their steps up through the gray army of standing stones, where the she-goat had nearly met her end, and back across the barren ridges that hid the valley from the world of men. The wind stayed gusty and biting. The summer foliage was black and slimy with frost. Along the way, Hal covered their tracks obsessively, searching for any sign that Lily might have left in her panicked homeward flight. Finally he had to admit how astonishingly careful she’d been for an injured fugitive at the very end of her strength.

  “Somehow, they always keep it hidden. You ask around at the nearest market town? People never know where Esther comes from. It’s as if they never think to ask. Yet there she is, with vegetables twice the size of theirs, and crockery and weaving that bring the farmwives from all around. Remarkable, these Deep Moor women. Remarkable, every one of them.”

  Witches, thought Erde, real ones, and knew it to be true.

  * * *

  They camped at noon deep in the woods on the downward slope. The animals lay down as soon as Hal called a halt. Even the dragon, despite his eagerness to be following his Voice, recognized limits to a day’s travel that the knight seemed to have forgotten. Hal’s impatience made him restive. He talked of the king as they set up camp, told stories of their better days together. He insisted on a rigorous sword practice before their meal and bed.

  “Twice a day now. You’re strong enough. Just at the point where you can start actually learning something. Here.” He tossed her the practice stick. Erde snatched it out of the air with one hand and did not fumble it. “See? Now, present your weapon.”

  Erde took her stance, gripped her stick, and held it out in front of her. Hal turned to face her, his own stick laid across hers for the first time. Erde felt a twinge of nervousness, but it was performance anxiety, not fear. She had been looking forward to the moment of actual engagement, to see if all this effort would amount to any real skill.

  “Now, watch. This third move we’ve been practicing becomes a right cross-parry. Try it. It’s a standard parry for swordsmen who can’t count on superior strength. Good. Now use it when I come at you like this. One and two and . . .”

  He came at her slowly, in the speed and rhythm of their usual practice routine. Erde cocked her wrists, straightened the appropriate arm, and his stick slid neatly off hers toward the ground. She knew he had relaxed into the parry, but the move still felt right and it gave her a most unwholesome sort of satisfaction. She grinned wickedly. Hal grinned back, winked, and sobered. “Now, again! Faster! One and two and . . .”

  * * *

  They rested, and awoke at dusk to move along again. The terrain became rocky and broken beneath stands of young trees thick with thorny undergrowth. The going was slow. Even the goat and the surefooted mule found it treacherous.

  “I know I’ll be breaking my own rules of safety,” Hal said on the second night out, “but a little north of here, we’ll come up on the road west toward Erfurt. I’d like to chance it for a while, till we get free of these hills.” He daubed at the raw scrapes and scratches on Erde’s palms with a salve Linden had sent along. “We’ve made maybe eight to ten miles a day this way. It’s too slow. On the road, we could make twelve to fifteen, and turn five or six days to Erfurt into four. What do you think?”

  Erde sent back a tired grin. Surely he wasn’t actually asking her advice?

  “What would you do if you were out here alone?” he pursued.

  He wanted an answer. Erde considered, then wrote on her slate: MOVE MORE SLOWLY.

  He laughed. “What if you had to move faster?”

  I WOULDN’T. HE CAN’T.

  “Ah. But what if you were without the dragon?”

  THE ROAD.

  He nodded. “Good. Then that’s what we’ll do.”

  Had he only wanted her agreement, or was he insisting that she begin to take part in the decision-making? Now they knew Hal would not always be there to guide her. Their paths had nearly divided in Deep Moor. Erde had an inkling of some new aspect being added to her training, and vowed to pay more attention to such things. She had no sense of how fast or how far they’d traveled. Hal had told Rose that she and the dragon had covered some two hundred miles in the month since she’d left Tor Alte. Two hundred miles seemed an enormous distance, yet she was not halfway across the east-west stretch of the kingdom, Tor Alte being on its extreme eastern border. She was beginning to understand why a kingdom was so hard to rule and keep together, why it could be so easily split apart by the machinations of a few dissident vassal lords.

  “It’ll be risky, but a lot easier on him.” Hal jerked his head at the dragon, who was nursing a deep gouge in his flank from a broken limb he’d tumbled into. All his injuries healed with miraculous speed, but the forest had become so dense he often could not squeeze between the trunks. He’d have to cut a wide arc around to find a way back to them. “To say nothing of easier on us,” Hal added ruefully. “And it might improve our chances of getting to Margit in time.”

  He got no argument, so the next dusk found them hunkered down in the trees above a rough track cut through the forest, wide enough for four men to ride abreast without their helms and standards being snagged in the overhanging branches. Earth eyed the open roadway with approval. Hal studied the muddied wheel ruts.

  “Well, it’s in use all right, and by more than just a few local farmers. Horses carrying men and armor. Mostly heading west. West . . .” Hal blew air through his teeth. “Ah, would I could fly like a bird. Would I were with His Majesty.”

  He didn’t say, would this dragon had wings. Erde laid a sympathetic hand on his arm.

  “Right. Here’s what we’ll do. Pack up the Mule more farm-style, hide the swords, but keep them handy. Tether the goat, if she’s willing to be led. You’ll be the idiot goat-boy, should anyone come along. Earth will have to be invisible, which in the dark, shouldn’t tax him too much.”

  They climbed down to the road as a peasant widower and his unfortunate son journeying to visit relatives outside of Erfurt. Hal embellished the tale as they strode along, both to tighten their cover in case they had to use it and to keep his mind off his concern for the king’s welfare. The road was deep in mud and standing puddles of icy water, but it was easier going than the woods.

  “Another good night like this and we’ll be within striking distance of Erfurt,” Hal remarked as they bedded down for the day high in the pine woods above the road. He would not allow a fire. Some traveler on the road might scent the smoke. But before they went to bed, he roused Erde for practice. This time, he untied the pack bundle that held the real swords, and freed them from their wrappings. His own was sheathed and he buckled it on with evident satisfaction, as if he’d missed the weight of it, companionable against his hip. The other, naked blade he passed to Erde hilt-first.

  She took it confidently, then felt s
uddenly thrown off balance. It wasn’t the weight. She could lift it well enough. But she’d taken it in hand assuming it was his, a spare he carried. Then holding it, she’d realized it somehow belonged to her. What was she doing with a sword? There was resistance as she tried to remember, as if that information was locked away in a shadowy place where her brain didn’t want her to look. With great effort she recalled finding the sword under her bed at Tor Alte. But no straining would tell her how it came to be there. Another blank spot, another lapse. She thought of the dragon’s dilemma and wondered if she was losing her memory as he regained his.

  Hal read her stricken look and sudden paralysis as novice’s nerves. “Oh, now. Just take a good grip on it, go ahead, like you would your stick. It’s no different, really.”

  Being given a task to focus on broke Erde’s daze. She did as he said, and found the hilt fitted well into her palm. She flexed her fingers around it, frowning. Perhaps it was hers after all.

  “Good hands,” approved Hal. “Strong hands.”

  She’d always been self-conscious about her hands. Too big and rangy for a girl, not frail and soft and white. Fricca had once advised her to sit on them in public. She gripped the hilt and found it warm as if from someone else’s hand, though Hal had held it only by its linen wrappings and by the incised base of the blade. The uncanny warmth sparked a flare of memory that fled almost before she was aware it had been there—a face, a smile, then gone, leaving only an ache inside. Fending off this unidentifiable pain, Erde raised the sword with both hands out in front of her. Automatically, her body corrected for the weight. Her stance widened, her back uncurled, her hips tucked. She felt a transition into balance, into harmony with the shining length of steel. She twisted the blade back and forth, letting it catch the dapplings of dawn falling through the trees. The flash of light was powerful, mesmerizing.

  Hal laughed softly. “See? You can lift it easily now. Don’t look so thunderstruck. I told you I was a good teacher. Now let’s run the whole routine. Face forward, blade down. Ready? And one, and two . . .”

  * * *

  It rained during the day, drenching them in their sleep, then it cleared and became cold and dry. But the next night, the road was ankle-deep in stiff black ooze, iced over in the shallows. It had narrowed considerably to wind through a steep-sided glen lined with dense stands of birches, as slim and white in the moonlight as old bones and set as close as prison bars. A grown man could scarcely pass between them to scale the darker slopes.

  Hal was in a black complaining mood from loss of sleep and damp clothing and not being with the king, where his duty lay. He was so intent on hurrying his party along that he didn’t hear the men approaching until they were nearly around the bend. He stopped dead in the middle of a complaint. “Christ Almighty!” he breathed. “Listen!”

  Ahead, the creak of harness and the quiet splash of many hooves through the mud.

  Hal shoved Erde toward one side of the road, the mule toward the other. “Scatter!”

  Erde had reached the thicket of birch trunks and was scrambling up the slope when the horsemen came into view. They were moving slowly, cautiously, wary of the forest night. Helmets and lance tips gleamed in the moonlight. Erde dropped to her belly. The she-goat was a flicker of motion freezing into silence farther up the hill. Erde guessed that Hal had split to the other side with the mule, and the dragon was . . .

  Still visible in the middle of the road. The close-packed birches might as well have been a stout palisade to him, and the road was too narrow for the horsemen to pass him by without touching. Invisibility would not conceal him. Earth was trapped, with a dozen armed and armored men coming straight for him, still unaware that they were about to run into anything unusual. The dragon, who could have done serious damage to them before they’d have time to strike a blow, was terrified. His fear clanged deafening alarms in Erde’s head as he charged the trees like a battering ram, rolling all his weight against the trunks. The smallest gave way and cracked rendingly, the thickest swayed and held. He backed up and rushed them again, creating a barrier of splintered wood rather than a passageway. The armed men were closing in. The leader raised a hand and called a halt, peering down the darkened road. He was jumpy, unsure. He gestured to two of his men to investigate the strange racket. Glancing at each other nervously, they set their lances and eased their horses forward.

  Earth saw the steel-tipped shafts moving toward him through patches of shadow and moonlight. He panicked. He threw himself again and again against a tangle of broken branches scarcely less sharp than the lances themselves. Sure that he’d impale himself, Erde leaped up out of hiding and tumbled back down the slope to stop him. One of the lancers spied her. He shouted a warning, the shrill cry of a man frightened of what might be lurking deep in a forest at night.

  A sudden curve of flame arced through the darkness and into the mud at the lancers’ feet. Another followed. Their horses neighed and backed. The riders fought for control, their lances colliding, nearly unseating them. The rest of the party spurred forward at the leader’s sharp command. Another burning arrow thunked into the mud, then another. A bright line of flame separated the lancers from their unknown quarry. The leader shouted. The horses shied and would not cross.

  Erde reached the panicked dragon, her mind yelling at him with all her strength to be still. He saw her dancing around him, felt her too close, ducking his flailing limbs, risking the crush of his plunging bulk. He froze. She laid her palms on his neck and climbed up on his foreleg to grip his head with both hands and stare into his eyes. Desperate to calm him, to get him still and invisible, she sent him the safest, most soothing image she could conjure. His mind leaped at it and clung to it eagerly. He knew that place, knew it well. He wanted to be there, longed to be there, not in a muddy dark forest pursued by sharp points and cold steel. Not here but . . .

  Erde felt her stomach turn over. Her mind went suddenly numb. She squeezed her eyes shut. He was falling or she was going to faint, from fear or . . .

  The dizziness passed. The dragon relaxed beneath her, and she risked a breath, a deep breath of warm, moist air smelling of grass and flowers. Familiar smells. The shrilling of Earth’s inner alarm bells ceased. In its place, an astonished but gratified sense of satisfaction. Still clinging to him, Erde opened her eyes.

  They were back in the meadows of Deep Moor. Not even attempting an explanation, she let go of the dragon and climbed down into the tall, sweet-smelling grass. She walked around a bit, dampening her hands with night dew. It was not a dream. She stared around the moonlit valley, then back at the dragon.

  —You did this. How?

  He sent her an image of a shrug, a notion she had taught him and now wished she hadn’t. It only encouraged his childishness.

  —Think how it happened! You must!

  His smugness unappreciated, he put his mind to remembering. It had actually been very simple. She had made him think of Deep Moor and he’d wanted to go there desperately, to the valley where he’d be safe, right here on this spot that he recalled so clearly, and so he just was.

  —And me. You brought me with you.

  Assent. Earth did not see anything particularly remarkable about that. She had been there in his mind, after all. What he marveled at was being safe again.

  —But it’s a miracle! Can you do it again?

  Assent. He reminded her that the only good thing about this snail-paced process of regaining his memory was that once he remembered part of a thing, he remembered all of it, like unlocking a door gave access to everything behind it. This was the better way to travel that he’d been struggling to recall. If he could image a place accurately enough, he could quite simply be there.

  Erde laughed in soundless delight, then stopped short with a gasp as she remembered Hal, alone, bearing the brunt and the mystery of their sudden disappearance. The flaming arrows were a stroke of genius, but they would have given his position away.

  —We have to go back!

 
; ?????

  She imaged Hal defending himself single-handedly against a dozen armed warriors. Earth countered with visions of lances and steel.

  —We must go back! We can’t desert him! He’d fight to the death to protect you.

  The dragon moved away from her, pacing and circling anxiously, sending up rich aromas of dirt and crushed grass.

  —Earth, please! We have to help him! What about the Mule and the goat?

  He sent back horrific images of her being sliced and dismembered, of himself having to kill soldiers in order to save her. It was wrong to take a life without permission. He didn’t want to do that.

  —You won’t have to. We can go back, grab Hal and the others, and bring them back here. You can do that, can’t you?

  Earth considered. He could go back, he knew that, and he could retrieve anyone or anything he could picture well enough to hold in his mind as a separate entity. Finally, he could not find an honest reason, besides his own fear, to deny her.

  —Then we’ll do it. Umm, how do we do it?

  He pictured her drawing close to him, helping him remember the place they had come from, though his image of it was far more vividly recalled than hers could ever have been. Hers was night-dark and vague, distorted by the emotional state she’d been in, but he remembered everything because he noticed everything, despite his fear, in all the sensual dimensions, sight, sound, touch, and especially smell. What she could help him with was the motivation to take himself and her to a place he had no wish to return to, and since wanting a place, desiring to be there, was crucial to his new method of transport, she had to convince him. She urged and encouraged, she shamed him and pleaded with him and finally, she reminded him that he had accepted an oath of fealty which brought certain responsibilities in return.