Children of the Plains tb-1

by Paul Cook

  He departed, leaving Nacris standing by her horse. Once he was well out of sight, two men emerged from the rocks farther down the draw and approached Nacris.

  “Well?” said Hatu.

  “He won’t join us, at least not yet,” Nacris reported.

  “I told you he wouldn’t,” Tarkwa said.

  Hatu fingered the handle of his flint knife. “But will he betray us?”

  “I don’t think so,” Nacris said. “Drunk or sober, his word is still granite.”

  “They say he tried to gut himself in front of Karada, Arkuden, and the dragon,” Tarkwa said with a smirk.

  “If his mind is weakening, so be it,” Hatu said. “That could be a boon for us. Alive and silent, he’s still dangerous. Alive and mad, he may be the best weapon against Karada we can get.”

  Duranix had left the valley only moments after seeing Vedvedsica atop the cliff at Yala-tene. Searching for the elf priest, the dragon flew south as far as the vast woodland claimed by Silvanos, yet he found no sign of Vedvedsica. The priest was probably already back in the elf city, trying to work his will with the help of the yellow stone.

  The dragon flapped hard to gain height, climbing so high that even his impervious bronze hide shuddered with the extreme cold. Peering southward, he could see — very faintly — the pale, golden glow on the horizon that heralded the city of Silvanost.

  Remarkable. To think there could be a gathering of the creatures so large that the combined light of their fires stained the night sky. A part of him would enjoy making the long flight to see such an amazing sight. Instead, he made a wide, sweeping turn, speeding his strokes.

  Now that he’d determined Vedvedsica was beyond his reach, he wanted to get back to Yala-tene as fast as he could. It was apparent Pa’alu had made some kind of bargain with the elf priest. The bronze disk had contained so much power it glowed in the dragon’s vision, even when clenched inside the man’s hand. By the time Duranix had gotten hold of the metal, it had given up its power somewhere, for some purpose. He needed to discover exactly what had happened.

  The landscape slowly unfurled below the flying dragon. The dense forest home of the elves gave way to grassy plains, which in turn began to swell and roll as he drew near the mountains that held the Lake of the Falls. Those mountains loomed larger and larger before him, clouds thickening on their slopes. Soon he was gliding in their silent heights, alone save for the tallest peaks poking up through the clouds.

  It was irksome that Vedvedsica had succeeded in getting the stone, but it was much to be preferred over Sthenn or the humans having it. The elf had some limited knowledge and experience of higher powers, but he could be in for an unpleasant surprise should he try to use the stone. It was a whole order of magnitude greater in strength than any fetish or object of power he would have encountered before. It could consume him in the end.

  Vedvedsica reminded Duranix of the thirsty centaur in a story Amero had told him. The centaur had stood under a thundercloud, eyes closed, mouth open, expecting a refreshing shower. Instead, he received a white-hot bolt of lightning. As the humans said, “Thought rain, got pain.” The elf priest hoped to bend the stone to his own ends; instead, he might end up being the one bent — or broken.

  Duranix smelled the waterfall from twenty leagues away and descended through the clouds. He circled the mountain once, morning sunlight flashing from his scales, then dived for the cave. His hind claws caught the rim of the opening, and he hung there for an instant, shaking the water from his long face. He smelled a human in his cave. It didn’t smell like Amero.

  He leaped to the floor, and his landing made the mountain shake. The cavern was dark, but his eyes noted a glimmer of body heat, far off to his left, near the small lower door.

  “Come out, little mouse, come out,” Duranix rumbled, in a very undragonlike, sing-song manner.

  Nianki stood away from the hoist basket, hands clasped in front of her. “Ah, no mouse after all,” said Duranix. “A wolf, more like.”

  “Save your humor, dragon,” she said. “I have something important to ask you.”

  He lowered his belly to the floor and folded his tree-trunk size legs under him. “Speak, Nianki,” he said.

  “Karada,” she said sharply. “Nianki is an old, empty name. It only sounds right coming from my brother’s lips.”

  “Speak then, Karada.”

  She stepped forward, and he saw her cheeks were damp with tears, her eyes red-rimmed. His barbels twitched with surprise.

  Drawing a deep breath, she said, “You’re a creature of great power, I know. I’ve seen some of it these past days. Just how great is it?”

  “It’s the measure of myself, no more, no less.” Karada gave him a disgusted look, and he snapped, “I’m not being coy or poetic, woman. I don’t know how to quantify my own strength. How powerful is the sun? How forceful is the wind?” He lowered his chin to rest on the stone floor, bringing his eyes more or less to the level of her own. “Why do you ask?”

  “I need your help,” she said, her voice tinged with real pain. “I… I’m going mad.”

  “For most humans, a short journey.”

  Karada was in no mood for levity. She whipped a flint knife from her belt waved it under the dragon’s vast eye. “I’ll not be made a fool of!” she cried, her voice ragged with emotion. “Listen to me or I’ll start that journey right now!”

  It was absurd, threatening a bronze dragon with a span of sharp flint. Duranix was unmoved, and the click of his blinking eyelids was loud in the quiet cave. However, her obvious sincerity moved him to say, in a kinder tone, “Please continue, Karada, but calmly.”

  She returned her knife to her belt and ran a hand through her gilded brown hair. “I have… I have a… sickness of the mind,” she faltered. “I don’t know where it came from, and I don’t know how to get rid of it.”

  “What are the symptoms?”

  She swallowed, her mouth suddenly dry. Her voice was barely audible. “I think about a man, all the time. I hear his name when I draw breath. I see his face whenever I shut my eyes. If I let his image linger, my face grows hot and my legs and arms feel weak.”

  “That’s not so mysterious. Humans are so afflicted all the time. You’re in love. Haven’t you ever been in love before?”

  Nianki turned quickly on her heel. “No, never! There’ve been men in the band I admired — Pakito is strong and loyal, Hatu a fine tracker, even Sessan was good fighter when he wasn’t listening to the venom Nacris poured in his ear…” Her voice trailed off. “But, it’s nothing like that. I feel sick… here.” She pressed a hand to her belly. “And I have thoughts. Strange thoughts.”

  “I’m sure you do,” Duranix said quickly. The last thing the dragon wanted to hear were this warrior woman’s inner thoughts. “In my years observing humans, I’ve learned love is an extremely potent feeling. It makes people happy and miserable, often at the same time.” He cocked a flaring metallic eyebrow at her and added, “You seem no different than the rest, except you’re not used to it.”

  His bantering tone was lost on Nianki. Arms hanging limply at her sides, she stared dully at the floor and said, with no emotion at all, “I’m in love with Amero.”

  The smoldering question in Duranix’s mind suddenly flared to brilliant life. The disk Pa’alu had been concealing the night of the feast must have caused this. He’d tried to get Karada to take his hand while he held the disk. He must have intended the spell (most certainly cast by Vedvedsica) for her and himself. This outcome had surely been an accident.

  Or was this exactly what Vedvedsica had intended?

  “Did you hear me?” she demanded.

  Duranix pulled his attention back to her angry, worried face. “Yes, I did,” he assured her. “Humans don’t mate with their siblings, do they?”

  “No!” Her eyes widened in self-loathing, and she clutched her head in both hands. “The very thought is a horror! How can I, born of the same spirit and flesh as Amero, possibly be so unn
atural?”

  Duranix gave no reply, but instead reared up on his haunches. Shuddering, he shrank himself into human form.

  Eyes downcast, wrapped in her own misery, Nianki didn’t notice his transformation. She started when his human hand touched her shoulder. When she looked up at him, she flinched even more violently.

  Duranix wore a completely new form. He was a tall, muscular plainsman with glossy, waist-length black hair and deeply tanned skin. “Be calm!” he told her. “I took on this form to make a point.”

  “What point?”

  “Outward appearance is an illusion. Every being is unique because his or her spirit is unique. I could, if I chose, take on the appearance of Amero, but would that make me Amero? Of course not.”

  With her mind in such turmoil, Nianki could not understand the reasoning behind his demonstration. “Are you telling it me it’s all right for me to feel this way?” she said, astonished.

  “No.” He sighed at the obtuseness of humans. “I believe you’re the victim of a plot, Karada.” He told her about Pa’alu and the amulet. As he watched her face redden alarmingly and her body begin to shake with anger, he chose to keep the name of Vedvedsica to himself. She was capable of any foolishness just now, even embarking on a quest for vengeance that would most likely end with her death.

  When Nianki finally spoke, her voice was a hoarse, furious whisper. “Do you mean that I’m suffering this unnatural love because of Pa’alu?” Duranix nodded. She clenched her fists and said, her voice rising with each word, “Oh, the filth-eating dog! The crawling, cold-blooded, wretched — !”

  Duranix held up a hand. “I don’t believe Pa’alu meant you ill. I think he traded the nugget for some kind of spirit-token, which was meant to loose its power on you and make you love him, but there was a mix-up, and the spell discharged instead on you and Amero.”

  Nianki breathed hard, forcing herself to master her anger. Her deep red color faded to normal tan. She could not escape the bounds of her compulsion, so her next question was, “Does Amero feel for me the way I feel for him?”

  “He does not seem so affected. We’ll have to find Pa’alu and question him on the way the token was supposed to work.”

  From towering rage, Nianki fell into despair. She wept uncontrollably at the mere thought that Amero might be suffering as she was. It was unbearable, the idea the one she loved could be in pain.

  Duranix watched her cry silently, but with some sympathy. He could think of nothing to say to her.

  “The old question returns,” she said, sniffling and dabbing at her nose with her sleeve. “Can you help me?”

  Duranix faced her, his black, more-than-human eyes sweeping her up and down. “I cannot,” he said at last. “If the power was forced into you, it would leave a spirit wound on you I could see, and I might be able to draw it out into a likely receptacle — a crystal or metal object, but I sense nothing out of place. That’s the black subtlety of it. Every human has the capacity to love. Yours has simply been directed along an unnatural course. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “Can’t you use your power to change who I love, at least?” she asked wildly.

  “I’m not a practitioner of such arts. If I tried blindly, I might harm you, or worse, even kill you.”

  Nianki laughed bitterly. “Death couldn’t be worse than this.” Her countenance convulsed in deep anguish for a few seconds, then suddenly cleared. She strode to the lower door, bypassing the hoist basket, which was lying on its side. Standing in the opening, her long shirt rippling in the breeze from the waterfall, she cried, “I can do something a dragon can’t! I can cure a lovesick heart!”

  She jumped.

  Duranix’s tall human form crossed the distance to the opening in two bounds. Without pausing, he hurled himself after her. A heartbeat later he hit the wall of plunging water. As he fell, he flung his arms outward and expanded to his true shape.

  The force of the torrent was driving him toward the lake below. Through the icy blast of falling water he spotted the warmth of Nianki’s tumbling body, already halfway to the foot of the falls. Duranix folded his wings tightly to his back and plummeted after her.

  Head down, neck outstretched, nose pointed at his own imminent death, the dragon overtook Nianki and grasped her in one foreclaw. She was limp and did not resist. He flung out his wings to slow their descent, but the force of the waterfall was so great, it snapped his left wing bone where it was joined to his body.

  Pain.

  He hadn’t felt pain in a long time. Genta’s spear thrusts, even Vedvedsica’s spirit-blast, had been playful buffets compared to this. The last time the dragon had felt anything this excruciating was the day the avalanche had covered the nest. A whole mountain had fallen on him, and he’d lain there, entombed with his mother and siblings, gasping in the darkness as his bones were crushed, his body smashed.

  He had to slow their fall. He threw his shoulders back, forcing his wings open. Bone scraped on bone in the broken wing, and the dragon roared in agony. The updraft around the churning falls lifted and slowed him just enough for him to put his three unencumbered claws down before he hit the ground. The shock of his landing was enough to bring blood to his mouth. Yet, through the red haze of pain, Duranix remembered what he held in his left foreclaw. He leaned to his right, put his claw down gently and opened it. Nianki rolled senseless to the ground. Duranix toppled over, trembled, and lay still.

  The sound of Amero’s voice penetrated the roar of the water and the fog in the dragon’s head.

  “Duranix! Duranix!”

  “Don’t shout,” the dragon rasped, “you’re standing by my ear.”

  He opened one eye. Amero and a score of nomads were clustered around. Several of the nomads knelt by Nianki’s limp body, working over her. Amero, his face white with concern, said angrily, “What were you trying to do, kill yourself?”

  “Humans are so much trouble,” muttered Duranix. “Besides being stupid, they’re clumsy. That one missed your basket contraption in the dark and fell from the cave.”

  Amero hurried to the circle where Nianki was being tended. He knelt beside her, pressing his hand to her throat. Her pulse beat strongly.

  “She passed out,” said Targun, who was kneeling on the other side of her. “Let her rest a minute, and she’ll come back.”

  Amero was about to rise when Nianki’s eyes snapped open. She half-rose and threw her arms around his neck.

  “Amero! Amero! Don’t let me go!” she gasped.

  Embarrassed and relieved at the same time, her brother pulled her trembling hands apart and lowered her back to the hide blanket Targun had brought for her.

  “You’re all right,” he said soothingly. She turned her face away and wept. Misunderstanding the cause of her distress, Amero added, “It’s all right, truly. Duranix saved you. He’s had a hard landing, but you can’t kill a dragon so easily.”

  As if to prove the truth of those words, Duranix had gotten to his feet. He clumped over to them, his broken wing dragging on the ground. His wide, serpentine head hovered over them, eyelids clicking open and shut.

  Amero held his sister’s cold, wet hand. “You and I have something more in common now,” he said cheerfully. She said nothing, her face still turned away. “We’re the only two people to have leaped from the dragon’s cave and lived. I guess clumsiness runs in our blood, eh?” The gathered nomads chuckled. “What do you think, Duranix?”

  The dragon glanced from Nianki to Amero and back to Nianki again. “I think humans make terrible pets,” he said.

  Chapter 18

  Autumn arrived. The days grew short and dark, but the darkness was not confined to the sky. Once the dragon was known to be injured, the atmosphere in the valley changed.

  Nomad and villager had been getting along tolerably well, with occasional disagreements between individuals offset by frequent incidents of cooperation. Several of the younger nomads had actually begun teaching their village counterparts to ride h
orses. At first the elder villagers scoffed at those taking the lessons, but the young of Yala-tene knew riding could be an extremely useful sill. The lessons were marked by much raucous roughhousing, but the gibing was good-natured, and no one got hurt.

  Now trouble between nomad and villager was on the rise — name-calling and theft became more frequent and escalated into shouting matches and fistfights. Riding lessons came to a halt. The once-friendly sessions had become untenable after several violent melees.

  Amero and the village elders moved from one crisis to another, separating angry nomads and villagers, smoothing over confrontations, trying to resolve a growing host of simmering disputes.

  “I don’t understand it,” Amero complained one evening. He was in the home of Konza the tanner. He and his host had gulped a hasty meal by the circular fireplace while waiting for the next outbreak of trouble.

  “I thought things would work out better than this,” he continued, poking the fire with an aromatic cedar stick. “Our people and Nianki’s — we’re all plainsmen. We’ve learned so much from each other and can learn a lot more. So why is there so much trouble?”

  “You believe too much in the goodness of people,” Konza said. The firelight etched the lines of weariness on his face with deep shadows. “These wanderers are lazy, good-for-nothing savages. What they want, they steal. What they don’t understand, they destroy.”

  Amero looked up from prodding the flames. “I thought Nianki could keep them in line.”

  Konza sighed, pouring hot water over a pot full of mashed dewberries. He let this steep a few moments, then poured off the resulting tea for Amero and himself.

  “You’ll forgive me for saying so,” Konza said solemnly, “but your sister is mad.”

  Amero stared at the flames. No anger showed on his face, for Konza was saying only what Amero had secretly feared for some time. Hearing the words from the sober, hard-working tanner made them seem all the more true.