Song of the Beast

by Carol Berg

  “I’m all right. Please don’t.” I pushed the hands away and sat up to greet Davyn, whose wide-eyed fright was yielding to a flush rosier than the dawn light.

  “I thought ... seeing you out here like this ...”

  “It’s a long story,” I said, “and not one I care to publish. Not very flattering to my Senai warrior heritage.”

  “But—”

  “I’m all right. I’d rather talk about breakfast. I don’t think I ate anything at all yesterday, and as it seems I’m inescapably attached to living for today, at least, I might as well get on with it.”

  “Of course. Yura was just lighting the fires when I came out.”

  We ate Yura’s breakfast porridge, thick, hot, and satisfying. Then, leaving Davyn still mystified, I took myself to the stables and the rock pile and the bridge and the woodshop. I worked hard enough that I could not entertain a single thought except how to persuade my body to do what I demanded of it. And when I buried my face in the straw-filled mat in the corner of the woodshop late that night, I held the faint hope that I might never wake again.

  I did, of course, to another dark figure lurking in the shadows, but this time instead of using a knife, my visitor beckoned me with his voice. “Wake up, slugabed, and come with me. We need to talk.”

  “Don’t want to talk,” I mumbled into my pallet. “Use the knife. I shouldn’t have stopped you last night.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you want, Aidan MacAllister.”

  At last someone was being honest with me. But as I recognized the voice as Narim’s, I decided that such a judgment was premature.

  “So talk,” I said. “Tell me something that is absolute truth.”

  “You are not dead.”

  I bleated in disbelief. “You’re a fool,” I said, and pulled my blanket over my head.

  “That is certainly truth. But not because of what I just said. One could as easily say that you are the fool, mourning the loss of your gods. The gods are still there. You just don’t know their names, and for a Senai to admit such a thing is beyond the capability of the species.”

  “I’ve seen no evidence to contradict my belief,” I said. “Not in a very long while.”

  “Ah, my friend, you are still lost in the darkness. How much more wondrous are gods who can create such beings as humans and dragons and Elhim, than your paltry deities who speak with borrowed voices.”

  “I do not deny that I am and have been a fool.”

  “But a live fool. Come with me and let me prove my contention.”

  “Why should I?”

  “For Callia. She deserves a reason for her death.”

  I stared at the pale-eyed Elhim who crouched in the darkness like a wolf waiting for the last embers of the watchfire to die away. “Bastard.”

  “If that’s the worst you have to say of me before we’re done, I’ll count myself fortunate ...”

  Silent and furious and wide-awake, I pulled on my boots.

  “... but then, of course, it is impossible for an Elhim to be a bastard. Our young have only one parent, so we know nothing of marriage or nonmarriage, thus nothing of bastardy. We’ve never really understood the insult intended.”

  The moon hung low in the west as we hiked for two hours across the valley, following an obscure track that wound its way between slabs of layered rock until breaking out onto a desolate hillside. Somewhere in the dark expanse of scrub and grass, sparse, stunted trees, and broken bits of reddish rock shone a faint, steady light. We headed for it as directly as one could without being a goat, and it soon resolved itself into a lantern, held aloft by none other than Davyn.

  “So you’ve agreed to try this?” he said anxiously. “We’ll be with you the whole—”

  “Well, he didn’t exactly,” said Narim. “I bullied him into it a bit.”

  “Bullied? Ah, by the One, Narim. What have you done?”

  “He wanted only truth. Complete truth. I told him he wasn’t dead. That was about as complete as I could get. Telling, bullying, truth ... He’s not going to believe anything until we show him.”

  “But Narim—”

  Davyn was interrupted again, this time by a muted rumbling as of a distant storm or a blustering wind heard from inside a thick-walled fortress. But the stars shone cold and still, growing in brilliance as the moon sank below the western peaks. Our cloaks and hair lay unmoving in the quiet chill of midnight.

  “Is the woman already in place?” asked Narim uneasily.

  “Yes. But we’ve time. You must prepare him.”

  I stood still, arms folded, determined to go no step farther until I heard an explanation. Narim screwed up his face at Davyn, then motioned for me to sit down. I found a convenient rock that put my face at a level with his.

  “Someone tried to kill you last night,” he began.

  “Was it you?”

  He looked startled at my question, and if the light had been better I would have said he turned red. But Davyn had taken the lamp up the hillside and was scrabbling about a pile of crumbling rock. “No. No, it was not ...” An edge to the way he said it told me that he was quite capable of killing, and would have no qualms if he believed such an action necessary. I listened more attentively after that. “... but I know who it was, and the attempt has made us change our plans. Move before we’re ready. We weren’t going to do this for a few weeks yet.”

  “Who was it?” I didn’t want to lose the critical answer.

  “I’ll not tell you that. It’s of no importance. There are those of us—some, not all—so blinded by fear that they can no longer see possibility. To them, safety dictates that the world remain as it is. They believe you represent the extinction of the Elhim.”

  “But why? I’ve told you—”

  “That is, of course, the most important part. The why. Something has given them pause, a reason to disbelieve your saying. They know you’re the only one capable. They’ve only to think back to the first time you heard a dragon’s cry in your uncle’s garden.”

  Now it was my turn to be surprised. “How in heaven and earth do you know of that?”

  Impatiently Narim cut me off. “We know everything about you from the day of your birth until the day of your arrest. Elhim have sources of information everywhere, and we used every one of them to learn of you. We know what you told your singing masters that first night, and what you told your mother, and how you lived the next three years and every year thereafter. Don’t you see? We’d been waiting for centuries for someone with your gift. In the days when we were friends, the dragons told us there were a few—a very few—people who could touch their minds. ‘Nandithari’ they called them—Dragon Speakers—who could understand their speech even when they were in their wildest state at year’s end. They told us that those rare beings had an open and quiet heart, ones who could listen so well they could distinguish the sound of one bird’s flight from another. When we heard you sing, we knew you were such a one.”

  Why wouldn’t they listen? Narim of all of them should know. He said he understood what it meant to me to discover that my life had been a lie. One more time I tried to convince him. “I cannot help you,” I said. “Even if there was a time when I could, even if I wanted to more than life itself, I cannot. No amount of wishing, no amount of words or storytelling, threats or pleading or plotting can put back what is gone.” I held out my scarred, knotted fingers. “Inside me the damage is worse than this. Far worse. What heart I possessed is dead. My music is dead. Why won’t you believe me? If I could make it not so ... heaven and earth, Narim, don’t you think I would?”

  The Elhim said nothing, only shook his head and took my arm, silently demanding that I should follow him. I let him pull me off the rock and lead me up the hill to where Davyn stood before a dark, round hole about a hand’s breadth taller than I. A pile of brush lay to the side of the yawning emptiness. Another rumbling. This time I felt it in my feet, as if a storm lay beneath the earth.

  “What is this place?” I foun
d myself whispering as if standing at the entrance of a tomb, my neck prickling with the unreasoning dread that the tomb was my own.

  Narim still said nothing, but followed Davyn and his lantern into the dark hole, dragging me along behind him. The passage was nothing like the airy warrens of the Elhim caverns, but only a cramped dirt chute through the side of the hill, a giant rabbit hole or worm’s den, bored smooth by an inhabitant the diameter of a man’s height. Downward. Ever sloping, gently, inexorably down. It was warm, very different from the cool caverns of stone, and quite dry. Only a few side passages, and the place smelled of dirt and roots. We might have been burrowing straight to the center of the earth.

  We had been descending for at least half an hour when I caught the first trace of brimstone in the still air. Unwittingly I slowed my steps, but Narim pulled me onward, still saying nothing. My friend Gerald Adair had been deathly afraid of dark, enclosed spaces, abandoning me when I would sing in the coal mines of Boskar or the hovels of the poorest of the poor. He would have gone mad in that long tunnel. I had teased him unmercifully about it, but I was beginning to understand his fear.

  Another quarter of an hour and a faint gleam ahead of us turned out to be another lantern like ours, abandoned alongside a large, empty leather sack at the opening of a wide side passage. Davyn set our lantern beside the other, trimmed it to a soft glow, then motioned us forward. Narim whispered in my ear, “Fifty paces from the crossing.” I couldn’t help but count the steps in my head. The silence was as palpable as the warm air, more heavily tainted with the rotten, sweet smell of brimstone. Mixed with the stink was a thick, ripe, animal smell ... musky ... dragon.

  “Where in the name of all sense are we?” I said with scarcely more than an outward breath.

  Neither Elhim spoke, but I got my answer soon enough. A faint smudge of light in the heavy darkness marked the end of our journey, and when I saw what was beyond, I was transfixed with wonder and terror and astonishment.

  We stood in our tiny dark hole high on the wall of a vast cavern, not one polished and furnished and home-like, as was the Elhim refuge, but crude and rough in its gigantic dimensions, blasted from the roots of the earth and lit by burning heaps of rubble. The cavern floor was pitted with boiling pools of luminous green and milky white, cracks and fissures that vented steam and smoke enough to make the walls drip and the hot air heavy and oppressive. In between the pits and pools were half-rotted carcasses and bones of every imaginable size. When I was forced loose from my paralysis enough to take a breath, I gagged at the stench of brimstone and carrion and the musky, decaying foulness of a beast too long confined.

  For the cavern was occupied by a copper-scaled monster five times the height of a man and twice that in length even with the spiked tail curled beneath it—a sleeping dragon. The patterned wings of green and copper were folded into bony ridges on the massive flanks, and the monstrous head was lowered to the ground, the gaping nostrils spewing only weak and intermittent spurts of flame in rhythm with the harsh blast of its breathing. The horny brow ridges were as thick as logs, as were the coverings that encased razor-sharp talons that could rip the hide of an elephant as if it were paper. The armored flesh was crusted with stony parasites like the hull of a ship long docked, and the folds where the head joined the long, muscular neck were deep. This dragon was unthinkably old.

  From behind me Narim made some movement, and it took me a moment to judge what it was he did, but when I saw the tiny figure far below us standing on a jutting outcrop of red rock, I shook my head in disbelief. The woman Lara stood almost in the beast’s face, just at the level of its eyes. She wore leather breeches and tunic, elbow-length gauntlets, and a stiffened-wool helmet—Rider’s armor. At Narim’s second signal, she raised her hand and shouted so that her words echoed through the thick foulness of the air and bounced from the moss-slick walls of the cavern. She spoke in the ancient tongue of the Ridemark, her voice stern and commanding, unyielding in the force of her will. “Arrit, teng zha nav wyvyr ...” Wake, child of fire and wind. Wake from the sleep of dying and heed my command.

  There was a pause as the echoes died away, as if the very orb of the world stopped its spinning dance about the sun, holding time in abeyance. My soul cried out in dread, commanding me to hide before time took up its path again. Thrumming, insistent panic begged my feet to run. But instead I sank to my knees, Narim and Davyn at my shoulders, their thin, strong fingers digging into my flesh as if to hold me together. When the beast began to move it was too late.

  “Speak your name, beast,” commanded the woman.

  The huge body shifted uneasily, the battering ram of a tail slamming into the cavern wall, the very movement causing the rumble that shook the ground. Rough breath and a snort of fire as its head lifted up slowly, and then the eyes came open. Glaring red eyes, swirling pools of scarlet flame glazed with films of ghastly white, filled with wild, unreasoning hatred—the gaze that could transfix a victim in horror while the furnace within was readied to release volcanic breath that would flay a man and cause his blood to boil right through the veins. The woman was sure to be incinerated.

  “Speak your name; then return to your winter’s death. The snow still lies deep upon the hunting grounds, and your brothers and sisters will not heed your call.” She held her hand in the air, and in the short, fiery bursts from the waking beast’s nostrils, I saw the flash of dark red in her fingers. A bloodstone—a kai’cet, the Riders called it. Heaven and earth! But every speculation as to how she had gotten away from her clan with one of its treasures, or how she had learned to use it, a woman—one who would never have been considered for training in the secrets of the Riders—all of that was lost when the dragon gaped its jaws and belched out a garish rainbow of fire that arced over Lara’s head. The thin trailer of water cascading down the wall behind her erupted in steam, and then the beast released a roar that shook the foundations of the world.

  The tide of sound broke over my head as if the ocean itself had reared up in a single mighty wave and commenced to drown the history of humankind, only it was not an ocean of water, but an ocean of fire. I believed in that moment that my life had come to its ending, that my flesh had been scorched away, that my entrails had turned to bloody vapor just as the waterfall had vanished in steam, and that my bones lay burning on the hard-packed earth of our hiding place. Despair and grief and memory were erased, wonder and curiosity dismissed in a torrent of pain. I could not scream, could not pray, could not weep, for every part and fiber of my flesh quivered in the agony of burning. And yet it was only an instant—less time than the swinging of a pendulum—and I could look upon myself huddled on the now quiet ground, my spasms held in the steady grip of the two frightened Elhim, and I could read the word that had been seared into my soul with pain and fire.

  For that single instant I hung suspended out of my life, and I formed that same word, whether only in my mind or on my tongue I did not know, and I reflected it upon the sender with my spirit’s whisper. Keldar.

  And in that same instant outside of time, I heard his answer, so faint as to be unnoticed by any who had not lived in silence for seven endless years: Beloved.

  Chapter 15

  What words can describe that instant of contact? Lightning is too cold, majesty too weak, glory too dim, salvation too imprecise, devotion too impersonal. Whatever soul it was that spoke to me in that breathless moment, whether god or dragon, pulled me from the brink of disintegration, and I clung to its word as a drowning child to a father’s outstretched hand. So much grief and regret and tender concern was wrapped in it that I did not believe I could encompass all of it in a year of remembering. He knew me, called me by the name Roelan had given me when I was young, the name my god had sung when filling the world with music. All the horror and disgust I’d felt upon learning that the voice of my music was a murderous monster was swept away in the flood of this creature’s care for me. A being with such capacity for love was no beast. My soul was touched with the remembranc
e of joy, and my companions had no idea of it, for I could not tell them, could not move or speak without letting go of the fragile moment.

  “In the name of the One, what have we done?” said Davyn, lifting my drooping head and raking his worried gray eyes over my face.

  “Only what was required. If he cannot bear it, then best to learn it now.”

  “Narim”—even as their faces flickered orange and gold in the reflection of dragon flames, Davyn stared at his friend with scandalized disbelief—“you’ve not told him any of it, have you?”

  “We need to get him out of here.”

  “Narim, my oldest friend, his life is not ours to use as we will. By the One, his very eyes bleed.”

  “By the time he was in our hands, there was no way to tell him. A man in despair cannot choose rationally. And somehow in the past two days, for some damnable reason I cannot see, the others have guessed what we already know. They’ve tried to kill him once and will not give up now they’ve judged him a danger.”

  “That doesn’t make this right.”

  “Ordinary estimates of fairness or justice have no relevance when the survival of an entire race is at stake. As of this moment, Aidan MacAllister is either on his way back to life or he is truly dead. I cannot think he would prefer to be where he was. Now let’s get him out of here so we can judge which way he’s gone.”

  All this was gibberish to me. They raised me to my feet, led me up the long tunnel, and sat me on the rocky hillside facing the rose-streaked silver of the dawn, letting the quickening breeze of morning sweep away the lingering stench of brimstone and decay. Though I struggled to hold on, the last echoes of Keldar’s voice began to slip from my grasp. Helplessly I felt it go, reaching after it with such aching misery and grief that I must have groaned quite audibly. Only then did the words of the two Elhim begin to filter into my head, and I began to wonder again who it was who wanted me dead and what in the universe I was going to do about what had happened.

  “Dragon’s teeth, did he fall off the ledge?” Someone else had come up behind me, someone my mind told me ought to be dead.