Dragons in the Earth

by Judith Tarr

  Someone had done this to him. Or some thing. He let his head fall back, turning his face to the moon. Its light looked like water, pouring over him.

  He melted. Hands into hooves. Hair into mane. Warm dark skin under moon-white coat. But his eyes were the same.

  So was his voice in my head. “I don’t understand this, either.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  He shook himself all over. Lifted each hoof; inspected his flanks and flicked his tail. Relief flowed through him, cool and faintly sweet, but with an even fainter hint of regret.

  “Thumbs,” he said. “Thumbs are useful.”

  “That’s what you have me for.”

  He rolled an eye at me, and flicked an ear. His shoulder turned. It wasn’t exactly a request.

  I started to tell him there was no living way, after what I’d just seen, that I’d get on his back. It was too weird.

  He flattened his ears at me and tossed his head.

  What the hell.

  The moon didn’t waft me up, and he wasn’t about to bow down to a mere human. I lined him up beside the fence and clambered and lurched and one way and another got myself where he wanted me.

  He walked sedately back to the pasture. No flying leap over the fence. He sidled to the gate and waited with conspicuous patience while I fumbled it open, nudged him through, and fumbled it shut again. Then he walked into the circle of his mares and let me know it was time to get off or he’d arrange it for me.

  I smacked his neck. “Don’t get fresh, you. I’ll get off when I’m good and ready.”

  The mares’ approval washed over me. He sulked, but he didn’t buck me off, as he was well capable of doing even if I hadn’t been in fancy pants.

  I slid down and smoothed his back where I’d been sitting. It felt the same as always: like neoprene over steel. I deliberately refrained from thinking about the other version I’d seen in its skin-tight starry coat, with the black curls tumbling over it. That one wasn’t for me.

  Aemilia bumped me with her nose, almost knocking me down. I thought she might be laughing at me.

  I glared at her, but she showed no sign of turning into a woman. No desire to, either. She was perfectly happy with the body she was wearing.

  14

  I might have made a phone call before I faceplanted in bed. Snapped at the voicemail, “You have some explaining to do.”

  If there were any dreams after that, I didn’t remember them. I sleepwalked through the morning chores.

  Emma was in about the same condition after a long night in the circle, so we stumbled around each other. By then we were so used to the routine that we didn’t need to say a word.

  It was her turn to haul hay down to the pasture. That suited me perfectly. I hadn’t made up my mind yet what to do or say around Bel. Considering that he was probably the avatar, or the were-form, of an ancient Mesopotamian god.

  The mares were still laughing at me. As if there was anything whatsoever to laugh at.

  “Lucky for you it’s your day off,” I said, “or I’d work your collective asses into the ground.”

  They weren’t even slightly intimidated.

  When I got back to the house, with nothing more on my mind than the strongest coffee I could get my hands on, my phone was blandly messageless. But I had email.

  Le Cirque Equestre invited me to attend a performance in Scottsdale a week from Sunday. Tickets and backstage passes would be waiting at the office. There was a booking at a hotel for that night. Fancy hotel, with “Resort” in the name.

  The tickets were for two. But if Emma came with me, there’d be no one to look after the horses.

  That’s the down side of living the life equestrian. You can’t just toss a bag of grain in and top up the water barrels and run away for the weekend. Somebody has to check in at least a couple of times a day, feed in measured installments, make sure nobody’s crapped in the barrels or put a leg through a fence or died of colic.

  Emma was stoic. “I don’t mind,” she said. “There’ll be other chances to see the Cirque.”

  “Damned right,” I said. “I’ll get you a set of tickets, don’t worry.”

  The way she shrugged, I knew I’d have to keep my promise. Not that I had any intention of reneging. I owed her, even if she was being paid to stay, and we both knew it.

  I really should just go by myself. Even Caro wouldn’t believe what I’d seen last night. We play with energy and court visions and invoke powers, but we don’t have actual moonlight conversations with gods. We’re lucky if one of us gets something more or less coherent out of a passing ghost.

  Elissa knew that. Was she expecting me to call Dorrie, then?

  If she wanted Dorrie there, she could make her own call. Which was not nice of me, but maybe I was protecting Dorrie, too, depending on what Elissa had to say when I finally persuaded her to talk.

  I turned my back on it all that week. I rode the mares, but I walked a deliberate circle around Bel.

  Until the morning I went to fetch Matina, and the grey horse who set himself in front of me was shorter, stockier, and flat refusing to move. When I tried to step past him, he delicately closed his teeth around my wrist.

  I froze. He hadn’t exerted any pressure at all, but one snap of those jaws could shatter bone. Or he could toss his head and rip my arm off.

  “Let go,” I said, a little breathless, but steady.

  He would, but I had to put the halter on him and not Matina. And then I was going to ride.

  “I can’t do that,” I said, though I was braced to lose my hand. “It’s too weird.”

  He didn’t care. He wanted his ride. I was his rider. Therefore . . .

  Horse logic has its devastating side. He was the same Bel he’d always been. I just hadn’t known how much there actually was to him.

  I had to face it sooner or later. He wasn’t going to let Emma on his back, and it was part of my job to keep the horses in shape. Either I sucked it up and dealt with it, or I collapsed in a heap of guilt.

  “They won’t fire me,” I said, though I wasn’t totally sure of that.

  They might not, but he would.

  I realized I didn’t want that to happen. It wasn’t this great soaring revelation. I just knew.

  I held up the halter.

  It had Matina’s name on it. He didn’t care. He let go my arm and slipped his nose into it, neat and tidy.

  It was a decent ride. Not great. I was still too weirded out. But I calmed down after a while.

  Riding a stallion, riding a god in horse form—they were about the same. Same sense of power under the hood. Same tropism toward doing what the alpha mare told him to.

  He was all horse by daylight. What he was by night, I hadn’t tried to find out. Emma did the bedtime checks that week, without visibly wondering why I’d suddenly developed a tendency to fall over early. Probably she figured it had something to do with old age.

  I didn’t dream, either, that I remembered. And that was weird, too. It was a very quiet week. Almost too quiet.

  By Thursday I had to make a cat-food run: stocking up, as if I was going to be away for weeks instead of just overnight. I deliberately avoided stopping by the Women’s Side, but there was Caro in the feed-and-pet, loading up on grain. I’d have missed her if I hadn’t stopped to admire—in a manner of speaking—the latest thing in cowboy bling: full headstall, breastcollar, and saddle blanket in neon red and green, complete with flashing LED lights.

  “And here I thought the shocking pink and purple ostrich leather parade saddle was the end of civilization,” Caro said beside me.

  I jumped a good foot. I hadn’t even felt her coming. “Imagine them together,” I said when I could breathe again.

  She winced. “Really. Let’s not.”

  I could have let her go then. Instead I said, “Want to go to Scottsdale this weekend?”

  Of course I expected she’d be busy. Christmas season is slower in Tucson than you might think—The Season sets
in in January, when the Gem Show takes over every hotel and vacant lot in town—but the gift shop at the Women’s Side was always mobbed.

  She gave me one of her level looks. “Le Cirque?”

  I nodded.

  “I can do that,” she said.

  I let that sit for a couple of breaths. “Emma told you.”

  “She did,” Caro admitted. “She thinks you might want some backup.”

  “To watch a circus with horses?”

  I got another look, longer and leveler than the first. “Emma doesn’t do false alarms. Pack your kit. I’ll bring mine.”

  “Look,” I said. “If this turns out to be dangerous, I really shouldn’t drag you into it.”

  “I’m already in it,” Caro said. “I’ll see you Sunday. Pick me up at eight.”

  I widened my eyes. “A.M.?”

  “Show’s at two,” she said. “Time to get there. Time to get lost finding the hotel. Time to get into whatever we’re getting into.”

  I groaned, but I had to agree with her.

  I was glad, too, though I tried not to be. Caro was backup with hobnailed boots on. Anything we got into, she’d do her best to be up for. Or we’d have a nice little overnight with pretty horses and nice people.

  Pigs could fly on pink bumblebee wings. Which, in the world I’d fallen into, might just be possible.

  15

  Battening down a horse farm, even when you’ve got Emma-caliber backup, is not a simple operation. I wouldn’t have gone to bed at all the night before I had to leave, if she hadn’t chased me in and stood over me till I surrendered.

  I didn’t expect to sleep, but as soon as I lay down, I was out. The next I knew, Roswitha was yowling in my ear.

  It was pitch black outside. December dawn. Bloody cold. Emma had coffee brewing in the kitchen and cats chowing down on their morning gooshyfood. “I fed already,” she said before I could start. “I’ll do stalls after. You’re packed, right?”

  I was. I’d managed that before I fell into bed. There was just one last thing, calling to me from my bedside table: the tiny carved horse who’d been with me since the night of the barbecue.

  I slipped him into my pocket, and he settled there. He felt just a little bit smug, like Bel when he’s manipulated me into feeding him an extra handful of baby carrots.

  Emma poured coffee into me and made me eat a bowl of hot cereal, then pushed me and my overnight bag out the door. There wasn’t enough of me to be coherent, let alone be twitchy about where I was going or what I’d do when I got there. I was as ready as I was going to get. I had the directions on my phone, and printed out, too. I’m old-fashioned that way.

  The horses ignored me on the way by. I wasn’t even close to a priority compared to their breakfast hay.

  Everything was quiet. The Old One focused on the west, but calmly. The ranch was safe, and the horses hidden in it, just as they should be. I couldn’t sense any threat; nothing rode the air this early morning, except a lone mist dragon undulating above the ridge.

  Because the back of my head was itching in a particular way, I looked for the hunter. I couldn’t find it. Either it had gone in search of prey on the far side of the world, or it had learned to hide itself.

  I didn’t want to think about that possibility.

  The sun was still behind the mountain in back of me, but it had dyed the Catalinas deep gold. The light grew as I drove toward Tucson, till I found myself in full morning.

  Caro lives on one of the dirt roads just off the east side of the national park. It’s the kind of road that can eat your tires if it doesn’t want you there, but I knew where the dips and the broken culverts were, even in my half-awake state. I made it as far as Caro’s front drive, with a pause to say howdy to her horse Max, who was hanging his big old head over the fence and flapping his lip at me.

  Max is a trickster horse, like Ricky but older and a lot deeper. He approves of me for some reason. He doesn’t approve of most humans; he thinks they’re too stupid to live.

  He liked that I was there that morning. I took it as an omen.

  Caro loped out of the house with a bag over her shoulder and a supersized travel mug in her hand. She was wearing jeans and her very ex-husband’s leather biker jacket as if she was going out to ride a horse instead of a ten-year-old pickup, with her hair pulled back in a braid. She looked armed and ready for battle.

  I shot the lock on the passenger side; she swung herself in and strapped down. We didn’t say a word as I put the truck back in gear. I never make much sense before ten a.m., and Caro isn’t a talker. If she has something to say, she says it. Otherwise, she’s comfortable in the quiet.

  I turned up toward the Catalinas, running along the base of the rampart in the Sunday-morning lack of traffic. My mind was in driving mode, not thinking about where I’d come from or where I was going, except as two spots on a map.

  When we came out onto the highway and aimed toward Phoenix, it felt like riding out of a fortress. The western end of the Catalinas plunged down on our right hands, and the flat, barely rolling basin opened up ahead, with the occasional minor mountain range to break up the monotony.

  It used to be all farms and cotton fields—Pima cotton, you know—but now it’s just sprawl. There’s a limit to it: Indian land, where the sprawl stops and the old landscape holds on. The light is different there; the ancestors haven’t gone anywhere, and the old ones still guard the sacred places, except where the astronomers have negotiated space on the peaks.

  I was almost too disoriented to drive, between the old ones and the jangly white-people noise and the dragons asleep under the mountains. Caro looked asleep, but I felt her holding space beside me, clearing my head enough to keep me on the road and driving like a sane being.

  The dragons were more conscious than usual that morning. They were still asleep, but their dreams had that sharp, waking edge. Without even thinking about it, I sent them deeper-sleep thoughts, the way I might have with one of the small spirits at home.

  I didn’t even dare to be shocked at my presumption. That might set them off. Then I had no idea what would happen. Earthquakes. Volcanic eruptions—it’s been a long time since any of the volcanoes around the valley has had anything to say, but that could change in no time at all.

  Phoenix isn’t nearly as present on the spirit side as Tucson is. It’s been bladed and trampled and developed till anything that might have tried to survive there is dead or fled. Here and there some New-Agey type has tried to pull some of it back, or fake it, but there’s not much left to work with.

  I suspected that was part of why the Cirque had staked its tents in Scottsdale. If my part of Tucson was so full of power it could hide anything, even gods, then the Valley of the Sun—not so fondly called the Forge of God—was a dead zone, like a black hole of the spirit.

  We could see the tents for miles before the highway finally let us go. They were tall, pointy, and vaguely medieval, and pure white. In the white light of December noon, they were close to blinding.

  I couldn’t feel anything weird about or around them. They were a dramatic fashion statement, but that was all they seemed to be.

  My GPS with its snotty British voice directed me to drive on past the banners and the billboards to another and equally stagey setting, this one with avenues of palms and dramatic fountains—flaunting their water waste, how very Phoenix—culminating in, more or less, the Alhambra.

  We were being put up in style. The staff barely blinked an eye at Caro with her biker grunge and me with my faded preppy lack of chic. We were valeted, checked in, and installed in a room with a lovely view of the palms and the white tents in—I timed it—fifteen minutes and thirteen seconds.

  Not only did we have time for lunch, we could have checked in for a quick massage, but I was too antsy and Caro made it clear she’d walk to the show if I didn’t get the truck fast enough.

  “Got a feeling?” I asked her.

  She shrugged, with a distinct overtone of shiver. “Some
places are too neutral,” she said.

  I knew exactly what she meant. I’d have killed for a bit of Tombstone kitsch or a nice haunted hotel. This sterile upscalery made me itch for something to get a psychic grip on.

  We could have walked to the tents, but I had a sense in the back of my mind that it would be good to have a getaway vehicle. I also had the sense that I was being paranoid, but better paranoid than—whatever.

  Because I was paranoid, I parked at a good angle to escape, on the end of a row with a clear line to the nearest exit. It was almost as long a walk to the entrance from there as it would have been from the hotel, but without a valet to get in the way.

  The whole show was its own site: parking on the bladed, barren flat, and the tents up near the road inside a circle of chainlink and white canvas. The effect was like a moat full of cars and trucks, and a castle flying the Cirque banner, white horse on black, from its multiple turrets. We were funneled into the castle from the lot down a straight sandy road lined with more banners, leading us through a gate wrapped in white streamers and topped with yet another banner.

  It was pure circus, and it was also very subtle woo. There were wards on all the perimeters, from the widest to the narrowest. I might not have felt them if I hadn’t been hypersensitized to anything that had to do with the Cirque.

  I caught Caro walking the way she does when she’s approaching a ceremonial site: cadenced and careful, putting each foot down just so. It wasn’t much more obvious than the wards, but I felt the air shift ever so slightly.

  The wards were accepting us. Anyone could come in here; it was a public space. But the protections that surrounded it had agreed to protect us.

  I caught myself before I blurted out any of this to Caro. She knew. She knew I knew. That was as far as it needed to go.

  Inside the gate was an open courtyard laid out with graveled walks and faux-stone planters overflowing with white flowers. There was a pool in the middle, and a statue in the middle of that: a white horse with masses of mane and tail, curvetting in a flowing arc like the sweep of a wave.