Dragon Weather

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  There were places the passage narrowed enough that Arlian wondered how the ore wagons ever fit through, but even so, it was always wider than most of the mine tunnels, and he already felt as if the world were opening out around him.

  And then he was at the top, at the end of the passage, and a heavy wooden door blocked his way. He hesitated. What if there were another guard on the other side? He had no weapon of any kind, not even a rock. What if that horrible fat old man who had carried him down the mine so long ago was out there?

  His mouth tightened. If that fat old man was there, Arlian would wring his neck bare-handed. He was no scared child anymore.

  He had to stop and think for a moment to remember how to work the latch—he hadn’t used one in so long! There were no doors in the lower mine. It was simple enough, though, and he swung the door open.

  Blinding light poured in; he fell back, momentarily terrified. The brightness was so intense he thought he might go mad. He flung an arm across his eyes and squeezed them shut, and still the world was flooded in bright red light.

  He was seeing the inside of his own eyelids, he realized; the light outside the door, whatever it was, was so bright that it was shining right through his flesh.

  But his eyes were adjusting, and after a moment he dared to open one a crack.

  The light was the sun. He knew that. He had been down in the darkness of the mines for so long that his eyes were far too sensitive to handle the ordinary light of day.

  If he wanted to escape, though, he would have to face it, to venture out into that glare and find his way safely away from the mine before anyone realized he was gone. He stepped forward, his arm still up.

  The air moved about him, and felt somehow wrong. His skin crawled, and he shivered.

  That was wind, he realized—just the cool wind blowing. That wrongness was cold—he had been so long in the mine, where the temperature was constant year-round save for where the lamps heated the air, that he had forgotten the sensation.

  He moved forward, and tried to look around, while still shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare.

  Everything looked washed out, almost white, the colors faded and thin, but he could see the great yellow cliff towering above him, and wagon tracks in the dirt at his feet, and ahead the slope of a hill covered in lush green grass, falling away into a valley. Sunlight blazed down from almost directly overhead, so there were few shadows.

  To his left was a small cluster of buildings, low structures of stone and thatch—the mine headquarters, surely, where Lord Dragon had sold him to the mine’s owners. If someone were to look out one of the half dozen visible windows he would be spotted instantly, and could hardly be mistaken, given his ragged condition and pale skin, for anything but what he was, an escaped miner.

  He had to get away from those windows as quickly as possible. The wagon tracks led to the left, past the buildings, then down a dirt road cut into the slope, down and away from the cliff.

  That meant he didn’t want to go left, nor straight ahead. He turned right and began walking—he did not want to tire himself out too soon, so he didn’t run. He stayed close to the cliff, hoping to blend in with the stone, and found himself climbing slowly.

  Before long he had reached the end of the cliff, and stood shivering on a steep slope amid scattered young trees; he paused and turned around, his arms clutched around himself in a futile attempt to keep warm.

  He had not been sure whether it was early spring or late fall until he had noticed freshly fallen leaves scattered here and there, but now he knew it was autumn. He also knew it was definitely colder than he liked.

  And the world was so strange, so intense—the wind on his skin was a constant rippling of alien sensation, the light was so painfully bright, the colors so glaring and vivid; unfamiliar smells were filling his head, bringing back odd bits of childhood memory he hadn’t known still remained anywhere within him.

  It was harsh and bright and cold and uncomfortable, the world almost hurt, but he never wanted to give any of it up, ever again. He thought he would rather die than go back down into the mine.

  And he intended to do everything he could to ensure that he never went back. That meant thinking, planning, not just wandering on aimlessly. He had to see where he was and decide where to go.

  To his left, as he stood there, was the forested top of the cliff, rising up to a peak and showing no signs of human habitation; to the right the land fell away from the cliff’s base in open fields, and he could see thatched rooftops in the distance. The sun had moved slightly, and appeared to have descended somewhat from the zenith, which meant it was in the west—and he had, he judged, been walking northwest.

  Although there was no sign of pursuit, he wanted to put as much distance as possible, and as many other barriers as possible, between himself and the mine. He thought that if he now turned due north, that would provide the ideal balance—no one would find him among the trees, and the cliff itself would be in the way of any search. Since the forest to the north appeared uninhabited, there would be less chance that he might be seen by anyone who would report a runaway slave. It would also be easier on his still-suffering eyes—the trees had lost most of their leaves, but they would still provide some shade, and shelter from the biting chill of the wind.

  Accordingly, he headed north.

  Hours later, when his eyes had adjusted and he barely had to squint even when looking west into the setting sun, he paused and looked around. He had put several miles behind him, across completely unfamiliar terrain; he had stayed clear of roads, houses, barns, and cultivated fields as much as he possibly could, and had seen other human beings only from afar. The outside world was still wonderful, but already beginning to lose some of its intensity and strangeness.

  Now he was on a rocky hilltop, and it was time to stop and plan again. He had to do more than flee aimlessly. He was free of the mine, well clear of it, and it was time to choose a place to go to, rather than one to flee from.

  He scanned his surroundings, and saw little but bare trees and empty sky—the day was cloudless, the sky brilliantly blue, a color brighter than anything he had ever seen in the mine.

  He had crossed streams and taken a drink or two, but he was thirsty again, and hungry, and cold; winter was coming, and he had no coat, not even a shirt. He had no food, no shoes—his feet had been toughened by years of walking on stone, but the sharp twigs and pebbles had still been hard on him as he fled.

  And he knew he must look terrible. His hair had not been cut or combed in years; his beard had never been trimmed. His skin was either woefully pale or starting to redden from the sun, but certainly unhealthy.

  He needed things only other people could provide—but he also feared that anyone who saw him would instantly recognize him as a fugitive. He had no money, no family, his only possessions a crude bag of worthless mementos.

  And he had no idea where he was.

  His mouth quirked into a smile. By any practical measure he had been better off down in the mine, where he always knew exactly where he was and where his next meal would come from—but he would not have given up his freedom for anything. He would rather die of exposure this very night, he told himself, than live to be a hundred as a slave.

  But he had no intention of dying, in any case. He intended to live, to make a life for himself, and to somehow avenge his family.

  Water was not a problem, as these hills produced plentiful fast-running little streams; the summer did not appear to have been dry. Food—he could go for days without food if he had to, he was sure, and had heard tales of people surviving on tree bark and insects.

  Clothing and shelter, though—he needed to find those before the weather turned any colder. Perhaps he could take shelter in a barn somewhere, steal a jacket …

  But where would he find a barn, or any other human habitation? He turned around slowly, taking in the endless parade of gray, leafless trees.

  And saw smoke. A thin line of distant gray smoke wa
s rising in the east.

  For a moment he thought it might be the smoking crater of his own native peak; then he thought it was more likely to be just a hearthfire in some nearby home.

  Either way, though, that smoke meant people, and perhaps shelter.

  Well, then, he told himself, that was where he must go. He would, he promised himself, walk until he found what he sought, or until he could walk no more.

  And he set out to prove it.

  9

  Sanctuary

  The night was moonless, and after he had walked into branches half a dozen times and stumbled a score, Arlian admitted that he could walk no more—painful as the bright light of day had been, he needed it to see where he was going. Even his dark-adapted eyes could not deal with the forest at night, so he dug himself into a pile of dead leaves for warmth and huddled there until morning.

  He did not sleep well in the cold and unfamiliar surroundings, and awoke before dawn had turned the eastern sky from gray to pink. He wasted no time in getting himself moving once again, and was pleased to see that the line of smoke he had followed the previous evening, until darkness had made it impossible, was still present—though it seemed no closer than before.

  Around midmorning he came upon a homestead, a house and three small barns set upon a few acres of fields; watching and listening carefully for any sign of the occupants, he crept into one of the barns and used the sharp end of an old hoe he found there, struck against a whetstone, to hack his beard down to a more reasonable length. It was still ragged and unkempt, but he had been working his fingers through beard and hair almost constantly as he walked, and he thought he might now look merely disheveled, rather than completely wild. He used a discarded bit of leather to tie his hair back—it wasn’t a proper braid, by any means, but it was better than nothing.

  He looked at his reflection in a half-filled trough and thought that if he had had a blouse and sandals he would be willing to allow himself to be seen.

  There were no shoes or shirts to be found in the barn, though. He did fish a handful of dried corn from the bottom of an abandoned trough and carry it away, nibbling it one or two grains at a time.

  That first homestead was not an isolated outpost in the wilderness; rather, Arlian realized when he crept out of the barn and looked squintingly eastward, it stood at the end of a narrow road, and other small farms adjoined it. He had crossed back over the line between the forested wilderness and civilization.

  He hoped that he had put enough distance between himself and the mine that this would be entirely a good thing. He didn’t dare use the road openly, as yet, but instead crept along behind the houses and barns and smokehouses. Staying close to the buildings also served to shelter him from the worst of the cold winds that seemed almost constant.

  He fed himself from livestock feed as he went, stealing a handful of grain here, a few dried fruit there; he resisted the temptation to break into a smokehouse or creamery for anything more substantial. He had eaten no meat since the day his parents died, and the scents that drifted from the smokehouses were almost overwhelming, both tempting and nauseating, driving him to hurry past as quickly as he could.

  He made his way onward, eastward, for another several days, sleeping in barns or woodsheds, living on animal feed and drinking from untended wells, perpetually cold and hungry, shivering as he walked. Several times he saw people, and a few times he was seen; whenever that happened he veered away but kept walking, so as to appear an ordinary traveler. Twice someone called to him, but on both occasions he ignored the hail and kept walking, and both times the other decided against pursuit.

  He passed villages occasionally, but skirted well around them.

  On the fourth day after his night in the woods he came across laundry hung out to dry, and took a man’s linen blouse, promising himself that someday he would pay the rightful owner back. When it had dried it provided some significant comfort against the cold, but he still dared not let himself be seen—after all, not only was he still suspiciously shaggy and barefoot, but the shirt’s rightful owner might recognize it.

  On the fifth day he could no longer resist temptation, and stole a ham; he was sick that night as his stomach rebelled at the unfamiliar food.

  The next morning there was frost on the fields, and between that and his upset digestion he was somewhat slower than his usual in setting out. He took the time to study that column of smoke that he had followed for so long.

  That was no mere chimney, nor even a village, he realized, but the smoke of a great city.

  Manfort, almost certainly.

  He had always wanted to see Manfort. What’s more, if he wanted to find Lord Dragon, to avenge the desecration of his village, Manfort was the logical place to start looking—but he could hardly walk all the way into that famous city in his present condition, wearing nothing but ragged breeches and a stolen blouse so close to the onset of winter.

  Well, it was still some distance away, he was certain. He was well clear of the forest now, making his way across gently rolling hills where one farm blended into the next and the next and the next for as far as the eye could see, where the road led from one village to another at intervals never exceeding twenty miles and often crossed or joined other roads in the process, but it was still countryside, and he had yet to glimpse a single watchtower or turret.

  Still, he could hardly proceed in his current manner indefinitely; some time before he reached the walls of Manfort he would have to find a way to clean himself up and obtain proper clothes. Then he could present himself at one business or another, looking for honest work, to get himself a living before he began his pursuit of revenge.

  He gave the matter some thought as he rambled onward, past farms and villages.

  Perhaps, he thought late one chilly afternoon as the sun was reddening behind him, he could simply present himself as a traveler down on his luck, one who had been beset by bandits but escaped, and offer to work for his keep at an inn. He had no special skills, but he had learned to swing a pick in the mines, and he thought that he could use that experience in splitting firewood.

  He remembered Grandsir saying that bandits never came this far north, but he could hope that either the old man was wrong, or times had changed while he was in the mine, or whoever he approached might not know as much as his grandfather had.

  He blew on his hands to warm them and rubbed the palms together, and decided that the time had come to try. He would have to rejoin the human race eventually, and this seemed the right time.

  He was approaching the biggest town he had seen yet, one so large that it could scarcely be called a village, much larger than his own childhood home. He was also nearing Manfort; that thin line of smoke had become a broad tapestry streaking up the eastern sky, and on those rare occasions when he caught an unobstructed view to the east he thought he could see the tops of towers in the distance.

  He was not about to march on into the city, but this town seemed suitable. He decided to risk inquiring somewhere within it—but he could not yet bring himself to walk openly down the main streets. Instead he crept into the town through the alleys, skirting the denser areas, looking for the back of an inn—he thought that if he presented himself in the stableyard he might be more acceptable than he would be at the front door.

  Then, when he had circled almost halfway around the town’s heart, he saw a building some three stories in height, of dressed stone trimmed with carved wood and all roofed in tin, with a dozen curtained, well-lit casement windows. A coach stood by the side door, with four horses yoked to it and a driver sitting impatient at the front, clearly waiting for someone who had gone inside. The yard behind the main building held more horses, rather than oxen or mules, and the whole complex was off to one side of the main highway, outside the town itself.

  That was surely an inn, and a very respectable one from the look of it. He crept toward it. He did not want the coachman to see him yet, so he circled around toward the other side, and at last emerged
between the stable and a woodshed into a muddy yard.

  The inn’s back door was closed and dark. He frowned, and looked up at the windows.

  As he did, a casement on the second floor swung open, the curtains were pulled aside, and a young woman leaned out, flapping one hand as if to drive away an unpleasant odor.

  Arlian stared.

  Except for a few quick glimpses from a distance over the past few days, he had not seen a woman since he was a boy of eleven. Many times over the years in the mines, as he grew to manhood, he had been very much aware of this lack, but he had been in no position to do anything about it; since his escape he had been too busy, too concerned with other matters, to give it any thought.

  Now, though, all those years of deprivation caught up with him at once, and he stared open-mouthed.

  The woman’s features seemed impossibly delicate to him, her eyes huge and alluring; her dark hair was long and elaborately curled, hanging in graceful curves around her face. Her arms were bare and slender, her skin fair.

  And she was naked—or at least, all he could see of her was. Her exposed breasts were plainly visible in the pinkish glow of sunset, the nipples large and dark.

  Arlian’s breath caught in his throat; his clothes suddenly seemed to constrict, strangling him.

  Then she stopped waving and closed her eyes for a moment, tipping her head back and taking a deep breath of the cool outside air. Her hair fell in sliding coils down her back and flowed around her shoulders, shining in the lamplight that spilled out around her, and Arlian swallowed hard. He was feeling sensations he had no name for, things he had never felt before. He took an uncertain step forward.

  As he did the woman opened her eyes and looked down into the stableyard. Arlian froze, but it was too late; her gaze locked with his, and her eyes opened wide in surprise.

  Arlian stood, rooted by terror and shame and lust, his thoughts buried in a conflicting tangle of fierce, unfamiliar emotions.