“You think it’s safer at your house?”
“For a while, yes. We can mislead this pursuit.”
“Really?” N’Doch brightened and began to look slyly around. “Well, then, Papa Dja—I think I can handle this. I’ll have you back home in no time at all.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
It’s crowded in the courtyard with all five of them there, but the look of approval in his grandfather’s eyes is worth any discomfort. Approval, and just the slightest trace of awe. The old man may know something about practically everything but clearly, he’s never experienced instantaneous transport before. N’Doch begins to think he could get into this dragon business after all.
The dogs set up a choral howl in the house. The girl reaches to reassure the brown dragon. It makes N’Doch grin to think that any critter as well armed and armored as that big guy could be afraid of dogs. He’s glad it’s not his dragon putting up such a fuss over nothing. But Djawara goes to the door and hushes the dogs sternly. Then he says something to the girl, gesturing toward the deeper shadow beneath the trees filling the little side yard. Remembering the copter, N’Doch glances upward, then around.
“So, Papa Dja—you got some kind of jamming signal hidden around here that’s gonna disable that copter’s sensors?” He laughs. “Some kind of cloaking device?”
“I said ‘confuse,’ not ‘disable,’ but actually I do. The birds are my cloaking device.”
“Oh, yeah, the birds.” Because of course the trees are full of them. Hundreds, maybe more. “Will it work?”
“Always has before.”
N’Doch wonders how often his grandfather has need of concealment from the likes of Baraga. “What if they leave?”
“I’ll call them back if we need them.”
“Oh.” It doesn’t sound foolproof, but N’Doch is distracted by the big dragon, who is looking unusually squat and reptilian as he squeezes himself under the low, spreading branches. “He’ll never fit.”
“He will.”
And sure enough, the brown guy slowly drags his bulk inward until he’s disappeared beneath the leaves. N’Doch peers under the branches and sees only shadow, a limitless darkness—and the dragon’s tail vanishing into it. A chill creeps up his spine.
“Papa Dja, how . . . ?”
“Don’t think about it, son. Just don’t.”
“But . . .” He’s not sure he wants the blue dragon swallowed up likewise, but she’s already on her way, leaving a trill of music in his head that sounds like reassurance. When she, too, has vanished, Djawara dusts his palms lightly and gestures N’Doch and the girl into his house. It crosses N’Doch’s mind that maybe Djawara’s neighbors are right to be afraid of him.
Inside, it’s dark, and Djawara lights a little kerosene lamp. N’Doch is about to explain the boondocks lack of electricity in the house, and then he remembers he’s the only one who’ll be missing it. The dogs leap around them with interest and suspicion. N’Doch makes a quick head count: seven of them this time. Seven scrawny but otherwise healthy-looking, lop-eared, evil-eyed mutts. Most of ’em good-sized ones, too. He expects the girl to freak, since her dragon’s so weird on them. Instead, she reaches out her arms to gather them and gets down on her knees among them like she’s welcoming old friends. They snarl and shoulder each other for her attention, but she speaks stern German to them and calms them. Then she smiles over their hairy backs at the waiting men.
“She tells them they’re beautiful,” Djawara translates. “That she’s never seen such clever dogs. They lap it up. Dogs are fools for flattery.”
“It’s good you speak her lingo, Papa Dja.” N’Doch doesn’t mention his doubts that the dogs speak it also. “I can’t talk to her otherwise, when the dragons aren’t around.”
“Aren’t they around?”
“No, they . . .” He realizes he knows this now, without even looking. He can tell from the silence in his head. He wonders where they’ve gone, and how they left from that weirdness beneath the trees. “They’re off hunting, probably. They’ll be back.”
“No doubt.” The old man is smiling one of his most complicated smiles. “Why don’t you teach Mademoiselle Erde some French?”
“Well, I will . . . I guess I will, when I get around to it . . . if she’s still here.”
“She will be.” Djawara lights a second lamp and carries it onto the cooking porch at the back of the bungalow. He sets it on a wooden slab beside a basket of vegetables. N’Doch comes to hover over the basket eagerly.
“You grow all this?”
Djawara nods. “Poor shriveled things. I can’t haul as much water for them as I used to be able to. But they’re all safe.”
“Look okay to me.” Squashes, tomatoes, peppers, a few things N’Doch doesn’t recognize. He picks up a long green thing he’s forgotten the name of. “What’s this?”
“A cucumber. Have you never had a cucumber?”
“Not for a real long time, Papa Dja.”
“Hmm. Getting bad in town, is it?”
“Bad to worse.” Actually, N’Doch hasn’t thought about it like that before, that it might be worse now than it was before. He’s prided himself on living in and for the moment, in the cool chaos of the present, where he’s like the flash of the vid image, the instant of pure data always morphing into something else and abandoning its former self in the irrelevant past. But now the past walks beside him, very relevant and immediate, in the form of a young girl and a dragon, and in a surge of childhood memories loosed by this old man and his peculiar house. He’d forgotten how peculiar. All this allows N’Doch a newly parallax view of himself, moving through time, a product not of just now, but then and now, a continuum. Which now includes a silver-blue dragon that the old man used to sing about a long time ago. Standing there thinking all this while he’s staring at the cucumber, it fairly well blows N’Doch’s mind.
“You all right, son?”
“Yeah, sure.” He paces a little, because he has to. “Papa Dja?”
The old man is slicing a squash into a battered pot. “Mmmm?”
“You know that old song you used to sing, about the kid and the sea serpent? How’d that end? I can’t remember.”
Djawara ladles precious water into the pot from a bucket covered with a damp white cloth. “Don’t know. You’d always fall asleep, so I’d always stop singing.”
“But there must be an ending. Every song has an ending.”
Djawara smiles, heading out back with the pot, toward the fire pit. “Then you’d better invent one. You’re the songwriter, after all.”
Outside, the chatter of roosting birds is deafening. N’Doch pursues him. It’s only half a dozen steps, but it feels like he’s lunging after his old grandfather. He’s just realized who he can blame for all this weird shit that’s fallen down around him lately.
“You got me into this, didn’t you! You were . . . prepping me somehow, way back when. What’s the deal? Are you some kind of alien invader or something?”
Djawara rolls his eyes. “Of course not. Where do you get such ideas?”
“I see it on the vid all the time.”
“All the time?”
“Lotsa times.”
Djawara grunts. “Consider the source.”
“Whadda ya mean?” N’Doch doesn’t think the idea’s so far-fetched, what with all else that’s been going on. “But it’s you knows what I’m supposed to do, right?”
“I know what my grandfather had from his grandfather and told to me so that I could pass it on to you.”
“But why me?”
Djawara kicks up the coals of his cook fire and tosses on a few handfuls of twigs. Then he straightens and faces N’Doch directly. “There is no why. Don’t you see? It just is. You’re the newest link in the unbroken chain. The why is to be ready when the time comes, which appears to be now, so you’re elected. Why not you?”
N’Doch can think of a billion why-nots, but he knows not a one of them will satisfy Papa Djawara
. “But you got me into it,” he repeats in helpless frustration.
“You got into it by getting born.”
“But you got to at least have an idea!” He remembers the girl’s red jewel, what she called her ‘dragon brooch.’ “Don’t you have some, uh, magic sword for me or something? Some kind of, what’s it, a rune book, like in the fantasy vids?”
“This is not a fantasy vid.”
“Damn right! And it’s no dream either, like I kept hoping!”
A few weak flames start up and Djawara sets the pot to boil on the iron grate. “Besides, if I gave you a book or a sword, you wouldn’t believe in it.”
“I might.”
“Inanimate objects bear only the power you yourself in-vest them with. You’re having trouble believing in a living dragon.”
“Oh, I believe in her all right. I got no choice. I’m stuck with her, and you ain’t got a clue to offer me!” He’s shouting now but even over his own outraged squall, he hears the familiar sound. Both men freeze and fall silent.
Whock-whock-whock-whock.
Djawara points toward the sound. N’Doch spots the five swaying pillars of light, bright pendulums slicing the night sky. He imagines a huge, long-legged spider, stalking him through the dark bush. He ducks back under the porch roof. Inside the house, the dog patter stills. The girl comes to the door, and he waves her back urgently.
In the yard, Djawara murmurs, “Don’t worry.” But N’Doch sees he must be a little worried or he wouldn’t be whispering or listening so hard himself.
The search beams swing here, there, then approach, like sharks swimming through the darkness, pulling the copter behind them. The light flows up over the compound walls and flares across the treetops, setting off a loud chorus of bird protest. The birds lift and settle, lift and settle. One roving beam slides over the cook fire and beyond, then reverses itself and returns, blasting Papa Djawara with its icy glare. N’Doch shrinks into the shadowed corner of the cooking porch. Djawara looks up, shielding his eyes against the light, and is no longer N’Doch’s mysteriously powerful relative but a pathetic old man, blinking and staring up out of the bush, caught in the innocent preparation of his evening meal. The light passes by, circles the empty courtyard, scrapes slowly across the bird-cloaked trees, and moves on.
Djawara waits until the sound has faded. Then he bends to stir his pot. “I didn’t say I didn’t have a clue. . .”
* * *
The old man spoons out cold rice while the vegetables are cooking, then sends the dogs outside the walls to hunt, telling them to be careful, strange things are abroad in the night. N’Doch digs into his pack and presents Djawara with some of the fish he’s dried back on the tanker. The girl looks puzzled when Djawara lays out a square yellow oilcloth on the floor, places the big flat bowl of rice and dried fish and squash in the center, then settles himself down in front of it.
N’Doch is embarrassed. He doesn’t mind the old style cooking so much—in fact, this rice dish called chebboujin is one of his favorites. But why can’t the old coot have plates and forks and a table, like folks do in town? Some old traditions are just stupid. What’s the girl gonna think?
But Djawara slides a cushion toward her feet and invites her to sit. When she does, he goes about picking out bits of fish and squash with his fingers, stacking them along the rim of the bowl nearest her. He chatters away in German all the while, explaining himself, N’Doch figures, since the girl nods and reaches with the correct hand to begin the meal. He thinks it’s gross, and he’s amazed that she accepts the old man’s word without question, like she just doesn’t know any better about old people and their uncool ways and notions. Nevertheless, he drops cross-legged beside them, knowing he’d better eat the old man’s way or he likely won’t eat at all.
* * *
Erde was charmed by the little mage’s courtly manners, and thanked him graciously before eating the first of the choice morsels he’d set aside for her. The food was delicious, and it was an effort to sit up straight and not gobble. N’Doch seemed very shy about eating at first. Perhaps he was just making sure she and Djawara got enough before he started in on it.
It seemed like years since she’d eaten a fresh vegetable, though it was only since Deep Moor. Oddly, this tiny compound reminded her of the women’s secret valley, in essence if not in physical reality. She decided Master Djawara would feel very much at home in those fertile meadows, as the women would in the heat and dust here. Immediately she felt as protective of the mage and his home as she did about Deep Moor. She studied every detail of his exotic dwelling: the rough yellow walls and baked mud floor; the flat, bright weave of the fabric hangings; the low wide benches, tossed with cushions, that hugged the walls in between shelves crammed with colorful books. Then there were the mage’s alchemical lamps, whose flames rose and fell on command, like the cook fire back in N’Doch’s stronghold, the castle he called a ship. And she knew true magic lurked outside, beneath those modest trees whose shade had swallowed up two full-sized dragons without a trace. When she’d looked for Earth in her mind soon after, he wasn’t there. She hoped they’d gone hunting again, and would bring back a load of fresh fish to swell this good man’s scanty larder. She waited until he’d eaten enough to slake his hunger, then blotted her lips gently with the hem of her linen shirt and told him of the dragon’s dilemma.
He listened through to the end, only nodding now and then. He seemed unsurprised by the dragons’ ignorance of their own Purpose. When she was done, he got up to make tea, a thick, sweet brew that he served in tiny, delicate flagons without handles. Only after the second serving did he return to the subject, with the suggestion that a quest after an unknown grail might be all the more passionate for being fueled by mystery. Erde could see he put great value in uncertainty. To her mind, he revered it rather too much, but she’d never say so, out of courtesy. Just as she was considering how to probe him further, she felt the dragons return, sleepy and sated.
—Dragon! Welcome! Did you bring food for this good old man?
—Of course. I am no ungrateful guest.
—You are the very soul of gratitude, my dragon. Now, we are discussing important things. You must stay awake and listen.
—We spoke of important things as well. My sister has remembered something further.
“Oh, what is it?” Erde exclaimed aloud. “Oh, Master Djawara! The dragons have news!” She translated as Water explained.
—I said that there are more of us. Now I recall the others’ names: They are our brother Fire and our sister Air. Air is the one we must find. Air was firstborn. She will know what our Purpose is.
“Great,” said N’Doch. “So now we’re looking for two people.”
“A person and a dragon,” Erde corrected.
“Perhaps they are one and the same,” offered Djawara.
“Why do you say that, Master Djawara?”
“Because it seems likely that the eldest should be the one responsible for gathering the others when the need arises.”
“But what’s the need?” demanded N’Doch.
“Indeed, that seems to be the question,” Djawara agreed.
With their news delivered, the dragons had gone to sleep. Erde wasn’t sure how much help their news had been. “I beg you, honored sir, surely there is some advice you could offer us, to further our Quest, to help us find the Summoner?”
The mage did not hesitate. “You must go to the City.”
The words struck home, and Erde wished Earth had stayed awake to hear them. The City. The idea kept reappearing in different guises, in Gerrasch’s reading of his bones and pebbles, in Rose’s Seeing, even in Erde’s own invented Mage City, with its white towers crowding a green horizon. She’d conjured it first to give a lost and despairing dragon a goal and an image of hope, but perhaps her vision represented a truth after all, guessed at by instinct or sensed by some power of Seeing she didn’t know she possessed.
But N’Doch, hearing this once the old mage rem
embered to translate, raised a terrible fuss.
* * *
“To the City? Are you nuts? We barely got out of town alive! How’m I gonna go walking into the City with a dragon on either arm? Might as well send up a flare to Baraga right now!”
“Calm, calm, my boy,” Djawara soothed.
“Then don’t tell her such things! Look, I know you don’t want us here too long, ’cause it’s dangerous for you and we’ll eat you dry, but you gotta have a better idea than that! Mama said you . . .” N’Doch stops dead, hearing an eight-year-old’s whine coming out of his grown-up throat.
Djawara stares him down a while, nodding and pursing his lips.
N’Doch looks away, humiliated. More quietly, he says, “Fâtime said you’d know what to do.”
Djawara lets apology hang unvoiced in the air. Quietly, he pours the third round of tea. Then he replies, “You are all welcome in my house for as long as you care to make it your home. And you would probably be safe. And we would somehow manage to feed ourselves adequately—it’s easier when you have help. But there is a greater need here.”
N’Doch knows this. And sees that he’d hoped to avoid the urgency of it by bringing the dragons to safety in the bush. But safety is not uppermost in the dragons’ minds. Not even in the girl’s, despite her moments of fear and reluctance. He sees that now. He hears the music of dragon presence in his mind, pressing him to action. His shoulders droop. “Okay. So it’s gotta be the City, you say. Got any idea how?”
Djawara looks to the girl, questioning her a bit like he’s checking up on stuff he already knows. She tells him something that surprises him. His eyebrows arch and he nods quickly, pleased. He turns briskly back to N’Doch.
“Well, first of all, since you grew up in the City, a place-image to travel to is not a problem.”
“I don’t know . . . it’s been a while.”
“You’ve been there more recently than you’ve been here, am I right?”
N’Doch nods. Lying to the old man is hopeless.
The Book of Water Page 13
