She pulled a copy of the shirt she was already wearing over that shirt and then pulled her arms in one at a time and somehow pulled the bottom shirt off over her head. I was fascinated. During this trick she put two slices of bread in a metal container which then glowed with some inner fire. She released a yellowish-brown liquid from a metal tube into a pot which she set on a grate above a perfectly round ring of blue fire. She put some dirt in a paper cone and when the liquid was boiling she poured it through the dirt into two mugs. Just as she dumped the cone of dirt into a garbage receptacle that opened magically for her, the bread popped out of its container and she grabbed the brown slices and threw them, swearing through her commentary, onto the counter.
“Butter or jelly? I’m doing both. I should have suggested that you shower last night, but frankly I was out on my feet and really wasn’t thinking straight. God, am I hung over. I keep forgetting what the boys can be like. If you want, you can come back here after and take one. From what you said last night, I’m assuming you really aren’t in a rush to catch a plane or anything. And that way, you could leave your stuff and not have to lug it all around. Don’t worry about returning the sweats. I doubt Joe is gonna come back for them and your muscles fill em out tons better in any case. So that’s the plan, Stan. Grab your... well, you haven’t set it down. There’s a story in you, isn’t there? But I’m not asking, so don’t worry. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Just don’t murder me or nothing okay? I’d be really put out. You ready? Shall we?”
She grabbed her sword bag, handed me one of the steaming mugs, and we left. I discovered that there actually was a sky above all those buildings and I made sure I caught a glimpse of the sun. It made everything seem a little more real.
That day was dreadful. We rode again on the El. But where, the night before, the cabin had been empty but for us and a drunken old man, that morning it was filled to the walls. More people got on and off that vehicle then live in entire villages in Kaveg. All different kinds of people: old and young and dark and light, in all manner of dress. The floor was covered with moist scraps of parchment, crushed cups made of some paper material, and mud. The walls and windows were painted with chaotic symbols that were sometimes repeated on the walls of the rapidly passing buildings. The crush of people was just bearable. The smell was overwhelming.
We rode for quite a while before getting off in some dark tunnel only to get on a different train. Nanda called one red and the other blue, but they both looked filthy gray to me. We soon emerged above ground once again and got off onto a raised platform that overlooked speeding mountless coaches on either side. Four lines of them! She didn’t even glance over.
Another short walk and we reached the hall I had arrived in the previous evening. The You I See Theater is what she called it. My initial joy was founded on a hope that I could somehow make my way back to Voferen Kahago and the battle from here. All morning I tried to find a way home. I wandered back and forth over the space where I had arrived. I opened every door. I even tried suddenly turning my back on my fighting partners in hopes that I could recreate the situation that sent me here.
By the time Peter Wooley called an end to the day and the workshop, I was out of hope. I realized that I was trapped here and began to worry how I was going to survive. My meager healing magic was nothing next to the knobless doors, horseless coaches, and flameless fire these people controlled. I couldn't count on Nanda’s hospitality for long. She owed me nothing. She didn’t know me.
∞
But she hadn’t known my uncle Ko either when she climbed down a dragon side to rescue him. I left Nanda for six sandturns in the middle of nowhere on the side of a dormant, tree-bearing dragon and she found a friend. When Yenay, and I returned from our search for approaches to the old dTelfur village, we found Nanda flushing water through the eyes of an old man.
We found them about ten yards from our makeshift camp, not far from a prodigious drop off the side of the large dragon. It was obvious from the dirt, bruises, and scrapes on both of them that she had somehow pulled him up over that cliff. The dirt and grass were torn up and scattered between the pair and the edge. A long string of skirts, blankets, sacks, and even the thin leather tarp from our shelter were tied from a tree in a bulky tether that led to and hung over the cliff before doubling back to Nanda who still had the end of my treasured wineskin attached to her sword belt. After climbing the cliff face she must have been unable to drag him further and brought to him the objects her simple understanding of healing thought useful.
The old man, bleeding and bruised, was lying on his side. The worn knees of his dirt-encrusted leather leggings were pulled up to the matted patches of rabbit fur sewn onto the chest and collar of an inexpertly tanned deerskin coat. His head was perched on Nanda’s knees as she used a cloth torn from her rarely worn skirts to drip water into his eyes and dab away the yellowish puss that washed out. The visible side of his face was a mess of congealed blood, dirt, and skin.
Hearing our footsteps the old man turned his blind eyes in our direction, “Someone comes.”
Small wonder he should be surprised to hear anyone in this empty land of sleeping dragons. The one who had woken would not approach so quietly or slowly.
“I told you I had friends.” Nanda gently pushed his head back down onto her knees. “Geoffrey’ll know how to fix you up.”
He stopped twitching, stopped trying to see through his eyes, and whispered, “Geoffrey...”
I stepped up my pace, asking Yenay to fetch my traveling satchel or, considering the condition of all things rope-like, the previous contents thereof. “Hello, Sir. I am Geoffrey. My hands may not be as soft or sweet-smelling as lady Nanda’s...”
“Not a lady.” She reminded me.
“I do have some healing powers. Shall I look to your wounds?”
It was in an odd, soft voice that he spoke to me as I asked him about each of the many wounds I encountered. At a distance he had appeared to be a weakened old man. While clearly malnourished, he was still well-muscled. He would have stood at least my height if not a hand taller, had he been able to stand at all with such a badly mangled leg. His hair was long and grizzled, but not coarse. His skin tough and covered in dirt was not spotted or sagging. His face was lined but not wrinkled. He was, I discovered, much younger and stronger than his voice or eyes belied.
He was also lucky. He told me that, having foolishly gotten lost, he was searching for his way back home when the cliff had come upon him and pulled him down, he thought to his death. He had only fallen about a tree-length when a flaking scale caught him. Landing on one leg, he had rolled well on the thin outcrop of dragon thereby avoiding any other serious breaks. A major patch of skin had been flensed from off his face and his mind had been kind enough to allow him to pass out for the time it had taken us to arrive, set up camp, and head off to search for an entrance to the village. When he awoke moaning, Nanda heard him and rappelled down to the rescue.
“Where is your home, sir?” I hoped to keep his mind otherwise occupied while I worked to treat his torn face, still cradled in Nanda’s lap.
“Name you everyone ‘sir,’ boy?”
“All those who inspire my respect.”
“And how could I, a broken old man covered in dirt and old blood, blind by his own stupidity, living trapped on a mountain of dragons, inspire your respect, child?”
“You're alive.”
“These trees are alive,” he twitched as I pulled a sliver of dragon scale the size of muntcoin out of his cheekbone. “They live off the dead hide of this poor creature.”
“You have pity for the dragons?”
“Once I did not. I rode out to kill the wakened one. I climbed through and over this horrible mountain of dormant dragons until I reached the center, the village. Not far from there, over one tall dragon neck, I found a lake. It's in the shape of a sleeping monster. The one missing dragon in this nursery of death. The lake is saltwater. It has no tributaries. It has no drain but the water eva
porates quickly. But the lake never empties because that one waking dragon returns and cries, filling its empty grave.”
The old man paused. He took a breath as I placed a warm, salve soaked patch onto his face. The sting of the medicine would have caused me to scream and grab at the patch but he just closed his eyes and started talking again.
“I resolved not to kill the dragon but to return and tell my sister of its pain. The dragon heard me scrambling up over its sleeping kindred and chased me back into the village with much growling. It did not often visit me, and it did not harm me, but it would not let me leave.
“After what I thought was an eternity of searching the underground village, sleeping in a different room each night, capturing what food and clothing wandered into the vast confines of my prison and rebuilding the farm that had grown wild from a hundred frseason of neglect; after exhausting all the possible and impossible escape routes, the dragon brought me a present.
“Screaming at the sky in tones too high for human comfort, it flew in, circled the village, and swooped over to the lake. I dropped my hoe and scrambled over the dragon neck to follow it. Like a cat bringing its prize into the kitchen to share, the dragon had laid its burdens down on the near shore of the shrinking lake, in the crook of the great dragon’s neck. As I ran and stumbled and climbed down to them the smaller of the two burnt bodies twitched and moaned. When I reached her, my sister was staring at the wakened one perched away on the far side of a sleeping dragon’s torso, its head peaking around a shoulder blade. When she saw me her eyes lit up with a joy which instantly turned to fear. She painfully turned her charred neck to look at her dead partner and then at the dragon. Then she turned back, desperate for me to understand, ‘He didn’t do it,’ she said, 'he didn’t do it.' And then my sister died.
“And still the dragon wouldn’t let me leave the village.”
I took the poultice off and stared at the old man’s face. I pulled him from Nanda’s lap, sat him up, and looked again into the old man’s face. He looked blankly at me, tears dripping yellow from his malformed eyes.
“How old are you, sir?”
“Not two nights ago, I successfully left the village and climbed through the dragons to find my way home. The wakened one did not stop me. The wakened one did not visit.”
“How old are you?”
“I have had no means of nor desire for recording time for many many sheddings of the dragon.”
A chilly wind blew over us and brushed the clouds from the moon and I nearly shook the man for the familiarity of his face and my desire for it not to be him in so much pain. Yenay stopped cleaning out the bandages and watched the man. Nanda held him up and watched me.
“But I did,” he turned his eyes to the sky, “once know a young prince named Geoffrey.”
In my mind, the dirt and lines on the face cleared away, the mangled cheek reformed itself, and the eyes cleared to sparkle my own green back at me. I recognized my ten frseason lost uncle. “Ko!”
∞
Nanda had spared nothing to show my uncle hospitality and I required far less work than he had. Unless this truly was a different woman, and I doubted that, I felt I could trust her to help me find my way here.
As it turned out, I never had to admit to her that I was lost or ask for her help. She took it upon herself to keep me safe.
After the workshop, a car ride, and a few beers at Louie’s pub, Nanda took me in hand and led me to the train, again chattering like a sapet and making as much sense. The light was still dying as we approached the gate under the tracks. I let her precede me to swipe the card that let us pass. When she stepped through the gate she stopped talking mid-sentence. As I stepped in, the gate was slammed shut and a rough hand shoved me down onto the cold, damp, stinking ground.
The three of them would have gotten away if they had just taken her coins and run. But that's not really what they wanted. They took the sword bag from me after they knocked me down, but instead of going through it, a fat guy with gold rings on every finger just tossed it to the side where it landed with a crash in the shadows by the northbound stairs. A small kid with a dishcloth on his head kicked me weakly in the ribs and laughed in my face. His breath put me in mind of the pig slop troughs in Halif the morning after Marcelendrew’s presentation of the family’s new earth apple liqueur.
That was the same morning I was robbed of my purse and my cloak, not two frseason out of Voferen. I had been too frightened then to defend my things thinking my life was worth more than a few muntcoins and a piece of cloth. I quickly learned that my life was dependent upon a few muntcoins and a warm piece of cloth. So I suppose that these brigands incurred the wrath I still carried from seasons ago and that first thief when they tried to rob and humiliate my love.
I lay still there while they tore her cap off and groped her bottom. They forgot about me and I watched as they reached into the front pocket of her shorts, ostensibly searching for her purse.
“We gotta strip search her.” The fat one tore at her shirt.
I slipped my minni out of its hip sheath and cried out. “Why not take my purse?”
“He hasn’t got one.” Nanda spoke before I was done. Her tone was high with a touch of panic, but firm. “He hasn’t got anything you want. Leave him be.”
Her stare bored into me, ordering me to stay where I was. But when the third one went for the buttons of her shorts I went for his heart. Up through the back ribs, it should have been an easy target, but Nanda leaned her weight on the other two and kicked him out of the way. My blade slid into his arm and ripped through as he fell back, cursing.
The fat guy who had been chewing on her ear now pulled a short metal rod from under his arm. Nanda grabbed his wrist and twisted the arm. She brought her left elbow up into the nose of the pockmarked boy who was going through her purse.
I grabbed the bag and knocked him to the ground before he could recover from her blow. A deafening bang riveted my attention back to where Nanda was struggling with the fat guy. She was no longer struggling. The man was falling from her arms with a face frozen in shock. The metal thing they had been struggling over fell to the ground with a clatter as his hands slipped from hers.
Nanda screamed at me, “Up the stairs!”
I followed her, rescuing the sword bag from the shadows. A hand grabbed my ankle as I started up, forcing me to the steps with only the swords to break my fall. I kicked at the hand and dashed up to catch Nanda, ignoring the swearing and scrambling behind me.
Another bang ricocheted through the darkness as the train pulled up to the platform. The nearest door opened about twenty yards ahead of me and I leaned into the pain in my ribs to reach it. Nanda was on board and screaming at me to hurry. I reached the train and leaped aboard, expecting the doors to close behind me as the magical vehicle raced off. But the doors didn’t close. And two of the thieves were already at the top of the stairs. I searched the doors for a way to shut them. Nanda took off running through the empty cabin to the far end. Seeing little choice, I followed her.
We had not gone far when the train lurched and threw us down, the doors only closing after the train had started moving. The first of the two chasing us had gotten his hand on the doorway, but no further.
Nanda always spoke of teamwork in Kaveg and fought readily at my side whenever I needed her and often when I did not. But as we stood on that train too shocked to sit down, she screamed at me for helping.
“Nanda, they would have hurt you.”
“Not so that I couldn’t recover! Now...” She paced the length of the empty compartment.
“Now what? You are not injured. We have lost none of our belongings. One of them has received his due punishment.” I hung on to one of the poles against the rocking of the train.
“His due punishment?!!” She turned on me, “He may be dead! I might have killed him! What were you thinking?!” She turned away, looking out the window as the train slowed down. “You don’t pull a knife on a man who has a gun. You… yo
u just don’t do things like that.”
We were stopping at a station and as the darkness flashed by more slowly, Nanda saw her reflection in the window, “Jesus, I’ve got blood all over me.”
She ripped her shirt off over her head, jogging towards me, revealing a colorful undergarment. An older woman started to step into our car the instant the doors slid open, but as she saw Nanda’s back, she chuckled and jogged down the platform to the next compartment. Nanda bent down at my feet and shoved her bloody shirt into the bag, taking out a sweaty shirt and pulling it on. She sank into the seat across the aisle from my pole, looked at her legs and pulled her bloody shirt from the bag again. After a few frantic moments of scrubbing at the small spots of blood on her legs, she muttered, out, out, damn you then collapsed over her knees with massive sigh and smacked her head on the back of the seat in front of her.
I stood frozen above the sword bag holding that pole and staring at my shivering and psychotic friend as she screamed and stomped the floor. I didn't recognize this Nanda. I'd been through many fights with her. This was the woman who had threatened the life of a Stray Tor wing Commandt in the presence of four weaponsmasters and a bloodmage.
∞
If our friend Toss had not intervened between Nanda and the Commandt, Arinaud, she would most definitely have been unable to continue our journey and by extension, I would have died in the Sapproach river.
“The bitch! What are you doing, Toss? I could have taken him.”
“And his friends, my lady, would have killed you.”
Kivern, the quiet washmistress who lodged us in Tyurae had been present in the gaming yard when Nanda’s conversation with Fierell had turned ugly. Kivern ran to find me at the blacksmith’s home where I was treating his son. By the time I arrived, Toss had led Nanda out through the wall that separated the yard from the shale. She was muttering violently at Toss under her breath and though he was a tall man he was having trouble keeping up with Nanda’s fierce stride while holding pressure against the flow of blood from her arm. When they noticed Kivern and I approaching they abandoned their argument.
Geoffrey's Queen: A Mobious' Quest Novel Page 7
