Dragon Book, The

by Gardner Dozois

  Humans were so stupid. They likened me to a crocodile or some kind of lizard, though surely they should have known that those creatures did not have silver claws or rudimentary wings, let alone the ability to change color. They also did not stand on their haunches and chirp in a reassuring way, indicating that they would like to be friends. My muzzle was far more delicate than that of a crocodile, and my teeth stayed inside it! I was slender, and fine-boned. I was only forty-five inches long in those days, and fifteen inches of that was tail. Yet somehow there were always humans who were terrified by the sight of me. To cater to such idiots, I was kept to my foster parents’ tent when there was no time to introduce me in a new place.

  It was hard to stay inside. I could hear music and laughter, the welcome that came before the boring speeches. One of the emperor’s soldiers—one of my friends—brought me a bowl of stew. I chirped happily at him: he’d remembered I liked honey-nut pastries and gave me two. After he left, I was alone. My boredom soon reached the point at which I might shriek if I didn’t do something. Since Daine only liked me to shriek during combat, I was really doing the right thing for Daine if I took a walk instead.

  I wriggled under the back flap of the tent. On that side lay mountains, their ridges and peaks sharp in the light of the half-moon. A small herd of screwhorn antelope was climbing to higher pastures, away from the noise. They were just as visible to my dragon eyes as they would have been with no moon at all.

  When I could no longer see the antelope, I concentrated on my scales. I changed color according to my mood; my parents knew that. They did not know that, over the long journey, I had learned to change colors deliberately. I let my magic spread out and around me, collecting the shades of shadowed sand, reddish limestone, black lava rock, gray-green brush, and moonlit air. I drew the colors back into patches over my scales. Then I set out for the village.

  I was about to pass through the gate when I heard the very distant sound of young humans whispering together. Since I am always curious, I followed the faint noise around the outside of the wall, away from the meeting of the emperor and his people. Soon the voices were clearer. They belonged to boys, excited ones.

  “Look! She’s at it again!”

  “She don’t learn.”

  “You got rocks? Gimme some.”

  Four boys crouched in the shadows around the ruins of a shed. They were barefoot, their clothes mostly patched. I halted, secure in my camouflage, waiting to see what had their attention. The village garbage heap lay in a dip in the ground nine yards or so away from the boys. A young woman was sifting through the heap, collecting pieces of food and stowing them in a basket on her arm, working by feel and scant moonlight. Magic burned at the heart of her, the stuff called the Gift that humans put to use like a servant. Could she not make money with her Gift, as so many mages do, and buy food?

  The thinnest of the boys crept forward and threw the first rock. He missed by a foot.

  The other three ran up to hurl stones at the woman. One hit her shoulder; another struck her leg; the third missed. She dropped the vegetable she’d been holding, but she made no sound. Instead, she knelt and scrabbled to get the vegetable into her basket. The boys threw more stones. All four hit this time. She half turned, catching them on her shoulders and back. Then she grabbed one and threw it sharply, striking the thinnest boy hard in the belly. While the others took care of him, she scrambled to her feet and ran, ignoring their shouts of anger.

  The boys gave chase. I followed on all fours, trying to think of what I could do that would stop them without permanently injuring them. In normal battles, no one cares if I split someone’s skull or shatter his bones with a whistle. I can throw fire, but that is just as fatal. These were human children. Daine, Numair, and Kaddar would be very angry with me if I killed children.

  The open ground before us gleamed in the dim moonlight. Here the mountains reached into the flatlands with long, stony black fingers that dug into the pale earth, leaving bays of light-colored dirt and brush between them. The woman ran for the bays, clutching her basket to her chest. The boys were hard on her trail. In addition to calling her vile names, they said that she had no business stealing their garbage. I wished I could ask the woman, or them, what they meant. Perhaps it was some odd local custom. Everywhere else I had been, garbage was made of things humans had no more use for.

  Suddenly the race ended. While the woman ran from my sight between two black stone fingers, the boys began to act very strangely. They separated and ran about, skirting areas as if there were obstacles in the way. They never strayed from the open ground between the garbage heap and the rocks.

  At last, they came together, panting and exhausted. I crouched flat, listening.

  “We searched those rocks everywhere, but she vanished!” the thin one said.

  “Every time we think we got Afra cornered, she goes into the Maze,” said another, a male with a long scar on his face.

  The Maze? I wondered. I had seen no maze, though the boys had moved on the open ground as if they walked such a thing.

  “You’d think the rock itself hid her,” grumbled the third boy.

  The four of them drew the Sign against evil on their chests. “I tole you Afra was a witch,” said the one whose clothes were a little better than the other boys’. “Witches do that. They vanish right in front of you.”

  That was pure nonsense. Numair is one of the greatest mages in all the world. He cannot do it unless the spell is already prepared. The female, Afra, had used no spells at all that I had seen. Her Gift was visible to me, but she had not employed it, nor did she wear any spell-charms.

  “We have to warn the emperor!” the scarred one said. “Afra might cast a spell against his life!”

  The four turds raced away, eager to tell a man guarded by my foster parents that their witch, who was too generous to singe them, was a danger to him. Like most humans, they didn’t realize that an emperor would never venture so far from his palaces unless he was very well guarded. I did think that perhaps the boys had seen Numair and mistaken him for someone who was silly. Many people do.

  I followed Afra into the rocky bays where she had gone to hide. I wanted to learn if she knew of the power that had not only made her escape route invisible to the boys but made them believe they had walked some kind of maze.

  Ten feet from the first stony finger, I walked into magic of a kind I had never encountered. My experience of magic even at that time was great, yet this was unknown to me. I had not found it in visits to the realms of the gods or to the Dragonlands. Nor had I felt anything like it in all my dealings with humans, Gifted or born with any form of wild magic. Even the spirits of mountains, trees, rivers, and streams had nothing like this.

  Numair says that magic is a sense for dragons as much as smell and hearing. The strangeness of this new power made my scales prickle.

  I called it “new,” but it was that only to me. As the strange force trickled across my face and made my licking tongue quiver, I could tell it was old. It might even be older than my grandfather, Diamondflame, who owns to several thousands of years. Where did this power come from? Who had placed it here?

  I took a deep breath. The scent of the power entered my nose and burned, making my eyes water. I tried a smaller breath and thanked the Dragongods that Afra carried rotting food. That stench fought the magic’s scent. I took three steps. The strange power thrust at me, trying to stop me. I whistled at it softly, pushing back with my own air-carried magic. My power balanced against that older one as I walked forward.

  Three feet. I slammed into a solid wall of magic that flared a hot white in my eyes. My softer whistle did nothing to that. I was too impatient to work my way up through lesser whistles. I used a midlevel squawk, good for shattering drawbridges. It was enough too for this barrier, which melted. I walked on into a third magic that poured down between two rocks, a flash flood that blazed green with red and blue sparks. I had no time to think. I yowled at the top of my lungs, fearing
what might happen if I failed.

  The flood vanished.

  Far in the distance, I heard humans cry out, demanding to know what was going on. (I heard them talk later about a leopard.) High in the mountains to the east, beyond the humans’ sense of hearing, I heard a rockslide. I cringed. If Daine shaped her ears to those of an animal that heard well, I was in serious trouble.

  When nothing more happened, and no humans came, I went on, following my nose. The scent of rotting garbage led me to a cave set in a mass of orange stone, partway up a black rock divide. Its opening was tucked around a bend in the trail, easily missed if no one knew it was there. Flat stones lay before the cave, so no footprints would ever give a dweller away. Light from a lamp or candle shone from its depths. She had to feel safe there.

  I poked my head inside.

  She gasped, then cried, “Monster! Get out!”

  She was quick to find a rock and throw it at me, painfully quick. It struck my head. I ducked out and waited, holding my paws to the nasty bruise on my forehead. After a moment, I shielded myself in protective spells and looked inside. She screamed and threw a blaze of her Gift at me. I backed out again. Her Gift had not touched me, but I understood why she was so frightened and why she needed any food that she could find. Her baby had begun to cry.

  It was time to think matters through. Turning what I now knew over in my head, I returned to the imperial camp. I needed to obtain a few things.

  I had just returned from my scavenging when I heard Daine and Numair. The long talk was over; they were returning. I smoothed a layer of spells over the items I had procured. When my mage-parents looked at my nest of blankets, they would see only the back of the tent behind me, not the other things. It was tricky to work out something that would fool Daine and Numair, but I’d done it.

  They would have been glad to help if I had let them know about Afra, but they always helped. I didn’t need that. I wanted to do it by myself, in part because I was bored, in part to prove to them—to myself—that I could. I needed something of my own to do. If I had not tamed Afra by the time we had to leave, I would let my parents know about her.

  I curled up in my blankets and pretended to sleep just as they entered our tent. They spoke quietly while preparing for bed. They said that the villagers had told Emperor Kaddar about a number of problems. They were hard for local folk to handle all at once, but their emperor and his companions could take care of them easily if they cared to do so. Kaddar and his men would seek a robber gang that operated in the mountain pass five miles to the east. Daine would see to illnesses among the village herds, while Numair cleared the river channel of the water weeds that choked it. We might be here for as long as a week, even two. That would give me more time to work with Afra.

  In the morning, when dawn just brushed the mountains, and my parents slept, I tied my things in a small bundle. Disguised in the colors of barely lit earth and stone, I returned to the place where the boys had acted as if they were lost in a maze of boulders.

  When the first shock of alien magic crackled against mine, I was ready. In the pale light, I saw it only as a blurring of everything that lay beyond. From sandy earth with its patches of scrub brush, to the black mountain stone, the strange power remade it into softness. It gave this land a more forgiving face.

  When I touched it, the magic ran over my scales. It felt different than it had the night before. This time it was like a thousand tiny hands explored me from crest to tail tip. I banished that thought. Grandfather Diamondflame and Numair would scold me for letting imagination color what I observed. I walked slowly into the magic’s growing resistance, seeing the boys’ tracks from last night, then my own footprints, off to my right.

  Next, I met the second, more resistant, wall. I didn’t see it. I simply walked into it and felt it give a little as I stopped. Again, there was something new, like a pause, as if the magic waited to see what I would do. I shook the peculiar thought from my skull. It was a leftover from sixteen years among humans.

  I had spent the night considering my encounters with this magic. I did not want to risk using sounds by daylight, for fear of drawing attention. If the villagers got frightened enough, they would call on Kaddar, who would call on my foster father. When Numair found this magic, I would no longer have the riddle to solve for myself. I didn’t doubt that my papa could probably shatter these barriers easily.

  Resting a paw against this barrier, I called up the spell I had prepared and blew it forward. The only sound I made was a long, soft hiss. The magic flowed out between my teeth, eating the barrier like acid. It vanished before my spell could devour it all, and I went forward with my bundle.

  I was ready for that third defense, the flood of magic, but it never came. Had I exhausted it last night? I wished I knew who had set these protections. Surely whoever it was had died long ago. Perhaps the mage had been an Ysandir, one of the ancient race alive at the same time that human civilization was beginning to grow. That might account for the total strangeness of the magic’s feel. It did not account for Afra’s ability to pass it without effort, however.

  With no more barriers to fight, I found a hidden place near the cave, where I left my bundle. I reviewed my plan. After last night, I knew I could not rely on the cute tricks that worked with those who knew me best.

  First, I had to investigate. I wrapped myself in silence, then climbed up into the rocks and over to Afra’s cave. She would not hear my lightest claw scratch or the slide of my scales. Then I positioned myself above the entrance to listen. It was so delightful, where I lay. Unlike the black rock, this orange stone was fine-grained and warm, far warmer than it should have been with sunrise just begun. I had an odd fancy that the stone was breathing, which was impossible. Grandfather Diamondflame would have scolded me roundly for so foolish an idea. Yet I could not stop myself from stroking that warm stone like a pet as I listened for what Afra might be doing, deep within her cave.

  Light smoke flowed up from the entry and over my nose. I sniffed: mint tea. Other smells disguised those of rotten food: garlic, ginger, and onion. I smelled another thing, one I knew from the times after Daine gave birth to my human sister and brother. It was mother’s milk. Afra was nursing her baby. She would not be leaving her hiding place right away.

  I backed away from the cave entrance, then halted. I wanted to stay right there, spread over the warm and breathing stone. I didn’t understand. I was no lizard, to doze my life away on any sun-washed rock!

  Finally, I ordered myself to stop being a fluffbrain, a word Daine often used. I went back to my bundle. From it, I chose some of the food I had stolen and carried it to the front of the cave. There I left my offering: a small goat cheese, dates, olives, and several rounds of bread.

  Then I returned to my hiding place, sheltered by chilly, normal black rock. I could not hear the sounds inside the cave as well as before, but the black stone did not give me strange ideas, either. I drew my camouflage spell around me, just in case, and waited.

  Soon I heard Afra’s footsteps as she came to the cave’s entrance. With my camouflage in place, I eased up to a spot from which I could see her. She stepped into the daylight, sure of the power that hid her retreat in the rocks. She was so confident that she almost crushed my gift before she saw that it was there. Then she jumped back into the cave, vanishing into the darkness.

  I waited. Soon she returned, crouching in the shelter of the cave’s mouth, peering around like a frightened creature. She had a rock in each hand. Only her head moved. She was listening for any noise.

  In the distance, I heard the village goats and sheep as their shepherds took them to graze in the lands not hidden by the barriers. A rooster in the village suddenly remembered that he had duties of his own. As he cried his name, other roosters joined in.

  Afra’s eyes strayed more and more to the bundle of food. I wondered if her nose was as dead as most humans’, or if she could smell the cheese, at least. I scolded myself for not bringing hot meat. She would have
smelled that.

  She licked her lips. She could smell the cheese.

  Slowly, she put down her rocks. She rubbed her hands as her Gift moved into her fingers. She wasn’t able to do magic without some gestures, then. For anything subtle, she would need to write the signs in the air. She would require special herbs, oils, or stones for more. Did she have them? It would be good to know.

  She wrote a sign for safety before her face. In the sunlight, I could see the color of her Gift at last. I rocked back on my heels. Afra’s sign was shaped in pale blue light, outlined in pale green. I nearly whistled my excitement, then caught myself. None of my human friends except Papa had magic in two colors. Numair’s books spoke of such people, but he said he’d never met anyone else. He would be so glad to meet Afra once I had tamed her!

  Had she borrowed her baby’s power? I asked myself. Perhaps this explained how she had passed through the magic that turned the village boys around, but not her.

  Afra completed her spell and set it in motion. It fell onto the food, oozing over it. Within a breath it had vanished, sinking into everything. The scales stood on the back of my neck. I hoped it wouldn’t harm the food. Cheese in particular reacts badly to some kinds of magic.

  Afra waited, looking all around, still wary. Then she darted forward, seized the food, and ran back into the cave. I guessed that if her spell didn’t react, it proved there was no magic on the bundle. I could not see her, but I could hear as she thrust a handful of something into her mouth and chewed. She continued to eat greedily out of my sight as I slowly took the remainder of my stolen goods from my bundle. Daine and I had cared for many starving creatures, so I feared I knew what came next. I had hoped Afra would have better judgment than to stuff herself right away, but I had been wrong. Carefully, retracting my hind claws so they would make no sound on the stone, I carried my next offering to the cave’s entrance and left it there. Then I ran back to my hiding spot.

  I was just in time. Afra raced from the cave, her hand to her mouth. She made it to a pocket of sand in the rocks across from me before she spewed everything she had eaten. I cursed myself silently. I should have given her just a mouthful of food to start. She had been living on garbage, and I had given her a meal of good fruit and cheese.