by E. E. Knight
“By the eggs that sheltered us, there’s something you don’t know,” Auron said. “There are others in this cave. Dw-auuggg!” Blinding pain as the copper’s teeth tore the soft tissue of his earhole behind his crest, near his beating pulse point. Auron thrust up with his rear legs, but his brother’s entire weight bore down on the weaker front legs.
Copper’s tail immobilized a leg, and the good forearm pinned his mouth shut to stop Auron’s squawking. “Others? I know about them. Good friends, strong friends, who’ll give me more of a chance in this world than my own kind. I saved your life, but would you share the egg shelf with me? Allow me a full belly? Even one sniff of Mother? I’ve lived in hunger and hiding since the day I came out of the shell, thanks to you.”
Auron could not respond. He could hardly breathe through his nose, let alone speak of the instincts that had driven him.
“So you’ll die now, as you should have died out of the egg. Two brothers, both stronger, and you ended up with the nest. It’s time to right a great wrong. Nearly time, that is. First you get to watch Mother and the chatterers skinned. Stop writhing, you lizard—you’re worse than a snake! Too bad you shan’t see me gorge myself on Father’s gold.”
The copper used his good forearm to twist Auron’s head on his thin neck. Auron could just see the egg shelf and Mother’s ridgeless back, pale green in the mosslight. He wasn’t a snake; he was a drake, even if he lacked Father’s scaly bulk. A snake was all spine—
Auron whipped his tail up like a cave scorpion striking. He aimed for his brother’s eyes, but the copper must have seen the blow coming. Instead Auron caught him on the side of the head. Auron twisted his limber body, and his smaller sibling gave way. The pressure on his neck vanished, and the two rolled across the cavern floor. Their jaws snapped at each other’s heads, and Auron took the worse of the exchange. Neither could catch the other’s neck.
They glared at each other, mouths agape. Auron sidestepped, but his brother turned, keeping the crippled arm behind his body.
Why wouldn’t his brother close?
He realized he had not time for a fight to the finish. The copper was playing him, keeping him away from the egg shelf while the dwarves gathered.
“You live this day if you trouble me no further,” Auron said. “Though when I tell Father of this, he may feel differently. He’ll pull the mountains down to find such as you, who’d lead assassins to the egg shelf.”
Auron did not wait for the snarled reply: he jumped away from his brother and ran. There was no chase; the cripple could not hope to run him down.
“Mother! Mother! Mother!” Auron trumpeted as he approached the egg shelf. “Others! Assassins, dwarves, here in the cave.” Auron leaped for the egg shelf, gaining it in a bound his scaled sisters could never match.
His mother was on her feet, neck and tail curled protectively around her female hatchlings. “We are discovered?” she said, nostrils flaring as she sniffed the air.
“They’re here. With spears, Mother,” Auron said, instinctively turning and putting his small body between the approaching dwarves and his family.
“No! I’m faint with hunger, and the winter’s been so—,” she began. She froze, looking out into the cavern. Auron had already spied them with sharp dragon eyes.
Figures appeared out of the shadows. They clambered over stone ridges, appeared and disappeared behind stalagmites, leaped over fissures in the cavern floor by bowlegged jumps. Many. Many-many. Some ran with spears, some with axes, some with climbing poles. Others came with heavy shields held before them, sheltering dwarves carrying machinery of some sort behind.
Mother reared up on her hind legs. Not to fight; she turned her back to the assassins, and gripped a broken-off stalagmite near the cavern ceiling. As it came loose, Auron smelled fresh air from above.
“I hope you aren’t too big for this, my hatchlings. Auron, take your sisters and go to the surface. At once! Climb, my love, climb.” She nosed Wistala up the wall.
Auron planted his legs wide and opened his mouth at the approaching dwarves. Oh, how he wished! He wished he had wings to spread, to frighten them from their approach. He felt his body begin to seize up, to spray his bile if nothing else—
His mother plucked him by his back and almost threw him into the hole. Something flew out of the dark and glanced off Mother’s neck. Below, he saw Jizara wide-eyed with fear, tail, limbs, and neck wrapped around Mother’s hind leg.
“Jizara! By your egg, Jizara, let go! My hatchling, I can’t fight with you there.”
Nothing frightened Auron so much as the sight of Mother gently trying to pry his sister loose from her leg. His mind cleared. He couldn’t fight, but he could give Mother one less worry.
“Jizara, up here! Don’t you want to see the Upper World?”
Something flashed up at Mother, sticking in her neck. Arrows. Spearpoints appeared above the rim of the egg shelf, followed by helmed heads, armor clanking and chain grating in the movement.
Mother looked up at him, and he read her. Mother’s mind was a fog of fear, two hatchlings to go into the Upper World unguided, one clinging to her as wounds stung her body.
“Climb! Auron, climb!” Mother implored, looking at him one last time before turning to face the spears.
Wistala would not move until Auron head-butted her. Then she fled, throwing loose rocks in a mad scramble up twists and shelves in the narrow chute. The sound of their panting echoed in the confined space, drowning out the battle cries of dwarf and dragon behind. No moss grew here to light their way; Auron grew more frightened rather than less as they climbed.
Then from behind came a cry—such a cry of anguish, a dragon’s shriek to rend the mountain’s heart. Perhaps the sound of a dragon in her death throes, perhaps the wail of a mother who has seen her offspring die under her eyes. Auron would never know.
Chapter 5
The glare from the snow hurt their eyes, the wind chilled them, and the light and horizons of the Upper World made them feel even more helpless and alone. Not even birds flew this high. A few stringy, wind-tortured pines clung to their tiny accumulations of soil among the rock several dragon-lengths below among splashes of lichen.
They might never have made it out of the cave if it hadn’t been for Auron. After a lightless, bone-tiring climb, they came to a dirty widening filled with dried odds and ends of dead things. The tunnel narrowed again before being blocked by ice and snow. Wistala began to cry and beg him to return to the egg cave; she had to know if Mother and Jizara were still there. Auron could smell the air through fissures in the ice and hear the wind moving just beyond. He lashed at the ice overhang with his tail, his fear and anger and loneliness driving each blow until bloody tailprints covered the frozen bar. Auron turned and tried to bite it, but succeeded only in tearing a layer of skin off his gumline. The bile building inside him came out in an acrid shower; it ate at the ice and made the tunnel smell like bat urine. At last he coiled and threw his body against the ice, bursting into the outer world—
And over a precipice. Auron clawed at the rocks wet with snowmelt and began to fall, when Wistala clamped her teeth on his tail. She braced all four of her legs until he found his grip. He pressed against her, squinting out the glare and resting on a shelf a fraction of the size of their familiar roost below.
When his hearts slowed again, Auron looked at his sister with new interest. She had never struck him as quick enough to act in a crisis, at least physically.
“Does your tail hurt?” Wistala said, sniffing at the blood leaking from deep tooth punctures.
“Not as much as the rest of me would have, had I fallen.”
“It’s too big.”
“What’s too big?” Auron said, bringing his tail before his eyes. Had she bitten it clean through so the tip would fall off?
“This,” she sniffed. “The Upper World. I feel like we’re nowhere.”
Distances so vast that there were no words for them marched off to the murky line where hori
zon met sky on the flat ground to the west. A mind-picture was one thing—but the dragon wings of clouds high, high above and the little splashes of green and brown below with the sun marking all with either her revealing light or bluish shadow made him feel like a pebble within the cavern. The sun would cast her shadow, the trees would fight to reach her, and the clouds would move above whether he and Wistala drew breath or died under a dwarf ax. How could such little things as a pair of hatchlings matter, when measured against infinity?
He pressed against his sister. She was the most important thing in his world now. The rest of the Upper World was too much to take in right now, but he could build a new world around her. Mother wanted it that way.
Auron looked at his sister, her scales shining green in the sun. She kept her head low, eyes rolling this way and that in the sunlight, the black slits in their rippled golden irises clamped almost shut against the glare.
It reminded him of a memory of Father’s. “Do you have mind-pictures?” He had never used the word before to her; he had hardly used it with his mother.
But she nodded. “Impressions of Mother’s. Or perhaps Father’s. Or other dragons from the old song? I don’t know. I feel as though I’ve been up here before, looking far down.”
“Me, too.”
“But that doesn’t mean I like it any better. Should we wait for a while and go back to the cave?”
Auron felt like biting her, but he resisted and changed the impulse to an embrace. He hooked his neck around hers. “We could do that. Suppose the dwarves are waiting for us? Or worse, climbing the chimney even now? Father said never to fight a dwarf without room to maneuver. They are strong, the strongest of the assassins. I don’t know if I can climb more. I’m already hungry. Hungriest I’ve ever been.”
“Then we should climb down the mountain while we have strength. Mother shared stories about hunting with Jizara and me. Fur and feather, she said it’s never too early to start. Tired hunters catch less or nothing—then starve.”
They craned their necks down over the precipice, sniffing and looking.
“I think I see a way,” Wistala said. “You found the way up the chimney—I’ll pick the path for a while. Follow my grips.”
Auron used his crest to push her aside. “No, if one of us falls, let it be me. I’m lighter—I’ll land softer. Besides, I have the longer neck and tail, so I can try more grips.”
He marked a gentle slope leading to a meadowed valley and made for it. They did not reach the valley by the time the sun disappeared behind the mountains, but they did find a larger shelf to rest on, with a jumble of flattened rocks that cut the wind. They were near the tree line. Auron hated trees at first sight. They reminded him of spears. So different from the comforting glow and the moist smell of soft cave moss.
“The runoff is freezing again. We should stop,” Wistala said, panting.
“I’d like to see those squatty dwarves climb down that,” Auron said, making a mental picture of the overhang below the precipice he had almost gone over. Wistala nodded. The thought of a few dwarves plummeting down the rocks warmed them.
Auron spread his aching limbs on the shelf. His body trembled with exhaustion. Wistala lay down beside him, hugging her scaleless belly to him.
He finally gave voice to his great hurt. “Is Mother—?”
“Don’t speak of her, or I’ll cry and cry, and I’m feeling bad enough as it is. Why did the assassins have to come to our cave?”
“The world grows harder for dragons every day,” Auron said, quoting something he overread Father thinking to Mother.
“I don’t think we’re strong enough yet, Auron,” Wistala said in her smallest voice. “Not to be out here alone.”
“We’re not alone. We have each other. We have Father.”
“Father? Scale and tail, what does he know about watching over hatchlings?”
Auron’s eyelids narrowed. Father was great beyond his sister’s singsong little imagination.
Auron stifled the impulse to lower the battle fans from his crest. “You shouldn’t—Oh, I don’t want to quarrel.”
“We must tell him about the dwarves,” Wistala said. “He’ll get angry and roast ’em. But where is he?”
“I can’t say. I think the gap he used was to the west; he would always go out early, so the sun would be shining on the land outside the cave but not in it.”
“Then we’ve climbed down in the wrong direction. We’ve come a little north, haven’t we?”
Auron’s sense of direction was sharper than his sister’s. “No, we’ve gone almost straight east. The stars will show us. We’ll see them all in this cold air. We’re finally going to see stars, Wistala.”
“I’d rather never see stars and sleep tonight between Jizara and M—”
“I know.” Auron said, gently clasping her snout shut with lip-covered teeth.
The stars were cold and remote, and the moon hung in the sky like the shining edge on a dwarf-ax. Auron had no heart for them, after using them as Father had taught him to find north. All he had to do was follow the nose of the Bowing Dragon. He paid homage to Susiron, the center star, the one thing in all of the Creation that never changed.
Once you’ve fixed on your star, you’ll know where you are for the rest of your life, he remembered Father saying in one of his oracular moods. But had he been talking of Susiron? There was still so much Father hadn’t taught him. Like what to say to a scared hatchling to comfort her, when his own gut was a cold shell of fear.
Or how to find and kill dwarves!
Something hot started in his chest, just where his long muscles could squeeze it.
They woke with sinews knotted: limbs, necks, and tails equally wound up. A light dusting of snow had come just before dawn.
“Brother!”
Auron startled. “What?”
Wistala touched the tip of her nose to his in relief. “You’re all white. I thought you had bled to death. I’ve never seen you anything but gray, or green when you sit on Mother.”
“I didn’t know I was doing it.”
Wistala looked back up at the shelf they had descended from yesterday. “Did Mother put a dream in your head?” Wistala asked.
“No.”
“Then she’s dead.”
“We don’t know that. Maybe she needs us nearby to tell us dreams.” Auron still felt tired, doubly so with this cold ache slowing his movements. Without Mother feeding him stories as he slept, he passed the night lightly, waking at creaks from the crooked pines.
“Look, Auron,” Wistala whispered. “In the rocks. Hungry?”
Nimble animals moved along the edges of the heights above the tree line, pawing away snow and pulling up fodder from tiny reservoirs of soil between the rocks. They had horns and odd, tufted little tails that flicked this way and that in a lively fashion. Auron sniffed the air: the animals were upwind. The scent made his mouth water.
“Hoof-feet. I think those are goats. After them, Wistala!”
“Auron!”
Auron slithered between the rocks, moving to the food as fast as he could. A long-horned goat blatted an alarm, and their white fur flashed as they bounced from stone to stone, heading for the trees. Auron reached the ground where they had been feeding, but not even echoes of their flight reached him.
Wistala joined him at the tree line, her scales bristling. “Scents and vents! You’re hopeless.”
The goat smell all around only made Auron all the hungrier. He lashed his tail petulantly. “What should I have done? We need food.”
“Young drakes! Twice the muscle and half the sense of drakka. We were downwind. They would have fed their way right to us, perhaps. You’re not fit to hunt anything but slugs.”
“Am too.”
“Then where’s your kill?”
“I didn’t know they could run so fast,” Auron said after a moment’s thought.
“Thank the Spirits for rats and bats that die and fall to the cavern floor, then.”
&
nbsp; “If I could fly, I’d find us food. Dead beasts, beached whales, carcasses bears have buried till they’re tender. I’d drive wolves away from their kills. Or best of all, a battlefield feast. That’s what Father ate before he flew off with Mother.”
“I can hardly stop my mouth watering,” Wistala said, clamping her nostrils shut. “If cold and covered with flies is your taste, so be it. I’m going to find us something fresh and warm. Rest somewhere out of the wind, and wait here.”
She moved off down the slope, and Auron curled up among the roots of a pine, where he watched his scales change color as the sun climbed up the sky and moved the shadows on his back.
Wistala returned, dismayed. “I almost got some big-footed eary hopper. Only a couple mouthfuls if I had, but anything sounds good now.”
“Almost” won’t fill our bellies, Auron was about to say, but thought better of it. His sister looked to be close to tears as it was. “A mountain hare?” he asked.
“Perhaps. It jumped at the last moment and ran like an arrow. An arrow that zigzags. It turned quick as thinking. We need to eat. What are we going to do?”
“Don’t worry about it. You’ll get one another time. Let’s try to find the western entrance. We’ll be able to smell where he goes, if nothing else.”
“There was a herd of deer in a gully, but they have ears like dragons. I think they even smelled me downwind. Every time I crept up, they began to move away. I’m sure they can outrun me. I found a perch, but they never fed near enough to it, and now it’s getting dark.”
“Show me this gully,” Auron said.
They moved into thicker stands of timber, interspersed with marsh meadow. Snow still hid in shaded areas under timber, but yellow and blue wildflowers sprouted bright in the sunny spots.
The gully coursed down the mountainside, deepening as it descended. Half-exposed mossy rocks stood out from its sides, like the bumps in Father’s pebbled underbelly.
“Softly now, Auron,” Wistala said with her mind. He followed as she crept from rock to rock on the side of the gully.
