by Deerskin
It paused, briefly confused by the fact that there were two of them, and swung its ugly, smoke-leaking head back and forth for a moment-and then chose Lissar.
"Ash, no!" Lissar said, just in time, and Ash hesitated in her spring, and Lissar grabbed an overhead branch and pulled, just missing the thin, stinking stream of fire the dragon spat at her.
"Ash, run!" she shouted, almost in tears. Dragons are stupid creatures. When she pulled herself into the tree it lost her, forgot about her. But its short legs could move its bulk at astonishing speed; in short bursts it might even be as swift as a fleethound.
The dragon was turning toward Ash when, at the sound of her voice, it stopped again and looked up at her with its little, deep-set eyes, red with malice. She thought that if it spouted fire at her again she would not be able to get out of the way in time.
The branches were close-set, and she was not an agile climber. And she was afraid to climb higher because she was afraid of what Ash would do-for Ash had not run away.
She fumbled in her pocket for a stone as the dragon opened its mouth-as Ash began her charge; and such was the swiftness of a fleethound of impeccable breeding when she is protecting someone she loves, Ash outran the dragon's fire as it swung its aim away from Lissar and toward her dog.
Ash bowled it over, but she was bred to pull down long-legged deer by grasping the nose, and letting the weight of her leaping body do the rest; or to snatch a rabbit mid-spring as she outmatched its speed. She did not know what to do with a dragon. Its thick hide gave her teeth no purchase, and it was too bulky to bowl over very effectively, or for very long. Lissar's heart nearly stopped her breath, it thundered so mightily. She flung her stone-and by good luck struck the dragon squarely in the eye. The eye was much protected by its horny socket, but the dragon was at least confused, for it fell again as it tried to stumble to its feet after Ash's attack; and when it parted its scummy jaws again, it was only to pant.
Lissar threw herself down from the tree, clapped Ash on the shoulder as she hurled herself into her best running stride-feeling the heat of the dragon's skin as she swept by it-and said "Come on!"-and Ash did, although she refused to run any faster than Lissar.
They ran for a long time, for as long as it took the panic to sweat out through Lissar's pores; as long as it took for what she knew of dragons to recall itself to her mind: that they were dismayingly, fatally swift, but only over short distances. She and Ash had left this one behind long ago.
Lissar did not sleep well that night. The brief battle with the dragon brought other images to her mind; glimpses of-she knew not what. It was as if a door had opened and closed again too quickly for her eyes to recognize anything behind it; a brief stab of horror assailed her, like a clap of thunder might strike her ears. While it shook her, as lightning striking too near may throw someone to the ground, she could not see where the horror came from, nor what were its dimensions or its name.
At the earliest greying of the sky she roused Ash and they went on.
One day they struck a road.
It was really not more than a path, a track; but it had been worn by human feet in leather, pounded by the iron shoes of domestic horses and rutted by the narrow strike of wheels.
Lissar stood, a little back from it, still hidden in the trees, and looked. Ash sat down and let her tongue unroll; she scratched an ear, investigated a flank, and, when her companion still showed no sign of moving, sprawled down full length on the ground for a nap, her head on Lissar's foot for safekeeping. Long months of life in the wild had not eradicated Ash's belief that her person was the chief mover of the world; on the other hand, Lissar, looking down, saw the cocked ear, and knew that Ash's nap was more apparent than real.
Lissar found herself willing to go on standing still simply because Ash's head was resting on one of her feet. It was not as though Ash had not leaned against or collapsed upon all portions of Lissar's anatomy many times before, had been unloaded as many times with protesting groans, and instantly did it again as soon as an opportunity presented itself-thus proving no hard feelings, nor any intention of altering her behavior. But in this particular case Lissar knew she had come to what she had decided, weeks ago, on a mountaintop, she wished to look for-signs of humanity. Having found what she sought, she was grateful for anything, even a dog's resting head, that might be held to be preventing her from acting on her discovery.
When Ash raised her head in response to a crackle in the undergrowth (which might be dinner), Lissar slowly, stiffly, lifted her freed foot and set it down in front of the other one. Then she raised that one and set it down in front of the first; then-then a silvery-fawn streak blasted silently past her, and across the portentous road. There was a brief rustle and squeak, and Ash reappeared at a more moderate gait. She crossed the road once more as if roads were nothing to her, something hairy and mottled brown dangling from her jaws.
Lissar stopped, still several steps away from the road. "We'll camp here tonight,"
she said aloud, to Ash, who twitched her ears. It was rare any more that Lissar needed words to communicate with her dog. She used them occasionally to remind herself she could, to remember what her voice sounded like.
They moved far enough back from the road that Lissar felt relatively safe from discovery, even with a small fire burning. She knew that the road was not heavily used; not only was it narrow, but she had seen no sign of human habitation-inns, she thought tentatively; rest houses for wayfarers, their gear and their beasts-and there were grass and weeds striking up through old ruts and hoofprints. But that the road existed at all meant someone used it; and the weather had been dry, so there was no mud to tell any tales of recent travellers, nor any recent piles of dung to tell of their beasts. All that meant to her, in her anxious frame of mind, was that it was the more likely that travellers would come soon. She stared through the trees toward the road; she felt as if she could smell it, as she had-belatedly-smelled the dragon. As if a miasma or a magic hung over it, a magic derived from the simple friction of human feet against the wild ground.
She drifted off to sleep with her head on Ash's flank, the curly hair tickling her cheek and getting sucked occasionally into the corner of her mouth or her nose as she breathed, so she made little snorting noises in her sleep. She woke up to a sound of roaring; Ash had curled around her, and put her nose in her ear. They rearranged themselves, and fell asleep again.
Lissar gave herself no time to think the next morning. She rolled to her feet, rubbed her face, pulled the white deerskin dress to order, and trotted off to the road, her muscles (and bladder) protesting such rough usage so immediately on arising.
Ash, grumbling and out of sorts at such abrupt behavior during her least favorite time of day, followed her, and they struck the road together, although Ash had set foot on it already and had not noticed this as a significant act. Lissar felt a tingle up through the bottoms of her callused feet as she ran along the road; a tingle she was willing to believe was imaginary, and yet no less important-no less felt-to her for that.
They ran till the sound of water distracted them; and then they halted for some brief ablutions. And then ran on. Lissar had chosen downhill, not because it was faster-though there were moments when running upon the particular angle of slope felt like flying-but because she thought she remembered that cities were more likely to occur on flat plains and meadows beyond the feet of mountains; and it was cities that contained the most people.
But did she want so many people at once? a little voice, scared, whispered to her.
Her direction-pointer had disappeared as soon as she first recognized a human-used trail, as if the pointer were a guide through a limited territory, and, having brought her to the edge of its own land, left her there. Sh,e was a human being; presumably she belonged in human landscapes. But its desertion made her feel lost, more tentative about her decision; it had helped to keep her back among the trees, with Ash's head on her foot. Perhaps, she thought, the words of her thinking comin
g in the same rhythm as her running footsteps, perhaps what she wanted was a village, something a little smaller than a city.
No, whispered the same voice she'd heard on the mountaintop. City.
She shook her head. There was already too much that was peculiar about what did and did not go on in her mind. She would have preferred simple memories, like other people had ... like she supposed other people had ... But perhaps other people had voices in their heads too, voices that told them what to do, or not to do. She remembered the Lady's voice, the sound of running water and bells.
She and Ash ran on, looking for a city.
SIXTEEN
WHEN THEY BROKE OUT OF THE TREES LISSAR STUMBLED AND
almost fell. Her horizons had opened too suddenly; her vision could not take it all in, and her feet faltered. She slowed to an uneven walk, and great shuddering breaths shook her that had nothing to do with the pace they had been keeping. She kept spinning to look behind her, behind her, always behind her; the wind whispered strangely out here in the open.... She wanted a tree to hide behind, a rock to put her back against. She stood still-turned a quarter circumference-paused-another quarter turn-paused-another. Her breath refused to steady.
Ash had initially wandered off on her own errands when they had come out from the forest, but now she trotted up and looked at Lissar inquiringly. Ash was a sighthound; open ground with long plain vision in all directions must be her heart's delight-or at worst a situation no stranger or more alarming than any other. Lissar lowered her hands to her dog's silky head and stood facing the same direction for several long moments, till her heart and her breathing had slowed. Then they went on, but walking now, Lissar looking to left and right as far as her neck would stretch.
She had noticed, a day or two since, that the trees were thinning, the road almost imperceptibly widening, though the surface grew no better; and there had been clearings that took half a hundred running strides to cross, and much longer spaces that were not forest at all but fields with scattered trees in them. In one the grass and heliotrope stood higher than her head, and as she swam through it she came unexpectedly upon three crushed circles where some creatures had briefly nested; a tuft of brownish-grey fur remained on a sharp stem-elbow.
But this was something different. When-the afternoon light was turning the world soft and gold-edged she turned and looked back, and saw the mountains looming up over her, and knew that they had reached the flat land she sought. They slept that night at the edge of a meadow full of daisies and vetch, and clouds of lavender-pink trollbane.
There was a further development about this flat land with its scarce trees the next day: she recognized the regular rows of planting set among clean smooth earth, and knew this for human farming. She knew at the same time that she had not remembered "farmland" one day before, but now that it was before her eyes she had a name for it, and memories of farmers, male and female, behind ploughs pulled by horses or oxen, or even pulling the ploughs themselves; and the rhythmic flash of the scythes at harvest, and the tidy-wild, great round heaps of gold-brown grain. She even remembered, with the smell of tilled earth in her nostrils, the smell of cows and chickens, of milk in a pail; she remembered Rinnol astonished at how little a. . . a ...
at how little she, Lissar, knew, because she was a ...
It was like a great rock, holding her memory down, or the door of it closed; as if she camped uneasily at a barricaded gate, afraid to leave, afraid not to leave; as if occasionally words were shouted to her over the barrier, which sometimes she understood and sometimes did not. Perhaps her memory was merely very small; perhaps this is the way memory is, tight and sporadic and unreliable; perhaps everyone could remember some things one day and not another day. Perhaps everyone saw the Lady. She stared at the tall grasses and the flower-spangled banks that ran along the road. Was it only that she was far from her home that she could put names to so few things? Rinnol had been a good teacher.
Ash and Lissar walked on. As twilight came on again, Lissar broke into a trot, and they went on so till the Moon rose and sank. And then Lissar found a stream that ran through a hedgerow, and a little hollow on one bank just large enough for a woman and a dog to sleep curled up together; and there they stopped. The sun rose over them and spattered them with light, for the leaves of spring had not gained their full growth; but they slept on. It was late afternoon when Lissar woke, and shook Ash (who, as usual, protested).
Lissar slipped out of the white deerskin dress and stepped into a quiet place in the stream, lined with reeds, where the water bulged into the same soft place in the earth where she and Ash had slept; and she stood there long enough for the fish to decide she was some strange new kind of flotsam; and she flipped their breakfast, flapping and scaly, up on dry ground. Ash was still the best at rabbits, but only she could catch fish. The water was cold; after the necessity for standing perfectly still was over with the sudden plunge and dip for her prey, her body broke into violent trembling, and gooseflesh ridged her all over. It was some minutes of dancing around and waving her arms before she was warm enough to hold tinder steadily and make fire. It had occurred to her more than once that the reason Ash did not learn fishing was because she did not like standing in cold water; and streambanks were rarely a suitable shape for fishing dry-shod.
It took Lissar two or three days to notice that she had switched them over to travelling at night-travelling from shadow to shadow like ootag giving wide berth to the scent of yerig. I'm frightened of facing human beings again, she thought. I don't know where I am; I do not know even if I speak the language of this place . . . I do not know the name of the language that I do speak. I do not know who I am or where I come from; I do not know why and how I know that there are different human tongues. I am frightened of the things I cannot explain.
She thought: I long for another human face just as I fear it. She paused and looked out over the Moon-silvered landscape. This looked much like the farms she remembered-but how did she understand what she remembered? She had not remembered farming till she had seen fresh-sown cropland and the green coming growth of the early crops laid out in front of her. Perhaps she did not recognize the difference between these lands and where she had lived before because ... she had thought, sometimes, that the bits of her memory she could clearly recall felt stretched, as if they were obliged to cover more territory than they could or should.... Perhaps she had come back to the place she had left ... escaped from. Her heart began beating in her throat, and she put her hands up to hold it in: she could feel it against her palms, as if it would burst through her skin.
No, said the voice in her head. This is a different place. You have come a long way from where you left. That place is far from here. I will believe you, she thought, slowly, in the voice she thought of as her own, because I want to. She and Ash walked on.
That morning, as dawn slowly warmed the countryside, Lissar did not look for a place to sleep, to hide, but kept on-walking, but slowly, for it had been a long night, down the rough, endless road. And so that morning, at last, she saw another human being; and that human being spoke to her.
He was leaning on his gate, watching her. She had seen him emerge from his house-a thin curl of smoke from its chimney had suggested to her that its occupants were awake-with harness over one shoulder and a fierce-looking rake over the other.
She watched him move, and thought how strange he looked, how unwieldy, reared up on his hind legs like that; utterly without the grace of dogs, deer, of everything she had seen moving during her long solitude in the mountains, even the dragon.
How very oddly human beings were made; and she wondered how she looked in Ash's eyes.
The man paused at the roadside before putting his hand to the gate-latch, looking up and down the road as he did every morning, expecting to see, perhaps, that damned dog of Bel's out getting up to mischief again, or maybe someone getting an early start for a trip into town. And what he saw was a Moon-haired woman in a Moon-colored dress with a tal
l Moon-colored dog at her side. She was barefoot, and her hair hung down her back in a single long plait. Her dress was so white it almost hurt the eyes, while the dog's long curly coat was softer, silver-grey, almost fawn, like the Moon in a summer fog. He paused, waiting, his hand on the latch.
"Good morrow to you," he said as she drew near.
She started, though he had seen her looking back at him, had known he was there.
She started, and stood still. She was close enough for him to see her eyes, black as her hair was white. The dog paused too, looked up into her lady's face, then glanced at him and gave one brief, polite wave of her plumy tail.
"Good morrow," she said, with a long pause between the two short words; but he heard nonetheless that she spoke with an accent he did not know. This did not surprise him; it was her existence that surprised him. He had seen no one the least like her before; given that she existed, that she stood before him at the gate of his farm, she must speak unlike his neighbors. It was reassuring that she did so; had she not, she must be a dream, and he was not given to dreams, or a ghost. He wondered if his language was strange to her; and then; even in the thought wondering that he should think such a thing, him, a farmer, who occupied his days with seeds and crops, and mending harness and sharpening tools, and the wiles and whims of beasts both wild and tame-wondered if perhaps this woman spoke a language belonging only to her, that she spoke it aloud only to hear the sound of her own voice, for only her ears recognized the meaning of the words. Even if she were not a ghost or a dream there was some magic about her; he moved uneasily, and then thought, No. If she bears magic, there is no evil in it.
She looked around, taking in his farm, the harness, his hand on the latch. He saw her understanding what these things meant, and was almost disappointed that such mundane matters were decipherable to her.
