by Lyn Worthen
He sought to prevent Amaru’s return, then. It tempers her joy. She asks Chaska, “What punishment does he deserve?”
# # #
Hwillak still groveled before Amaru. I almost said, “Take everything from him, as he took it from me.”
Except. Now I had back what Hwillak had taken from me. And he wasn’t to blame for the rest. He had lost more than I had. My shoulders sagged. “He’s already been punished. We used to call him Hwillak the Wise, but now he no longer has his wits.”
Amaru’s voice was like the roll of waves in a storm. “Move away from him.”
I hurried to obey her; the other children followed my lead. Amaru brought her great tail down and wrapped Hwillak in her lower coils. He didn’t struggle. She breathed over him much longer than she had breathed on me. Then she let him go and flew up to circle over the tribute we’d made for her.
Hwillak straightened and ran his hands along the sides of his face as if collecting himself. Despite his rags, he once more resembled the great priest he had been months earlier.
His calm faltered as he met my eyes. “I’m sorry, girl. I – the banishing ritual – it made me… lose myself. Did I do you great evil?”
How to answer that? I shook my head. “I don’t think you meant it.”
He stood silent for a long moment, then said, “And you summoned the Amaru? You must have great magic. Why were you not a priestess?”
“My parents said people no longer respected the temple. They feared for my safety and wouldn’t allow it.”
“Ah. Your parents were wise to protect you. I should have been safe from harm and yet you know the punishment the Lady ordered for me.”
“How are you now?”
He rubbed his jaw and frowned. “More myself, I think. What happened after my banishment?”
I told him how the priests had given stricter orders and how hungry, angry, and afraid the people had become. How they had burned Llaxta. “There’s nothing left.”
He nodded. “That is what I foresaw. I tried to warn the Lady. I told her we must find a new land with more resources. She wouldn’t consider it.”
“And now there are so few of us.” I surveyed the other children. The younger ones ran under Amaru. They laughed and pointed as she flew above to admire our work. “And most are so young. Can we even hope to do what you advised?”
“There’s always hope,” he said. “But after everything that’s happened, can you forgive me? Do you think we can work together to build a new life?”
“I think so. Now we have Amaru.”
The winged serpent, having heard her name, returned. “You are friends now?”
I took Hwillak by the hand. “We are.”
The evening fell anew, and I heard the llamas squawk as Izhi brought her herd back to us from wherever they had wandered.
# # #
The beings who now care for Earth are small and frail compared to Amaru’s own kind. Their fear, and sometimes their greed, may oppose their ability to make the world new. They will need her knowledge and power.
A sheltered lake lies high in the mountains where the weather is pleasant. The land will be rich if they care for it.
She will show them the way.
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C.H. Hung grew up among the musty bookstacks of public libraries, once winning a reading competition by devouring 300+ books the summer after 2nd grade. By the time she showed up for school that fall, she had her picture in the local paper, beaming parents, a newfound love of good stories, and her first of many, many pairs of prescription glasses. After a brief, 15-year diversion in reality, C.H. Hung re-entered the world of myth and fantasy, finally putting to paper the stories she’s carried in her head since those long-ago summer days in the library. Visit her at www.chhung.com
About this story, C.H. says: “My mother was born of myth and superstition. She taught me about fate because I was born in the Year of the Sheep, a sign infamous for unlucky love lives, and she worried that I would fall victim to my much-too-tender heart. ‘No dating Oxen,’ she cautioned. ‘No Rats, no Dogs, no Tigers. Above all, no Dragons. Lucky in life they might be, but Dragons eat Sheep.’ Of course, I married a Dragon. And we are lucky in love indeed. This story is for my mother. It’s about a Dragon who wins because she has the heart of a Sheep.”
Keeping our “eye on the prize,” and focusing strictly on our goals can sometimes blind us to what’s happening around us, and make it challenging to step out of our own lives to offer help to another. But as Tianlong learns here, success is measured in many ways, and not all of them obvious.
The Soul by Which We Measure Ours
C.H. Hung
“I want you to be everything that’s you, deep at the center of your being.”
– Confucius
The call from the Jade Emperor filled Tianlong with dread so thick she could taste its bitter tang on her tongue, like the ashes of dreams crumbling into dust.
Dragons were the luckiest creatures in the Jade Emperor’s kingdom, but Tianlong had been born on the fourth day of the fourth month, as the fourth child to parents who were both fourth children, and four had never been a lucky number. So when the call came to fill the ranks of the emperor’s heavenly guard, determined by a race, and the Dragon Clan decided to choose their representative by lottery, Tianlong knew the draw would not go in her favor.
The clan gathered for the selection on a wide plateau atop the tallest pillar mountain in the valley. Only one dragon per family could be entered, chosen by the family’s patriarch. The names engraved on bone tiles clattered loudly in the jade jar as Tianlong’s father gave it a shake. He smiled benevolently at the nine silent dragons standing before him whose names were in the jar, all of them young, unmated dragons entering their prime. The best of the clan. Except for Tianlong, who was by far the smallest and weakest dragon.
She shouldn’t even be in the running, Tianlong thought, crouched low to the moss-slickened plateau on her short legs. Her peers swayed their serpentine bodies above her, not noticing or paying any attention to her, just the way she preferred. She wondered why her father hadn’t put one of her brothers’ names in the jar instead.
But with a one in nine chance of being drawn, perhaps she would not be called. Even she couldn’t be so unlucky as to be chosen for this terrifying task of carrying the pride of the dragons in the Jade Emperor’s race.
Sure enough, her father withdrew the tile that said Tianlong.
She fled before the echoes of the last syllable had finished bouncing off the peaks of the pillar mountains surrounding them.
“I don’t want to compete,” she protested when her father fetched her from her favorite peak, where she normally hid from her squabbling older brothers. “It’s embarrassing to lose.”
Tianlong curled around the craggy quartz-sandstone rocks of the peak, her claws dug fast into its nooks. Rising several hundred meters above the valley floor, the pillar was topped with delicately branching dove trees and nestled among a cluster of similar pillars even taller than hers, making it the perfect hiding place. If they weren’t found frolicking in the ocean, the dragons usually preferred to perch on the highest peaks. No one would look for a dragon on a lower peak, halfway between water and earth.
Plumes of white clouds draped around Tianlong’s mountain in delicate cirrus lace, camouflaging her hated black-and-white scales, mottled like the patterns of their carp cousins. And, like the carp, two thin ropes of white whiskers drooped from her nostrils, lowered now in deference to her father.
His own whiskers were raised, unfurling alongside his snout and trembling with suppressed impatience. If she pushed him much further, they would splay outward like a cobra’s hood, and then she would know she was really in trouble.
“Ai ya, Tianlong,” her father growled. “No creature is bigger, stronger, or faster than a dragon. You will easily win the race.”
“But I’m the smallest, weakest, and slowest of our clan.” Tianlong lifted
her scales in agitation, as if by doing so, she could shake off her inauspicious colors. “Why would you put my name into the jar? Why not one of the ge ges?” she complained, referring to her older brothers.
Before her father could answer, the dark skies around them flashed, followed by the sharp crack of lightning and a low rumbling of thunder. The shriek of an embattled dragon assaulted them next, at a pitch too high for human ears, making Tianlong wince with its ferociousness. She clutched her rock even harder and fought the urge to flee into a cave.
Her father didn’t so much as twitch. “They’re busy.”
The explanation was much too polite. Her brothers were obviously brawling, and for whatever reason, her father didn’t think it necessary to stop them from tearing apart the celestial skies. These sibling battles could go on for days, and the Jade Emperor’s race was tomorrow.
“I don’t have the luck to win,” she said stubbornly.
“Bad luck can be overlooked.” Her father’s nostrils flared along with his whiskers. “But bad behavior cannot.”
The barb struck home with painful finality. Tianlong ducked her head and her whiskers drooped even lower.
Her father knew she would do as she was asked, no matter how much she feared failing. It was what daughters did. Shape themselves to become what their fathers and mates demanded, what their clan needed.
And it was her name on the tile, after all. She had lost.
“It’s your duty to represent the dragons, Tianlong,” her father pressed, softening his voice as the only acknowledgement of his victory.
“I don’t want to let the clan down,” Tianlong said in a small voice. She had shrunk so far into herself that she could almost hide the entire length of her serpent-like body behind the mountain’s peak. She wished it were as easy to hide from duty and familial loyalty.
At this, her father gathered her into him, coiling around both her and the mountain’s peak, like warm, comforting noodles in her belly.
She noticed for the first time how frail his short arms were, how dully his fire-red scales gleamed. Even the fresh, evergreen scent of his musk had grown stale and musty, reminding her more of the dank, moldy humus fields where mushrooms grew rather than of bright algae swirling life through the ocean’s currents.
Her father was getting old. The realization brought with it a swift stab of hot shame for her headstrong rebellion. She should be making him proud instead of vexing him with her selfishness.
“The tiles have chosen you for a reason,” her father said, “luck or no luck. Give us the best you have, and the race will be yours to lose.”
She sighed her acquiescence. “All right, baba.”
He patted her shoulder in approval. As another flash of lightning crackled across the skies, her father added, “But don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Lose.”
# # #
Dawn illuminated Tianlong’s fears in stark relief, the roiling gray clouds a mirror of her internal fears. The dragons unfurled from their sleeping caves, carved high among the jagged pinnacles of the pillar-like mountains where they made their home. Tianlong’s father yawned widely to welcome the new day as if he would swallow it whole.
“It is a beautiful day for a race,” he said heartily, even though drizzling rain trickled damp trails down his scales.
Tianlong hunched deeper into her family’s cave. She hated the dampness, which was truly unlucky for her since it was her family who was responsible for bringing rain to nourish the earth. Go figure she couldn’t have been born into a dragon family that oversaw the autumn harvest, or maybe even the ocean tides. Something that didn’t require suffering the dreary rain.
“Just beautiful,” she muttered, picking at a goose carcass without much enthusiasm.
Her father dumped another armload of geese and flopping carp in front of her. “Eat,” he commanded. “You’ll need your strength. Your mother tells me that Tiger Clan has already arrived, so we are already late.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, swallowing a carp to keep her father from nagging her any further. “Rat is the smallest and slowest, so their clan will likely be last.”
“Who cares about Rat?” Her father’s eyes narrowed. “It’s Tiger we need to be careful of.” He nudged the rest of her half-eaten goose toward her. “Now eat.”
# # #
Tianlong and her father slunk down from her family’s mountain head first, capering down the rocks with nimble and familiar ease. Near the bottom, her father leapt into the wide river that carved its meandering way through the valley of pillar mountains where the Dragon Clan had made their home, splashing joyfully into the slate blue water. He twisted his body through the waves, undulating laterally just beneath the surface of the water as easily as a snake slithers through grass.
Tianlong landed on a rugged rock jutting above the waves and picked her way carefully along the river, hopping from rock to rock.
“Tianlong,” her father called, already a hundred meters upstream. “Hurry.”
“I’m moving as fast as I can,” she yelled back.
“Get in the water and swim like a real dragon.” His annoyance resonated in embarrassingly loud echoes off the stony mountain walls that formed cliffs on either side of the river.
Tianlong prayed to laotian, the old father in the heavens, that no one else heard her father’s admonishment. She drew in a deep breath, clenched her jaw, and jumped in.
The water rushed cold and brisk over her scales, sending chill tremors down the length of her body and numbing her claws. Internal flaps closed off her ears and nostrils like the blowholes of whales, leaving her free to focus simply on swimming. Left to right, over and over again, the coils of her serpentine body made S-shapes through the water, propelling her forward.
She could swim for nearly an hour without pause, but Tianlong still came up for air more often than her father, who kept going while she gasped for another lungful of breath. He drew further ahead slowly and steadily, although never so far that he would lose sight of her if he looked back. Tianlong was sure he did it on purpose, to keep her moving faster rather than dawdle as she wanted to. Only a parent would understand the inner workings of their child so thoroughly that they needed no words to communicate, and Tianlong’s father was no exception.
The third time she broke the surface of the water to draw breath, Tianlong paused so long that she was forced to climb onto a nearby boulder lest she sink to the bottom. She squinted at the sky. The rain had stopped and the gray storm clouds still lingered, but now in the far distance, she could make out a ruddy orange glow limning the low hills that marked the boundary between the pillar mountains of the dragons’ home behind her and the sprawling, fertile lands of the human villages ahead. The Jade Emperor’s palace would not be far beyond the villagers’ vale.
“Baba,” she called out, and her father poked his head above the water. She pointed at the strange glow. “What is that?”
Her father glanced over, then shrugged. “Whatever it is, it is no business of ours, and our own is pressing enough. Let’s keep going. We’re almost there.”
Tianlong frowned, her gaze riveted by the orange, now flickering and throwing up a bright luminescence against the dark underbelly of the storm clouds. The unmistakably acrid scent of ember and char tickled her nose. “I think that’s fire.”
“Even more reason for us to keep going,” her father said. “We are creatures of water. We certainly have no business with fire.” He slipped back under the river’s waves, apparently satisfied that the conversation was settled.
But Tianlong didn’t follow. She stood on her boulder, her long, sinewy neck stretched toward the fire, her nostrils quivering as she read the wind’s grim news.
Creatures had died and were still dying. Some of the Ox Clan, domesticated by humans to do human work, and some of the Dog Clan had perished in flame. Rooster Clan, too, had lost many of its members. Surely they all had known better than to linger when the fire started,
Tianlong wondered. Why hadn’t they run?
“Let’s go!” her father called, his head bobbing in the river. “The Jade Emperor waits for no one.”
Tianlong started to obey automatically, but a distant roar sounded, and a rush of sparks flew so high into the air that she flinched. Flames leapt tall enough to brush up against the clouds. Thick puffs of light gray smoke rose lazily to smudge the sky.
Even though she was small for a dragon, Tianlong was still several times bigger than the largest creature in a human village. And the ferocity of that fire made her heart jump. Surely she could still help whoever was left.
All she had to do was disappoint her father.
Dread filled her mouth again, sticking it closed. She wanted to be a good daughter, a good dragon that her clan could be proud of despite her size, especially on this most prestigious of days with the emperor and all of his kingdom watching to see who would be the most worthy to serve in his heavenly guard. Dragon Clan must be represented in the guard. Tianlong had to win for the pride of her kind, and to do so, she had to get to the Jade Emperor’s palace on time.
But she also couldn’t do nothing as this fire swept aside anything and everything in its path. She could smell fear on the wind, and it wasn’t coming just from her.
She climbed out of the river and trundled across the grassy banks toward the hills.
“Tianlong!” her father roared from the riverbank. His whiskers flared from his nostrils, perpendicular to his body. “Get back here and do your duty!”
“I will, baba,” she threw back over her shoulder. “I promise. But I must see to this one thing first.”
“Tianlong,” her father growled in a final warning, his body half-raised from the water.
The fiery orange glow grew brighter. There wasn’t much time to lose.
“I promise,” she repeated, and raced ahead.
# # #
