by Marc Secchia
To his surprise, the Seven Scamps practically moved in with him after the sunlocust plague. They slept on his porch, on his chair, even at the foot of his rough pallet. They shadowed him when he walked the Isle, searching for food or grain or nuts – anything at all – and flitted down the cliffs when he returned to replace Nyahi’s floorboards, to repair a cracked wall and to reseat her roof, for her explosive power had knocked it off its pegs. Good thing he was strong enough to raise the entire roof by himself then, wasn’t it? Asturbar replaced three cracked pegs and then resettled the roof’s underlying log frame. Good as new. He dusted his hands cheerfully, and tried not to recall her pounding the place to pieces too vividly. Grief, four cracked wall boards – they were solid timber two inches thick apiece!
He could have done that with a hefty kick, or in full armour. Asturbar flexed his muscles. Hope she liked mountains for biceps. ’Cause his were small Dragonships!
Oh, here came Prime Scamp, a pretty blue female with the cheekiest grin, a lithe body and tripartite wings which were butterfly-like in their edging, but reinforced with classic flexible draconic struts that allowed her expert control in the air. She could hover, dive, somersault or stop on a platinum mark, and her reflexes were so fast she could snatch an insect out of the air at high speed. She gave an imperious squawk. Digger Scamp, whom he had nicknamed for his ability to burrow out his own bodyweight in soil within about five seconds, marched in and dropped a fine beetle on the floor.
Asturbar eyed it with amusement.
Prime Scamp made that bossy sound again. Clearly, he was meant to consume the offering.
He said, “Thank you, but that’s poisonous.”
Cheep-cheep!
He tried in his limited Dragonish. Poisonous. Not good for Humans. Fruit? Seeds? Vegetables? Uh … roots would work, too. Roots? He mimed digging. Perhaps some edible roots might have escaped the rapacious maws of those sunlocusts.
The dragonets appeared to discuss his needs – or the range and severity of his deficiencies, he imagined by the amusement burbling through their conversation – animatedly between themselves before flitting off with chortles of laughter. Perhaps they thought Humans feeble or helpless. No mind. He took measurements and tried to work out how to replace the boards without tearing down half of her hut – which was apparently a clear and present danger, between the two of them. Since the corner posts had been fashioned with a simple slot-in system for the boards, there was only one answer. Lift the roof, replace the boards. Great. He’d just fixed that!
He wondered if the magic drained her; if she needed to hibernate after a particularly violent session of soldier-bashing. Ha. That girl would discover how stubborn he could be. And he would find out her name. Yes. The sithastroon would be problematic, though. He really needed glue to fix the crack in the neck, and he had no idea what could be turned to glue in this place.
For the remainder of that afternoon Asturbar worked at splitting his logs carefully. It was an exacting business to achieve an end result akin to boards with the tools he had to hand, but the windfall trees were straight and true of grain – perfect lumber if only he had a saw! He wedged them apart patiently. Hammers. Chisels. Shaping new, bigger wedges. Sweaty work. In the late afternoon the Seven Scamps returned in a state of high excitement and presented him with a tuber. One very large, very edible-looking tuber.
He was bowled over.
Seven sets of whirring fire eyes watched expectantly for his response. They were quite the group of misfits, all shapes and sizes and colours, clearly not of any one particular subspecies of dragonets. The largest he had dubbed Fatty Scamp before realising belatedly she was female, and pregnant with a clutch of eggs. Chauvinism and soldiers? The less said, the better. The dragonet was a pretty, unusual pink colour – not albino, but a richer colour like fine rose quartz – with a short but stout body and long, wedge-shaped wings that lent themselves multiple forward somersaults in the air. That was her favourite trick, and she could throw in corkscrew somersaults too.
Thank you! Asturbar enthused.
Hmm. This appeared to communicate poorly.
Alright. Whooping, hollering and cheering, he capered about the hut waving the root like a trophy. Apparently this achieved the goal of cross-species communication perfectly. Asturbar felt ridiculous, but it was pure delight to see the dragonets bursting into a spontaneous aerial dance of self-congratulation. They tapped wingtips, spiralled around each other, puffed out their little chests, and – oh! Well, then. Apparently a spot of public mating was in order. That was rather more of an eyeful than he had bargained for.
He squinted in another direction, very pleased to note a haze of resplendent green starting to develop around the Islands once more. The ragions had apparently been unaffected by the swarm, but the rest of the plant, animal and insect life had been devastated by a million unquenchable appetites. Thanks to Nyahi’s intervention, his injuries had not been severe, but the conundrum of being stuffed through the gap beneath her bed preoccupied his waking thoughts and more than a few of his nightmares, too. Nightmares were nothing new. Many soldiers dreamed about what they had seen and done; he wondered if there was a kind of battle trauma that manifested in sweat-soaked awakenings and paranoid or hair-trigger behaviour. Soldiers that struck their spouses in the night but had no memory of it come morning. Flashes of fury out of all proportion to the offence.
Soldiering was no easy life, but it surprised him how quickly he had turned his back on all he had known since childhood, and how little he missed it.
Asturbar buried the root beneath a small fire and kept it tended for the balance of the afternoon. Several hours of steady heat ought to slow-cook it to perfection. Then he would go and entice Nyahi with delicious smells. Oh! What about adding fish?
Few denizens of the pools had survived the sunlocusts, but he succeeded in hooking two ten-inch specimens after half an hour or so. In that time, he noticed that the layout of the Island-to-Island waterfalls had changed. Odd. How was all this fresh water produced anyways? That there was a good and apparently unending supply was out of kilter for the dry, harsh climate of the Doldrums. He would have to investigate just as soon as he finished – he could not resist the allusion, despite that it made him shiver – rousting the Dragoness from her lair. For which she might thank him by snapping his head off his shoulders.
Pure romance.
* * * *
On another achingly perfect Doldrums evening, as the last crimsons of a fiery half-eclipsed suns-set faded into the gathering night, Asturbar presented himself at the cavern entrance with a plate of delicately deboned and filleted freshwater trout, roasted tubers with the unfortunate inch of char cut off of them, and a breadroll which despite being neglected in her oven, had somehow escaped being crisped to death. He was proud of his arrangement on the plate. Evidently he did possess at least one artistic bone in his body, if not two.
“Nyahi, are you awake?” Something stirred heavily inside the cavern with a leathery rustling sound. Asturbar took a step backward. “I brought you some food. Would you – yie!”
GNARRR! Before the plate he abandoned had time to drop two inches in the air, the phenomenon he was beginning to recognise as associated with Nyahi, a lavender blur, shot like a crossbow bolt out of the cavern, snapped up the entire plate in a mouth three feet wide – which vanished instantly into the aether – slammed against his braced, crossed arms, and bolted back into that hole like a mink darting into its burrow. Something slurped, guzzled, and gnashed against the metal plate.
He wrung his smarting wrists. “Ouch. And not even a word of thanks.”
The plate whirred out of the cave and whanged him in the left eye. Asturbar may have uttered an indelicate word at that juncture.
No mind. Stubborn risk-taker that he was, he fetched another, much more substantial helping of victuals, again thoughtfully arranged, but he did have the foresight to deliver this one by prodding it toward the cavern with a long stick.
“Eat u
p!”
Hiss! Something quite different smudged across his vision.
The plate was gone. He held half a stick. Asturbar grinned and mopped some not-so-imaginary moisture off his brow. “Don’t grow too fat in there!”
The flying plate bruised his elbow this time. “Festering murgalizards!”
Round three started promisingly. Asturbar poked the rather battered and sorry-looking plate forward with a fresh stick. He imagined the plate wishing to grow legs and bolt in the opposite direction. “Dinnertime for hungry ladies!”
She replied, “I’m so sorry, I – oh no!”
Growl, blur, munch … this time, he caught the returning plate neatly in both hands and twirled it upon his forefinger. “Ha! Stuff that up your pipe and smoke it, crazy-magical girl!”
He could have acquired serious riches by predicting her silences. This one was more ominous than most. Asturbar backed up another four feet just in case. He would have given a Dragonship load of platinum ingots for his armour just then, for he sensed his mortality approaching with the speed and fury of a feral Dragon.
“Boots?”
Phew! Her Human voice at last, but he had been fooled before. The speed of her changes could give lightning a decent race. “Nyahi? Are you alright?”
Lilting of voice, she ribbed him, “Are you being deliberately vulgar?”
“I … well, I … it was just an expression.” Which could be misinterpreted, evidently!
“Thanks for the food – but … ah, perhaps it’s a cultural fillip?” He blinked. As if she heard the shuttering of his eyelids, she added, “Let me explain. That turn of phrase might mean something different to you, but where I come from –”
“Oh. Sorry. I guess I’m just about as persistent as a bad rash.”
Nyahi made a tsk-tsk-tsk sound with her tongue. “And he continues to drag the tone of the conversation through stinky gutters. What sort of rash was that, exactly? Forgive me?”
Asturbar was quite certain there was steam literally seeping out from beneath his shirt. How under the five Moons was it possible that he must blush his way through every conversation with this girl? He was not the blushing sort! “Yes! As to the former, I’ll have you know that not every word which passes my lips is a lewd ode to –”
Her bubbling laughter brought him screeching to a conversational full stop. “Oh, Boots, you are so very charming, falling for every scrap of my teasing and putting up with all my shenanigans with such unbelievably good humour. I’m glad you still have possession of all of your fingers.” Steamed up tenfold by her mischievous tone, he could only splutter inarticulately. Nyahi added, “No thanks to me, of course. In all seriousness, I … I don’t deserve this … I need to sleep again. Will you come by tomorrow? Please?”
She sounded so young. So mournful. Asturbar reminded himself that she might be over twenty, but she had missed out on any company whatsoever for seven long years. Much could and perhaps should have been learned in that time, but exile had taken its terrible toll instead. Nyahi must have lived in desperate fear of her magic; in the sure knowledge she would be alone for the rest of her life. Then, a disgraced mercenary had pitched up on her doorstep.
He nodded to the darkness. “It shall be my pleasure.”
If he could only contrive to stay alive long enough to enjoy it.
* * * *
The following morning, Nyahi was not present at her home, nor was he able to rouse the sleeper in the cavern. By listening very carefully, he could just about make out the rhythm of her breathing. She must be lying just inside the entryway, but she was as untouchable there as if she had been on the far side of the Island-World.
He wrote in the sand with his finger, and departed.
Asturbar spent the remainder of the day completing her boards and shaping them according to his measurements. The colour would be darker and the texture a finer grain than before, but he hoped this would prove no impediment to a woman’s sensibilities. Surely function was more important than colour?
He scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Hope so.”
Somehow he doubted the mystery that was Nyahi could be reduced to any form of simplicity.
In the early evening, he revelled in his now customary swim in the central pool. Each day he noticed new growth, especially around the water, but also up the long, slightly curved binders and on every Island in the great amphitheatre around his location. Armies of insects and protodraconic scavengers had already reduced every carcass to pieces and consumed or carried off the bounty – was this some feature of the ecosystem, he wondered, a renewal of life? Many life forms he had identified before, such as the delightful butterfly-dragonets which were undoubtedly the fashionable courtiers of their kind, seemed to have vanished or gone into hibernation. He had discovered thousands of pods ranging from several inches to as long as three feet, hanging from the trees in the forested section. Some had taken up residence beneath his narrow eaves.
One way to avoid being eaten.
One thing was for certain, he watched the skies with considerably more attention now than before the sunlocust plague. The Doldrums had returned to their overheated, brooding guardianship of normalcy, but he did not trust that any longer. He could do with leaning on Nyahi’s experience. She had survived this place for seven years. Resourceful, powerful and … painfully bashful? Right!
Stealthy plop-plop sounds alerted him a second before Asturbar realised he had company. The Seven Scamps! Colours whirled beneath the water, blue and yellow and pink, and then suddenly they all broke the surface in a synchronised wave and doused him thoroughly! Wings fluttered. Paws splashed. Asturbar spluttered and coughed, and then decided – to heck with this! Swinging his arms like the windmill farms of Chankuti which milled their golden grain, he paid the dragonets back double and treble measure, yelling and chortling and gurgling in surprise as they spat sharp little spouts of water into his face. He and the Scamps romped happily around the edges of the deep pond; the dragonets tracked him underwater as he explored the depths until he could hold his breath no longer, and he had not even come close to finding the bottom. The water was a clear, deep blue and seemed fathomless.
The suns were lowering and the day cooled at last. Time to retry his appointment with Nyahi.
Asturbar had four heavy boards to transport, so it took him almost an hour to traverse the vertical climb of some one hundred and sixty feet, located about three hundred yards shy of her dwelling on the eastern inner edge. Hopefully his ropes would not be eaten here; he glanced repeatedly at the neat hut as he rappelled down to the third solid tree that grew sideways out of the cliff face, and rested his load there. Ah, a slight rippling of heat above the chimney drew his attention. Promising. Perhaps a few yummy smells in the offing. His stomach gurgled enthusiastically. Did he spy a partially shadowed face in the doorway, taking a brief peek at her surroundings?
Be that as it may, by the time he swung up the path singing a marching song to the vocal bemusement of the Seven Scamps, the hut again seemed abandoned. Now, his approach must be circumspect. As cunning as a hunter stalking his … ah, perhaps a better metaphor was called for. She might intend to dice him up for her stewpot, but he had no such desire. If he might allow himself a smidgen of honesty from time to time, his was most assuredly a pursuit, just a different sort.
He finished his song on a crescendo that set a flock of lesser yellow-crested chaffinches off in a flurry of panic, and popped his rump down on the stone. “A hulloo over the Islands to thee, o maiden most fair!”
Startled silence.
Perhaps his off-key singing had hurt her ears? No mind. He opened his mouth.
Nyahi called out, “Well hulloo there, bootsy bandit most … vociferous? I don’t know that allusion.” She paused to wheeze alarmingly – anxiety attack? “Ah, can you see well enough from over there?”
“I believe so. Can’t you?”
With an embarrassed hitch, the voice explained, “When I came into my powers, my eyesight changed and I
now don’t see much beyond the reach of my hand. You look like a large, fuzzy white blob with tan bits on the bottom.”
Flattering.
Asturbar narrowed his eyes. She was watching him? From where? How?
Nyahi added, “But don’t think you can sneak up on me, soldier. My other senses more than compensate.”
Frankly, he would rather have been tickling the underside of Azhukazi the Iolite Blue’s forepaw at that point than face the prospect of attempting to sneak anywhere within a league of this deadly, changeable creature. He deadpanned, “Oh, is that so?”
“Oh indeed. For example, I can tell by your scent that you usually bathe before coming to see me. The Island’s water has a moist, minty tang that’s quite distinct.” He vented a hiss of dismay, but her tone sprouted an unseen smile as she added, “It does not go unappreciated. Now, I’ve spent all day practicing and I’d like to show you something. Sound good?”
If she could scent him from that far, then was the gambolling of his heartbeat an open scroll to her? “Excellent. Go ahead.”
“Look. See?”
It took a moment, but there it was. A finger … two Human fingers … just sneaking out from behind the left doorpost. “What do you think?”
Asturbar made an approving noise and said drily, “Impressive.”
“I know!” she squealed like a girl half her age. “Better still, I didn’t even blow anything up! Isn’t that amazing?”
“Truly staggering.”
“Now, watch this.”
This sally earned a hearty slap upon his knee. “Ooh, the whole hand! Glad I’m sitting down at this juncture … oh!”
