A Dragon at Worlds' End (6 page)

Relkin knew of several good herbs for poultice making, but he doubted he would find them in these ancient forests. This forest was a strange place. There were very few flowering plants; the trees were mostly conifers, and unfamiliar types to him, too. Few of the familiar herbs were visible, either.

Still, Old Sugustus and hot water would do wonders, and the worst part of the wound had been cauterized with hot steel. If they could get some water into her and keep her safe, maybe she would wake. Maybe she would even survive. Relkin thought there was an even chance of it. He had seen more than his share of bludgeon wounds, not to mention sword wounds, arrow wounds, and every other wound one could imagine, and had come to hold expert opinions about them. The girl's skull was intact, there was no blood in her ears or from her nose. That was a good sign. So was the furious twitching of the limbs when he cauterized the wound. She was not paralyzed in the least. The heaviest part of the blow had come on the shoulder behind the collarbone, which had not broken. Relkin was pretty sure that no bones at all had been broken, though he couldn't be absolutely certain about the shoulder blade. If she came around, they could find out. Until then she must be kept perfectly still, dry, clean, and supplied with water.

He brought her water in a vessel made of a gourd he had cut from a forest vine and hollowed out and dried over the fire until it was as hard as fired clay.

She drank small amounts when he held it to her mouth, but choked after a while so he desisted. Every hour or so he gave her more.

Meanwhile, Bazil gathered more wood. Some went for the fire. The rest went to build a wall of brush around their position. The tide had come up about halfway to the high tide mark, which it clearly only reached a couple of times a year. They had dragged the boat farther up until it was beside the big beached tree. Now they built a "boma" around the position, cutting out brush, branches, and masses of twisted vines, some of them bearing savage thorns. The barrier was eight feet high before they were finished, and Relkin was satisfied that it would deter all but the biggest predators and even delay those.

Here they would stay until the girl either got better or died.

Before the sun went down, they built their rock oven and laid over it the haunches of meat they'd brought down from the hills. The meat cooked while the sky darkened and the moon rose. Relkin thought of Eilsa, and tried not to think too hard about the girl with the tail, lying on a bed of palm fronds he'd made, bandaged and struggling for life.

Their life by the river wasn't difficult, particularly once Relkin had the time to make a crude bow and some arrows, and then some fishing line and finally a net. These items improved their diet quite considerably. It turned out to be a necessary move, as the supply of over-aggressive reptilian predators had thinned out over the weeks as they were killed off night after night by Bazil and the sword. The lack of such ill-mannered fellows had also made for uninterrupted sleep.

From the skin of one of the largest red-brown beasts Relkin had renewed his own wardrobe and outfitted a sun hat for the dragon, with a long flap at the back that could be unrolled to cover the shoulders. Bazil had long complained of the power of the tropical sun's rays. Leatherback dragons were creatures of the northern coasts, after all.

Their camp gradually took on a more permanent look. First Relkin built a crude shelter, over the girl and thus over the boat. Around it there sprouted a palisade of sharpened sticks, and around that an outer palisade. Finally a ditch of sorts was dug and more stakes put out in the bottom.

By then there was a much larger shelter inside, in which both dragon and boy could sleep at night. Attacking animals made so much noise on the stockades that it always woke them up well in time to deal with the nuisance. Then the animals grew fewer in number and dwindled to nothing and the nights became quite peaceful.

To capture more food, Relkin tried a deadfall trap and a pit with a stake at the bottom, but neither produced any game. Bazil did manage to surprise some big two-legged critters and kill one of them after an epic chase. The bounty from this kept them in meat for a week. In all this time the girl drifted in and out of unconsciousness while her wound swelled briefly and then drained and began to heal. The bruising began to fade and the color deepened in her cheeks. When she stirred and groaned, Relkin had found he could feed her soup, and so meat soup had become a staple and was made fresh every day in a hollowed-out trunk. In time this became fish soup. He thickened it by grinding the flesh of the fish between two smooth rocks before adding it to the hot stock in their firepit cauldron. Without a pot or a kettle it was arduous work, but Relkin was used to such a life and he quickly adapted.

With Bazil's powerful assistance they examined the trees and plants in their surrounding area, searching for whatever might be useful. From the bark of a tall tree that had leathery little round leaves Relkin could extract long threads of fiber. These he wove together to make string. By various means he learned to make this fiber string stronger and more effective, and eventually coated it with pine tar and dried it in the sun and then by the fire. After some trial and error he finally had an effective bowstring with reasonable strength. These strings broke more frequently than good Marneri-made twist, but he could always make more, and they did the job well enough to give him an effective addition to their armament.

In addition he was working on softening the sinews of the beasts they had killed. When cooked they were useless, as stiff as pieces of wood. So he cut out a few while the meat was fresh, a laborious process. Then he stretched them in the sun while working them constantly to keep them pliable. Later he hardened them by the fire. However, although they were strong and had a fair degree of elasticity, they were hard to work, tending to unravel when stressed repeatedly. This sent him back to the pine-tar-shellacked string, which worked well enough.

In the meantime he had woven enough coarser thread to start stitching together his first net. That was a small one, an experimental model that proved its worth when used in conjunction with a fishing line and one of his precious collection of metal hooks, also from his waist pouch. They were good Marneri hooks bought on Foluran Hill and he had four of them, and when they were gone he would have to make his own hooks. Which had him working with the teeth of some of the larger fish they managed to catch. One monster was eight feet long and had been caught when it came out of the deeper water to take a smaller fish that Relkin had hooked. At Relkin's cry Bazil threw himself in with Ecator in hand and emerged with the back half of the fish, while Relkin pulled in the rest. The teeth were large and partly hooked. Relkin sought to accentuate the hook with the tip of his dirk. The results were not that good. The small net, however, made it much easier to land smaller fish and it became a permanent part of his fishing equipment.

As days passed into weeks his busy fingers twisted together fiber from the tree that Bazil had felled, and the bigger nets were done and they quickly made life much easier. They stretched the first around a snag stuck about four hundred feet out in the river. Bazil swam out to check it after every tide and usually found something big caught in it. The river teemed with fish.

Meanwhile, Relkin was also making rope from vines and trying to figure out how to make a trap that they could lower to the bottom of the river to see what they might catch down there. He imaged crabs and lobsters of great size and wonderful flavor. The ropes were easy, since the vines were tough but pliable and could be held together with a glue made from pine tar thinned down with hot water.

In these ways the days passed quickly and their camp became ever more comfortable.

And slowly the girl began to awaken for longer periods and even to some sort of awareness. At first it was just little cries and moans. Her body might shiver a moment during these episodes. Later her eyelids fluttered open and she stared around for a moment before falling back into unconsciousness. The next day she woke again and remained awake longer. Her face registered astonishment, fear, and curiosity in equal measures. She said something incomprehensible and repeated it several times.

When Relkin spoke to her, she screamed and tried to get to her feet. She wasn't physically ready for anything like that. Her legs wouldn't hold her and Relkin quickly took her in his arms and laid her down again. Her eyes were fixed on him. Although at first she stared at him with suspicion, he gave her some meat broth in the gourd. She sniffed it suspiciously, then devoured it and looked for more. Relkin refilled the gourd from the fire.

When Bazil came back with a load of driftwood, she screamed again and tried to crawl away, but could only roll onto her stomach and wriggle. When he dropped the driftwood by the fire and squatted down nearby, she stared bug-eyed, on the point of dragon freeze. Then Bazil spoke to Relkin. When Relkin spoke back, she fainted.

Thus began a period of mutual education. Relkin learned that her name was Lumbee and that she was of the "Ardu" people, the people with tails. In return she soon managed to pronounce "Relkin" and "Bazil" clearly. It took time for her suspicion of them to really fade, but gradually it did and at the same time they picked up words of each other's language so that within a few more days they were capable of carrying on basic conversation. He learned that she had escaped an attack by "no-tail" men on her people. She had been clubbed in the fight, but had retained consciousness long enough to fall into the canoe and push it out onto the river. Lumbee spoke of the "no-tail" men with dread and hate in her voice. She had been remarkably lucky, because the lake that her kin were camped beside had two exit streams, one flowing south to the land of the no-tails and the other north into the lands of terror. By pure chance the canoe had gone north; otherwise she would have long since fallen into the hands of the dreaded no-tails.

Later, when Lumbee was strong enough to walk, they moved camp several miles downstream to a small island. It was perfectly defensible and equipped with a nearby companion islet to which Relkin could string the big net. The fishing was good and they built a crude raft on which to float across the daily mound of firewood that Bazil collected along the shore.

It was at the island camp that Relkin began to seriously learn the language of the Ardu folk. It was a process of trial and error with occasional outbursts of laughter as he mastered the pronunciation of common words and began to fashion crude sentences.

In exchange Relkin taught Lumbee some Verio, the common language of the far east, and a few phrases of dragon speech. Lumbee was a quick study for languages and learned even more swiftly than Relkin, who was trying very hard. Lumbee was not so quick to accept that Bazil was what he was, an intelligent person who could speak and be spoken to. Her own first efforts at speaking to the dragon, in unfamiliar Verio, left her weak and frightened afterward. But, as the days progressed, so she grew used to the huge, friendly presence of the leather-back wyvern.

Once, when they were attacked by a pair of green-skinned long-striders, Bazil unsheathed Ecator with that weird, shivery, ringing cry the blade made when hungry for action. Then with smooth, lethal strokes he cut down the predators. Lumbee was awed. She understood now the power of the pairing of a man and such a warrior beast. The sword in such huge hands became a godlike weapon to a simple Ardu girl. Lumbee now confronted the realization that Relkin and Bazil came from a civilization of an order beyond that of anything she knew or understood. They spoke of cities and great oceans, things that she had only heard of in legend, and of ships that sailed on those oceans. All these things churned in Lumbee's mind and she would ask Relkin questions for hours at a time as she tried to understand them. Her world was turning upside down and it was not an entirely comfortable experience.

Furthermore, she began to have the most shameful ideas about the pale brown boy that had saved her life. With his sun-bleached hair and easy, infectious smile, she felt strongly attracted to him. He was a young man, his body hardened by a life of constant movement and physical work, but she saw in his eyes a depth of experience and a sadness that she wanted desperately to quench.

Lumbee was not a stranger to love. She had gone beyond the fire circle with Konsh, until the previous summer when he had disappeared, presumed abducted by the no-tail slavers who haunted the Summer Lands. More recently she had been paired with Ommi, though she did not care for big Ommi as much as she had for Konsh.

To meet with Konsh beyond the firelight to kiss and fumble and entwine tails was an acceptable part of the courtship of marriage. The Ardu owned no property; they were hunter-gatherers with garden plot agriculture. They were relaxed about courtship rites.

But to meet with a tailless one for such activities?

Lumbee had already asked to see the base of Relkin's spine, and been amazed at the complete absence of a tail. Where her own, muscular, brown-skinned tail sprang out of her body to flex behind her, his backbone stopped abruptly, just above the buttocks.

At first she had been repelled by this lack, but after a while she found that she had accepted it. The way everybody had once accepted old Gampi, a distant great-aunt of Lumbee's, who had lost a hand in her youth and had just a stump at the end of one wrist. Nobody had thought twice about it in the clan. After a week or so she found she didn't miss the tail on Relkin anymore.

She prayed for guidance to the forest gods, the gods of wood and glen, creek and pond, that had stood by the Ardu for millennia. But she was far from her homeland and unsure if her gods could hear her prayers in this dark, ancient forest.

Still she asked questions, compelled by a frantic need that she scarcely understood. Perhaps it was just to deflect the mounting interest she felt in Relkin.

As she became more conversant, so the others learned more from her concerning their whereabouts. Relkin had been correct in his supposition that they were on the southern shore of the Inland Sea. The Ardu's knowledge of the world was limited. They knew of the sea as the northern terminator of the world. They knew nothing of the lands to the east and north. When Relkin spoke of the sea, Lumbee's eyes lit up and she gestured to the north. But when he spoke on, she grew troubled and asked many questions. Relkin was left exhausted by the effort to both learn the new words and answer the endless questions.