Heart of Light (39 page)

The dragon had killed so many of his comrades in the Hyena Men. It had tried to attack him and Nassira. It was even a danger to Emily and Nigel. And, he was sure, to others as well. People who had done nothing to attract the monster's attention except be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yet Emily Oldhall had touched it, and it had shown no signs of aggression. Was that better or worse? If the creature retained a shred of humanity within it, shouldn't it be able to control its animal impulses? And shouldn't it be held accountable when it didn't?

Yet now it was a man like Kitwana—if paler—lying upon the ground, writhing in pain. Wounds like pinpricks—the shrunken remainders of lance stabs—clustered on his arms and legs, his back and shoulders.

The wound on his shoulder, however, which Kitwana had inflicted with his spelled lance, bled more profusely than all the others combined, leaking dark blood onto the mud. The Englishman moaned and rolled on the ground, then made a sharp sound, like keening. His dark green eyes looked less human now than they had when he'd been in dragon form. They embodied madness and pain. His eyes were all iris, huge and rolling, the pupils mere pinpoints contracted to the tiniest aperture, keeping light out. Kitwana still held his spear, but he could not use it.

Emily was right. Desperate in his pain and looking maddened by torment, Peter Farewell was, nonetheless, utterly human and completely helpless.

Kitwana knew how easy it was to kill a man. And how irretrievable life was, once lost.

All humans should be allowed to live, unless they proved for a fact that they were incapable of redemption. Because while a man lived, there was hope he would change.

Disturbingly human-looking blood escaped the dragon-man, to mix with the sand and dirt atop the rock and form a rich mud.

Emily had gone very pale, staring at the man, her hands clenched on either side of her blood-splattered gown. “Will he live?” she asked, and looked at Kitwana with such anxious need for reassurance that Kitwana nodded reflexively.

If no one bound his wounds, the dragon would die soon. If Kitwana just pretended to treat him and didn't, then the dragon would die. Kitwana would not need to kill him. It would be nature taking its course.

“Shouldn't we stop his bleeding?” Emily Oldhall asked. Her hair was loose down her back, silky soft, almost begging to be touched. Her eyes shone full of the same certainty, the same faith in Kitwana's goodness and kindness that Kitwana's father had always showed. Until their last talk.

Kitwana didn't think he could bear to disappoint such faith again. He looked around, found a piece of cotton cloth nearby. It was one of Nassira's ubiquitous wraps, this one in dark green. It fluttered atop the pile of sticks and straw that she'd used for a mattress and was, therefore, not soiled.

He retrieved the cloth, tore a strip off it and handed it to Emily. “Bind the wound on his shoulder,” he said.

She stared at him, holding the cloth dangling from her hand, as though she were quite at a loss to know how one bound wounds.

“He will die if you don't,” Kitwana said. He wondered if he'd found the one woman, from any culture, who'd never been trained in the care of the sick. But in the next breath, Emily knelt in the bloody mud, her hands working deftly as though by long habit, reaching for the dragon, looping the cloth around his chest.

The dragon-man keened again and snapped ineffectually at Emily with his human teeth. She pulled her hand out of harm's way. “Now, Mr. Farewell,” she said.

She said it primly, and it made Kitwana want to laugh that she could say
Mr. Farewell
to a creature she'd watched change into a huge, supernatural reptile and then back to human again. To a creature so confused that he was trying to bite her while she bound his wound.

It made Kitwana want to cry. He'd felt an odd desire to laugh and cry, both, ever since he'd seen her standing in front of, her finger raised and wagging. How far out of touch with the world she was that she thought she could save not only the life but the soul of a were-creature and get it to behave like a human being? And how commanding her belief. How like Kitwana's own father, who believed he could reform tyrants and reclaim mass murderers. And who often managed it. Her attitude brought out Kitwana's mixed longing for home and the faint annoyance that his father always made him feel.

He turned his annoyance toward Emily, who was absorbed in tying the strip of fabric around Peter's shoulder. She did it in such way that the flow of blood slowed.

“You know we should kill him.” Kitwana said. “More merciful all around.”

“Mr. Kitwana,” Emily said. Now he was
Mr.
? It was all he could do not to laugh.

She fixed him with her blue eyes, severe and caring, managing somehow to look like his father's eyes when Kitwana vexed him. “Don't talk nonsense,” she said. “We don't kill people.” She frowned at the person on the ground—naked, covered in minute cuts and mud. “We should get him something to cover himself with,” she said. “To make him decent.”

The man had turned into a dragon before her and flown flaming into the sky, and she was worried because his genitals were exposed? But then he realized that, in Emily's mind, Farewell's exposure meant humiliation, and she wanted Farewell covered for his sake, not her own.

Now that Kitwana had figured out how much Emily resembled his father in spirit, he thought he knew exactly how her mind must work. And also how unavoidable her demands were, and the futility of arguing with her. She wanted to confer human dignity on this creature and there would be nothing Kitwana could do to dissuade her. Nor did Kitwana
want
to. Instead, he found himself full of strange impulses and thoughts he could hardly control. He wanted to caress her burnished skin, to feel it even and smooth beneath his hands. He wanted to hold her, pliant and solid in his arms, have those blue eyes look at him alone.

He backtracked through the now-dark camp, where the fire had died down or been trampled into the ground. He stumbled on a body, face up on the ground, his chest bitten through by a huge, reptilian mouth. He must have killed these men in the melee. Kitwana stepped over the dead man, not looking at the face, not wanting to remember his name. Emily wanted to help the creature that had murdered this man. Kitwana wanted to believe with Emily. He wanted to think that Farewell could be redeemed. Kitwana wanted to believe again in his father's wisdom, as he had in his childhood. But he knew that the man now half-crazed in pain on the encampment ground was also a creature so terrifying that it could bite through a man's chest.

Kitwana's stomach clenched in revulsion.

And then he remembered the men prodding at the great beast with lances, turning it into a pincushion. How could it not defend itself? And it had no other means but its huge teeth. Why would it not use its natural defenses?

Kitwana stepped over another corpse and went on. He saw two more bundles on the ground, but forbore to go near. He would not think of those men now, who had been under his command and his responsibility and whom he should have protected better. He'd let them bait the dragon and the dragon had killed them. Their deaths fell as much at Kitwana's door as at the dragon's.

He made his way to the tent of the dragon-man, and fumbled on the ground to find Peter's pants, his underwear, his shirt. And then, thinking of those wounds covered in mud, Kitwana sighed. The creature would never live.

He took the clothes back to Emily. She had bound the big wound on Peter Farewell's chest. Her forehead was wrinkled in worry, her mouth pursed. “I'm afraid we're out of disinfectant salve,” she said. She opened both her hands in a show of helplessness. “The bottle somehow got broken.”

Kitwana looked at the dragon. Peter's eyes appeared lusterless, dull. They were the eyes of a moribund animal. He looked up at Emily's anxious face. This had to be utterly alien for a European woman who'd probably been cosseted and protected her whole life. But she wanted to save the dragon.

Kitwana sighed. He handed Emily Peter Farewell's clothes and said, “Please, hold these.” If there was one thing Kitwana could improvise, from water and sheer, raw magic, it was a healing salve. His father had provided them for every village around, for every refugee climbing his mountain. And Kitwana had learned the trick of it early, had learned to make himself useful and prevent his father from running his magic—and his health—into the ground.

Now he found a jar full of water beside what remained of the camping fire. He pulled the jar aside, put his hands over it and wished all his healing magic into the water, so that the water would be an extension of his most potent healing spells.

The water hissed and bubbled. A pale golden light issued from it, making the thick clay jar seem, for the moment, transparent, and lighting the whole encampment like a flash of lightning.

Across the encampment, Emily Oldhall gasped. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Making a healing salve,” Kitwana said. He picked up the jar and brought it to her.

She narrowed her eyes at him, then widened them at the jar. “A salve?” she asked. She pulled back a strand of dark, curly hair that had fallen in front of her eyes. She wrinkled her nose at the water jar he had set at her feet. It still shone, faintly gold, and the dark red clay looked odd.

“Just from water? Don't you need herbs or extracts or something for that?”

Kitwana met her gaze and held it. He did his best to look earnest and honest. He knew there were differences between their magical cultures. For one, no African had ever thought of using his magic in a group with others, or apply it to running a train or flying a magic carpet.

Very few Africans were born totally without magic, but very few had magic to compare to the great European wizards. Kitwana knew his own magic was somewhat smaller than that of European noblemen. Or at least, so he'd assumed.

But if this woman, this English magician, had never heard of the simple water and magic salve, perhaps Kitwana had underestimated his abilities.

“It's easier with herbs,” he said. “And later on, we could make some. But this should do for now.”

Emily looked doubtful, but she tore a strip from Nassira's colorful wrap and dipped it into the glowing salve. She looked up. “All the others are gone?”

“Yes,” Kitwana said. One way or another. “Some . . . He killed some.” He felt bad saying it, as if he were a small child tattling on a playmate.

Emily reacted just as Kitwana's father had once. She compressed her lips, but said only, “Help me move Mr. Farewell to a clean patch of stone. And help me clean his wounds and dress him.”

By helping, Kitwana assumed she meant for him to move him. At least he couldn't imagine such a small, frail creature as Emily doing much of the heavy lifting. But she put her hands beneath Peter Farewell's shoulders and managed to raise him about an inch above the ground, which was enough to move him to a relatively clean patch of rock, close by where the fire used to be.

Emily soaked the cloth in the salve and dabbed at Peter's legs, though she hesitated at touching his groin or his back.

Kitwana made a sound of impatience at her prudery, pulled the cloth from her hand and dabbed the few cuts in those areas himself.

Peter Farewell whimpered and made sharp, hissing sounds as the cloth touched his flesh, but he struggled only feebly—too feebly to swat their hands away.

Kitwana redipped the cloth and passed it back to Emily, who dabbed at Farewell's arms and neck, while Kitawana pulled the underwear and pants onto the man, only slightly hindered by Peter's struggles. The pants immediately became tinged with droplets of blood that made them look as though they were decorated with dark red embroidery.

Kitwana tried not to think that the wounded man he was trying to save was the same creature he had tried to kill earlier. But he couldn't avoid feeling Peter Farewell's skin under his hands, all too human and covered in a light beading of sweat from pain and exertion.

Looking at him now, Kitwana would not have believed Farewell was a dragon.

How could two creatures so different share the same bit of physical matter? How could two creatures share a mind and matter and yet no drive, no opinion, no actual fixed purpose?

Or did they?

Kitwana looked at Farewell with narrowed eyes, trying to discern in him the look of a killer. Trying to see the dragon within the man. But he saw only a man in pain, trying desperately to obey Emily's nudges as she made him lift his torso off the ground and slipped his shirt on him.

Kitwana remembered having seen whiskey in Farewell's tent. There was a remedy for Peter Farewell's pain, and, besides, Kitwana needed a respite from the creature's consciousness, from the dragon-man's eyes fixed upon him with such human pain. He needed to be able to speak to Emily about Peter Farewell in the abstract and not while the man was looking at him.

He went back for the whiskey, then knelt beside the man and brandished the bottle.

Peter flinched, and pressed himself against the ground, his face ghastly pale, his lips drawn back from his teeth, his eyes wild.

“Drink,” Kitwana said, and he put his hand beneath Farewell's shoulders to prop him up. “It will lessen your pain.”

He wondered if the man even understood him, but Farewell pulled himself up on his elbows and opened his mouth to drink a swallow from the bottle, then pressed his lips together and shook his head as Kitwana tried to give him more.

“He needs water,” Emily said. “Not alcohol. Please light the fire. We'd all be better for some tea.”

Kitwana almost suggested they give Farewell the salve to drink, but he knew what it would do—healing salves when ingested caused a lot of pain. He didn't want to have to explain to this determined woman that he wasn't killing the dragon-man. Not now. Not when he'd just tried that very thing.

He eased Peter Farewell gently back onto the rock and took the bottle away. “You don't want more?” he asked.

Farewell shook his head again. He swallowed once, twice. “I . . .” he said. Then he blinked and swallowed again, noisily. “It lessens . . . control. I don't want . . . to switch.”