The Last Dragon Chronicles: The Fire Ascending (3 page)

seen. But if I opened my mouth to muse upon these things, Yolen threatened to fill it with river mud and grass. So I did what my keeper wished of me. I walked straight and tall towards Kasgerden, now and then hearing Galen’s soft roars as he sang his lament to his oncoming death.

By the late afternoon we arrived at the old stone bridge of Taan. The followers from Horste had made their way across it to the fertile farmlands on the other side.

The Taans, like many of the ancient tribes,dwelled in places constructed of wood,usually cut from the forest of Horste. There was no thievery or conflict amongthe two peoples, but there was a sharp andpersistent trade. What Horste gave in

wood, Taan gave in sheep. One tribe slept among needles of pine; the other within timbers from the trees that dropped them. As we came upon the first of the kroffts, I noticed that the people, even the elderly, were leaving their dwellings and joining the Horste on the grassy undulations that were a feature of this land. Many of them were lying face down upon the earth with their hands and feet spread out like stalks.

“What are they doing?” I asked.

Yolen shook his head and muttered to

himself, “This is not right. Why are these people still here?”

There was a quiet roar in the distance. Dusk was drawing its dim skies upon us, but there was no mistaking the dark silhouette on the peak of Kasgerden. The

followers, all of them, Horste and Taan, began to babble in appreciation. From a Taan woman’s mouth, a song came forth – a strange, intoxicating hum that was taken up by most of the pilgrims present, especially the older ones.

Yolen dropped to his knees.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

He nodded at the grassland and bade me place my hands upon it. And that was the first time I truly encountered the power of a dragon. Despite the season, the crispness in the air, the ground beneath my hands felt
 
warm
.

I took off my sandals and walked uponthe grass. I danced. I laughed. There was
fire
 
in my feet. “How?” I said. “How isthis possible?”

My keeper caught the hem of my robeand pulled me down. There was angerrumbling in his throat when he said, “Youare a goat herder, not a god. In thepresence of Gaia, you will kneel like therest of us.”

“This is Gaia?” I whispered, pressing the ground again.

“This is Galen,” he said, through teeth bound with grit. “He is calling upon Gaia to draw up fire from the core of the earth. It is a signal that he’s ready to go back to the force that created him.”

I let my fingers idle on the grass. Fire,coming up from the centre of the earth? Now my excitement was tamed a little. “How high will it rise?” Were we all tobe consumed in the dragon’s auma?

Before Yolen could speak, somethingwhistled past my head at speed. Therewas a thud against the side of the shelternearest me. I looked up to see the blood-stained shaft of an arrow. A dead raven

was pinned to the wall of the krofft, the head of the arrow right through its throat. The eyes of the bird had been removed. Three more arrows rained down and from

each of them dangled a similar corpse. In the panic that followed I was drawn into a nearby krofft, for safety. As well as Yolen, three Taans were with us. A man, his wife and their youthful daughter.

“Are they coming again?” asked the woman. She gathered the girl to her. They were very fine looking, as Taans often were. The girl had eyes like the sheep she

surely tended, large and soft and void of harm – but not of spirit.

“I don’t think so,” said the man. He was peering through a shuttered gap in the wall. “I can’t hear their horses. But this is

clearly another warning.” He stepped away from the shutter but did not close it, allowing some light to fall across our faces. “You are welcome to shelter with

us,” he said. “Unless you confess to be allies of Voss.” From his belt, he drew a large hunting knife.

“Rune?” gasped his wife. She could see the wild innocence splashed across my face and was shocked by her husband’s show of aggression. He quickly relented and slid the knife back.

“Forgive me.” He bowed his head.

“Such a show of hostility shames the good name of the people of Taan. Twice today our homage to the dragon has been disturbed by riders bent on evil.”

“We met them by the river,” Yolen said. He briefly told the story. “You know this man as Voss?”

“That is how he announced himself to

us. Voss, from the territory of the same name. You must have wondered why our people are still rooted here and not at the skirts of the mountain by now?”

Yolen  nodded.   I  remembered  his

puzzled question on the bridge.

Rune checked the shutter again. “He threatened us. Anyone leaving the district of Taan in search of fraas would be put to death.”

“On whose authority?”

“On his. Did you see the black horse he

rides?”

“I saw the horse.” Yolen’s back had

been turned when the horses had charged

us. But not mine.

I glanced at the girl. She was behind hermother, but her sheep’s eyes were heavilyintent on me. “It had blood in its eyes anda stump in its head.”

The Taan man knotted his hands in

anger. “That it did, boy. That it did.”

Yolen shook his head, hardly able to believe this. “Are you’re saying it was a
 
healing
 
horse?”

Rune gave a grim-faced nod. “A unicorn,   aye,   from  the   slopes   of Kasgerden, violated in the most appalling

way. Its horn was sheared off at the base. Voss wielded the remnant at us. He

commands some sort of dark power with

it.”

“Is he Premen?”

That word again. I was desperate for ameaning, but I held my voice in check.

Rune stalked sullenly across the room,stopping to light the wick of a candle witha splint he had taken from the fireplace. Above the fire hung a painted huntingbow. “I know nothing of Premen. But ifthe rumours of these… supermen are true,then Voss has turned all that is good inthem to malice. No one dares leave the

settlement. The leader of the Horste is

aware of the threat. They have ended all thoughts of a pilgrimage for now and are

looking to their sibyl for guidance. But I tell you, stranger, this sibyl will be no match for Voss.”

And there were four dead ravens

outside to prove it. Hilde’s enchantment with the dead man’s eye had failed.

A heavy hand pounded the door. Without invitation, another man stepped in. He put a fist to his heart: the standard Taan   greeting.   “Rune,   pardon   this intrusion.”   His   accent   was   more

prominent than any Taan I had yet heard. A farmer, perhaps. A man of the fields. “The men are gathering now in the motested.” He stared at Yolen and briefly at me. “Both tribes. No women – unless

they be sibyls.” He thumped his heart

again and withdrew.

“What is a ‘motested’?” I asked.

“Their meeting hall,” said Yolen.

A meeting. A debate upon how to deal with Voss. My breathing quickened, but Yolen soon slowed it. He turned and put a firm hand on my shoulder. “Agawin, you will stay here.” He glanced at the woman, who nodded her consent.

“No. I want to hear what is decided.”

“You are two years from manhood. You will do as I command. Be aware that you are a guest of these people. You will ask nothing of them except their good grace.” He ran a hand through a side of my hair. Then he headed for the meeting house with Rune of Taan.

“Agawin. That is a noble name.” The

woman spoke as the door closed in my

face. I turned to look at her. It was

impossible not to be impressed by her beauty. Her hair fell in two sweet plaits to her shoulders and there were trinkets of

bone in the lobes of her ears. Her dress

was like nothing I had ever seen. Unlike the Horste women, whose legs below the knee were always exposed, the Taan wore gowns of decorated flax that bustled at their shoulders and swept around their ankles. At her waist was a graceful pouch, hung by a long strap across her breast. She put her hands into her sleeves and bent her knees slightly. It made me feel a little less anxious to leave. “I am Eleanor,” she said, “and here is my daughter, Grella.”

I looked into her eyes. They drilled me with suspicion. She was older than me,

but not by much, possibly just of marriageable age. Her hair was fair and tied back in a tail. Her skin, like her mother’s, was delicate and pink, as if she had been fashioned from fresh flower

petals. She, too, wore a dress that reached her ankles and a pouch that was a little less subtle than her mother’s. It was sewn

with the same interlocking pattern that

trimmed the neck and hem of her dress.

“Please, sit,” Eleanor said. She pointed to a flat seat carved from pine. It was covered with the brushed woollen hide of

a sheep.

As if to claim an early advantage,

Grella moved to the seat herself. But

instead of sitting, she picked up something from it. A cloth, bound within a wooden

frame. Strands of loose thread were

hanging from the underside of the cloth. On its surface was stitched a picture of some kind.

“You like our tapestries?” Eleanor asked, as my eyes followed Grella to the better-lit side of the room.

The girl tossed her hair and sat, cross-legged, on a low-slung bed freely coveredwith hides. She placed the tapestry frameacross her lap. More examples of herwork were pinned to the wall above her. “Stop,” she said, as Eleanor drew menear. Grella held up a needle, made froma splinter of polished bone. “He’s a caveboy. He smells of dung. I don’t want itcatching in the tapestries, Mother.”

Her mother looked set to protest this

rudeness but I countered it with a remark

of my own. “Don’t worry, my eyes are sharper than your nose. I can see your tapestries perfectly from here.” And I stood where I was, some paces from the bed, and looked at the beautiful pictures they had made.

Scenery, mostly. Kasgerden and the white-tipped hills around it. The river. The settlement. The sheep being herded. The fields being worked. But the ones that opened my young eyes widest, and made me wish I hadn’t planted my feet so far away, were those that pictured dragons.

When she saw where my gaze had wandered, Grella leaped up and stood before the tapestries. Her eyes were the colour of amber stones.

“Have   you  met   with   all   these creatures?” I asked. There were many types of dragon here, of many different shades, all in various stages of flight.

Eleanor answered for her. “The dragon that sits on Kasgerden is the first that Grella has truly glimpsed. But she has seen them in her mind ever since she was

a child.”

“How?” I asked the girl.

“I don’t want him here,” Grella hissed at her mother. “He asks too many questions.” She lifted the needle, as if she’d like to prick my eye.

“He is a pilgrim,” said Eleanor. “He has as much right to observe Galen as anyone. Be kind, Grella. Before this day is out, we might need all the friends we can

get.”

The girl wrinkled her nose. For one brief moment I thought I saw a glint of violet in her eyes, much as I had seen in the sibyl, Hilde. She sat again and attended to the cloth, thrusting her needle into it with great ferocity, as if she wished she was stitching my eyelids together.

“Would you like to try it?” Eleanor said. She drew me away from Grella and opened a box in which there were a host of coloured threads and needles. She

picked a fresh cloth from a sleeve inside the lid. “Stitching is a Taan tradition.” She invited me to sit with her on the pine seat. “Like most tribes, we remember our history in words, but we also preserve it on cloth. And everyone, even a boy from a

cave, has to have a story to tell.”

Across the room, Grella gave a sharp grunt.

Eleanor dipped into the box again. From a small compartment, she picked out a short black stick, whittled at one end to a dull point. It dirtied her skin as she rolled it through her fingers. “We call this a krayon. When moved across the flax it leaves a mark, which we then stitch over with a coloured thread. Can you draw, Agawin? If I asked you to make a likeness of something – Kasgerden, for instance – could you do it? On the cloth?” She offered it to me.

I stared at it for several moments. At

first, my mind was completely blank. I could picture my cave and the goats and

the river – the great mountain, as Eleanor had said – but none of these held much

appeal for me. Then an image did drift behind my eyes and I set the krayon to work on the cloth. Grella’s curiosity hovered like the promise of brooding thunder, but she sat where she was until my drawing was done. It was only when her mother said, with some hesitation, “Is that… a
 
new
 
breed?” that the girl could no longer keep her distance. I had drawn, with some faith, the dragon I had seen on my journey with the tornaq.