Nightpool (9 page)

*

They did not leave the cave until nearly
nightfall, and again Teb followed blindly as the foxes made their
way through the low, narrow tunnels. Renata left an old aunt with
the cubs; and three more foxes joined them at the common, so now
they were twelve again as they wound and dropped and climbed
through the pitch-black holes. Then at last a faint smear of
moonlight far ahead, and a smell of the sea, told Teb they were
coming to the western portal.

At the portal they listened, but there was
no sound except the far lapping of the water. The moon was thin and
its shadows indistinct. Pixen sent a young fox out to look, and he
was gone a long time, returning at last with an uneasy frown.

“No strange scents, nothing stirring. The
land seems empty, but I
feel
something amiss, all the
same.”

“Come back inside,” Pixen said, and he went
out himself to have a look.

Pixen was gone even longer. He returned with
his ears back and his tail lashing. “There are still troops at the
western portal—nine that I counted—and they have the two jackals
with them. Luex was surely right, they do stink. The troops are
growing restive—I think we’d better go on before they decide to
explore.”

Teb took up his pack and waterskin, touched
the knife at his belt, and followed Pixen out the small hole, with
the others crowding behind him. The bushy cover outside scratched
his face and caught at his clothes, and he could not seem to go
silently as the foxes did. Soon Pixen stopped. “Take off the pack
and waterskin, Teb. Reeav and Mux will drag them back inside.”

Rid of his belongings, Teb was able to move
more quietly. He feared for the foxes, though, for even in the thin
moonlight they could be easily seen. The tops of the bushes caught
light, and the tops of the stones, and when they drew near to the
bay, a thin path of light fell across the water. On the other side
of the water rose the dark towering mass of Fendreth-Teching,
topped by the rocky peaks of the dragon lair.

The little band moved along beneath a mass
of bushes, Teb crawling through the leafy tunnel of branches that
insisted on snagging his clothes. The foxes slipped through quite
untouched. Teb breathed in the scent of the bay, salt and wild.
When they came out of the bushes they were on a sheer cliff high
above the water, and now the way was rocky and precarious. The
foxes skipped along it and, Teb suspected, would have traveled much
faster without him. He tried to see where he was by the shape and
width of the bay directly below. Yes, here the bay had begun to
narrow, but he could not yet see, off ahead, the thin channel
linking the Bay of Dubla with the outer, seaward Bay of Fendreth.
Once they reached the channel, Bleven would lie less than a mile
beyond. He would go on alone then.

But suddenly heavy flapping filled the sky,
and a coughing growl. The jackals were on them, dropping and
snarling. Hoofbeats were pounding behind, loud on the stone as if
they had just come up from softer ground.

“Run!” Pixen cried to Teb. “We’ll delay
them.”

But Teb could not; his knife was slashing at
a jackal even before he knew he had drawn it, for the creature had
little Reeav in its mouth, shaking her. He slashed at its throat,
then its face, but it would not let her loose. At last, with three
foxes at its throat, it twisted in agony and let her go. Reeav
staggered away. Mux tried to get to her, but the riders were all
over them, all was confusion. A jackal grabbed Teb’s leg, tearing;
then he felt himself snatched up by the shoulder as a horse shied
against him and he was lifted and thrown across a saddle, facedown,
so the saddle back jammed hard into his ribs and belly, knocking
out his breath and searing him with pain. The horse swerved, and
Teb revived enough to bite the rider’s arm and kick at him; he got
a blow across his back that shoved him into the saddle again and
made him go dizzy with pain. Then the horse was whipped to a
gallop, and the pain was like fire in his middle.

*

The soldiers moved northward all night. Teb
hurt so badly he wished he would die, and much of the time he was
unconscious. He threw up twice, and the retching made searing stabs
of pain. He didn’t know when they stopped, knew nothing very
clearly until he woke the next day in broad daylight with someone
shoving a waterskin at him.

He lay trying to understand where he was and
why he hurt, and was not clear about anything. He was in some kind
of a building made with logs set wide apart so sky and seashore
shone between them. The logs were lashed together with chain. The
thing was like a huge cage, and he was chained inside it.

He was in the dragon trap.

He pawed at the waterskin and turned to lift
it, sending fire through his middle. He soon found he could lift no
weight without pain. He managed to slide closer to it and drag it
up on his chest, above the hurt, and sucked at it, spilling a good
deal over himself, but satisfying his thirst at last.

He lay there all day, asleep, awake, then
late in the day burning one minute and shivering the next. Someone
brought him food, fried rabbit and hard bread, but he was too sick
to eat. He begged for a blanket and was ashamed of begging. He
slept and woke, and was conscious of little, until he woke and saw
it was dark. Or nearly so, for the moon was there overhead, thin
and bright—and then gone. The moon suddenly gone.

He thought it was his illness making him
blind. But no, there was something—something there in the night,
covering the moon. Something . . .

Then he could see the moon again, but the
something was still there hovering in the sky low over the cage,
reflecting moonlight on its pale silvery body that stretched out
long and curving, on its immense wings that shimmered across his
vision far broader than the width of the cage. He stared up at her,
trembling. Immense she was, and wondrous, and though he should have
been terrified, should have cringed away, knowing she could kill
him, he was not afraid. He was filled only with wonder, with awe
and with a longing he had never known and could not challenge or
question. There was no fear. Only a strange, throat-tightening love
that left him confused and shaking. She lifted away higher and grew
smaller, passed across the moon again, then disappeared.

And still he trembled and stared at the
night and could not sleep anymore. Long after the dragon departed,
she still filled his mind, her gleaming wings and her huge, clear
green eyes looking and looking at him.

The dragon had awakened not many days
before, in the mud of Tendreth Slew. She had been asleep for many
years there, and she was the only singing dragon among the dozens
of squat hydrus and common dragons that used the slew for
concealment. When she woke and lifted her head from the muck to
look around her, she saw no other like herself. She stretched her
long neck up to look more carefully, and rivers of mud ran off her
silvery scales. She blew from her nostrils in a shower of mud. Then
she stood up with a sucking noise, and mud poured back into the
hole she left. The other creatures stirred and moved away to give
her room, so the whole slew writhed with their slithering.

She stared up into the dawn sky and opened
her great red maw, and roared at sky and mountains and at the world
in total. The mountains thundered her call in receding echoes. She
pulled one clawed foot from the mire to paw at the chill air; then
she climbed out of the slew onto the stone ledge beside it with a
sucking pull and made her way along the escarpment until she
reached a clear, fast spring flowing down out of the mountain and
into the rock-edged lake. She slid in and swam, washing herself,
rolling and blowing in the deep icy water, twisting down into the
depths, then up again to break surface with sprays of foam.

She came out glistening, as pale and
iridescent as a sea opal. She was no color and all colors, for her
glinting sides reflected the colors around her: her belly coppery
from the stone beneath her, her sides brown and green from the
mountain, and her back mirroring the pale dawn sky just as her
dragon’s mind mirrored the long, rich life of Tirror.

She stretched to dry herself, streaming
water. She spread her wings on the wind and shook them so they
shattered the light. She was as long as twelve horses, and slender,
with a fork at the end of her tail, and two gleaming horns on her
forehead. Her sharp fangs marched in two rows beside a forked
tongue red as blood. Her eyes were green, though they could look
azure or indigo, depending on her temper. She stared into the
clouds above her, her mind filled with a thousand pictures, and she
wanted to sing. But she would not sing here, alone. And then slowly
she realized why she had waked. She felt the changes in her body,
subtle as song itself and as compelling.

Her eggs were forming. Soon she must
fertilize them. She felt the urgency to breed like a great tide,
and she cried out a ringing call. Her eyes flashed, her body
towered, rearing. Then suddenly she leaped skyward in an explosion
of beating wings.

And if before she had been beautiful as she
reflected the lake’s waters, now in flight she was like jewels of
ice. She lifted on the thermals and spiraled upward, bellowing her
clear call, filled with the sky’s freedom and with the thrill of
her own power, and she headed north toward the highest, wildest
peaks of Tirror to begin her search for a mate.

But was there any male left in Tirror? Had
all the singing dragons but herself fled through the twisting ways
into other worlds? Was she the last, all alone?

Then as she headed north she spied the army
camped on Baylentha’s shore, and she dropped to look. But the
soldiers did not cheer her as men of old would have done, before
she went to sleep. These men cowered from her and brandished
weapons, and that angered her. She dove at them, bellowing, and
they ducked away and cried out, and some shot arrows at her. She
dove at them, spitting flame, and drove away their horses, and left
them huddled together as she swept away to more urgent
business.

But something about the camp on Baylentha’s
shore made her curious, and she returned several days later.

Now the shore was bare, so she circled and
left, but still she was drawn to it, and the next time she came the
soldiers were back, and now they were cutting trees and
constructing something huge on the shore. They stood watching her
this time with some strange urgency until she swept up away into
the clouds.

Her curiosity drew her back again and again.
She spent her days searching the mountains for a mate, then came to
Baylentha late in the night, while the soldiers slept. Soon she
knew what it was they built, and then one night there was bait in
the trap, and she dropped low to see.

A young boy was tied in there. She hovered
over the cage, staring at him. He slept so deeply. She rose quickly
against the moon, excited because he was there, and unsettled.

The next day a male dragon began trailing
her; she discovered his scent on the crosswinds, and her own inner
pulses quickened; and they began the slow, elusive game of seeking
that dragons desire. She should not have returned to the boy. But
something insistent drew her back each nightfall.

He was always asleep when she came, and she
decided he was ill. One night she drew down very close to him and
saw the mark on his arm, and then she knew. She knew why she had
come.

As swiftly as Ebis the Black’s troops moved
northward, the two foxes who accompanied them moved faster,
impatient at the slowness of horses. They left the riders behind a
mile, two miles, three, as they fled for Baylentha’s shore in a
frenzy to see the dragon. For already they had sighted her overhead
in the moonlight, and if luck held, they might warn her of the
trap.

When they topped the last hill, they plunged
to a halt and stared down directly below them at Sivich and his
men, all asleep in the moonlight. The trap was huge, and they could
see Tebriel curled up in a corner of it; and already the dragon was
storming in over the sea.

She dropped down out of the sky, directly
over the trap.

“The door is propped open with a stick,”
said Luex. “Oh, she’ll be caught!” The two foxes knew quite well
about traps; they had seen many of their small, mute brothers, the
red foxes, caught in them.

“She’s avoiding the door. She knows about
traps,” said Faxel, and he watched the dragon’s descent with
admiration.

“She’s beautiful, like snow and sea foam,”
breathed Luex.

“She’s looking in at the prince. How can he
sleep, when she is there beside him?”

“Maybe he’s just lying still. Maybe he’s
afraid,” Luex said sensibly. “He doesn’t
know
. No one has
told him.”

*

Teb lay half awake, feverish and chilled,
his chest hurting so, it was agony to move. When the strong, sudden
wind touched his face, he rolled over, gasping with the pain—and he
was staring up between the log bars at the dragon.

She blotted out the stars, hovering above
him. She stared down, and her huge eyes held him. A mountain might
have been swinging in the sky above him, except this mountain
looked and looked, its eyes like two green pools, seeing deep
inside him, seeing more than any creature should see, more than he
himself knew.

At last she tore her gaze away and circled
the cage, and then, as Teb’s heart thudded, she dropped down to
earth and stood with her shoulders pressing against the cage and
her head thrusting in through the bars at him, her mouth inches
from his face.

*

“What will she do?” whispered Luex.

“What’s keeping Ebis?” Faxel grumbled.
“Horses are so slow.”