The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet (36 page)

“. . . he was a magnificent man. Bravehearted. A dragon of a man. But impulsive. Rash. Headstrong. A bit like you.” Djawara clears his throat gently. “So perhaps you will pardon . . .”

“She is neither rash nor impulsive. She’s merely insufferable, and always has been. She gets no pardon from me.”

“Nor needs one,” Sedou interjects.

“Tell
me
your story. I’d like to hear it.” Djawara clasps his hands behind his back, his slight, erect form so vulnerable-seeming beside Fire’s towering bulk. “You were saying that you waked early . . .”

Fire sighs, not the satirical exhalation that Paia is familiar with, but a long hissing release. “I find myself in need of someone to run my temple, old man. Are you available?”

Djawara chuckles politely.

“I take that as a ‘no.’ Pity. Perhaps you’ll reconsider when you hear what I have to say.”

“Please do continue.”

But Fire is growing restless with human interaction. Paia knows the signs. At home, in this mood, he would bellow at a subordinate or two, resume dragon-form and swoop off to terrify a few villages. In a rage, he’d do much worse. He’s not in a rage, not yet, but she can see the darkness gathering in him. He turns away abruptly from the window and his moment of quasi-intimacy with Djawara, and announces flatly to the room at large, “It’s very simple, really. Our Destiny requires our death. That’s the short explanation. Air, of course, gave it to me in endless painful detail at the time, but I . . .”

“Come now,” says Sedou. “There is always risk with . . .”

“Listen to me! I said,
requires
. The concept of accident is not involved. But I wasn’t having any of it then, and the same goes for now.”

“But what . . .”

Fire whirls back to the table to loom over his sibling with his palms planted to either side of Sedou’s elbows. “Shut up and listen!”

Sedou’s chin juts and his nostrils flare, but he stays seated and quiet.

“Fortunately for all of us,” Fire continues tightly, “the final fulfillment of this absurd plan demands the presence and more crucially, the cooperation of all—four dragons, four guides—within a certain time frame. Which, of course, will not be revealed by me, and is otherwise known only to the missing fourth of our number, who you have been unsuccessful at locating.”

“So far,” Sedou hisses.

“Perhaps.” Fire looks down, flicking a trace of ash from the gold braid circling his cuffs. “But the point is, like it or not, I’m saving your lives. Now tell me how that constitutes betrayal?”

. . . and yet, he must.

His genes decree it. Every atom spiraling in his cells is arranged to obtain precisely this result. His will, even if he wills otherwise, is secondary.

She, immaterial, an ephemeral impulse, a
signal
. He, physical. She has need of his voice, his hands, to move in the world of men. To move at all. And she is the One. There is work that must be done, and quickly. If there is hope yet for the planet, it’s her. The dragon. Air.

Hurry! Hurry!

The Librarian tells himself that he’s had more lives than any ten men could hope for. Perhaps that’s what his recent trip down Memory Lane was intended for—to remind him of that. Now it’s time to let the dragon live . . . if only he can find the courage. So hard to let go. Never once, down along the centuries, has the Librarian ever contemplated suicide.

But now he searches his overstocked data banks for images of his most beloved places. A difficult choice. He’s had so many. Though his physical body will continue without him—former occupant moved, left no forwarding address—he imagines it enshrined in earth, a final resting place, at each favorite site. He chooses one.

It’s the mirrored, dark-rimmed lake where he first met a fellow dragon guide, and got his first whiff of Destiny. He sees his stick hovel deserted, the worn plank door thrown wide, the chimney clear of smoke. He see the oblong pile of smooth lake stones that marks his grave. He lets the clear orange sun sink past the far shore, toothed by spruce and pine, and just as the moon is rising behind him, the Librarian says . . .

Yes
.

H
e doesn’t . . . 
cease
, as he’s expected, as he’s prepared himself for. But very soon, the Librarian suspects that oblivion might have been easier.

His mind is eclectic, wide-ranging. It has made for him, over the centuries, a commodious and varied inner space. But the dragon is vast. Like a mighty ocean tide, she rushes in through the opened locks of his consciousness, into every bay and inlet, every nook and cranny, until there’s little room left for his smaller, more finite, self. Pressed flat against the curve of his skull, he’s near to suffocation. The dragon is unpracticed at sharing even an ephemeral geography. She has no sense of how to keep her mental feet and elbows and breath and volume to herself. Crushed, jabbed, stomped on, deafened, the Librarian quails.

He could blank on her. Overstretched, overwhelmed, he could choose a painless voluntary oblivion. Put his besieged brain to sleep. But he worries that the dragon has no idea what to do with this physical body she’s so abruptly claimed. He can sense her testing its mechanisms, without any concept of its limits. She’s playing with his heart rate, speeding it up, slowing it down, dilating his pupils, stimulating his muscles into spasm, inflating his lungs past comfort or reason. Stretching him like an elastic band. Deep, primal agony. Lightning bolts of pain. The Librarian imagines a teenager climbing into his first car. The dragon could kill him out of sheer ignorance, before she has a chance to make use of his body. His miraculous serial lifetimes, wasted in a moment of clumsiness.

Stop! Stop!

But begging for mercy has no effect. The dragon isn’t
listening, or can’t. Or rather, she’s listening at such a cosmic tuning that the Librarian’s faint human pleadings go unheard. Suffering, helpless as a laboratory rat, he knows he must, somehow must, resume his task of calibrating the lines of communication. But this will take time, time he may not have if he can’t wrest control of his limbs and metabolism from the dragon before she carelessly tweaks him into cardiac arrest. And this means giving himself to life again, after having made his quietus. It means rejoining the fray.

Life. Okay, perhaps. But can he do it?

His fists open and close. His fingers and elbows stretch and recoil. His legs twitch. He’s stumbling about in involuntary dizzying circles while his features twist through a series of grotesque grins and grimaces. What does a dragon know about human expression, after all? Or human balance? The Librarian’s ankles tangle. He goes down hard, shuddering, breathing in gasps, and still the dragon, in her perilous curiosity, seems intent on jerking his strings like some demon puppet master until every last one of them snaps.

Writhing in the dark on the smooth, chill floor, the Librarian fights for a hairbreadth of elbowroom in his beleaguered consciousness. Grasping at straws, he sends out a fervent SOS. A bit of signal snatched at random, its code rewritten and released, like a messenger pigeon taking wing from the walls of a besieged castle. A demand for recognition, a request for dialogue. He thinks of it as a dove. For clarity’s sake, he images its diagonal, white flight in his mind. The bird flies home, from one sector of his brain to another.

This is insane, the Librarian muses. It’s like pleading with myself. But it works. The puppet master eases off abruptly, leaving him limp and panting on the invisible floor. But the Librarian is wary. The dragon’s urgency has not faded. She’s still there crowding him into the farthest, tightest corner of his self. He can see that a simple giving in, giving over, is not how this is going to work. A more active partnership will be required if they, man and dragon, are to accomplish anything at all. He dispatches another dove, requesting a parley.

The dove returns. He can see it this time, a pale, faintly glowing, fully dimensional bird. It lands silently on the floor
beside him. He takes it into his hands, astonished, and gently picks the slim curl of paper from the capsule banded to its leg. He unrolls the tiny scrap. It’s thin, almost translucent, and totally blank, but its message comes to him loud and clear.

SORRY.

The Librarian chuckles, half amused, half for joy. Well, now, that’s better. A bit awkward, birds and paper bits and all, but who cares, if it works? It seems he doesn’t have to actually write out the minute print with his big, soft hands and lack of any sort of writing implement. He has only to think his words, and there they are.

A second dove lands beside him, announcing itself with a soft salvo of flapping. The Librarian extracts its message.

NOW? HURRY!

Ah. Back in familiar territory at last. He’s relieved, but no more enlightened. Hurry, yes, of course, but where and how, not to mention why? What exactly are we meant to do? He has so many questions. Too many to fit on a tiny scrap of onionskin.

Perhaps a larger messenger? The Librarian pictures the big crow he’d once rescued from a trap. After it healed, it stuck around, apparently because the life he offered it was more interesting than the one it had known before. He smiles at the thought of it, and out of the darkness ambles the very bird, its bright eye fixed on the pile of raisins that have appeared in the Librarian’s palm. By now, the Librarian is incapable of surprise. He greets the bird, then lays half the raisins on the floor and nibbles the rest himself, pondering his next message. What questions will win him the most information in return? Meanwhile, a shorter query goes out with the dove. He doesn’t really care if she answers, but he’d kind of like to know.

Why me?

HAS ALWAYS BEEN.

What is my part in all of this?

HANDS. EARS. EYES. FEET.

I know! I know all that!
Though to tell the truth, he hasn’t thought of being her feet before.
What am I supposed to DO?

HURRY!!

The Librarian takes a breath. Perhaps he can inhale a
measure of patience from the very air. Finding a common language is not always the same as finding a common basis for reasoning. The dragon is as circular as ever. Random access. Well, fine. He knows how to deal with that. He sends the crow out into the ether, its tightly rolled scroll black with printed code.

And so, painstakingly, and strained by the effort of staving off the dragon’s single-minded urgency, the Librarian extracts the outlines of the history he’s lived, but has never understood. Finally, it’s no longer a mystery why he’s felt the need to live so many of his centuries in hiding.

In the beginning, he and Air were one. She, a discorporate entity, deaf, dumb, and blind to the material world. He, an animal body, canny, clever, and secretive, willing but hardly self-aware. The perfect physical vehicle for an ephemeral power. He existed while she slept, keeping himself alive and ready, should the need arise for the dragon to walk in the world.

But when the call came, the aeons of separation proved a desperate disadvantage. Air woke still wrapped in vast and cosmic dreaming. In her waking confusion, her sibling Fire saw an opportunity. He stole her physical vessel and stashed it away down the timeline, far from the forward point in the world’s history that Air had chosen for her den. And so her den became her prison. A prison not of walls but of silence. Marooned far forward in time with no way to communicate either her dilemma or her whereabouts, except by the faintest of beacons, as likely to reach their goal as signals from another galaxy. No way, that is, until her kidnapped guide had lived long enough to evolve a brain capable of recognizing her distant transmissions, and figuring out how to reestablish their connection.

Kidnapped! The Librarian lets the memory surface, so long buried beneath the sediments of time and terror. The sharp grip of the golden dragon’s claws, the fury and heat of his presence. The horror of abandonment in a cold, wet world full of unfamiliar threats and vicious two-legged predators. Why didn’t the Fire-breather murder him right then and there?