The Book of Earth (14 page)

S
he scrubbed the blood from her cloak as best she could, and steamed it dry. She tended the fire. She spent an hour retrimming her shorn hair. She tried to keep too busy to eat, but by nightfall she had finished all her food. It had seemed like so much more when it was heavy in her pack. Now it barely filled her, and the dragon too was hungry, so hungry it could not keep still. It paced in the outer caverns like a caged lion, and she wondered why it didn’t go forage for itself the way dragons were supposed to do. Of course, its not having any wings might make that difficult. Dragons were supposed to be able to drop out of the air and scoop up their unsuspecting victims. She’d also assumed all dragons were created fully formed, but perhaps this one was young and still developing its wings. Meanwhile, it would have to sneak up on its prey and drag it away like any other large carnivore.

Listening to it pace and snuffle in the outer darkness, Erde knew that the dragon would drive her back into the open even before her own hunger and growing claustrophobia got the better of her. Up there it could surely feed itself—she hoped then it would cease its steady barrage of sheep images, crowding up her brain when she was desperate for a clear head to make her plans.

Two things she was sure of: she was not going back to Tor Alte now—maybe not ever—and she had to get the dragon out of the caves. She had seen it move fast when it felt motivated, but could it move fast enough to elude the Baron’s Hunt, which would surely track them down before long? She had to get it away, down the mountain into the lowlands, where her face wasn’t known, where the
farmers were sure to have fatter sheep in their meadows and where she wasn’t on a first-name basis with practically every deer in the forest. And better to do it sooner than later, while they were both still strong, or before the half-starved dragon devoured her in desperation. Perhaps just down and away was enough of a destination for the time being. If she knew she was heading in the general direction of Erfurt and the king’s court, she could learn the way as she went along.

At last the time came when drinking the cold earthy water of the underground pool no longer slaked her hunger pangs. Erde brushed rock dust from her shirtfront, put on all her clothes, and packed up her meager possessions. She made a sling for Rainer’s sword from strips of the sheeting that had bound its blade. Now it rested at an angle across her back, with the hilt by her right ear. She settled it comfortably and shouldered her satchel. She sent a
follow-me
image to the dragon and led it to the surface.

*   *   *

The snow and mists had cleared. The temperature was chilly but a little more like a normal mountain night in August. Erde was sure the Hunt had been at the cave mouth at some time during the day. The bits of bare ground seemed more scuffed than she remembered and she smelled horse dung. The Hunt never ranged this high because neither did the deer, which confirmed her assumption that the baron had sent his huntsman after his daughter. She wondered if it was dragon-scent that had kept the hounds outside the cave.

A clear half-moon lit their way, scudding through broken clouds, but the journey down was slow and perilous, slippery with leaves that were already beginning to fall from the trees. Erde knew every trail and the dragon appeared to have remarkable night vision, but she had never traveled these steep-sided woods with a pack and a man’s sword strapped to her back. Plus the dragon was curious about everything and a little clumsy. Its horns, matched arcs of shining ivory, caught in overhanging branches. Its claws slid on the rock. It had a pronounced tendency to go crashing through the noisiest brush or to send cascades of loose stones rattling down the mountainside. It was like fleeing through the forest with a very large, dusty child. Erde was
forced constantly to impress on it the need for silence, while urging it ever onward.

She rested as often as she dared. She had thought her mountain walks fairly strenuous until now, when she could no longer go home to food and a warm fire after a few hours. But fear kept her moving past her first exhaustion, and later she found new strength for the dragon’s sake.

She stayed well away from the mountain villages so that the dragon would have no cause to become interested in them. She wanted it to forage on its own, but in the forests. Mysteriously missing livestock so close to Tor Alte would alert the Hunt. The countryside was aroused enough already, and she didn’t want
her
dragon made a target for Fra Guill’s dragon hatred. Yet the dragon didn’t show much inclination to hunt, despite its hunger. It did halt once, on a hill above an isolated farmstead, at the sound of a dog barking. It raised its huge nostrils to the wind and would not be lured forward. The image invading Erde’s mind was finally a new one, a kind of aggressive blank that shoved aside all her own thoughts, rather like blundering into a blinding snowstorm inside your head. Erde suffered a few astonished moments of panic before she could assure herself she wasn’t going mad and her brain hadn’t broken. She noticed that her face was pressed into a questioning frown, and decided that the blankness was the dragon’s way of demanding information.

She conjured the sleeping farmstead in her mind, its muddy rutted yard, its stubby slate-roofed cottage, every detail but its barns and herd stock. She did add in the dog for verisimilitude, but made it a small thin mongrel not worthy of a dragon’s attention, too irritating to be bothered with. Finally, the dragon moved on, and Erde learned that its pride was vulnerable and could be played upon to advantage. But she was not cheered by the fact that she had barely yet learned to communicate with the creature and she was lying to it already.

Just before dawn, it began to rain lightly, blown into a chill mist by gusty breezes more reminiscent of October than August. Erde’s route, half-knowing, half-random, took them above the village of Tubin, where the richest of the local merchants lived. Erde had visited it many times with her father. One of the merchants there sold the baron all
his silks and velvets. Taking shelter in a pine grove where she could look down at Tubin’s dark, once fertile valley, she recalled that merchant’s elaborately paneled shop, with its crackling hearth fire, and the small supper he laid out for his best customers. She nearly wept. She had never been so cold and hungry in her life.

Tubin was practically a town. It had several main streets and a stout gated wall protecting its market district. Inside the wall, the cobbled church square was lined with the merchants’ two-storied stone houses. But most of the town lived outside the wall, among the fields and farmyards. Erde resolved to find dinner here for her dragon and later, for herself, before her strength failed her completely.

She searched out a forest gorge where the dragon could hide, on a dry ledge overhung by tall dark pines clinging to the vertical rock. She rested briefly, then left the sword and her pack in his care. The rain had stopped but not the biting wind. Erde hugged her cloak closely and shivered. She thought it odd, as she trudged through the dark sodden meadows outlying the farmsteads, to hear the bell in the church tower tolling before any sign of daylight, not the quick peals of celebration or the hard-edged clang of alarm but slow and steady like the drumbeat of a marching army.

She heard dogs barking from the cottages closest to the road. Keeping tightly to the deeper shadow of hedges and fence lines, Erde spotted lanterns moving along the road, a group of farm folk murmuring among themselves as they walked into town. She smeared mud on her cheeks and, reluctantly, on her cloak whose fine wool had already once betrayed her identity. She shrugged it high around her shoulders, leaving the prentice cap showing. Nervous about going in among people again but driven by the fever of her hunger, she fell in behind the group on the road, then realized there were others behind them, and more behind them. She saw she was caught up in a moving throng, and nearly bolted. But away from the dim flare of the lanterns, it was dark enough and no one took any special notice of her. She struggled to walk steadily, not to show her abnormal exhaustion in any obvious way. The road was muddy and slick. Cold rainwater lay deep in the wheel ruts and soaked into her boots. But Erde was relieved to be among people again, especially people who weren’t chasing her. And she
was curious to know what would make the entire countryside head into town in the small hours before dawn. She quickened her pace to catch up with the two men directly in front of her, to eavesdrop on their subdued conversation.

“. . . rode into my yard and walked right into the smoke-house,” muttered the tall one on the right. “Started cutting down hams. Said the baron ordered it.”

“That priest is eating well enough,” his companion growled.

“Better than we are.”

“Wasn’t no surprise though, when he pointed that one out,” the stouter man declared. “And she standing right there in the crowd like she’d lived in the village all her life, same as the rest of us.”

Erde could not hear the tall man’s reply, muttered beneath the woolen blanket he’d wrapped around him for warmth. But the stout man seemed to feel the need to prove his great foresight further. “Sure, remember Podi’s cow, after she visited his wife that time? And the smith’s cousin, who lost her gold ring in the well? She’d had some dealings with her.”

The tall man muttered again. Erde strained and still could not hear him. The stout man’s voice only got louder.

“She was
your
neighbor, Deit. You’d better be keeping a closer eye out. What about all this god-forsaken rain and cold? Business so bad all around and you don’t wonder why?”

“Don’t talk to me!” The tall man’s chin finally emerged from its cocoon. “We lived side by side for years with little more than a how-de-do. It was you always tagging after the woman, so even your wife could notice.”

The stout man glanced around fearfully, in case someone might have overheard. “Well, hell, a young widow woman usually likes a little company. If I’d have known then . . .”

“You didn’t know nothing till she turned you down. Now, my wife was friendly to her. Said she had a healer’s gift. Saved my boy from the agues that time. I had nothing against her. Just looks to me like she turned down one man too many.”

“Here, now, what’re you saying?”

“Nothing, nothing.”

“Your trouble is, Deit, you’re always saying something.”

“I said, I ain’t saying nothing.”

“Well, I wouldn’t, if I were you, not out loud where the holy brothers can hear you or you’ll end up in one his visions. You’re lucky we’re such old friends.”

Erde nearly turned and fled. But hunger spoke more eloquently than panic. If there was a crowd in town, there might be food sellers, and if the crowd got excited, it might be easier to lift a loaf or a pie during a distraction. She promised herself that if she spotted so much as the sleeve of a white-robe, she’d be gone in a flash. She let the crowd carry her through the town gates and toward the main square, following the ceaseless grim summons of the church bell.

It was warmer inside the gates, out of the cold ceaseless wind. The streets were narrow, walled in by tall stone houses and shops, overhung with wooden signs that dripped rainwater into Erde’s face. The traffic thickened as they neared the square, and she avoided anyone carrying a lighted lantern. She had been in this town before as her father’s daughter. Someone might recognize her.

People poured in from the side streets, men and women, old people hobbling along on canes, sleepy-eyed children in their parents’ arms. Among adults again, Erde was once more a child, yet she knew her childhood was over, however prematurely. She felt her first tinge of homesickness, of nostalgia for the security of having adults to care for her and tell her what to do. Though their parents’ faces were reserved and serious as they moved through the dark wet streets, the young boys darted wildly in and out of the crowd, splashing through puddles, snatching at each other’s tunics and hooting as if it were a feast-day celebration. Erde envied their ruthless innocence. Those boys suffered no shame over the sweet-cake they stole from the neighbor’s kitchen window, or the dead mouse on their sister’s pillow. But then, they had no cause for
real
shame, not like she did.

The memory of Georg flailing backward seized her, filling her nostrils with the sweet-sour smell of his blood. Erde stumbled, her empty stomach turning, and nearly fell. She wrapped her arms around her chest and grasped herself
hard for a moment, leaning weakly against the rough wall of a boot-maker’s shop, gasping and fighting for balance while the throng flowed past unawares.

Except the hand that caught her elbow. “All right there, lad?”

She was alert in an instant, sure she’d been discovered. She nodded without looking up.

“Sure, are you? You look a bit peaked.” The voice was gruff and matter-of-fact. “Look like you slept in a mud puddle.”

Erde ventured an upward glance. The man’s face was solid, seamy and blessedly unfamiliar. He was quite tall but carried himself with a diffident stoop, in the way of tall people who do not favor always relating downward to the rest of the world. Or, she thought next, in the way of people who wish not to be noticed. His damp, close-cropped hair and beard were silvery gray, but the arm supporting her was strong, his grip on her elbow secure. His cheeks were weather-hardened but somewhat puffy. Erde thought she recognized the signs. But if this man was a drinker, he was certainly sober now. The most striking thing about him was his leather jerkin, worn and sturdy but dyed a deep red. Erde couldn’t imagine choosing to wear the color of blood. Still, something about the garment seemed oddly familiar, though she was sure she had never seen this man before.