The First Book of Lost Swords - Woundhealer's Story (22 page)

      
Now he had achieved a silence that would let him rest.

      
Zoltan wiped his Sword clean on grass, then knelt down and drank from the stream. Next he tried to stanch the bleeding of his scalp. Tied on his belt was the small medical kit that Mother Still had given him. Inside it he found a small jar labeled FOR BLEEDING. Using the Sword itself, far keener than any other blade he’d ever handled, he hacked awkwardly and blindly at his curly hair until he thought the wound was as exposed as he could safely get it. Then he loaded a finger with the unpleasant-smelling salve and pressed it directly into the flow of blood. Immediately the bleeding diminished, and in a matter of moments the flow was stanched completely.

      
Only then did Zoltan remember to look for his mount. He was suddenly afraid of what the reptiles might have done to it while he defended the mermaid; but the load beast was unharmed. Perhaps the leather-wings had been under orders to concentrate on the escaping mermaid. She had said something about their being sent after her by some enemy.

      
Zoltan remounted and pushed on. He continued downstream, paralleling the river.

      
Hardly was he well out of sight of the place where he had fought the reptiles when a familiar figure reappeared. It was the crazy-looking little wizard again, standing directly in Zoltan’s path.

      
This time Zoltan was treated to praise and concern. “You’re a brave boy, yes. Oh my, that was fine. But your head is hurt. Oh,
 
oh,
 
oh,
 
oh.” And the wizard, his dried-apple countenance pinched up as if he felt the pain as much as Zoltan, did a little hop-dance of helpless sympathy, meanwhile waving his arms ineffectively.

      
Zoltan felt called upon to be patient. “It’ll be all right. The bleeding’s stopped already. Mother Still gave me a medicine that worked beautifully.”

      
“Are you sure? I don’t know her. Oh, oh.”

      
All Zoltan could think was that this wizard, despite the power that he had demonstrated, did not inspire much confidence. Raising a hand, he gingerly explored the area of clotted blood where his hair was now cut short. “Yes, I’m sure.”

      
“That’s good. That’s good. Then you should go on.”

      
“I mean to do so.”

      
“That’s good, Zoltan. You’re a brave boy.”

      
“Thank you, sir. Who are you?”
 

      
“I don’t think I ought to tell you that. Because if I tell anyone, he might find out somehow, and—and anyway, whoever I am you still have to go on and find—and find your uncle. No matter what.”

      
“Where is Uncle Mark?”

      
The wizard gestured nervously again. “I think you should look for the trail of a dragon.”

      
“Oh. If I follow a dragon’s trail, it’ll lead me to him?”

      
“Something like that. Yes, I think that would be the best thing for you to do.”

      
“All right. But wait, what does a dragon’s trail look like? I’ve never seen one.”

      
The figure of the wizard hopped from one foot to the other, speaking faster and faster in its gravelly voice. “You’ll know. Oh, you’ll know it when you come to it, won’t you? Go on, hurry, hurry! I can’t stay here arguing all day.”

      
And, almost as soon as he had uttered those words, the strange wizard disappeared again.

      
Zoltan forged on, still heading downstream. He assumed that was still the proper direction, not having been given any instructions to the contrary. If finding his uncle Mark meant trailing a dragon, well, he would never be any better equipped for that than he was right now. Pride was growing in him as he realized how successfully he had fought off the attacking leather-wings. Not that a dozen of them were the equivalent of a real dragon, of course—but he felt ready to fight the dragon himself if it came after him.

      
At least, almost ready. That was a chilling thought. Well, possibly the creature wasn’t very large. The smaller land-walkers, he had heard, were no bigger than load beasts.

      
Zoltan had expected soldiering and adventuring to be painful and sometimes frightening. But now he wondered if such activities were always as confused and filled with uncertainty as this. Somehow this wasn’t quite the way he had imagined things would be.

      
He pushed doggedly on, along the stream.

* * *

      
That night he camped on the riverbank again, and lay awake, watching the surface of the water ripple in the moonlight, and waiting. Before he could fall asleep the girl came back, a splash and then a silvery outline, a dreamlike presence in the moonlight.

      
Zoltan wasn’t sure if he was relieved or worried at her presence, but he moved to sit beside her and talk to her again. He offered his medicine kit but she declined; he could see that her wounds were superficial and were already partially healed, showing rough scabs and crusting on her skin.

      
The air was colder tonight, and Zoltan brought his visitor one of his blankets as she sat on the rock. She thanked him politely. They congratulated each other on surviving, and she thanked him for his aid against the reptiles.

      
He told the girl his name and explained to her that he was taking the Sword of Heroes to his uncle, who was going to have to fight a dragon. She said that she had heard of the Swords of Power, and sounded as if she had some idea of what they were.

      
“But how are you going to locate your uncle?” the girl asked.

      
“Our friend, the strange-looking little wizard, tells me that I have to look for the dragon’s trail first. Then my uncle will be nearby somewhere.”

      
“What is our rescuer’s name, I wonder? And why are you so sure you must do what he tells you? If he tried to give me orders, I should be very doubtful about following them.”

      
“So far I don’t believe he’s lied to me. But I don’t know his name.” Zoltan went on to tell the girl more of his story than he had told her previously. Then he got around to asking her if she had yet managed to recall her name.

      
“No. It may be that my name is gone forever. Along with half of my humanity.” She flicked her tail, sending up spray.

      
“I asked the strange little magician for his name, but he wouldn’t tell me.”

      
“That is not so strange, for a wizard. Names are things of great power in their lives.”

      
“I’m no wizard. My name is Zoltan—I told you that before. I wish you could remember yours.”

      
The girl shrugged, a delicate motion. “There are certain names of power that I remember—ones the Master used to call me by. But I am afraid that if I uttered one of those, I should be completely enslaved to him again. And the other man, the lesser wizard to whom he gave me, sometimes used those names—but I will never say or hear them again if I can help it. You should call me whatever pleases you. I think that I have never had a name I truly liked.”

      
Zoltan’s mind was a buzzing blank. “I’ll try to think of something.” And he went on to tell her something more of his own story.

      
The mermaid assured him that she believed his story; it was, after all, perhaps not so unbelievable as her own.

      
Not that she could remember very much. She had been somehow kidnapped from a fishing village—she seemed to remember it as a fishing village, along a river very much bigger than this one—at a very early age, and conscripted into the evil Master’s service—she was very vague about the details of how all that had happened.

      
She hesitated suddenly, in mid-speech, staring past Zoltan as if she saw something there that frightened her. Before he could turn, the transformation, which until now he had not witnessed directly, happened before his eyes. There was a large puff and cloud of something like steam in the moonlight, close enough for him to feel it; and he caught one clear glimpse of a large, leaping fish before it splashed into the water.

* * *

      
Late next morning, Zoltan, still following the stream downhill, came upon a trail—he didn’t know how to describe it except as a trail—that was unlike anything that he had ever seen before. A vast, shallow gouge in the hard, dry earth, wide as a wagon road, knee-deep in the center and shallowing toward both sides. Desert bushes and other small plants had been uprooted and rocks torn out of the earth and dragged. At least it was easy to see which way the trail led. It looked to Zoltan as if some cylindrical weight the size of a substantial house had been dragged in a gently curving path across the land.

      
The track went right across the river and away from it again on the other side. Zoltan was still sitting on the bank, around midday, frowning at it, when the mermaid emerged partially from the water to talk with him again.

      
This time she sat in the sandy shallows instead of climbing out. She frowned at the strange scar that wound across the earth, and announced at once: “It is the track of a great worm.”

      
Zoltan stared at her for a long time before he spoke. “Oh” was all he said when he did answer. Deep inside him, somewhere between his stomach and his heart, a lump of ice had suddenly congealed.

      
Almost everyone had heard at some time of great worms, though neither he nor the mermaid had ever actually seen one of the creatures. Very few people in this part of the world had ever done so. They were the final phase in the life cycle of the dragon and a thousand times rarer even than the land walkers.

      
Immediately after the first shock of fear that Zoltan experienced, doubts began to arise. Certainly this was not what Zoltan had had in mind as the spoor of the dragon. He had been intent on finding gigantic footprints of some unknown shape—but in some vague way, reptilian-looking—showing the marks of great unretracted claws. But this-—his looked, he thought, as if an army had passed by, dragging all their baggage on sledges, obliterating by this means all of their own footprints and hoof prints. Such an effort might have wiped out even the tracks of dragons, land walkers, Zoltan supposed, had there been any.

      
“Are you sure?” he asked the girl.

      
“Oh, yes. I am afraid so. I am afraid that this can scarcely be anything else.”

      
He was silent, thinking. Was it possible that any army would march with a dragon, or several, in its train? Zoltan had been reading and listening to martial stories since he was old enough to read, and he had never heard of the creatures being used as war-animals. The beasts were said to be too stupid and uncontrollable for anyone to try to use them—though, now that he thought about it, Uncle Mark and Ben told tales of a dragon, constrained by magic, that had once been set to guard the treasure of the Blue Temple.

      
Suppose, Zoltan thought, someone could harness a land-walker, a big one, and make it pull a sledge. Maybe, conceivably, it would produce a trail something like this … or maybe a gouge like this one would need a squadron of land walkers. Now, following the trail slowly as it curved away from the stream—there was no doubt of which way it led—he had come to a spot where even small trees were bent and broken. One of the tree trunks was almost as thick as a man’s body.

      
Wide as a wagon road, yet without ruts, the broad concavity went curving gently across the rugged countryside.

      
If this was indeed the dragon’s path, then Zoltan’s duty was to follow it. To do so, he was going to have to leave the stream, perhaps for good, and with it abandon his alternate plan of getting back to Tasavalta that way. Also he would miss his sometime companion, but there didn’t seem to be any choice. Of course, the wizard’s actual instructions had been to stick to the river. But having found something this unusual, it was hard not to assume it was the trail he had been told to look for.

      
He returned to the place where the trail crossed the river, and knelt to fill his leather water-bottle. The mermaid gazed at him sadly, and Zoltan tried to explain his difficulty to her. “I don’t know if this is really a dragon’s trail or not. But I suppose I have to follow it.”

      
She was silent. Then he saw with vague but deep alarm that she was starting to weep.

      
“It is the trail of a dragon, as I have said,” she told him presently. “But I wish that you would not follow it. I think that you are now my only friend, in all the world. And it will kill you.”

      
The lump of ice was back, bigger than before. Other sensations, less definable but equally uncomfortable, accompanied it. Zoltan muttered something incoherent, and for some reason he could feel himself blushing.

      
As if with an effort of will, the mermaid ceased to weep. Brushing hair and tears out of her eyes, she predicted that the trail would loop back to the river again within a few kilometers because of the dragon’s great need for water. “Unless of course it should be going to another river. Or some lake or pond.”

      
“I do not think that there are any lakes or ponds near here.”

      
But she was crying again and could not answer.

* * *

      
Zoltan finished refilling the waterskin that Mother Still had given him, and struck out away from the river, following the awestruck track, whatever it was, across country.