Tortall (34 page)

He did not fly.

We were on Taka Hill once on a stormy day when, desperate, I tossed him into the wind. He glided to the ground with his wings outstretched, ran over to me, and bit my
ankle. It only bled a little. I did take it as his way of saying he’d had enough. That same day he called me to the bluff overlooking the plain with a shriek. A tornado had touched down not so far away that I could admire it in comfort. It was close enough that I saw land and a couple of bison fly up around its deadly tip. If it hadn’t been moving away from us, I would have grabbed Mimic and screamed for the dogs and sheep to run. We got a brief drubbing with hail as it was.

Only those of us in the eastern hills ever saw the storm or felt the hail that day—us and the cattlemen at the plain’s edge. They were forced into the barns that our people had built on the plain ages ago. No one else in our valley even knew that the storm had passed so close.

At last we had sun and heat for a couple of weeks. The fields dried. Our farmers predicted that we would have a fine crop, the gods willing.

We were only days from the grain harvest the morning when Mimic and I woke to a heavy gray sky. It was going to rain again. If I’d had my way, I’d have stayed home, but sheep have to eat. The knowledge that I was going to be soaked again put me off my own feed. I skipped my breakfast, giving Mimic his and filling my pack.

“Be sensible,” Ma told Peng and me. “Come in if you think it’s bad.” She looked worried.

I touched my forehead to her hand in love and laughed when she had to dust flour marks from my skin. Then Mimic and I trotted off to the fold. Mimic was restless. Normally he preferred to ride atop my pack on our way to the pastures. That day he went afoot, at least until the sheep were on the path up Taka Hill. Then he climbed onto the back of our
bellwether. He was the most patient of the sheep when Mimic wanted to ride. He only looked at me as if to ask, What can a fellow do?

On top of the hill, the wind was gusting from the south, hard enough to make me wonder if coming here had been my best idea. The birds who flew up to join us fought the gusts all the way. They finally steered into the trees down by the stream. They did not try to reach the bluff, not when the wind knocked them back every time. I left the herd by the stream as well. There were dips and hollows in the ground where they could graze out of the wind.

No herds were out on the plain. My view was limited: rain fell in the distance, and gray clouds filled the sky above me. Lightning struck a few miles east. Even the air was different. It had turned a strange yellow color. I did not like it. Mimic was acting odd. He stood upright beside me, his eyes fixed on the cloud that had harbored lightning. When I shifted my leg to press against his side, I found that he was trembling slightly. We both flinched at the next flare of lightning. This one ripped like a river along the clouds, vanishing in the north.

When I heard the approach of our cows on the road below, I looked down. I was curious to see if the chief herdsman would take them on the plain today. Men, dogs, horses, and cattle bunched up where the road entered the pass through the hills. Everyone was looking at the dark skies.

The chief herdsman, my uncle Tao, walked ahead to the top of the pass to see how things were. Lightning jumped from the clouds above the plain, striking the earth in three places. This time I could hear the distant growl of thunder.
The storm was an hour’s horseback ride away, moving faster than any horse.

When Tao came back to the herd, he was shaking his head. He motioned for everyone to go back the way they had come. They would cross our river to the pastures beyond. The cows and their guardians would be safer there than on the plain.

Uncle, the last to go, looked up and saw me high above. He made the same turn-around motion to me. I gave him a big wave to tell him I had seen. Just as I did so, a gust struck me hard in the back, almost knocking me off my feet. Mimic bawled like a calf, clinging to my pants to keep me from falling.

I turned to look at the plain. The rain was closing in. I could see the fire of lightning, but not the bottoms of the clouds. The air was turning from yellow to green, a very bad sign. I had only been caught on the edges of four such storms in my lifetime—all had been killers. It was time to get everyone home to safety.

I put my fingers to my mouth and blew the whistle that told my dogs to gather the sheep and take them home, now! I caught Mimic up in my arms and half-ran, half-stumbled as the rising winds pushed me. We reached the stream. Chipper was there, barking furiously to get the sheep together. They were baaing with fear, their own good sense telling them that the weather had taken a turn for the worse.

I shoved in among the restless sheep to put Mimic on the bellwether’s back. “You’ll be fine with him,” I told Mimic when he squalled his objection. Already I could see that one of the ewes, her lamb, and my dog Brighteyes were
missing. The wind picked up, blowing away my whistled signal to Chipper to take the herd down. I was about to try it again when a much louder echo of my whistle cut through the wind’s roar. Mimic looked at me as if to say, I’m helping even if you want to get rid of me, before he gave my whistle,
loud
, a second time. Chipper drove the flock down the trail while I went in search of the missing ones.

Hail came—hurtful knobs of ice as big as pigeon eggs—just when I found Brighteyes and my missing sheep. Lamb and ewe had slid into a small gorge when the earthen lip crumbled under them. Brighteyes had gone after them. She was trying to tow the lamb out, but the silly thing thought the dog was trying to eat her. It fought Brighteyes, throwing her off balance. Sheep and dog alike were yelping their pain as the hail struck them. I wanted to join them in their cries, or better yet, hide until the hail was over, but that would not get any of us to shelter in a hurry.

I yanked the rope from my pack, secured it around the nearest tree, and used it to walk down the crumbling dirt side of the little gorge. First I brought the lamb up. It had gained weight since the last time I’d had to carry it over my shoulders. I dumped it at the base of the tree. “Don’t you
dare
stray,” I ordered, and went back for its mother.

I heard barking. I turned, wondering what had possessed Chipper to leave the herd and come back. Of course, it was Mimic. He stopped in front of the lamb, barking at it just as Chipper would have done to make it stay put.

“Thank you,” I said, and went for Brighteyes. She only needed me to bring her halfway up; she scrambled over the rest of the gorge’s wall.

The ewe waited patiently as I put on my leather gloves. I hoisted her over my shoulders with a grunt, thanking the gods that she was young and not one of the heavier ewes. I’d had to work for a couple of years to be able to lift a grown sheep. Only then was I trusted with a herd, just for times like this. At least the hail was done. I would have good-sized bruises when the day was over.

Step by step I pulled us up the side of the earthen gorge. We were nearly to the top when a crack of thunder sounded almost in my ear, deafening me. Stupidly, I took one hand off the rope to drag the ewe into place and slipped down. She jerked, her weight dragging me backward. I flailed until I got both hands on the rope again. Slowly, grinding my teeth, I bent until she was balanced again and began to climb. I was a third of the way from the top when someone began to pull us up. It was easier to climb with that help. When I threw the ewe and myself over the edge, there was Mimic with his teeth buried in the rope.

The ewe scrambled to her feet and ran to shove her lamb in the direction of home. Brighteyes went with them. She knew where the others were.

I went to Mimic. “How did you do that?” I asked, feeling as if the world had turned sideways. “You pulled us up—how did you do it?” I had the strangest idea that he was a little bigger, which had to be a dream brought on by too many knobs of hail striking my head. “You did that—and what about your teeth?” I whispered. My hands trembled. Mimic could not have done that, but he was the only one who could have done so. “What if you broke them? I would
never forgive myself!” I knelt and drew his lips back. Patient as ever, he let me do it. His teeth were fine. Perfect, in fact. Like the rest of him, they seemed to be larger. “Maybe it’s growth,” I said, talking mostly to myself. “Sheep grow, why not you? No doubt you’ve been a little bigger each day, and I just never realized it until just now.” But he still wasn’t big enough to haul us out like that, unless there was some magic to him. I reminded myself that he could be no dragon: no antennae, no glorious colors, no scales, no great size, since even their little ones must be large.

Mimic only squeaked and rubbed his head against my hands. “I love you so much,” I told him. The air was emerald green.

A roar like a thousand bears struck the valley. A fresh thunderclap deafened me. Rain lashed us, stinging every bare inch of my skin. My hearing returned, only to be overwhelmed by that roar. I forgot Mimic’s new strength. We both ran until we could see the road and the pass. Mimic got there first. The rain that had pelted us must have stopped, because I saw everything so clearly.

The sky above the pass churned. Less than half a mile from where I stood, on the far side of the road, the clouds formed a shape like a top that pointed down in a slight curve.

That curve grew longer and longer as Mimic and I watched. I was terrified that if I tried to scramble over the dips and lumps to dash straight down the hill, or if I backtracked to the trail for its easier way down, the short-lived monster in that stem of cloud would attack me from behind. In my fear I even forgot to pray.

The tornado touched down in a cluster of pines that was older than my village. For ages they had crowned the hills on the western side of the pass. The tornado ripped a gaping wound in them, throwing tall trees into the air like a child in a tantrum. Now the tornado grew thicker, its winds screaming. Like a turtle, I pulled my shoulders up toward my head—I still held Mimic—trying to block some of that dreadful noise. I didn’t realize I was screaming, too. The monster was moving north, down the hillside toward our fields.

Then I saw a thing that made me weep with wonder and grief. It was the birds. The birds in the trees—the ones who had joined the herd and me, and the others who lived in our valley, thousands of birds—they all took wing. I thought they fled the death that bore down on them, but I was wrong. They had come to fulfill the pact. They flew at the tornado, using their own magic to get as close as they could without being sucked in. When the winds thrust them back, the birds reached out with their claws and seized lengths of the furious air. Turning, their wings digging at the sky, they tried to drag the tornado up, back into the clouds.

The crows came next, their beaks open. They must have been screaming, but I could not hear. Other birds came with them, big and small, bright-colored and dark. They flew over my head from the plain, and from the direction of the river and the village. They, too, seized pieces of the tornado and fought to pull it back into the storm that had birthed it. The tornado’s stem wobbled and shook, needing those pieces of itself as thousands of birds dragged them away. The tornado’s roar sounded like curses to me. Lightning shot from the clouds—four, five, six bolts of it—murdering birds in its
path as the thunder made my ears ring. More dropped from the sky, dead of exhaustion and wounds. The birds who still lived kept their hold on the monster.

A surge of clouds passed from the thunderheads down, through the stem of the funnel. Thunder crashed again. Suddenly the tornado was bigger, stronger. It flung off the birds, hurling them to the ground or into the trees.

Mimic began to thrash in my grip. I clung to him, terrified. Then he bit my arm hard. I dropped him. In all that noise a whisper said in my head,
I’m sorry
.

I sat down. I did it because Mimic jumped into the air, flapping his wings. With each beat, his wings got bigger. Bigger, and stronger. His body stretched and lengthened. His pink and brown skin cracked and peeled to reveal new skin, scaled and beaded in every color of red that could be imagined. The lumps on his spine and head swelled and burst. They revealed flame-shaped scales on his back, and horns and tendrils above his eyes. He opened his mouth. Light, not sound, came from his throat in a burst that lit up everything I could see. Inside that light, Mimic flew at the fat trunk of the tornado and seized it in his claws.

The birds rallied to help. Those who could returned to the air to grab any pieces of the tornado that escaped Mimic. They surrounded the great crimson dragon in a cloud of feathers and claws. All of them, dragon and birds, hauled the shrieking tornado back up into the clouds. Lightning wrapped around Mimic just before he vanished in those soft gray mounds. Its jagged spears rippled along his new crimson hide.

Then Mimic was gone from my view. So were the birds. I bowed my head on my knees and wept.

Suddenly a great roar made me scream in pain. I covered my ears and looked up. The part of the storm over our valley had blown apart at the center. The remaining clouds tumbled toward the mountains, in a great hurry to leave the place of their defeat.

As the storm fled, a large, mixed flock of birds flew or glided slowly to the earth. Many of them came to me, borne on the wings or in the claws of other birds. They had not survived their battle with the tornado unscarred. Looking at them, I could see I had a lot of work to do, right away.

I was not left to do it alone for very long. Our healers came up from the village to help.

Ma and Grandpa reached me first. I was splinting the wings of Mimic’s friend, the crow who had always sheltered him from the sun. At least it was used to me and did not struggle as I worked.

“Ri, you’re hurt,” Ma said. “The bleeding’s stopped, but—that looks like a bite.” She poured water on the wound in my arm and then tugged away the sleeve that had dried over it. She was so gentle that I was able to keep fixing splints to the crow. I did my best not to flinch.