“How would you know what is usual for Dragons?” she said coolly. She had not settled herself, as even Aivuh had, but was pacing slowly up and down the stones near the riverbank, her tail wreathing and working slowly.
She ignored them again, but the pacing was making her twitch. She started to pace too, paralleling Hiriedh. At least it’s something to do while I think.... “One doesn’t have to count one’s scales to know if one has a hide,” Segnbora said, keeping the response cool herself. “Only look at me, Hiriedh.”
Hiriedh did, and looked away again, as if seeing something most unpleasant. “The sorcerers of the rhhwhei can do such things,” she said, her tail lashing now; “changing their shapes to those of birds or beasts, or even other humans—taking their shapes and voices. There should be no difficulty for a talented sorceress to manage being a Dragon for short periods—”
Segnbora laughed out loud, a long triple-toned hiss, and kept on pacing, closer to Hiriedh now; she matched the other’s tail-lashing with good-natured curves of her own. “If I were just a talented sorceress,” she said, “I might manage a short period of such change, yes, before having to take to my bed for a month. An hour of this, two hours, would kill me. And no amount of mere sorcery could give me this.” She dropped her jaw wider, smiling harder in the Dracon manner—but the dull, reflected glow of Dragonflame was clearly visible way down in her throat. “What must I melt for you, Hiriedh? Or must I do something less subtle?” She stretched her neck out toward Hiriedh’s lashing tail; her jaws snapped hard as the tail whipped out of her way—just.
Segnbora paused, her neck curving around to keep her gazing at Hiriedh. She kept her jaw dropped down in good humor. “Dav’w’hnesshih indeed,” she said, “and not just Hasai, either. But I think I don’t need to prove what my fangs are made of. I am Dracon, Hiriedh.”
Hiriedh paused, then started pacing again. Her wings were starting to cock upward in the forward-spread mode of one threatening, or meaning to threaten, with the terrible razory wing-claws. “That must yet be seen,” Hiriedh said. “Shape is not everything. Surely you have been human enough, of late, when you wish to be.”
“Old habits are hard to break,” Segnbora said. “And the Goddess made me so: it would be discourtesy to throw that self away completely, seeing that She spent some years on it.”
Hiriedh was pacing closer. Her jaw was dropped open too, now, and Dragonflame showed as Segnbora had showed it; but the position of her wings made the smile a threatening, scornful one. “Then you admit you cannot be Dracon,” she said, “for even humans raised with Dragons all their lives cannot master our language, or even the voice with which it’s spoken. They cannot see time as we see it, or the world.”
Segnbora shifted her pacing into a slow circle around the other, as Hiriedh had begun doing. It was surprisingly taxing to have to interact this way with someone who was going to be close enough friends with you, some time sooner or later, that she would be telling you her darkest secrets; especially when she was hostile and suspicious now, not having had any of the same ahead-memories. But mnekh’eiea was like that sometimes, and this was one of the things that gave Dracon interactions their spice—possibly a blessing in disguise, when too often the rest of the time you knew exactly what the other was likely to say. She shut her jaws; what smiling had been in her to start with was ebbing away.
“Hiriedh,” Segnbora sang, letting the growing complexity of the note make it plain that finding a Dracon voice was not a problem for her, “I see time and the world well enough. I see what is coming, though dimly just now; maybe my humanity causes that dimness. Whether it’ll last, who can say? But I do well enough to have mnek’eiea of you, for example. I see us sitting by some riverbank, and Hasai is there, and you are telling me—”
“No!” Hiriedh cried, and Segnbora fell silent in shock. No Dragon had ever interrupted her before, not even the mdeihei; it was one of those things that wasn’t done. Hiriedh’s wing-claws came right about to point at Segnbora, as pace by pace she stalked toward her. For the first time, then, Segnbora wondered: Just how tough is this hide?—remembering old Llunih in nn’s’raihle with the new Dweller-at-the-Howe, and what short work Dithra’s talons had made of him. Will the Fire give me any advantage? What a time to have to find out.... But another thought occurred. This is the fear—the same odd reaction as all the other Dragons have had, that they tried to hide. But Hiriedh has no need to hide it. Or has some other reason for not hiding it.
Perhaps is unable to hide it—
The mdeihei were roaring inside her in anger. Segnbora had rarely heard them in such an uproar. “You cannot!” Hiriedh hissed, pacing toward Segnbora. “All you have is the memories of your mdeihei. Not one of them is yours! You can remember nothing without help! You are not Dracon—”
As Hiriedh came at her, Segnbora had been keeping up her circling, slow as a sorcerer setting the wards, trying desperately to keep her ehhath cool and proper. But now something snapped. Now she flung her wings up, and cocked their barbs forward at Hiriedh. “In all the Immanence’s Names,” Segnbora roared, “what must I be to please you? Here is what I remember—!”
She lifted the blue-flaming shadow-talon that was Skádhwë, in this shape, and called on the Fire. It was the least kind of Firework to gather their minds in, Hiriedh’s, and Aivuh’s, yes, and Lhhaess’s and Sd’hirrin’s too—let there be no doubts about what Hiriedh would be seeing. And Hasai’s—but he was there already, for the moment just one more voice of the mdeihei again.
Here is what I remember! she said.
Hiriedh was struggling, but it didn’t matter; she was held hard. Segnbora gripped her in mind, with talons and tail and pierced through with Skádhwë’s power, her Power. And she remembered. The world fell away, replaced by another; red stone, a dusky red sky darkening to black. Behind it sank an old pinkish sun; over it rose a great whirlpool of stars. But all the splendor of the light was a deception, for the world was dying, shaken by terrible tremors that threatened to rip it apart. Faintly lit by the light of the great pool of stars in the distance, thousands of small shapes went streaming away from the world that had given them birth, out into the dark, mourning their old home, hunting a new one.
Behind them, the old pink star glowed pinker, and whiter, and white, too white to look at. It swelled, and burst, and reached out with its fires, and ate the Homeworld. All Dragonkind were orphaned in a day.
But there was one of them who had mnek’eiea, and knew the way that they should go: the youngest of them, Dahiric. He remembered-ahead the small green planet with its golden sun. Some of the Dragons looked at his own livery, green scales, golden underside, and wondered to themselves. Dahiric never cared. He led them out into the dark between the stars.
There was no knowing how long they traveled that road. The oldest Dragons went mdahaih during it, and some of the second-eldest. But Dahiric never faltered; Something had told him the way. And finally they found the little yellow star—
—and found that something else lived on its third planet, and did not want them there.
Hiriedh was struggling still, and so was Aivuh, but it availed them nothing. Segnbora held them all in the past as if in amber, and inflicted memory on them, as dark as Skádhwë, and as sharp. This I remember too, she said, as they watched the formless blackness, like a horrible cloud, come boiling up off the planet to bar their way; intelligent, hating, murderous. Dahiric never hesitated, even at the sight of something so awful; he flew at it flaming and vanished into its bulk. And his body came floating out not long after, his Dragonfire all quenched, the life all gone out of him, not even mdahaih but rdahaih, lost to them forever—
And this, she said, as the battle began, and went on and on, hopeless; as the space around the small green world began to fill with the corpses of Dragons gone rdahaih, all their Dragonflame spent in desperation, and wasted. Hope died, for there was nowhere else to go. The Dragons’ strength had been sapped by their long journey; they needed sunfire to live,
but the Dark was driving them out into the darkness again, and they would die slowly there—The mdeihei sang dirges, and Hiriedh was frozen still with horror now, but Segnbora was past caring. And this, she sang, this I remember too—
—as the last moment came, the Dark spreading so wide that it hid the planet completely from their view, so close that it would engulf the last thousand or so of them. The DragonChief and the Eldest, those of them who still lived, did the only thing that they could; they gave up their lives to the Immanence, willingly, and convened Assemblage, speaking the Draconid Name in hopes of their people’s salvation—
And light came. Right through them She plunged, a Dragon whose every scale was a point of light that burnt like a sun, and the webs of whose wings flamed searing white instead of black. The Dragons scattered, blinded and dazed, as the burning shape flew at the Dark, which reached up to swallow Her. She flamed, a blast like a star breathing out. The scream the Dark made echoed in every mind, as the Messenger closed with it, grappled with it, dragged it away howling from the blue world, out into the long night, Her light dwindling like a traveling star. The more keen-eyed who watched showed the others how that tiny point of light dragged the blackness into the yellow sun, and vanished with it.
Is that enough to remember? Segnbora said to the silent minds trapped inside her own. Must I also show you Dahiric your forefather being brought down through the blue air, and the four mountains uprooted and laid over him and melted down, as if he were a Dragonet being protected from starstorm in the old days? Or how much further must I go back, how much of our history must I remember for you, and how much more of the Goddess’s precious time must I waste on your unbelief?
She let them go then. They reeled; so did she. The combination of the blue Fire of a trained adept in breakthrough, and Dracon memory, was more potent than Segnbora had suspected.
“Now,” she said to the crouching, scared Hiriedh and the stunned Aivuh, “I have had enough of your questioning.” Her tail was lashing and her eyes were narrowed, and every fang was bared; the fire was broiling blue in her throat, and she didn’t care if they saw it. “You and all the others who have come to stare and consider everything so coolly, with all your ehhath in place. No more of it! The Messenger was sent you to bring you safe to this place, and all you did was dig snug caves in the world the Immanence has given you, and refuse to come out in the air and the light. Then the Advocate is sent you, in human form and Dracon, not once but many times, and you will not hear the message—to live here, and be part of the world, and involved with it. Well, I tell you, you shall hear this time: the Howe will ring with the choice to live, or to do nothing! And your wings will darken the sky—or something else will, and there will be no dawn after that darkness, and no way to fly above it and out into the starlight. The sky will be stone, and you in your graves, like Dahiric; and the Immanence will speak the Draconid Name, and no one, not one of you, will answer!”
They stared at her, speechless.And then Segnbora crouched down, swallowing her fire, suddenly both tired and embarrassed. The merely spoken mode of mnek’eiea did not come upon a Dragon often, and Segnbora thought this was probably just as well. When speaking in that mode, one couldn’t lie—but mere speech was not usually as revealing as image when it came to describing what was going to happen.
They stared at her still. Segnbora folded her wings down, and then threw the Dracon shape away and just sat there on the stone in her own body again, with her knees drawn up, and put her head down on her knees.
Hasai’s shadow was over her, and his head bent down till she could feel the heat of the fire in his throat, burning through the hide. He was gazing at Hiriedh and Aivuh with poorly concealed rage. All their mdeihei were singing with a combination of shock and threat, an awful dissonance of anger. “Go back to the Howe,” Hasai said, “and say to the Dweller that we require her audience.”
“We were sent to bid you there,” Aivuh said, sounding subdued.
“So rudely?” Hasai said. “No matter—we’ll take that up with her. Go and tell Dithra that you’ve delivered her errand.” Hasai flattened his spines down and glared at them. “We will come to the Howe when we’re ready.”
Lhhaess and Sd’hirrin looked at one another in shock. When the DragonChief called a Dragon, that Dragon answered immediately. But both Aivuh and Hiriedh wore the wing- and limb-stances of Dragons who had been severely disconcerted, and were in no mood to try to assert any authority at all. Segnbora had been looking partly through Hasai’s eyes, for the few moments she needed to gather her wits again. Now she looked up herself, and saw not just in Hiriedh’s manner, but in Aivuh’s too, the same odd combination of fear and yearning that she had seen in other Dragons who had come to see them in previous days. What is it? she thought, still shaken. Why do they fear us? What it is we’re going to do?
Hasai had put a talon down beside her. Segnbora braced herself on it, pulled herself to her feet, and did her best to stand straight, for she was tired. “Sehé’rae, lhhw’i’rae,” Segnbora said to them, and bowed slightly.
They bowed back, the full bow with upraised wings that they had not vouchsafed her before. “Sehé’rae, raihiw’sheh,” Hiriedh said. And they raised wings, and flew upward and northward, and were gone. Lhhaess and Sd’hirrin were looking at Segnbora and Hasai in concern. Hasai, though, was looking down at her with one great eye, a glint of humor and fear in it. “Au, sdaha,” he sang, slow and amused, “you hear what she called you.”
The Advocate is sent you, Segnbora heard herself singing, and you will not listen.... She shook her head. “We’re really in trouble now, mdaha,” she said. “The argument has started in earnest.”
“Your first nn’s’raihle,” said Hasai. “May its ending not end us as well.”
SIX
They tell the tale of the woman who went hunting the Goddess. She sought her in waste places and the sides of mountains, in deserts and on the high fells, in the empty fields and by the shore of every Sea, and in every grand and terrible and lonely place; and she found Her not. And that woman returned in sorrow to her home, that was in Darthis city, and there was no food in the larder, and sorrowful still she went to market. In the market she stopped at a shrimp-seller’s, and was picking over the shrimp, when she looked up and saw beside her a Woman wearing that Cloak which is the night sky, and with a basket over her arm, and bread in it and wine. And the woman looked at the Goddess in amazement, and the Goddess sighed and smiled, and said to her, “It’s such a nuisance, but sometimes you just have to go into town.” And She kissed the woman, and was gone....
Asteismics, 6
That night Herewiss dreamed, and oddly. This he was becoming used to, since the conduct of the world is not a simple matter, and the Goddess’s messages about the business to human beings tend to reflect that complexity. Dreams are the quickest way for Her, better even than plain speaking, since in dream Her senses of eternal time and urgency are most closely matched by the dreamer’s. But perplexity came with the dreams regardless.
He was walking up a road that climbed along the shoulder of a hill. It was a narrow road, with old overgrown stone walls on either side of it—the kind of walls that are actually two layers of stone with several feet of dirt in between, and hedge-bushes planted in the dirt, to keep the cows and goats in. The thorny hedge was half again as tall as Herewiss was, so that he couldn’t see past it, except for the occasional gap made in the hedging by some fox or hare. Bindweed and honeysuckle tangled in and out of the hedging, and the air was sweet with the smell of them; but strange sounds were coming from beyond the hedge, and he couldn’t see what was making them. This made him nervous. Herewiss paused and turned to see if anyone was following him, but there was nothing in sight but the rutted dirt road. He turned again, and went on walking up the hill.
Toward the spot where the road crested, the hedging on either side gave way as the wall began to fall into ruin. He felt vague concern over the state of the wall: weren’t the cattle going to
get out? Wouldn’t the goats be into the neighbor’s garden? But there was no sign of cattle or goats, or gardens for that matter. He walked on past where the walls crumbled, and came to the place where the road topped out, on the shoulder of the hill.
There was a little house built there, fieldstone like the walls, with a slate roof; and off to one side, a small three-sided porch or shed. The smell of hot metal came from it, and the sound of blows. There was a man there, forging something.
Herewiss knew something of that work. He ambled over to the smithy to watch, and found the smith beating out something with a long thin blade, a scythe or reaping-hook. He was having a hard time of it: something wrong with the pincers, Herewiss thought, but at any rate the blade on the anvil kept slipping, and the smith’s hammerblows kept falling awry.
“Here, let me help,” Herewiss said, and went into the smithy. The smith, a big, broad-shouldered, grim-looking man, nodded and handed Herewiss the pincers. Herewiss took them two-handed and held the sickle hard and fair in the middle of the anvil, and the smith took his hammer two-handed and began making a fairer job of his forging.
They were at that work for some while, Herewiss relearning the shudder and jump of one’s muscles when bracing against such heavy work, and the way you braced against them in turn to keep the twitching from ruining the work; and the way you had to pause, every now and then, to let the shuddering do itself and the muscles rest. It came to Herewiss as he looked at the smith during one of these pauses that this was in fact the Goddess in disguise. Well, there was no particular surprise in that: She was disguised so in every human being—the problem being to keep reminding yourself of it.