The Book of Fire Page 38

  “Can we help?” Sedou asked, for them both.

  Stoksie handed over one of his buckets with a gap-toothed grin. “Betcha!”

  The berries were tiny but sweet. Erde couldn’t resist nibbling a few, but all the Tinkers were doing the same. The picking went quickly with so many pickers, and consolidation produced an impressive crop. Several large buckets were capped and stowed. Watching Stoksie rub his hands in satisfaction, Erde thought, every little bit helps.

  A small noon meal was shared out, with water from the big wooden casks lashed to each wagon. When the expedition moved on, a steady pace brought them down off the higher reaches and into the foothills by midafternoon. It was hotter there, and traces of civilization appeared. Very soon Erde understood Baron Köthen’s dry bemusement at what he called N’Doch’s “ridiculous luck,” for stumbling upon the Tinkers and not someone more dangerous.

  Her first hint was the ruins along the road, the crumbling stone foundations of farmsteads long ago deserted. These looked sad and lonely, but with a peaceful aura of having eased gradually back to Nature. After that came less comforting signs: structures more recently inhabited, not fallen back to the barren earth quickly enough to eradicate the high metal fences that had once surrounded them, now smashed and broken, or the wide dark scars of explosion and conflagration.

  “Surely there was a war!” exclaimed Erde, after the seventh or eighth burned-out ruin.

  The dragon-as-Sedou shook his head. “Mankind is a rabid animal destroying itself from within.”

  “No animal would so foul its nest. God set Man apart from the animals, to do His bidding, but Man will not follow His will.”

  “It’s humanity’s belief that they’re different from animals that leads to all this.” He gestured across the devastated landscape, his face stony with ancient despair. “Would any true god allow it?”

  Erde’s lips pursed. She regretted starting this conversation, for the dragon could talk circles around her. But there were certain perversions of dogma that she should not let pass unchallenged. “As if there could be more than one! My lady Water, you learn this pagan talk from your godless guide!”

  “More from his brother, the martyr and idealist whose shape I walk in.”

  “A man you’ve never met.”

  “Yet who lives richly in the mind of the brother who loved him.”

  “Oh, how do you know what’s really Sedou and what’s merely N’Doch’s memory of him?”

  “I do not. Does it matter? Why do you say merely? Is it not mankind’s dearest hope to be lovingly remembered when one no longer lives?”

  “Mankind’s dearest hope is salvation,” Erde reminded him primly.

  “Ah. Salvation.”

  She sensed mockery and frowned up at him.

  The dragon-as-Sedou grinned. “Well, little sister? Did it never occur to you that some dragons—and their guides—might not be Christian?”

  A shout from ahead saved her the cost of a foolish reply. The wagons halted and every Tinker without reins in their hands reached for a weapon.

  “Uh-oh,” murmured Sedou, sounding very much like N’Doch.

  N’Doch and Baron Köthen came loping up from behind. Köthen had armed himself with a stout sharpened pole.

  “Dochmann! Stay with milady!” he ordered, still moving forward. “Dragon man, come with me.”

  Sedou fell in beside him. “Dragon woman, you mean.”

  Köthen shook his head. “Woman dragon. Dragon man.”

  Sedou laughed, and the two of them trotted ahead, along the line of wagons. Next, Luther hurried by, with several others behind him.

  “Should we go, too?” Erde asked N’Doch.

  “We’re safer here.”

  “No, I mean, don’t you want to know what’s happening?”

  N’Doch stares at her. She’s craning forward, this way and that, like an anxious bird. Either she’s the bravest fool he’s ever met, or she really has no idea. “Hey, we’ll know soon enough. If it blows up into something serious, we’ll go in as backup.”

  “Well, I’m going now.”

  N’Doch grabs her arm. “No, you don’t. The boss says stay here, that’s what we’ll do.”

  “The boss?”

  N’Doch fidgets. “Y’know. His high-mucky-muck lordship.”

  The girl looks interested. “Have you sworn service to Baron Köthen?”

  “Gedoudaheah! No way!”

  She cocks her head at him, puzzled.

  “Just never mind, okay? What do the dragons say is going on up there?”

  She makes a little pout at him, then goes inward to that place where, as N’Doch thinks of it, the channel is always open. “That there are some people up ahead who claim the right of payment for our safe passage through their lands. Stoksie, Luther, and Brenda do not agree with them.”

  N’Doch smirks. “The old toll gambit. Getting back what they gave.”

  “But Ysabel seems to think it might be wiser to negotiate a reasonable price.”

  “What for?” Actually, N’Doch is sorry to miss this bit of entertainment. His regret must be reading on his face, ’cause the girl grabs his hand and starts yanking him forward.

  “You do want to know! Come, N’Doch! You needn’t do everything Baron Köthen tells you to!”

  Ouch, he thinks. She’s really learned how to get to him. But by the time he’s made up his mind to go along with her, the Tinkers are relaxing off the alert, remounting their wagons and taking up the reins again, though their weapons are set closer to hand. Soon Köthen and Sedou come strolling back from the front, both of them looking just a bit smug.

  “So what happened?” N’Doch demands.

  Köthen flicks a hand dismissively.

  “A few hungry people trying to fill their bellies the easy way,” Sedou says.

  “Yeah? What’d you do?”

  Sedou shrugs. “Just showed up.”

  “Well, that’s kinda too easy, ain’t it?”

  “A scrawny, measly lot of brigands,” Köthen mutters.

  “Not brigands, Dolph. People starving.”

  Köthen bows to the dragon man satirically. “I stand corrected.”

  “Stoksie’s seeing what they have left to trade for food.”

  “Oh,” exclaims the girl. “We ought to just give them what they need!”

  N’Doch is glad he’s not the only one staring at her like she’s a lunatic. “And what do you plan to eat after you’ve given it all away?”

  “Well . . . if they had items to trade, would they not have traded it for food already, in the villages?”

  Sedou gropes for a middle ground between honorable charity and reckless waste. “Luther says these people can’t go to the villages. They’re exiles. They don’t approve of the villagers’ religion.”

  “Good on them,” N’Doch remarks.

  Sedou nods. “So Stoksie’s trying to work out a way to give them some food, without giving it outright.”

  “Which is against his principles,” Köthen adds.

  “Like to see what he gets for it,” says N’Doch.

  “I think he did not wish to make them beg for their food,” Sedou concludes.

  Köthen sucks his teeth. “I think they were not strangers.”

  They all look at him, waiting for more.

  “Really?” N’Doch prompts.

  “Yes, though they wished to pretend otherwise.”

  “Well, that doesn’t make sense.”

  Köthen offers one of his hard looks.

  “Okay, lemme put it this way: why would they do that?”

  “Friend N’Doch, I have not yet given the structure of alliances in this region a thorough enough study.”

  N’Doch’s getting irritated. “Well, lemme know when you do.”

  It’s only after the wagons move forward again and Köthen drops back to his habitual spot in the rear, that N’Doch realizes the baron’s learned how to bait him, too, in return for the abuse he’s been dishing out. This mak
es him laugh out loud.

  The girl stares at him. “What’s funny?”

  “Your man Dolph.”

  “Don’t call him that,” she murmurs.

  And her regret is too real for him to make light of. “Okay. I won’t.”

  When they pass the spot where the front wagons had halted, he sees a group of eight or ten ragged folk squatting down in the dust with a small pile of food between them. They’re arguing over it already.

  The toll gambit is pulled on them twice more before the wagons reach the first village, with much the same results. By then, N’Doch suspects that Köthen is right, or the Tinkers are more softhearted than they’d like to admit. Either way, he hopes they pack extra rations on these trips, so they can afford their own generosity. No wonder they’re in trouble.

  The first village is a small one, no more than twenty houses set beneath a scattering of battered, broad-trunked trees. Must be water underground, N’Doch decides, to keep these oldsters alive. The houses are low and square and made of stone. If they were cement block, they’d look a lot like his mama’s house. A roof over one’s head but otherwise full of holes. At dusk, the place looks deserted, not much of a threat. Not even a junkyard dog to greet them, just a few old people peering cautiously out of their doorways. The Tinkers pass through the village unchallenged and pull the wagons into a tight ring in a dusty field on the other side. While dinner preparations are underway, a small but well-armed delegation walks back into town to announce the start of trade at dawn the next morning and to negotiate water and grazing for the mules. N’Doch wonders who they’re gonna find to talk to.

  He’s scavenging bits of twig for Luther’s cook fire when a murmur runs around the circle of wagons. Folks straighten up from their chopping and stirring to point at the horizon. N’Doch dumps his meager handful beside Sedou and the girl. She’s teaching the dragon man how to peel potatoes.

  “Take a look out there,” he tells them.

  An odd formation of cloud has appeared to either side of the blood red setting sun. Not rain clouds, but puffy and pink. More what N’Doch would call fair-weather clouds, unlikely at dusk in any location, and certainly weird in this place. He hasn’t seen a hint of a cloud since he arrived, only the ever-present sooty murk that turns the empty sky yellow and green.

  Sedou stares at the horizon, the potato forgotten in his hand. “Interesting. Not one of mine.”

  N’Doch laughs. “Oh, yeah?”

  “Mine have more water in them.”

  “Cool, bro. Bring ’em on! I could do with a shower.”

  “Such energies are not to be squandered lightly.”

  N’Doch sees he’s serious. “Wait . . . you can do that? Really?”

  The girl gets that haunted look. “Have you forgotten how Lady Water saved us at Lealé’s?”

  “I can do it, sure, I can. A shower is a mere parlor trick.” Sedou turns his dragon stare on N’Doch, only there’s a lot of Sedou in it, too, Sedou flaring in righteous wrath. He shakes the potato in his dark fist as if it stood in for all of Nature. “But do you mean, can I fix this dust, this parched field, this . . . wasted earth? I can turn it to mud, if you like . . .”

  “No, I . . .”

  “For an hour perhaps, and then the life-water would be gone, sucked away as if it had never been! The roots would still dry and the stems still wither! It takes more than just water, even if I could offer an endless supply. Too much water, after all, is a flood, and a flood is as destructive as a drought! Alone, I can do little. But with proper help . . .”

  “Whoa. Easy.” N’Doch hates this. Just when he’s let himself forget, the millennia creep back into the voice of this man-thing who isn’t really his brother.

  Sedou stares at the horizon, and then his rage is gone as quickly as it came. “But with help . . .”

  “With help you could what? Make a monsoon?”

  The girl clucks her tongue, disapproving his attempt to lighten up a moment just because its gravity makes him nervous.

  “No. No. But surely this is part of it.”

  “Part of what?”

  “Part of all of it. Of what we are to do, to accomplish. Together.” Sedou’s chin lifts and his shoulders drop back as his gaze drifts to some inner dragon space that N’Doch doesn’t even want to contemplate. “Sometimes I see . . .” He falters, his inhuman eyes suddenly dark with foreboding.

  “What, bro?” N’Doch asks again, uneasy. “What do you see?”

  And then it comes to him what’s been bothering him since they arrived at Blind Rachel. He just knows this gig’s been much too easy so far. Any minute now, the shit is gonna hit the fan. The girl is staring at Sedou reverently, like he might lay out some final truth any moment. She prefers him like this, damn her, more dragon than Sedou.

  But the dragon/man sighs, shakes his head. “It’s never clear enough to really say. What my brother Earth calls a Purpose only partly understood . . . for me, it’s more like a vision, only partly glimpsed.” He shakes himself out of his sober reverie. “But those clouds . . . those are interesting. A sign . . . of some sort.”

  The Tinker delegation returning from the village descends upon them with jovial enthusiasm.

  “C’monta my fire, nah,” invites Ysabel. “Feedju up gud!”

  N’Doch soaks up the crinkle in her hair and the faint Latin music in her speech like it was cool, sweet water.

  Sedou lifts the pot of potatoes he and the girl have not quite worked their way through. “Thank you, but Luther was kind enough to ask . . .”

  “Luta come, too, den. Dat ri’, Luta? Allyu come wit me! Heah da news frum town.”

  Stoksie grins up at N’Doch. “Yu bring gud luck, tallfella.”

  “Yeah? How’s that?”

  Stoksie runs a hand across his shiny bald head, then points at the clouds, grown into two thin spires that flank the ruby oval of the sun like the minarets on a mosque. “Dese townies call dat a sign. Say da god smile onda trade day.”

  “Which god is that?” Sedou asks lightly.

  Stoksie and Ysa flick glances at Luther, as if waiting for a cue.

  “Dere’s only one fer dem,” Luther says grimly. “Da monsta.”

  The girl frowns. “They think the monster is God? You did not mention that.”

  N’Doch laughs. “And he cares about trade?”

  Stoksie’s grin returns. “Shur, shur. Lotsa time, dem townies trade der food ’n der craftwerk for stoopid glittajunk to give ’im prezents.”

  “Glitter junk?”

  “Shur. Like dem jools what wimen usda weah. Ornyment.” Stoksie sees he has the three visitors’ total attention. “Fake stuff, y’know. Salvage.” He mimes digging. “We find it ’roun.”

  Sedou nods. “But why are the clouds a good omen?”

  Stoksie blinks at him. “Clouds is alwiz a gud sign, tallfella. Whachu tink? Mebba it rain, nah?”

  “When did you see clouds last, can you remember?”

  “Can’ say wen it wuz. Wachu tink, Ysa?”

  “I’d say tree mont’, mebbe fowah. Dat weerd time. Yu memba dat, Luta?”

  Luther, absorbed in cloud study, responds to his name with a start. “Betcha! Come up suddin like, afta nuttin fer neah a yeah. Den a few, den moah ’n moah fer a week, like. Den alla suddin, nuttin agin. Till now.”

  “Three months ago?” asks Sedou thoughtfully. “Clouds like these?”

  “Sumpin’ like.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Okay, c’mon nah.” Ysabel hooks an arm around Stoksie’s elbow. “Talk whilyu eatin!”

  Night settles in during the meal prep. There are fewer cook fires inside the ring of wagons than at the camp. Not enough firewood. N’Doch feels the darkness wrapping him close. He’s used to not much light at home, out in the bush, but this night is the very definition of lightless. It looms like a wall, a tsunami of darkness. And his conviction that the party’s over is still giving him the creeps. Maybe the others sense it, too. N’Doch sees how, despite
the heat, everyone finds a spot to huddle in tight around the few dim pools of glow. But it’s not a night attack that worries them. Instead of keeping it quiet, they talk louder than usual, act raucous, as if to shout down suffocation by the void.

  At Ysabel’s fire, Luis joins them and a few couples N’Doch knows by face but not by name, plus Mari and Senda, who hang around Sedou whenever they can get away with the idleness that hanging around requires. Brenda and Charlie sit down long enough to eat, then go off on perimeter watch. N’Doch wishes Marley was by, with his guitar, but the old man has stayed at camp to look after his prize tomatoes.

  The conversation is about the townies. Those who went into the village share out the local gossip—who’s dead, who’s married who, who’s promised what for trade. Then comes the news that’s got the village in an uproar: some big religious figure making a town-by-town tour will not be stopping by their village because it’s too small.

  “Too small fer da monsta ta bodda wit’,” notes Luther. “An’ das a gud ting!”

  “Das why we come heah,” Stoksie agrees.

  “But dey hate dat, doncha know? Makes ’em feel bad. Like dey not gud enuff.”

  “Gud enuff fer us, nah.”

  General agreement runs around the fire, then talk turns to the monster god himself. War stories, N’Doch thinks of them. Disputes about the span of his wings, the size of his claws, the direness of his wrath. It takes a lot, he notes, for these folks to air their grievances. They’d rather be laughing and yarn-spinning. Old tales are trotted out to shock the visitors’ virgin ears, and everyone dutifully claims not to believe any of them, so Luther can attest loudly to the accuracy of every single one. N’Doch thinks of evenings in the bush village where he grew up, though the gossip there was mostly the bad news from the city and the stories were the familiar ancestral myths, recounted each time as if for the first time.

  “But why do they call him God?” protests the girl in her polite but pained way, after Mari and Senda have shuddered their way through a fourth graphic tale of bestial cruelty, “Where is the religion in such a practice? Is there doctrine? Does he work miracles? If he’s there in the flesh and there’s no denying his presence, what are the issues of Faith?”