Wild Stacks

Wild Stacks / issue 0 / 2010

BY RIGHT OF THE STARS

By ANNE GAY

I’d never seen anything like it. I was just sitting there at a long table like everybody else. Something massive and strange passed outside the ice-encrusted windows. I slid the old dagger out of my boot and slipped it up my sleeve. Inside our cavern, heads turned until everyone was staring apprehensively, reaching for knives and swords. Even so they flinched, and so did I, as the monster slammed open the door. Tall, it was, with a strange peaked head and leathery skin scabbed with snow.

Behind it, the northern lights crackled green. The sudden gust made the lanterns flicker and the fire flared. For a moment no one moved.

Then the monster ducked inside and back-heeled the door. Into the silence a deep voice said, “Sorry about that. Wind ripped the door right out of my hands.”

And hands there suddenly were, rising to fumble at the claws on its breast. Hands all brown and strong but human-like. All at once the skin unfolded and we saw it was great blue-black wings that spread wide. One mighty beat and the creature speared upwards, beak gaping and eyes scanning the assembly.

Then we could see a man who’d been under the bony-headed creature, a slim fellow but broad-shouldered, with a lean tanned face and eyes as dark as pitch, as the giant bird-lizard flew up and away from him. Men gasped and ducked as it circled over the long tables, shedding snow and dancing round the stalactites with clacks of its long jaws, lazily ducking a knife Ostal threw. Then it slipped nimbly past the leather curtains and was gone into the bigger cave beyond.

“Don’t mind Teri,” the stranger said. “He likes fish better than flesh.”

Only now did another man find his voice, Wotansmund, a powerful man in a spangled green robe, standing at the far side of the room in front of a board lined with arcane symbols. “This place is private!” he burst out angrily. “What right do you have to come bursting in here where you’re not wanted?”

The stranger raised his eyebrows. Without the bird’s wings cloaking him he shivered, but he answered readily enough. “By right of the stars,” he said, and his dark eyes were steady in his wary face.

Laughter roared through the cavern. Each and every one of us at the tables laughed, the initiate-master loudest of all.

But the stranger didn’t laugh. He raised his hands and drew a square on the air. It shimmered and opened...

***

Beneath a burning sunset, wave upon wave of red sand stretched to the far horizon. A strange shape filled the foreground. It took a moment for the men in the cave to realise it was an animal with a long, curved neck, seen from a saddle of crimson silk. The stranger, slim inside his robes, slung bags and rolls over his broad shoulders, then reached forward to caress the shaggy head.

“Further I cannot take you,” the camel said in a voice as dry as the whisper of sand. “My enemy the sea would swallow me if it could, as it did once before, so very long ago. Aren, it will swallow you too if it can. And down there my other enemies will kill to stop you because they fear their end. But it is the only way for us to find freedom.”

From the crest of the last dune Aren followed the camel’s gaze. Here the land rolled downwards, growing green and lumpy with date palms and orange trees as it neared the coast. The last shadows lengthened and the first stars peeped over the dunes in the east. From up here Aren could see the shame of his people: white walls girdling the town. All the way from one headland to the other the walls rose strong and proud, fencing off the port and the bay. But a smile flashed across his face as he realised that in their arrogance they hadn’t posted a guard. It wouldn’t take him long to scale the walls. Within, ten thousand stars burned yellow to challenge the god’s jewelled heavens. Lamps, he suddenly realised. The lamps of those who hated the desert. Hated him.

“How can I leave you?” Aren whispered.

“You must or I’ll die, and so will you.”

“I will die out there,” said Aren, gesturing with his chin at the scarlet sea.

“Then I’ll die with you. Not the same day, not the same hour, but I will die, and all my dwellers with me. Go, my hope. Go, so you can come back to me.” And Aren felt the sand trickling down under his touch until the camel and the saddle were only veils of dust sifting away on the hot air.

***

By the time he’d walked down past the groves and the trading-ground, it was dark. The salt-moist breeze was rapidly cooling and the stars twinkled dimly, put to shame by the lanterns and cook-fires of the town by the sea. Southwest and northeast, cliffs reared jagged for a hundred leagues or more. Only here could the traders land. Only from this one, noisy, smelly, smoky port could Aren sail to find what he needed. And until he’d found it, he could never come back.

But the gates were shut. From below and above thick white bars closed the entranceway. In the light of the quarter-moon the walls glittered restlessly. It was hard to focus on them. None of his people had ever been allowed so close. They seemed to writhe beneath Aren’s gaze.

Then two lamps opened above the gates. Startled, he stepped back. He felt exposed, as though those lamps were looking at him.

They were. Flat, reptilian eyes, moon-shot and cold. Tempting, taunting, the top bars raised and the lower ones fell and he knew it was a trap. The mouth of the giant snake dripped with venom as the jaws widened further to lure him in. All around, the little snakes that made up the wall squirmed and thrashed to reach him with their needle-sharp teeth. Small wonder there were no guards. Who needed soldiers to keep the desert out?

Aren leaped back as the forked tongue slashed towards him.

Panting a little from sheer terror, he sank down cross-legged on the road. He too was taunting: he sat just out of reach, watching the thick black tongue sweeping out, but however hard it tried to catch him, always stopping short. Acrid venom flashed like opals, trying to blind him, bind him to the snake’s will, but Aren had the serpent’s measure. Where he sat, it couldn’t drag him numbly to its maw. But it tried and kept on trying as the ghostly moon swung up the sky, wreathed ever more thinly by the coils of cooking smoke.

Slowly the sounds of the town faded. One final argument between shrill and gruff voices, a last lilting song, one tired ringing of cymbals, the little ones girls played between their fingers before they sought sleep on their pallets on the flat roofs. Only now the port was sleeping could he hear the lullaby: the soft susurration of the waves. Too soon, too soon the tide would turn. If he missed it...

In time Aren smiled a little smile to himself. He wasn’t sure it would work here, the sand-magic, in earth that was compacted with dried dung and crumbling leaves. A mere handspan beyond that scything tongue, he dug his fingers below the hard surface, calling the desert that lay sleeping beneath.

Watching as the snake’s jaws grew tired and the tongue could barely raise the energy to slash out at him, Aren called a little of the desert’s power and by touch wrought a tube. His slender fingers tapped here and there and tiny holes appeared down the length of it. With a gentle twirl he widened the tube’s end and suddenly he put the thing to his lips.

Eldritch sweetness filled the air, soft and slow. It was almost a flute-song yet not the sharp sounds of music made by man. Gently swaying, Aren played the endless hush of the sands, the poignant sighing of the breezes that ululated around forgotten spires of rock. The melody rose and fell, rose and fell, gentle as a sleeping baby’s breath.

The little snakes’ heads drifted back and forth, back and forth, remembering the days in the wilderness, before they’d been imprisoned by men. Hated men, who trapped them always beneath the burning sun, never let them find shade in the noontime or warm crannies when darkness brought the chill. When the sandstorms hadn’t stung, because they could burrow down to safety. When they could feast on desert rats or sometimes tunnel into a fallen gazelle, no one to tell them when they could and couldn’t eat.

They yearned for the desert. They strained towards it, towards the song that called them. Even the mighty snake, Queen of the Wall, swam back into a sand-sea of memories that went back before her egg, before the egg of her dam, and her egg... Queen of the Desert, then, with all the wide spaces trembling beneath her mighty sway.

Aren played on, now louder, now softer, until the moon had sailed down behind the western cliffs and the sun sent his first faint messengers through the dim charcoal sky. And in the last darkness before the dawn his song grew softer yet, so soft the snake-wall couldn’t hear what they craved, that threnody of freedom that came out of the wilderness in the east.

Then one, then two, then hundreds of white asps wriggled and stretched and snaked towards it. All thrashing at once, they freed themselves from enchanted knots and surged to Aren’s flute. But before they reached him, long paces before they could engulf him, he spread his fingers and caught the dawn breeze. He held the flute high and turned it to channel the song of the air, then lofted it behind him. Grains of sand shimmered in the last starlight and sought their home, and the comber of snakes broke around Aren and was gone.

Last of all Queen of the Wall oozed towards him. She hissed, and words whispered into his mind: “You have freed me, Power of the Desert. Take this against your need.”

Then she too was gone. Only a sliver of white was left, a dagger made of a tooth, with a hilt of opal that held stars in its milky depths.

Aren walked into the town.

***

Already the first lights of coming day shone out through the windows. Families stretched and yawned and quarrelled, and babies cried for the warmth of their mother’s milky breast. People like his people, but not like. Here was no sharing. Here the people took. When the people of the desert came with their treasures, the arrogant people of the port kept them waiting in the trading grounds outside the White Wall of Shame. After all, they were only barbarians.

A carving of ivory, elegantly shaped by days and weeks and months of craft? The port’s traders sneered and offered coppers. The people of the desert were hungry? The traders sold them rancid coconut and mouldy dates. “Nothing good comes out of the desert,” they said, but they took the goods anyway and gave starvation in return. Great slabs of salt, the two huge panniers that were the six hundred pounds a camel could carry, went for half a bolt of shoddy cotton. Ice from the Mountains at the heart of the world, packed in oiled silk and skins and straw and mud and cloth that must be constantly cooled by water? A silver for a piece the weight of a tall man. For every item, bronze bowls and shapely pottery, strong nets for fishers, cakes of dye and perfumed essences, the traders lied, “Can’t give you more than I can get for it.”

But now the Wall of Shame was gone, and the people of the desert would deal directly with the shippers. The merchants’ stranglehold was loosening.

And Aren, all alone, would be fair game for any of the port’s leeches who saw him. Light as wind he trod, ducking past flame-lit windows and hiding in shadows, heading for the caravels and the galleys down at the wharfs. The streets were so narrow that hanks of dyed wool strung across drying-poles made a shifting roof between walls he could touch with either hand. Slipping down an alley under the pearly grey skies, he saw a pot-bellied child drawing in the dust. Its eyes widened but he winked and put his finger to his lips. And swiftly he sketched a smiling camel that got up and plodded away. Rapt with wonder, the toddler followed it into the pre-dawn dimness and Aren eeled down a gunnel that was narrower yet. But it was rich with the scent of straw and dung that meant a stable.

And a stable meant donkeys. Donkeys that worked at the docks. He was close!

And he was seen.

A stocky merchant in rich clothes came out of a lamp-lit doorway and stopped abruptly. For a heart-beat the two stared at each other. Then the broad man yelled, “Raider!”

Aren whirled and doubled back but now two others burst into the alley. Eyes glittering with hate, they jabbed towards him with their scimitars as if they couldn’t wait to get close enough to run him through. The merchant stepped backwards and servants pushed past him, almost tripping each other in their haste. Aren was trapped.

He leaped upwards. Hands and feet splayed against opposite walls, he pushed himself up and up until he reached the overhanging roofs. Beneath him the mob bayed. One of them even copied him but didn’t climb far before slithering back down.

Aren grabbed the coping-stone on one side and hauled himself onto the flat roof. Maids were folding blankets and rolling up mattresses, and one was cooking over a brazier. He ran past them just as the two servants burst up from the staircase.

“He’s here!” yelled one, smiling broadly and tossing his knife from hand to hand.

The other didn’t bother speaking. He moved aggressively sideways, blocking Aren.

Who jumped from mattress to mattress, right over their heads and onto the stair-housing.

“You can’t get away from Brahim!” yelled the talkative one, jerking his chin up to point at the other men pouring from the stairwell. In the first rays of the sun their sword-points glittered like stars. The merchant himself was smugly in their midst, urging his servants on.

Aren leaped down on them, his weight knocking three to the ground and sending the others off-balance. He ripped a hilt from one’s grasp and whirled it in an arc. His own knife was in his other fist. Leaping forward, he cannoned into his closest foe, then lashed a foot into another’s knee.

But he was penned by the mass of them into the corner where the girl was cooking. She huddled away from him and he flashed a grin at her. She was desert-born, a slave. Her fine features and the bruises on her arms said so. He flicked his sword under the rim of the broad pan and boiling meal scalded the front rank. The sole of his boot kicked embers that spun into the air.

And he sprang to the rim of the wall, jumping down onto the roof of the donkey-stable. It was thatched, and he went straight through, landing on a heap of straw and palm-fronds. Embers rained down with him. Tongues of flame licked shyly upwards, then gained confidence and roared into pillars of fire. The donkeys were braying and kicking in terror. Aren hurled burning fronds at the base of the locked doors, then bashed them with a pitch-fork, levering them apart.

In a charging river of hooves and teeth and flesh he burst out of the blazing stables and through the throng outside. Some were fetching pails of water. Some were striving to stab the son of the desert. But all of them were yelling hate.

He leaped aback a bolting mule and urged it downhill. He’d left the sword behind when he’d grabbed the pitchfork but the knife, long and deadly, was still in his grip. Leaning his weight sideways, he turned the mule round a corner, its hooves scrabbling on the stones of the quayside. Lines of loaders leaped aside as he galloped through, their burdens spilling to slow the pursuers.

On board the ships, sailors in strange clothes were already about their work. At one, not quite the farthest, they’d already cast off the bow-line and were struggling with the thick aft cable round one bollard.

“A fortune if you’ll take me with you, lads!” yelled Aren.

Quick as a mosquito he sprang from the mule and ran up the cable to land panting on the deck a moment before the rope was cast up beside him.

“Show me the fortune,” the first mate said. “Better be worthwhile if you want us to outrun that lot.”

Chest heaving, Aren fished inside his robes. Nobody saw what he was doing. They all thought he was just scrabbling around to find what he wanted. When he withdrew his hand and opened his fingers, red gems sparkled on his palm.

“Right then,” said the mate in his gravely voice. “Guess the captain won’t mind. But I can’t hurry the wind.”

Aren took one look back at the yelling mob, hundreds strong now, dashing towards them through the melee on the quayside. And raised his arms, back and then forwards, pushing the wind from the desert. The sails cracked and filled and out swept the caravel ahead into the bay, faster than any galley could follow, though they tried. “Remember my name, you desert mongrel!” howled the rich merchant, leaning out from the closest galley in their wake. “Brahim! The man who’s going to kill you!”

***

Racing past the headlands, the caravel heeled on the waves as the men on the steering-oar tried to turn it. Aren saw what they were doing, and swivelled to funnel the winds north and eastwards, parallel to the shore. Only when the last galley had dropped behind did he sink to the deck, exhausted.

He had no idea how he looked. The clothes he wore were charred. Blisters rose on his arms and tears from the fierce winds carved white streaks through the soot on his face. His long hair was grey with ash, and the palms of his hands left bloody prints on the planks.

Curious and unhappy, the captain came aft to where he slumped. “What’s all this about a fortune?” he asked harshly, in a tongue that clearly wasn’t his own. “It had better be worth it because that port’s closed to me now.”

Wearily Aren moved one hand, and a trail of rubies fell from his grasp. “Those do you?” he asked.

With a tilt of his head the captain signalled the mate, but thought better of it and picked up the gems himself. Seven of them, each the size of a desert quail’s eggs. He rubbed the blood off them and squinted through their incandescent hearts.

“So what did they want of you?” the captain asked, signing now for the mate to bring food and water for their captive. Or was he their passenger?

“I’ve removed their Wall so you can deal directly with my people now. They won’t rob us – or you – any longer. They wanted revenge.”

“That true?” the captain said, as his officer strode the shifting deck with a loaded tray. “Is the Wall gone?”

“Didn’t see it,” the burly mate said, kneeling to touch wet cloths to the stranger’s wounds. “Should’a been on the cliffs but it weren’t there. Thought it mighta been misty, though.”

“Where you headed, lad?” the captain asked absently, spinning round to check that the Wall no longer glimmered on the cliff top but the cove was well behind them now. The fabric covering his legs was light-drinking black and his shirt was white silk. Aren swigged water and examined him. His beard was the colour of wheat and he dressed like no one Aren had ever seen.

“North, where the snow comes from, and the sky is green and yellow and the sun doesn’t set at night.”

“We wasn’t headed there.”

“But you could be?”

Now the captain was polishing the rubies with a fine lace-edged kerchief while the burly first mate tried not to seem like he was staring. “Or I could tip you over the side and take the rest of them jewels.”

“But you won’t.”

From the crow’s nest the watch called, “Sail ahoy!”

They looked where the boy was pointing, at the triangular sails behind. The caravel was carving the rollers well enough, but at a speed the faster ships were easily overhauling.

“Make me more of that wind!” snapped the captain.

“I can’t. I’m worn out.”

“I’ll hand you over to them.”

“You’ve helped their enemy, captain. Think they’ll stop with taking me?”

Grimly eying their twin pursuers, the tall blond man stowed the fare into his cummerbund. “More sail!” he yelled. “Clear the decks for action!” and to Aren, “Can you fight?”

***

Closer and closer came the two ships, lean, raking biremes with flashing banks of oars. Sailors were in the rat-lines, cutlasses bared and grappling-hooks darkly fanged against the bright horizon. Within minutes they’d be upon them.

Calmly Aren ate and drank, and in the bustle of arming the crew the captain forgot him. Aren prowled down into the holds, smelling out what was there. Piles of gazelle-horns spiralled in the light of a swaying lantern, and bales of cured hides sent their ripe musk into the gloom. Sacks of salt. Ivory and brass. Vast bowls of copper from the heart of the desert. Aren smiled, and opened the hatches.

The captain – Aren hadn’t even had time to find out his name – yelled, “Batten ‘em down!” but Aren strode to him and whispered in his ear. The captain called, “Belay that! Get to your stations!”

At their master’s command the steersmen heaved on their boards and the ship reeled aslant, furling all sail. The galleys swept past, the larboard one so close that the caravel’s stern raked the oars to splinters. Over heeled the ship, sending Brahim and his men tumbling. On the slave-decks rowers screamed as their chests crumpled, and so fast was it travelling that the oars on the far side had already dipped so it swerved away, crippled. Blood streaming from a gash in his head, Brahim the merchant raged his vicious spite.

But the other galley slowed and backed water and then it was alongside. The grapples swung and bit the caravel’s rails. A wave of sailors leaped aboard. Steel met steel amid the ringing battle-cries. On the poop-deck the captain hacked, his steersmen at his side. Blood stained the decks. A hand flew and flopped to tangle empty in the ratlines. And nowhere could the captain see Aren, the cause of all his troubles.

Now the one-winged galley had limped to their other side. Once more the grapples hit the rails. Brahim the merchant was busy at the forefront, urging his soldiers on. The defenders’ forces were split. Slowly they were being pushed into the middle. In a moment they’d be back to back, surrounded.

Then they heard a sound, felt it rather, a resonance that sounded like a wet finger on the rim of a glass, only deeper, far deeper, deep enough to shudder bones. For a heartbeat, nameless dread stopped the fighting but Brahim cursed and thrust forward, impaling a defender and kicking him off the point of his scimitar. Then the slash and thrust renewed with clanging savagery.

Suddenly Aren stood on the deck at the head of the open hold. Round his neck was a necklace of lion’s teeth. In his left hand he brandished the Queen of the Desert’s tooth, and balanced on his right was a bowl of shining bronze. Round and round the rim he sent the serpent’s tooth, making that unearthly sound – or part of it.

Because the rest was quivering through the planks. A torrent of hoof beats, a deafening waterfall of snarls. Ghostly gazelles plunged and bucked. And the skins of desert lions filled with their ghosts and smashed outwards at the attackers.

Yelping with fear, some tried to flee. Some hurled themselves from one deck to the other, and some fell to be crushed between the hulls. Others battled on, too fearful of their lives to look aside.

But not Brahim. Berserk, he jinked past a lion and carved his way towards Aren. Cords stood out on his bull-neck and his scimitar darted gracefully through one target to the next.

Then he was before Aren. He saw the desert-man armed only with the things which brought forth such hideous, deathly music. With a sudden smile on his sweating face, Brahim lunged.

Aren swayed a fraction and plunged the serpent’s tooth through Brahim’s shoulder. The merchant fell back, the tooth still in his flesh, and the music stopped. Skins fell to the deck, but the human dead were still dead. Aren saw Brahim struggling to stand. He yanked free his serpent’s tooth. Grinning, he gonged the bowl on the merchant’s temple, and Brahim toppled.

***

The captain – Aren had now learned that his name was Jan – was all for taking the galleys as prize-ships, but Aren tilted his head to where other sails now poked above the horizon. “No time. But free the rowers. It will slow them down.” Briefly all was chaos as the last of the enemy were locked below their own decks, Brahim hurled un-gently on top of them, while the rowers cheered and Jan’s crew snatched what they could. Not much, but still a worthy haul.

Hoisting sail, the caravel headed north and east once more. When Jan had his men clear the slain from his decks, he only shrugged when the mate wailed, “All them skins is full of holes!”

“Ours aren’t. Cram on the canvas.”

***

The caravel sailed north. Once a storm all but swamped them, and once when they stopped in a cove for supplies, bad water sickened the crew. Still they seemed to have outrun pursuit. Jan kept a wary eye on the desert man and didn’t try to rob him.

They dropped anchor in Amsterdam to offload, and there Aren found a berth on a whaler heading for Stavanger. Three days he waited for the whaler to set sail, and all the time he turned his eyes from the hostel on the Ijssel Meer to watch for incoming shipping, but he didn’t see the galleys. Nor did he see Brahim, shivering, lurch down the gangplank with one arm in a sling off a brigantine that had made port at Le Havre.

But Brahim saw him.

***

At Stavanger Aren came off in a bumboat, and felt clumsy when his feet touched the frozen earth. Ice slicked the quayside and the mountains back of the fish-stinking town reared white spikes to the ever-dark sky.

The food was wrong. It lay cold and heavy in his belly. The furs he bought with the rubies of his blood weighed so much he felt swaddled and ungainly so he wore only the thinnest. The one piece of iron he’d brought – a needle suspended in a small bamboo cage – pointed the way.

People told him a blizzard was coming. Don’t leave, they said. Watch out for the elk. They’ll trample you. The wolves will hunt you down. Stay away from the dragons because they’re always hungry for travellers. And the trolls – but they wouldn’t talk about them.

But Aren remembered Brahim, and climbed out from the town to set his ambush.

Up into the dark-firred mountains where the winds smelt of snow and even the food tasted of pine-resin. Far off a wolf-pack belled, and in the next valley a male howled back his loneliness. Aren was camping by the thread of a waterfall spilling out of a half-frozen lake when he heard wings above the crackle of his fire.

He sat very still, one hand pushing down into the soft earth below the ash, where his fire had melted the permafrost. Wise enough not to stare into the flames but outwards, beyond the golden circle of firelight, he scanned the skies. Wind stirred the tops of the fir-trees so they seemed to try and catch diamond-bright stars. The aurora borealis sang in shifting curtains of rose and emerald.

And there in front of it was a moving patch of blackness. The blackness grew until it had head and wings and a long, spear-like tail. Aren sat very, very still, humming.

The blackness had shining eyes that gleamed brightly in the light of the fire. It perched on the rock which helped shelter Aren from the cold, and said, “You’re not trying to kill me! That’s very polite of you. Perhaps I won’t have you for supper.”

Aren’s hum rose in his throat until it was words. “I bring greetings from your cousins in the sunny lands to the south.”

“Cousins?” The dragon cocked its head and its eyes shone like stars. “I have cousins?”

“Indeed you do. They have hides of amber and red and copper, but they don’t have the plain elegance of your ebony skin.”

“Is that manners or is it flattery?”

“That’s for you to decide,” said Aren with a crooked smile. “But you’re letting my supper burn. Would you mind if I took it off the spit? You’re welcome to share it, of course. It’s fish.”

The dragon, its body not much longer than Aren’s but lighter with its bird-bones, hopped down the other side of the fire, ungainly until it had coiled its tail neatly round its haunches. Its toothy jaws made some difficulty in speaking but it managed. “I love fish. Too cold to catch it this time of year, though. The water makes my teeth ache.”

“Not if you have some twine and a hook. There should be more come morning, but for now, let’s eat.”

***

Above the eastern mountains the sky grew pale and yellow but west over the wild seas, stars still sparkled around the crescent moon. After a long night swapping tales, the dragon was asleep, curled almost round the fire to hog the heat, but Aren had kept to his own spot and slept with his fingers still in the fire-warmed earth.

The earth trembled softly to footfalls coming closer. Aren woke at its message. Soon he heard harsh breathing as seven men toiled uphill. He peered cautiously over the dragon’s bulk at them several bow-shots below. Sure enough, Brahim was there, fat in his frosty furs. His arm was out of its sling and the gash on his forehead had healed to a thin white scar. Two pale men were in front of him, others with darker skins straggling back behind.

“You’re tickling me,” grumbled the dragon.

“We’ve got visitors. The fat one wants to stop me.”

“Stop you what?” said the dragon, shifting his head round on his long neck to peer sleepily at the newcomers below.

“Stop me learning how to trap words on parchment so no-one can cheat my people any more.”

“Don’t they do this word-trapping closer to your home?”

“They do, Teri, they do. But it seems there are different ways of trapping words. Way up here their magic looks different and it’s so far from home that our goods are worth many times what folk nearer would give. And it would take many magicians to change one language to the next for all the lands that lie between. Each might lie or cheat and if we don’t understand all their word-magics, how would we know? So the desert sent me to find out the word-magic of these ice-mountain people. Brahim and his people have robbed your people and mine too many times for us to let them get away with it any longer.”

“They’re not my people. And there are seven of them and one of you,” said Teri, the point of his tail beginning to twitch. “How do I know you’re telling me the truth?”

“I’ve told you my story. Here’s the Queen of the Desert’s tooth. What does it say to you?”

Teri took it in a forepaw, sniffing the long spike with its tip of venom ever ready. Cold-blood to cold-blood, creature of myth to creature of myth, truth ran from the fang to the dragon’s mind. “Let’s eat them!” Teri exclaimed.

“Let’s not,” said Aren. “There’s more fish on the lines. Will you frighten away the men of the north? I’ll take Brahim.”

What they had believed was a rock suddenly became a man beside a dragon. The men of the north were terrified. Both made religious signs, then one ran while the other threw a spear in panic. It fell far short. He drew a sword. So did Brahim and some of the others.

Teri leaped aloft. His wings cracked the air as they opened wide. So nimble was he that he made a game of dodging their missiles or catching them to rain them back down. He enjoyed frightening them off and swooped cheerfully down the valley.

Only Brahim kept coming. Sweat dripping from his crimson face, the fat merchant waddled up the hill, scimitar in hand. “Got you, you son of a diseased camel! I know your game and you’re not getting away with it!” he puffed.

He must have felt secure in all those layers of fur, in all his years of running his town and cheating his victims. But the desert man brandished Queen of the Desert’s fang like a dagger. From its tip flew a spot of venom that landed unerringly in Brahim’s eye. It sparked like an opal, shone like a star. He screeched and fell to his knees, pawing at his face.

No more than Brahim had Aren expected quite that. Brahim knelt weeping. At first he keened with pain, or that’s what it seemed like. Then his cries turned to sobs.

“What have I done! What have I done!” he wailed. “No wonder the desert hates me. It’ll swallow me up, swallow all of us, and there’ll be nothing but sand forever.”

“We of the desert have your place, and we of the sand our own. Treat us fairly, Brahim, and we’ll trade with you and with the ships. Rob us and you doom your kind.”

Swiftly Aren pulled in his fish-lines and started breakfast. Neither he nor Teri noticed when the hidden man crept out and led Brahim away.

***

I saw the stranger clap his hands and the window closed. Now there was just tables and chairs and a man in light furs. Silence hung in the cavern but for the wind rattling the door. Wotansmund began to say, “You’re not welcome– “

Then a swoop and a splash and a caw of triumph rang out from the lake in the back cavern to remind us that the stranger was not alone.

The initiate cleared his throat and grasped the fronts of his spangled robe in a considered pose that was supposed to show his importance. “You’re not properly welcomed, I should say. Come in and warm yourself by the fire. A stoup of mulled ale and a platter of pork-belly?”

“That’s very kind,” said Aren, and slipped neatly between the rows of benches.

“What – ah, what did you think to find here?”

“I’ve come to learn your mysteries, the mysteries of words trapped on parchment so lies cannot stand.”

“And what would you give for this?” asked Wotansmund, clearly thinking of rubies and magic.

“Your mystery of trapping words should be free for everyone, don’t you think?” asked Aren, quietly. “That way you and we can both benefit.”

“What of your mysteries?” asked the initiate, fire catching in his greedy eyes.

“Come to the desert. You can learn our ways in half your lifetime.”

“That’s too high a price!”

“I’ve paid it already, paid it in a thousand stars.”

From the inner cavern the dragon crunched bones.

Hastily Wotansmund said, “So you have.”

We all sneaked our daggers away and picked up our pens, Aren among us, smiling softly as he brought a new magic to the desert.


© Anne Gay. Originally appeared in Dark Horizons 51 (BFS 2007). Used with permission.