Song of the Dragon

CHAPTER 39

“Well, Drakis, what are you thinking?”

Drakis smiled. “I was just thinking how beautiful this place is, Elder Shasa.”

Drakis walked side by side with the large, balding Elder down the wide path on the right-hand side of the village square. Small children ran about their feet, chasing one another with concentration in their delight that was oblivious to the adults around them. The square itself was lined with stalls filled with a dizzying variety of goods-fruits and vegetables from the farms that terraced the hillsides surrounding the village as well as pottery, tools, weapons, shields, and any number of other crafts. Many of the goods were obviously made by the Sondau, while many others had quite obviously been looted during previous raids. Everywhere Drakis looked there were dark-skinned men and women, young and old, all freely engaged with one another. Three huge and powerful men stood together at the corner of the green speaking to each other in quiet tones but with large gestures, their eyes filled with the passion of their argument. Ahead of them, two women walked past, their arms filled with large fruits. They both turned to look at Drakis as they passed, then broke into giggling laughter as they walked on.

“Yes, son,” Shasa said as he stopped at a stall filled with a sweet-smelling, long yellow fruit and turned to face a woman with high, delicate cheekbones tending it. “There is no place more beautiful than Nothree. . wouldn’t you agree, Khesai?”

“Far be disagreement from my door,” the woman replied with a wide smile. “May the gods grant you a fair wind, Elder Shasa.”

“Where is Durian today?” Shasa asked. “I would have thought he would be here on market day. . especially with such a fine crop.”

“He is helping Moda repair a ship at the beach,” Khesai replied. “Moda has offered to help us add a room to our home in exchange.”

Shasa raised his eyebrows. “Another room? Then have the gods blessed your family, Khesai?”

“Soon enough,” the woman smiled even more.

Shasa nodded. “Have you met our traveler, Drakis?”

“Fate smiles,” Khesai bowed slightly with the traditional greeting.

“Fate smiles,” Drakis bowed back.

“Your family shall be in our hearts, Khesai,” Shasa said. “Forgive us our leaving. I must speak with Drakis.”

Shasa turned and continued down the path with Drakis falling into step at his side.

“Elder,” Drakis said, “I have only been here a week, and yet I feel more at home here than any other place I have ever been.”

“This was not always so, Drakis,” Shasa laughed deeply.

Drakis grinned. “No, Elder Shasa. . that is true. When we first arrived. . well, I had never seen any humans with skin nearly so dark as the Sondau.”

“And this worried you?” Shasa asked.

“Well, no. . I just felt terribly conspicuous. . as though everyone was looking at me.”

Shasa laughed again; warm and filled with humor. “Everyone was looking at you. It is easy to pick you out in a crowd. . your white face could be seen from two leagues in the darkest part of a cloud-covered night. Finding you is not a problem. . hiding you is.”

Drakis nodded.

They passed the great house at the end of the square. The path under their feet now moved under the canopy of the tall, palm trees and the huts of the village families. The sounds of a mother yelling from inside the home for one of her children drifted past them as the path soon started to climb a winding trail up the steep slopes surrounding the village and its bay.

“There was one other thing,” Drakis said after many steps in silence.

“Yes, Drakis.”

“It’s that I’ve never seen so many humans in one place before,” he replied. “There have always been a few of us, of course, doing specialized jobs or kept around as curiosities. Timuran owned five or six of us, and that was considered an extravagance. But several hundred in one place? That could only happen when entire Legions were called into battle, and even then it would be hard to find them in the enormous press of so many other races. How did you get here? How have you survived?”

“The Sondau Clan settled Nothree during the Age of Fire, some seven hundred years ago by the counting of our lorekeepers,” Shasa said. “In those days, it was an outpost of the Drakosian city-states; the human kingdoms of the north that ruled all the land of Armethia. They were still recovering from the War of Desolation-the first great conflict between the humans of the north and the Rhonas army of conquest from the south. It was an unsettled time, and the Clans of the Coast took it to be a sign of opportunity.”

“Opportunity?” Drakis squinted in disbelief.

The path became steeper and more winding as they climbed.

“Certainly!” Shasa nodded. “In all change there is opportunity to benefit someone. So our ancestors came in their ships to what they saw as a land of promise. They found that the Forgotten Coast east of Point Kontantine was mountainous and lush, its ground fertile and mineral rich from the ancient volcanoes that had shaped it. Much of the coast was treacherous going for ships but there were choice harbors to be had if one knew where to find them along the arc of Sanctuary Bay. The Sondau captains were exceptional seafarers, and soon small settlements tucked in the back of hidden harbors like this one-accessed through all-but-impassable rock-strewn passages-dotted the great jagged shores of Sanctuary Bay.”

As Shasa spoke, they stepped to the crest of a low hill overlooking the village. The thatched roofs of the huts below could barely be made out through the canopy of trees-lush broad-leafed hardwoods and tall, strange trees with great fanlike leaves spreading out from their tops. He had never seen their like in all the lands of Rhonas and wondered why. Surely, he thought, they would fetch a handsome price for so strange a thing as these trees Shasa called “palm.”

The village was formed around a small, deep harbor surrounded entirely by steeply rising hills. The homes had to be built on the hillsides, and in many cases the roof of one butted up against the foundation of the next home higher up the hill. Communities here seemed to grow in clusters, like fruit springing somehow from the mountain-side. The harbor itself was guarded by a narrow and winding passage that looked to Drakis to be entirely impossible to navigate although whenever he brought this up with the Sondau villagers, he was universally greeted with laughter.

Behind him, bright in the rising light of morning, stood the craggy peaks of the Sentinels, nearly vertical mountains whose slopes were covered in lush foliage and whose tops were always shrouded in clouds. Those peaks seemed to hold the outside world at bay and, Drakis reflected, perhaps that was truer than he knew.

“So they found their land of opportunity, then,” Drakis said as he sat down and looked back out over the village spread below him.

“No, not nearly as easily as they had hoped. . for no dream comes without cost,” Shasa mused, sitting next to him. “Many other settlements were established during that time as the Drakosians tried to extend their land holdings to include footholds in Nordesia and the Vestasian Coast. but each in turn failed. Only Nothree, Notwo, Nofor and a handful of others clung stubbornly to their existence through the tumult of war and shifting alliances that marked that age. Our fathers found themselves increasingly on their own. The Clans of the Coast, as they called themselves. . Darakan, Phynig, Merindau, Sondau and Hakreb. . struggled to survive as the ships from our homelands became increasingly infrequent, and our distant government drifted farther and farther removed from our lives.”

Shasa picked up a stone from the hillside and tossed it lightly down the slope.

“Then, two centuries ago, when the dragons of Armethia betrayed their alliance with the Drakosian lords,” he continued, “the ships stopped coming at all. We became ‘The Forgotten’ colonies, and here, in our little havens, we have been born, loved, lived, and died ever since.”

Drakis thought about this for a moment, the silence resting easily between them. “Elder Shasa. .”

“Yes, Drakis.”

“Have you determined whether I am this ‘prophet’ everyone is looking for?”

“Drakis, what a strange question,” Shasa said. “It seems to me that a prophet would know the answer to that question himself!”

“I don’t know, Elder,” Drakis replied. “Sometimes I believe it, and sometimes I think it’s just nonsense. I hear the Dragon Song in my mind, but from what I understand so do many others. My name fits the prophecy, but then it’s a common name. . there is none more common among human slaves.”

“There seem to be a lot of people who want you to be the Drakis of prophecy,” Shasa replied. “Perhaps you should ask a different question.”

“A different question?”

“Yes,” Shasa said as he, too, gazed off across the harbor. “Perhaps you should ask yourself what you want. Do you want to be the Drakis of the prophecy. . or do you want something else?”

Drakis stared at the balding man sitting next to him for a moment.

“Because if you’re looking for something else. . then you might consider looking down that upper path around the western hill,” Shasa said casually. “I believe I saw Mala following that same path toward the Lace Pools not ten minutes ago.”

Drakis smiled and stood up at once. “Thank you, Elder Shasa!”

“Write your own destiny, Drakis,” Shasa called after the warrior as he sprinted down the path.

Drakis could hear the cascade of the Lace Falls before he saw it, a gentle, quiet roar of water tripping down a rock face. The warrior in him knew that it masked the sound of his approach, and almost without thought he softened his footfalls and stepped more gingerly down the beaten path that wound between the dense undergrowth and the tree canopy above. The stream ran down the slope next to him, its clear, cool water rushing down toward Nothree far below. Before him, the forest was brightening as he neared the clear area around the pool.

He stopped just short of the water’s edge, holding his breath.

Mala.

She stood in the pool beneath the falls, the cascade of white water splashing around her shoulders and masking her body in tantalizing sheets. He could just make out the sweeping curve of her back above the surface of the pool, a hint of her breasts and the profile of her elegant neck as her face turned up into the tumbling water.

Mala turned toward the pool and dove, the momentary sight of her shoulders, waist, hips and legs shining in the morning sun taking his breath once more before the lacy foam on the surface that gave the pool its name hid her from him.

Her head surfaced near the center of the pool. She reached up out of the water with her glistening arms, and pushed the water back from her short hair.

“Hello,” he called gently across the water.

Mala turned suddenly toward him, but her startled, angry stare softened at once. “Oh, it’s you.”

“Yes, it’s me.”

“If you’ve come for a bath, you’re too late,” she said, her shoulders just above the surface as she moved her arms back and forth through the water. “I claimed this pool, and it is mine by right. I will not share my private little paradise with anyone else-no matter how badly they need bathing-and you, most certainly, are desperately in need of a bath.”

“I didn’t know you could swim,” Drakis said, moving to the shore of the pool and sitting down.

Mala took in a luxurious breath. “Neither did I, but I must have learned at some point. It feels so right. . and I’ve probably left so much of the road in this pool that it will probably foul the stream for several months. Oh, but it’s good to be clean again! What do you think of my hair?”

Mala turned around. Her red hair was wet, but he could already tell it was shaped differently than he remembered. “That’s a new look for you. When did that happen?”

Mala smiled and turned her head. “Several of the women from Nothree took it upon themselves to trim my ragged mop into this more pleasing form. Do you like it?”

“Yes,” Drakis said as he reached down and removed his sandals, “I like it a great deal.”

“Now, you can stop right there,” Mala said, though there was a smile still playing at the edges of her pout. “I said this is my pool, and brutal warriors are not allowed to share it.”

“I just want to put my feet in,” Drakis complained. “Surely you cannot deny me the opportunity to wash these travel-weary feet?”

“You? Travel weary?” Mala said. “You’ve done nothing but travel, Drakis-and dragged us all along with you.” She affected a serious look on her face, lowering her voice. “We go north! Keep going north! Don’t know where it is. . but it’s north!”

“Fine, have your laugh,” Drakis said, though he was chuckling as well. He slipped his feet into the water. “But it got us here, Mala. . and here is not a bad place to be.”

“No,” she said softly. “Here is a good place.”

Drakis paused for a moment and then, reaching up over his shoulders with both arms, grabbed the back of his tunic and pulled it off over his head.

“You can just stop right there, warrior-boy,” Mala said sternly.

“It’s a mess!” Drakis replied holding out the rumpled cloth. “Look at it! Hasn’t been washed in weeks. . I’ll bet it would move on its own if I left it standing. People won’t talk to me, Mala, for the stench of it. This shirt needs a cleaning. . it’s just a courtesy.”

Mala giggled. “Those are the worst excuses I have ever heard! Can’t you come up with something more creative?”

“ ‘Warrior-boy?’ ” Drakis smirked.

“Very well, that wasn’t my best either, but you have me at a disadvantage.”

“So you need clothes to think?”

Mala smiled through her pout once more. “I don’t seem to be thinking very clearly without them.”

Drakis laughed again, plunging his shirt deep into the pool. Then he drew the wet cloth up, wrung it out and then stopped, just holding it.

“What is it, Draki?” Mala asked, her lithe arms making eddies in the surface of the pool.

He stopped. “It’s good to hear you call me that again.”

“So what is it?” she urged.

“I am weary of the road, Mala,” he said in a voice that barely carried over the rushing sound of the waterfall. “I’ve been fighting all my life for things that meant nothing to me. . for masters who thought of me as property and who didn’t care if I lived or died. Now with all this ‘prophecy’ nonsense. . it feels as though everyone wants me to be something or somebody for them again. I’m tired of living my life for everyone else’s expectations. . everyone else’s life.”

“What do you want, Draki?” Mala said quietly.

“I want. .”

Drakis struggled for a moment. It was a new thought for him and he was having trouble even putting it into words.

“I want. . something of my own.”

“Something of your own?”

“Yes,” Drakis said, his words forming with more conviction around the idea. “I want a place like this, a life that has nothing to do with the Iblisi or the Imperium, or mad dwarves, or prophecies, or this damn song that keeps calling me to a destiny I never asked for and certainly do not want. I want. . I want this place, a small home in the village, cool water to drink, food to eat. I want children to raise and a life that is my own to share and. .”

“And?” Mala asked, pushing backward through the water.

“And. . and I want to know how to swim,” he finished.

Mala laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“The great big warrior afraid of the water!”

“Yes,” he sighed.

“Draki. .”

“Yes, Mala?”

“You shouldn’t be afraid,” she said softly. “I’m standing on the bottom. It’s not that deep.”

Invisible to them both, Ethis the chimerian stood watching Drakis and Mala from the shore of the pool. His skin blended so perfectly with the foliage that had they known he was there, they would not have been able to see him even were they looking directly at the spot where he stood.

All they might have discerned was the movement of the cloth as he fingered Mala’s gown where she had draped it over a bush.

But they would have had to look quickly. . for in the next moment, he was gone.