Dragon Clan: In The Beginning

CHAPTER THREE

I’m only twelve. I need my sleep Only old people can stay awake at night. The regular motion of the canoe as the old man paddled, the soft night air, and the letdown of the excitement of escaping his captors, all contributed to Seth’s eyes closing. When he woke, the sky was still dark, the cold had returned and seeped inside his clothing, but the steady sound of paddling continued. He glanced at the figure in the back of the canoe and felt somehow comforted.

Dawn said, “Be light soon. I can use a few winks if you’re up to it.”

“You mean paddling? Sure, I can do that.”

“Knew you could. Didn’t know if you would.”

“You talk funny,” Seth muttered as he struggled to an upright position and accepted the proffered paddle.

“See that group of stars right there?” He pointed. “The three bright ones that make a sort of an arrow? Keep the boat going that way.”

Seth didn’t bother answering. He tried to imitate the way the old man paddled, going steady, correcting drift slowly when the boat turned in either direction, but never too much.

The gentle rise and fall, the swaying, and soft surges with each stroke soothed his anxieties. He had successfully bolted from the clutches of the Salt People. For now, that mattered and not much else. The future might hold a list of negatives, but none that he could think of were worse than the bleak future he’d faced only yesterday. The daily beatings and scraps of food fed to him, took a distant second to what he expected would have happened when the Salt People encountered another tribe. Boys his age soon grew into productive young men able to quickly learn their tasks. They were young, but old enough to understand that escape attempts ended in death. Not escaping meant a lifetime of servitude. It was hard to tell which was worse.

A trade with the Salt People for him might have given them two young dogs, a fistful of good arrows, a warm blanket, or even an old sheep. He’d been valuable. But instead of the Salt People getting furs, tools, or blankets in exchange for him, Seth had stolen their only canoe. Their other canoe had sunk more than a month ago, mostly from the same lack of care they gave to all possessions. The boats allowed them to fish, clam, travel, and transport seals or other meat. Two canoes were a luxury, but one was a necessity.

Modoc would chase him to the ends of the earth. While fat and lazy, he contained a meanness just under the surface, far beyond normal. He enjoyed hurting things. Seth had once watched Modoc run a deer down after shooting it with an arrow. While the deer lay at the edge of a meadow bleeding its life away, Modoc taunted and poked the animal until Seth wanted to rush in and smash the life from the deer with a large rock to end the pain.

Glancing up, Seth realized his course had drifted off to the left. He corrected it and changed his thoughts about the future. Much of it depended on the old man sleeping and snoring behind him. Dawn. The mind of the man was clearly muddled, overly friendly; his odd sense of humor funny only to him.

There were still choices to make. When the canoe arrived wherever Dawn wished to go, Seth could steal it again, if taking a boat he considered his own, was stealing. The coming of the winter snows concerned him most. The rest of the year he could survive with a little luck and a lot of learning. But there were people he could scout and watch. They could teach him how to hunt and provide food, never knowing he was watching.

But winter was different. Most stayed huddled under thick fur skins near warm fires, surviving on the stores they put away during the rest of the year. At least his original family had. Winter meant burning wood gathered near their hide hut, sitting and doing very little, day after day, with breaks to eat food they had gathered all year long.

Food again. Quit thinking about food. Seth dipped the paddle more and used his shoulders to move the canoe faster as an outlet for his anger and fears. Another glance at the three stars assured him he was still going in the right direction, but they were dimmer. He looked east and found gold tinged on the horizon.

But he had also found his rhythm. One stroke, two, three—shift the paddle to the other side and one stroke to correct the course, then repeat. No thinking, just doing. Steady, one, two, three, and four. His upper body moved to reduce the strain on his arms and shoulders.

It gave him time to think and plan, but beyond what he’d already decided, little mattered. Plan for winter. Survive until warm weather returned. The dawn forced the darkness away, and the stars faded. The sun peeked over the edge of the water.

Seth’s regular paddling broke stride. His head slowly turned one way and then the other. He looked behind and ahead. There was no land in sight. None. Only water.

“Hey, Dawn. Wake up. We have a problem.”

“Problems are all around us,” Dawn’s sleepy voice responded.

“Water is what’s all around us. I thought you told me to follow that arrow of stars. Look at where we are.”

Dawn shifted his weight as he opened his eyes to find Seth staring at him. “You followed my directions?”

“Look for yourself. You can still see the three stars if you look hard.”

The old man did. After which, he smiled. “Very good. Keep going in the same direction while I nap.”

“No, you don’t understand.”

“I know the stars will fade as the sun rises. Notice the wind is coming from our left? Keep it there and watch ahead. You’ll see our destination about mid-morning.”

Seth watched him close his eyes peacefully and unconcerned. For the first time, he had a good look at Dawn. He saw a man older than he believed possible, hair white as starlight, and wrinkles everywhere. He was almost as small as Seth.

Looking closer revealed more. The wrinkles at the corners of the eyes and around the mouth suggested a lifetime of smiling. He had no visible scars, unusual for a man. His beard was clipped short, but neat. His clothing was durable, not flashy, but well-made. He carried two leather purses and a knife attached to a wide belt. Nothing else.

Calming himself, Seth turned and took note of the wind, waves, and the sun before beginning to paddle again. He watched ahead while deciding that whatever lay up there, was not far enough from the Salt People. If Dawn, or whatever he called himself today, wished to leave the canoe, Seth would continue until he felt safe.

He counted again, one, two, three, and four. He kept the rhythm steady, never dipping the end of the paddle too far into the water, but learning to adjust the depth of each stroke to maintain the direction without needing many corrections. He knelt and his knees were sore and wet. His shoulders ached. And he needed more sleep, but after a quick glance behind gave that last idea up. Dawn curled up and soon breathed heavily in a steady rhythm of his own.

Hunger reared its ugly head, a constant reminder for him. After they had slain his family in the attack, he had gone hungry for several days and after that time of daily hunger, finding food and eating turned into more of a priority than ever before. Seth planned his next meals but always eating when the opportunity arose. When walking in the forest, if he saw ripe berries he paused and ate them on the spot, knowing that carrying them meant one of the Salt People would take and eat them, for spite if nothing else.

He remembered it had been different before the attack, they had been good. As the weather had warmed, when he lived in his old home, his mother and father allowed him to play or splash in the water with his friends. They fed him regularly. He had chores, mostly consisting of helping his mother while his older brothers helped his father hunt, make weapons, or defend the family. His sisters had left the family at an early age, always with young men. They never returned.

Seth allowed those ideas to form in his mind as he fondly considered his earlier life. Since the attack on his family, he hadn’t had the time to review all of it, remembering the good times as well as others. His life consisted of either doing chores from daybreak until dark, or the Salt People beat him for being lazy. With darkness came time to sleep and after working all day he seldom remained awake after sunset.

His thoughts returned to Dawn. What would his father have said about him? Seth pictured his father as being taller and stronger than any other man, and his other sons tended to take after him, too. All but Seth. Seth was short and didn’t enjoy hunting, fighting, or strenuous work. Instead of doing things in the old ways, he devised new ones that made for less work.

His brothers used to dig for roots with a wide bladed shovel, each scoop removing a basket full of dirt at the cost of wasted energy. Seth took a broken shovel blade and reshaped it into a narrow blade that went into the dirt easily. Instead of a basket of dirt it removed a fraction of that, and dug deeper. The roots they gathered were easier to reach. In disgust, his brother had quit doing the digging tasks and given the job, and the narrow shovel to one of the sisters.

His brother believed that Seth had made a fool of him. The sister that inherited the job of root gathering hated him even more because of the extra work for her. But most of the time his ideas bettered their lives. While the men fished with a hook on the end of a hand line, Seth fashioned several hooks on the same line and often caught two or even three fish at the same time.

His family seemed to enjoy his quirky personality, even to the point of showing respect for him as he grew older. The concept that they were all dead seemed more remote each day as they faded from memory. There was one sister with long yellow hair who was almost old enough to marry. She ignored him in favor of showing her coy smile to any older boy from another village that would look in her direction. Seth could still see her face in his mind, but only dimly, and her name escaped him. All memories of his original family grew fainter with each passing day.

Would they all fade away in time? His morose thoughts kept his mind busy. When he looked up again, a smudge rose over the water ahead. Turning his head to each side to get his bearings, he found nothing else like it, but it seemed to be where the canoe headed so he resumed paddling.

The smudge slowly started to take on detail. Seth was sure it was the shore, but it looked so far away. What was it doing way out there in the deep water? More importantly, could Modoc find his way to it?

Seth didn’t wake the old man again. He must be worn out, an old body paddling all night long, with no warm fire or food. The wind from his left side tended to push the canoe to the right, so he pointed the boat at the left end of the land when he felt the boat shift under him. Dawn was sitting up.

“Yer, doing good, Seth. That’s where we’re bound.”

“Is there food? I’m hungry.”

“There is, but we’ll have to gather it. I’ll show you.”

Seth continued a few more strokes, then abruptly asked, “Will the people treat me mean?”

“No meaner than me,” Dawn said, the laughter clear in his voice and a now familiar smile on his lips.

Ahead, the land took on more definition. Tall cliffs met the water, cliffs made of solid rock. As if reading Seth’s thoughts and concerns, Dawn said, “If you don’t mind, we need to point this thing further to the left and go around that point. We can row ashore because there are beaches instead of cliffs.”

“Modoc will find me here. It’s too close.”

“He the big one that chased us? Well, I think you’ll be safe here. Want me to take the paddle?”

No matter what the old man said, Modoc would follow the shoreline until he found the canoe. One night’s travel was not enough distance, but Seth wouldn’t argue. He wouldn’t stay, either. The matter resolved in his mind, he handed the paddle to Dawn and settled back to watch the approaching cliffs and the green forests above.

Dawn made a wide circle, taking them further out to sea and then around the end of the point, only to reveal more cliffs. When Seth was about to comment on it, he noticed they were not as high, and beyond those closest, they became lower and seemed to disappear. Maybe Dawn was smarter.

A flicker of movement captured his attention. Up near the few puffy clouds, a dark spot emerged, appearing as if it flew out of the cloud instead of behind it. The wings were long and shaped like those of bats instead of birds. The body looked thin, the neck as long as that of a heron, but the overall appearance didn’t fit any bird he’d ever seen.

He watched it circle and descend. Although still too far off to see detail, the creature dove to the surface of the water and then flapped its wings furiously. It lifted into the sky again, carrying something with its feet. It flew a wide circle and headed for the beach.

Seth looked over his shoulder, questioning the old man.

Dawn said simply, “A dragon.”