eye with one blow. A baby dragon? There was no blood, no signs of age. Was that why I lived? I examined him carefully, much more carefully than the first. There were no holes for spitting teeth. Did they develop with age? Had we found the birthplace of dragons? Did dragons breed, after all? But I was soon to have other worries, for Mar was tugging on my arm and pointing. «Look, oh, look.» I looked. Through the bushes, the trees, there was a gleam of pure white. My blood froze. So huge a dragon. The mother of all dragons. She would spit. She would burn. And I saw, reflected in the light of the afternoon sun, a dozen eyes of a hugeness which made me forget all my bravery. I ran. I ran and left Mar to follow. And I stopped running only when I reached the web. I was trying to climb it when she caught up. «Help me, help me,» she cried. We clambered over the web at the expense of more cuts. It was a full day before I had the courage to go back to the web. We walked along it. It was huge. We reached a place where it changed. I checked for danger and we started to walk past a different kind of web and suddenly there was movement. We ran to the trees and watched as the section of the web which had swung back slowly closed the gap left. I went back, stood there again, moved about. The web sprang open. «It's alive,» Mar gasped. No teeth holes. No eyes. It was more and more curious. «We will go in,» I said. «Oh, God, no.» «We went in before.» «There's the huge dragon.» «We will watch for him.» We went in. A different kind of dragon's path awaited us, surfaced with small, loose stones. There were no dragon's tracks on it, however, and, emboldened, I led the trembling Mar onward along an avenue of huge trees, until, once again, we caught the gleam of white through the trees. I left her and went forward, tree by tree. I could not get an overall view of the dragon, it was that huge. But I got closer and closer without incident. When I was near, I could see that the dragon extended upward, had a covering of long, regular pieces of bone which looked like stone, had eyes which were square-cornered, some tall, some short, eyes which reflected light. It was a puzzle. The dragon seemed to sit on a wall of stones of regular shape, as if anchored permanently. Experimentally, I showed myself. Nothing happened. I threw a small stone and it clanked off the side of the dragon. Still nothing. I threw a larger stone, aiming for an eye. The stone shattered the eye, and I waited for the dragon to roar, but there was only silence until I saw movement from a part of the huge thing and a plate opened and out came a small dragon which carried an eye in the form of a large sheet of the type of bone which I'd scavenged from the dead dragon in the field of the dead. I could see through it. I watched in amazement as the little dragon sprouted legs, grew upward, carrying the eye, and, after clearing the socket of shatters, replaced the eye. I shattered another, and the same thing happened, and as the little dragon worked I stood in the clear. I went unnoticed. I edged closer and as the dragon finished his job and came down, folding his legs inside his body, I leaped forward and smashed his eye with my ax. He died, the hum fading slowly. Feeling very brave and not a little foolhardy, I explored, being so close to the huge thing without being dead. The skin was not dragonskin, but seemed to be wood—I made little dents with my ax and had to leap quickly as a small dragon came out and sprayed the white stuff which covered the wood over the dents I'd made. You see, by that time, not being stupid, I had figured out that these small dragons had no teeth and that their eyes were not deadly. To prove it, I walked directly in front of the little dragon which spit out the white stuff and he ignored me. I smashed his eye and he died. So, I thought, what treasures are here, unprotected? I went back for Mar. She was frightened of coming with me but more frightened of staying. We approached the huge white thing and found stone, formed as layers which led upward like the exposed rocks of a hillside, only neat and in lines. We stood on the thing, under a part of it, nervous, admittedly, but more and more confident that there was no danger. As we came close to the side of it a plate opened. It took a little while to decide to go into the thing's maw. But go we did, and there was softness underfoot. In a place like a cave, the plate closed behind us. I panicked. I ran and started to cut my way out, but the plate swung open. I experimented. Any time I wanted to go out, the plate opened. We moved forward. Mar and I both still dripped water from being wet in the rain which came from the ground, and it was staining the strange, soft thing under our feet. I heard a sound, saw a small plate open in the wall and a tiny dragon came purring out. I raised my ax. The dragon went to the water stains, made a purring sound, and the water stains disappeared, eaten. The dragon moved toward us and then halted, waiting for us to move. We moved, and he ate the water stains. I felt a little nervous, even if he did seem harmless, so I smashed his little eye. He died. Immediately another plate opened and another dragon of a different sort came out, picked up the dead one, and went away. «You should have killed him, too,» Mar said. «He'll tell others that we're here.» I said nothing. I looked around. There were plates all around the cavelike place. I stood in front of one, and it opened. Another cave, much larger, was before us. I stepped in. The sun came out suddenly in the form of a glow which lit the cave brightly, and I looked wildly around for a dragon, finding none. I suppose when you feel fear so often, you grow immune. Heart pounding with the suddenness of the light, I waited. I looked around. There were things, huge things, colored and soft-looking. They reminded me of chairs and couches. But they were huge. And my blood went cold. «There were giants in those days,» the old storytellers said. «Gods of man,» I said. «We are in the house of the giants.» «Eban, let's go,» Mar said, clinging to my arm. «The treasures here!» I said. I walked to one of the eyes, saw outside the close-growing grass, the bushes with white flowers. The eye was partially covered with a sort of skin which went to the top, and, when touched, was wondrously soft and thin, unlike any skin, however well scraped, I'd ever seen. Thinner than the membrane of guts, white, delicate. I ripped down a huge piece of it. I draped it around Mar's shoulders. «Gods, it's so beautiful,» she said. «Treasures,» I said. «We are so rich.» «And if the giants come home?» «The giants are dead. They are as old as the dragons.» I sat in a chair thing. It dwarfed me. It was soft and yielding. Mar, seeing my bravery, tried a couch thing, and ended up bouncing on it, yelling happily as she sprang into the air. I tried another. I heard a small click and leaped, but not soon enough. A plate opened on the wall and an eye of big and white horror glared at us, and there was a sizzling, grinding sound and white flashes in the eye and then a sound like rushing water and flickers of light in the eye, but we were looking back on it from the first cave. When nothing happened and the eye went out and the plate closed we went back, but soon tired of the couch things and the chair things. Another cave had a bottom of stone and was nearly empty, but when we walked in and stepped onto the cold stone a hideous sound broke out and continued as long as we stood on the stone. It was a sound which I cannot describe, consisting of many things, some like the screech of a dragon, some soft like the wind in the trees, and under it all a rhythm which reminded me of old Seer of Things Unseen beating on her treedrum. But
all in all it was a grating noise, and we soon tired of it to find, at the end of a long cave, the most wondrous cave of all, a cave of multiple plates which opened at a touch, revealing incredible things. There were frail cups, not nearly as sturdy as the cups which my family made of fire-hardened clay, and huge plates, and other things, some of dragonskin, and the most amazing thing, a whole collection of skinning knives so wonderfully wrought that there was no blood and so sharp that I could have scraped away my hair. I chose several, thrusting them into my loincloth, and gave Mar two to carry for me. I could, with those knives, skin the largest bear with no effort at all. We climbed a cave with steps and found couches and things we knew not, huge bowls on the floor of some small caves, for example. We liked the lower caves better, and satisfied that we were alone, decided to spend the night. It was not cold inside the caves, as it was growing with the lateness of the evening outside, but a hunter has his fire. I cast around for a place and decided that the best place, with the clearest field of vision, was the room with the stone floor, if only I could stop the dreadful sounds which sprang out of the walls when we entered. I solved the problem by following my ears to find the places where the sounds originated and stopped them with several blows of the hardax. Then it was quiet. I used the ax to break up some chair things—having to take time out to kill at least half a dozen small dragons who seemed to be intent on stealing my firewood—and started my fire on the stone floor in the center of the room. It was a cheerful sight, even though the magic sunlight lit the room well. The smoke rose and began to collect, and I decided that we needed a vent, so I knocked out a couple of eyes with my stone ax, and soon there was a dragon outside putting the eyes back into place, and no sooner did I knock one out than he was there putting it back. By then the cave was filling with smoke. Mar was coughing. And then she screamed, as it began to rain, and the rain was not mere water, but a smelly, sticky whiteness which cascaded down from the roof of the cave. Our fire was quickly out and we were covered by the stuff, and there were dragons everywhere cleaning up the remains of our fire and the white stuff. «Enough,» I said, smashing dragon's eyes right and left. «We leave this place and seek sensible shelter in the woods.» «Yes, yes,» Mar said. Just to give the dragons something to do, I smashed a few eyes from the outside and threw a burning brand into two or three of them to watch the white rain fall. Then it was night. We went into the woodlands and built a small lean-to and a roaring fire, and Mar was, happily, my———I had come to accept the word. Chapter Five Now winter found us. Ice froze in still waters in the swamps. The small animals hid in their burrows, the climbers in their nests, and I was thankful for the sun-dried meat which I carried in my pack, fashioned of part of a deerskin. There were nuts to eat and a small black berry which I observed to be clean, since the birds liked it and it gave, unlike most of the vegetation, no warning of spirits. We ate climbers until I longed for a huge and juicy deer haunch roasted on a spit over a fire of cinders from our long-burning hardwoods of the mountains. We moved eastward from the grove wherein sat the cave of the
