parted her hair and saw that the tooth had not broken her skull, but merely chewed along it, taking a small groove of flesh and hair. I carried her to water, a stream which we had passed not long before, and bathed her head in the coolness, finally stopping the flow of blood. But still she slept. «Mar, Mar, without you I am again alone,» I told her. She heard not. Through a long and sad afternoon and through the night I sat beside her. She opened her eyes with the morning sun and looked at me as if she did not see me and went back to sleep, but I now had hope. It is said that out of chaos comes good, but it is not always true. What good comes from God's chaos of the eastern flats? Sickness and death. But, true, in the mountains the chaos of the fires from God's anger from the skies clears the underbrush and leaves growing room for new and tender things. Out of God's blow to Mar came good in the long run, I suppose, for it taught me that I needed her. To that point I had considered her merely a
———, that dirty word of her people. And a companion. Someone with whom to talk. Now, thinking that she was dead, a hurting in my chest, tears on my face, all the pain, told me that she had become more, and I cradled her in my arms and crooned grief and sympathy for her. After a long, long day, she opened her eyes again. «I hurt,» she said. «You will be all right.» «My head.» She put her hand up and winced. «It is not broken.» «I feel…» And she slept. She was dizzy for a few days, during which we made camp by the stream and she constantly wanted me to hold her, which, as she felt better, led to other things, and, finally, laughing, I accused her of pretending to be dizzy so that we would not walk but stay in camp to do the together closeness. She smiled, but then she shuddered. «When I saw the dragon…» «You saw it?» «Then I felt the pain and there was a moment when I was alive before I died and in that moment I knew regret.» «I know,» I said. «I would have felt it, too, for I would have died, my Mar, without telling you that you are my true pairmate.» «Truly?» I had explained to her the ways of our people, that pairs mate for life and two lives are as one. «Truly.» «My regret, too, was that I had not spoken,» she said. «Speak now, then,» I said. «I hesitate.» «We are pairmates. You may speak anything.» «But I may be wrong.» She clung to me. «Oh, I do not want to be wrong.» «Between pairmates, nothing is wrong except the giving of pain,» I said. «It is that I have not blooded for three moons,» she said. I digested this information, nodding. Thinking of all the implications, remembering the deformed baby which an inbreeder had killed by smashing its head against a tree. «Perhaps I am merely old, for in old women the blooding stops,» she said. «At fifteen, no, sixteen summers?» I asked. «I will be happy if I am right,» she said. «Will you, Eban?» She gazed at me from behind long lashes, her face fearful. «It will be a son,» I said. «We will call it after my father.» «And you are happy?» «Yes,» I said. But I could think of nothing except that deformed thing which died even before it lived, of the sickness in Mar's people, of the warning tingle which came, ever so faintly, from her very bones. It is forbidden to mate with the inbreeders of the lower slopes. Another sin for the head of Eban, Killer of His People. Now I was taking the taint, the sickness, into the very home of my kind. We circled the field of the dragon. His path lay through a valley, and he was in the center, commanding a view of the entire valley and the ridges surrounding it, and had I been inclined to kill, I would have been sore tested to approach that one, for he was well placed. Within a moon Mar's belly was swollen, and she was happy. We saw signs of people, but I skirted them. I did not want to be seen by the true men of the hills, without hair, in my present condition, with a hairy inbreeder woman as my companion. But I had forgotten the skills of my people. As we made our way up a valley, leading into the hills, making camps beside a clear and cold stream, living on the plenty of the hills, I walked into an ambush without realizing it. I had become spoiled by the easy life among the lesser men. I saw, suddenly, two men leap into the clearing in front of me. «Ho, hairy one,» one of them said. «I am Eban the Hunter, son of Egan, of the family of Strabo the Strongarm of the northern hills,» I said, bowing in politeness, my hardax dangling in front of me. «He knows the form,» one man said. «Haired,» the other said. «He lies.» «I have hair, but I am a man,» I said. «I have killed dragons, for which I have proof, with your permission.» «Ha,» said a mountain man. I took that for permission. I took the necklace of dragon's guts from my pack. Mar refused to wear it. I tossed it onto the ground at the feet of the mountain men. «Ha,» they said, together. «How can it be true, from a hairy one?» «It is a curse,» I said. «And I have suffered for it. But I have flown, and I have seen the killbird.» «No inbreeder talks so,» said one of them. «I beg only that we be allowed to cross your land,» I said. «We seek nothing, save living room, and we hope to find it in the western hills, where our hair will give no offense.» «That is for the family head to decide,» said one. «Understood. May I beg to speak with him?» «Follow.» «Ho,» said the other. «First I test. Lay down your bow and hardax, hairy one.» I obeyed his orders. He came close, so close that he could have felt the warning had he been so close to Mar, but he did not test Mar, only me. And he said, «It is true. He is not of the inbreeders.» We followed the two mountain men into a clean and tidy village of hidehouses. It was the family of Stoneskull the Leftarm. He reminded me so much of Strabo that I was saddened. We were surrounded by the people, in front of Stoneskull's hidehouse, and given leave to speak. I repeated my desire for safe passage to the west. «There be dragons,» Stoneskull said. «I am Eban, slayer of dragons,» I said, presenting him with one strand of my dragon's-gut necklace. There was an oohing and a moan of approval. «We will hear your story,» Stoneskull said, and with feasting and rhythm from the drum, I told of my slaying of both the lion and the dragon and, for the first time, never even having told it to Mar, the tale of my leading the killbird to slay my family. There was a moan of sympathy. «It is true, God has seen fit to try you,» Stoneskull said. «I think you have suffered enough, and, although you are haired, you may, should you choose, live in our lands.» But not, I noted in their village. «You are generous, honorable father,» I said. «But we seek solitude to live with our curse in peace.» «I grant you permission to traverse our lands, but I warn you that beyond the rocky dome there be dragons so deadly that no man returns.» We spent the night in the village, sleeping in the open, for no one was willing to give hospitality to haired ones, and then set out. The hills seemed to be thickly populated with families. But they were all offshoots of the Stoneskull family, so that word went ahead of us and we were welcomed with food and fireside in camps between a series of ridges which led ever deeper into the mountains. I became Eban the Storyteller, and there were times when I could hear Mar giggle as, to add entertainment value, I embellished our adventures. But at last we were below the rocky dome, and beyond it, as we were constantly warned, were dragons of the fiercest disposition. Mar was big in the belly when we made the last climb. To her everlasting credit, she did not complain, nor did she question my decisions. She, too, felt the shame of being considered a freak and wanted to find a valley of our own, a place where we could have our child and, dream though it was, start our own family, a family of hairy ones in the midst of the people. A mist crept over us as we climbed. The going was easy, for although the dome was the highest in that part of the mountains, the dome from which I flew, that last time, reached to the clouds. The summit was barren, rocky. Huge boulders joined each other in a line along the crest. I approached them cautiously and peered over into the valley beyond, a narrow cleft between two ridged backs. I saw neither dragon nor the white bones of the dead. Nor did I see sign as we went down into the cleft, started the climb of the opposite side, gained the top of the ridge and looked out over ridges descending toward the west. «The dragons of these hills,» I told Mar, «are like the dragons of the east, often told but seldom seen.» «I pray so,» she said. The days were shortening. Soon it would be time to build a hidehouse, to make a clearing, to store provisions for the winter. I felt like a new man, home in my mountains, the air clean, the temperatures cool. I studied the ridges ahead of me and saw, the second ridge over, that there was space for what should be a nice valley. «There,» I said, pointing. We took a leisurely two days to make the journey, I taking note of a dam of the swimmers and promising Mar a winter garment of their warm hides. I saw bear sign. I began to look upon that valley, which now lay just over the next ridge, as my home, and I prayed that the tales of the dragons had kept it free of men. I was to find one obstacle. As we climbed, I came upon a dragon's path of a type not known to me. The dragon had lain down two lines of dragon stuff which lay, bleeding and twisted, atop a little mound which extended alongside the ridge. It was evident that the path was long unused. In places there were slides and the lines of dragon stuff were buried. It made for easy walking, and it seemed to point toward the top of the ridge, so we followed—to see, as we rounded an outcrop of rock with a drop of two arrow flights to the bed of a rocky stream below, the strangest dragon of my experience. I leaped back. Mar was behind me, and dragon's teeth shattered the rock outcrop and hummed off into the air over the long drop. «We must go back,» she said. «We shall see.» I crawled and peered around the outcrop. The dragon lay, half curled, in the curve of ridge, long, bleeding with ancient blood, one large eye on its head looking directly down the path toward me. The dragon was segmented, and I could see that his body was connected by a backbone, low, and at the end of the segments I could see space between them, except where the backbone connected, down low, I considered. The dragon was blocking the way to my unseen valley, but he was stupid, like my first dragon, for he had chosen his lair below a cliff which rose above him. I determined to test him, to find his capabilities. The path in front of us was littered with rock fall and obviously unused. Indeed, the path to his very head was the same, and, as I examined him, I suspected that he was unable, for some reason, to move, for there were no fresh tracks and things grew in the pathway. Was he mortally wounded and lying there to die, taking eternity to do it? I took off my pack, took out my sleepskin, held it on my longbow and suspended it beyond the outcrop and did not manage to jerk
