She touched Pit’s cheek in the dark and he stirred, the faintest smile on his face. He was happy here. Young enough to forget, maybe. He’d be safe, or safe as he could be. In this world there are no certainties. Ro wished she could say goodbye but she was worried he’d cry. So she gathered her bundle and slipped out into the night.
The air was sharp, snow gently falling but melting as soon as it touched the hot ground and dry a moment later. Light spilled from some of the houses, windows needing neither glass nor shutter cut from the mountain or from walls so old and weathered Ro couldn’t tell them from the mountain. She kept to the shadows, rag-wrapped feet silent on the ancient paving, past the great black cooking slab, surface polished to a shine by the years, steam whispering from it as the snow fell.
The Long House door creaked as she passed and she pressed herself against the pitted wall, waiting. Through the window she could hear the voices of the elders at their Gathering. Three months here and she already knew their tongue.
‘The Shanka are breeding in the deeper tunnels.’ Uto’s voice. She always counselled caution.
‘Then we must drive them out.’ Akosh. She was always bold.
‘If we send enough for that there will be few left behind. One day men will come from outside.’
‘We put them off in the place they call Beacon.’
‘Or we made them curious.’
‘Once we wake the Dragon it will not matter.’
‘It was given to me to make the choice.’ Waerdinur’s deep voice. ‘The Maker did not leave our ancestors here to let his works fall into decay. We must be bold. Akosh, you will take three hundred of us north into the deep places and drive out the Shanka, and keep the diggings going over winter. After the thaw you will return.’
‘I worry,’ said Uto. ‘There have been visions.’
‘You always worry…’
Their words faded into the night as Ro padded past, over the great sheets of dulled bronze where the names were chiselled in tiny characters, thousands upon thousands stretching back into the fog of ages. She knew Icaray was on guard tonight and guessed he would be drunk, as always. He sat in the archway, head nodding, spear against the wall, empty bottle between his feet. The Dragon People were just people, after all, and each had their failings like any other.
Ro looked back once and thought how beautiful it was, the yellow-lit windows in the black cliff-face, the dark carvings on the steep roofs against a sky blazing with stars. But it wasn’t her home. She wouldn’t let it be. She scurried past Icaray and down the steps, hand brushing the warm rock on her right because on her left, she knew, was a hundred strides of empty drop.
She came to the needle and found the hidden stair, striking steeply down the mountainside. It scarcely looked hidden at all but Waerdinur had told her that it had a magic, and no one could see it until they were shown it. Shy had always told her there were no such things as Magi or demons and it was all stories, but out here in this far, high corner of the world all things had their magic. To deny it felt as foolish as denying the sky.
Down the winding stair, switching back and forth, away from Ashranc, the stones growing colder underfoot. Into the forest, great trees on the bare slopes, roots catching at her toes and tangling at her ankles. She ran beside a sulphurous stream, bubbling through rocks crusted with salt. She stopped when her breath began to smoke, the cold biting in her chest, and she bound her feet more warmly, unrolled the fur and wrapped it around her shoulders, ate and drank, tied her bundle and hurried on. She thought of Lamb plodding endlessly behind his plough and Shy swinging the scythe sweat dripping from her brows and saying through her gritted teeth,
The snow had settled in slow melting patches here, the branches dripping tap, tap and how she wished she had proper boots. She heard wolves sorrowful in the high distance and ran faster, her feet wet and her legs sore, downhill, downhill, clambering over jagged rock and sliding in scree, checking with the stars the way Gully taught her once, sitting out beside the barn in the dark of night when she couldn’t sleep.
The snow had stopped falling but it was drifted deep now, sparkling as dawn came fumbling through the forest, her feet crunching, her face prickling with the cold. Ahead the trees began to thin and she hurried on, hoping perhaps to look out upon fields or flower-filled valleys or a merry township nestled in the hills.
She burst out at the edge of a dizzy cliff and stared far over high and barren country, sharp black forest and bare black rock slashed and stabbed with white snow fading into long grey rumour without a touch of people or colour. No hint of the world she had known, no hope of deliverance, no heat now from the earth beneath and all was cold inside and out and Ro breathed into her trembling hands and wondered if this was the end of the world.
‘Well met, daughter.’ Waerdinur sat cross-legged behind her, his back against a tree-stump, his staff, or his spear—Ro still was not sure which it was—in the crook of one arm. ‘Do you have meat there in your bundle? I was not prepared for a journey and you have led me quite a chase.’
In silence she gave him a strip of meat and sat down beside him and they ate and she found she was very glad he had come.
After a time he said, ‘It can be difficult to let go. But you must see the past is done.’ And he pulled out the dragon scale that she had left behind and put the chain around her neck and she did not try to stop him.
‘Shy’ll be coming…’ But her voice sounded tiny, thinned by the cold, muffled in the snow, lost in the great emptiness.
‘It may be so. But do you know how many children have come here in my lifetime?’
Ro said nothing.
‘Hundreds. And do you know how many families have come to claim them?’
Ro swallowed, and said nothing.
‘None.’ Waerdinur put his great arm around her and held her tight and warm. ‘You are one of us now. Sometimes people choose to leave us. Sometimes they are made to. My sister was. If you really wish to go, no one will stop you. But it is a long, hard way, and to what? The world out there is a red country, without justice, without meaning.’
Ro nodded. That much she’d seen.
‘Here life has purpose. Here we need you.’ He stood and held out his hand. ‘Can I show you a wondrous thing?’
‘What thing?’
‘The reason why the Maker left us here. The reason we remain.’
She took his hand and he hoisted her up easily onto his shoulders. She put her palm on the smooth stubble of his scalp and said, ‘Can we shave my head tomorrow?’
‘Whenever you are ready.’ And he set off up the hillside the way she had come, retracing her footprints through the snow.
IV
DRAGONS
‘There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.’
In Threes
‘Fuck, it’s cold,’ whispered Shy.
They’d found a shred of shelter wedged in a hollow among frozen tree-roots, but when the wind whipped up it was still like a slap in the face, and even with a piece of blanket double-wrapped around her head so just her eyes
