Elegy for a Lost Star (10 page)

If they are encroaching on your lands, why do you not just eat them?
she heard herself saying in the voice of a child.

Eat them? Do not be ridiculous
, the wyrm had said.
They are men. One does not eat men, no matter how much they may deserve it
.

Why not?

Because that would be barbaric. Men are alleged to be sentient, though I admit I have not seen evidence of that. One does not eat sentient beings. No, my child, I limit myself to stags, sheep, and tirabouri. They digest well, and carry none of the guilt that men would in the stomach
.

I know no guilt
, thought the dragon bitterly.
Only hunger
.

She allowed her dragon sense to explore further, to wander closer to the hunting camp, where the snow had walled the huts inside the ridge, forming a frosty barrier between the humans and the river. They had dug a pathway—four feet, three and three-quarters inches wide, seven feet, four and five-eighths inches high, her dragon sense noted—between the camp and the river. In her mind's eye she could see the footsteps that had tramped to the water's edge, and the skids where the buckets had been hauled back.

With the rising hunger and the expansion of her dragon sense, the wyrm's eyes narrowed in thought.

I have no such qualms about men
, she ruminated.
They are a large source of meat, warm of blood and thin of skin. I imagine they roast nicely, and will keep well
.

And I am famished
.

The decision was an easy one.

Open
, she commanded the doors of the castle in a voice that rang with bloody intent. They slammed open in response; the icy wind blew in, swirling angrily through the cavernous hall.

Spurred by hunger, and the desire to vent her pain in destruction, the beast slithered out through the doors into the dusk, over the battlements, and down into the crevasse, where she disappeared into the earth beneath the snow.

T
he Rampage of the Wyrm
was an epic poem penned in the Cymrian era, inscribed on an illuminated scroll and found, after centuries uncounted, hidden deep in the vaults of the library of Canrif by Achmed, who presented it, with wry amusement, to Rhapsody just before she undertook a long journey with Ashe to find the dragon Elynsynos. The Bolg king had sat smugly, scarcely able to contain his glee, watching her expressive face as she read the tale, which told of the murderous exploits of the dragon she was about to seek.

Elynsynos, the wyrm for whom the continent was named, was older than Time, the manuscript said. It related in breathless detail the story of the primordial dragon, said to be between one and five hundred feet long, with a mouthful of teeth the size and sharpness of finely honed bastard swords. As dragons possess some of each of the five elemental lores, she was able to assume the form of any force of nature, such as a tornado, a flood, or a blazing forest fire, the manuscript said. She was wicked and cruel, and when her lover and the father of her three daughters, the sailor Merithyn the Explorer, did not return to her as he promised, she went into a wild fury and rampaged through the western continent, burning it with her caustic breath and decimating the lands up to the central province of Bethany, where her fire sparked the eternal flame which burned to that day, in Vrackna, the basilica consecrated to the element of fire.

Rhapsody was quick to point out to the gloating Bolg king that the account was mostly nonsense, which was evident to her without even meeting the dragon. As a Namer she was familiar with folklore as well as lore, the first told by untrained storytellers and woven over time into tales that tended to be filled with falsehoods and exaggerations, as opposed to the
latter, which was as pure as possible, related by those trained to keep the history accurate.

Even so, the descriptions in the tale carried enough possible truth to make her nervous.

Sometime later, when she finally did meet the wyrm in her lair, Elynsynos quickly debunked the manuscript and its false account of history.

You've been reading that tripe
, The Rampage of the Wyrm,
haven't you?

Yes
.

It's nonsense. I should have eaten the scribe who penned it alive. When Merithyn died I thought about torching the continent, but surely you must be able to tell that I didn't. Believe me, if I were to rampage, the continent would be nothing but one very large, very black bed of coal, and it would be smoldering to this day
.

The continent and its people, for all their fear of the dragon legends, for all the tremulous whining in the manuscripts that recounted their history, had never in fact seen the immolation the tales told of, had never lost more than a stray sheep to the beasts, and certainly had never experienced a true rampage.

And therefore were totally unprepared.

T
he men of the Anwaer village in the midlands of the Hintervold were a quiet lot.

Unlike the seasonal nomads who spent the summer culling fish from the area's fertile streams and trapping fur-bearing animals, then relocating to the southern part of the realm when autumn came, the families of Anwaer braved the bone-chilling cold and the towering snowfall to stay together in their ancestral lands. They were all related in some manner, and found the beauty of the isolated tundra, the verdant forests of spiraling spruce, and the silence that reigned unchallenged by any but the mountain winds to be reason enough to endure the harsh winter in the place their families had called home for generations.

So when the autumn came, and the nearby villages thinned out, Anwaer ended its season of transport of skins and fishing and prepared to hunt.

Usually the hunting time lasted only a few weeks, less than one turn of the moon. With the heat of the summer fading and the merciless swarms of blood-sucking insects dispersed by the approaching cold, the game animals of the Hintervold would come out from their summer hiding places, down from the summits of the white crags and into more sheltered areas, seeking vegetation or prey, and a more hospitable clime for the coming winter.

The endless expanse of the land at the top of the world caused game animals to grow to substantial size, and a single one, carefully dressed, was generally enough to feed an Anwaer family for the winter. So the hunters
moved away from the villages into the thicker woods, and waited for the game to come.

But this year, it never did.

After two weeks without a single kill, the men determined that something was terribly wrong. Whatever had spooked the game animals had frightened them not individually, or in clusters, but as a herd; the caribou and the northern tirabouri had last been seen ranging north, contrary to nature. The solitary animals, the moose and the predators that the Anwaer men hunted for pelts, were gone as well. The hunters sat in their blinds in silence, hearing little and seeing less. Even the customary birdsong of the migrating raptors had been stilled.

Finally, with winter approaching, the men of Anwaer decided it would be necessary to follow the herds north. If the hunting party could come upon a cluster or even the outer edge of a ranging herd, it might be possible to bring down enough meat to salvage the winter. If they could do it within another turn of the moon, the shallow glacial river would not yet be fully frozen, and could be floated in makeshift barges back to Anwaer in time before the heaviest snow came. If the new moon came before they had gathered their stores, however, it would be too late, and for the first time in memory, the village would have to join the migration, hurrying to keep ahead of the weather.

Should the men not be back by the time the moon had faded to a slim crescent, the women were told to start ahead alone.

T
he youngest member of the hunting party was tying down the boats on the rushing silver river when nightfall came.

The wind was chill; the water, shallow in most places to the depth of a man's knee, with deeper spots up to his shoulder, was rippling beneath the breeze, causing the makeshift rafts to bump against each other on the shoreline, tugging at their rope and stone moorings.

Sonius, as the hunter was known, struggled to keep the barges from breaking apart in the chilly water. Racing against the falling sun, he muttered obscenities under his breath, finally pulling the doeskin gloves from his hands in an effort to handle the ropes more efficiently.

He glanced back at the smoke seeping from the vent in the snowpack that sealed the huts into the shelter beneath the wide ridge. The landfall from an avalanche soon after they had made camp had fortuitously sealed in the area they inhabited, keeping them sheltered from the worst of the winds and any predators that might come, lured by the scent of their kills. They had brought down five moose and two tirabouri, and were in the process of smoking the latter to assure it keeping until their return to Anwaer. Sealed behind a solid wall of snow, with nothing but the tunnel they had carved
out to the river and a crescent-shaped opening at the top of the snow wall where the smoke escaped, the rest of his hunting party was settling down to sleep before heading for home on the morrow.

Sonius had drawn the short straw, and so, despite his exhaustion, he kept at his task until he was certain the boats were secure. When at last he had tied the final knot, he rose tiredly and looked out over the silver-gray river before him.

The wind had died down to almost still; white chunks of ice from farther up the glacier were floating downstream now, spinning slowly in the rushing current. The dim light of the crescent moon reflected off the river, pooling in swirls, then vanishing into darkness again.

Sonius wondered absently why the silence had deepened, then exhaled, casting the thought from his mind, and turned around to head back through the tunnel in the snow into camp.

At first he didn't see the movement, but as he came within a few steps of the snow wall a flicker in the mountains above him caught his eye. He stepped back and looked up, trying to get a better glimpse, thinking that it was the mountain ice calving again, praying that it was not another avalanche that would bury his fellow hunters inside the sheltering ridge.

Sonius stared up into the endless crags of snow, and thought he saw a shadow slithering down the mountain face. He shaded his brow from the dim light of the moon.
There is some movement of snow
, he thought,
perhaps just from the wind
.

But there is no wind
.

He rubbed his eyes, then looked back up to the peaks.

The movement was gone.

Sonius shook his head, then started for the tunnel.

The dragon's massive head crested the ridge, rising above the snow wall, then thrust down directly in front of him. The stench of brimstone filled the air, which cracked in the heat.

The serpentine eyes narrowed, the vertical pupils expanding in the light of the moon.

A ragged gasp tore from the young hunter's throat. He stared, glassy-eyed, at the beast looming before him, then made a scrambling dash for the tunnel below her.

Suddenly the shoreline of the river was drenched in light as bright as day. A rippling blast of flame rolled in a caustic wave down from atop the ridge, illuminating the human shadow, lighting his young face to brilliance for a split second before it turned black and withered to skeletal ash, along with the rest of his body.

Then, in an instant, the light was snuffed; darkness returned again.

The dragon lay crouched on the top of the rock ridge, staring ruefully
down at the baked skeleton in the pile of ashes at the edge of the snow wall.
Damnation
, she thought.
The skin is even thinner than I had imagined. This will not serve if I want the meat
.

She turned around on the ridge. With a thundering slap, she brought her spiked tail down on the snow wall, crushing the top of it and causing the ice to collapse into the tunnel. Then she climbed down onto the wall and slithered to the crescent-shaped opening, behind which her dragon sense told her the humans were sleeping before a dwindling fire.

There were eleven, she knew; her mind, flooded with the sensory information from the primordial element in her blood, was aware of each of them, how much each one weighed, where he was sleeping, and the relative depth of slumber each of them was enjoying. There were also four dogs, all in various stages of repose. She stared at the camp behind the snow wall for a moment, thinking what a good place to store this cache of meat it would be.

Then she slid through the opening.

The first man was in her grasp before any of them had a chance to waken; the dogs saw her, smelled her probably, and began to bark agitatedly as she barreled over the wall and slid through the fire into the first makeshift hut, crushing it like a nutshell beneath the weight of her body. He was wrapped in wool blankets; the beast squeezed him with a crushing force in her talons and slashed his throat, then tossed his dripping body to the ground to turn her attention to the man who had been lying beside him.

That man, who watched in stark terror as she disposed of his bunkmate, began to scream, a gargling, high-pitched sound that rippled painfully over the dragon's sensitive eardrums. He continued to caterwaul as she seized him and lifted him from the ground; she severed his head in one clean bite and spat it into the fire to make it stop squealing.

From that point on it became an elegant, joyous dance of death. The men, trapped behind the immense wall of snow, scattered to the corners of their small shelter, hiding behind rocks, scrambling in vain to the wall itself and trying piteously to scale it. They fired their crude hunting weapons—spears and longbows—at her, but the missiles bounced off her armored hide, impotent.

The firecoals, scattered about in the fray, cast weak shadows on the massacre, sparked with bright blood.

And in the heat of the skirmish, as one by one she cornered the hunters and slaughtered them, the beast laughed aloud with delight, a harsh, ugly sound that rang with soulless malice.
Destruction eases the pain
, she thought as she seized the last of them, crushing him slowly, taking pleasure watching the life being squeezed from him inch by inch, while the dogs, who had ceased to bark, whined in terror.
And I have so much pain to ease
.