The Forging of the Dragon (Wizard and Dragon Book 1) (26 page)

Berillitha obeyed. And once beyond the tom-up earth, she galloped quickly to the cliffs and began scooping down eggs and devouring them as quickly as her great horn would permit. It was her example that led the others to make the passage, and soon the entire wheel — Gadolitha included — was feasting contentedly as a result of Seagryn’s diligent game of kickball. As for the lesefs, they seemed none the worse for their brief evictions from their dwellings. They were all safely back in place before Seagryn caught his breath.

Chapter Twenty-four

THE GREAT WHEEL

“WE must go,” Yashilitha said the next morning.

“Go?” Seagryn frowned as he blinked his eyes to wake up. “Where are you going?”

“We must go.”

“You said that,” Seagryn nodded.

“
We
,” Yashilitha affirmed, stamping the frozen ground for emphasis.

“Oh, you mean I’m to go too?” Seagryn said, now understanding. He wasn’t certain the news pleased him. “Ah — where?”

Yashilitha appeared confused by the question. “Where?”

“Yes — to what place?”

“The Great Wheel.”

Seagryn nodded thoughtfully. “Is it far from here?”

“Very far.”

“I see,” Seagryn muttered.

“We all can see,” Yashilitha said with a puzzled frown. He apparently failed to understand the Wiser’s purpose in constantly bringing up the subject of vision.

“Why must we go, if it’s far?” Seagryn asked.

“You are the Wiser,” Yashilitha said flatly.

“Yes?” But the wheel leader would say more. “I se — I understand. I think ...” Seagryn added to himself.

“Of course you think. You are the Wiser.” Yashilitha turned toward the cliffs, reared his head back, and began to pry his breakfast from the cracks above. As Seagryn watched, he noticed the snowflakes that had started flipping gracefully down from the sky to recarpet the ground with white shag. He also noticed that Berillitha stood only a few steps behind him, watching him without expression. He wished he could pretend he hadn’t seen her, but that wasn’t possible.

“Good morning.” He nodded.

Berillitha wasted no time. “I am your pair,” she said quietly.

Seagryn glanced back at Yashilitha to see if he was listening. He appeared to be far more interested in his meal, and Seagryn looked back around at Berillitha. “You — saw yesterday that — I am not like you.”

“You are the Wiser.” She shrugged.

Apparently that was a convenient explanation for anything odd he might do, but now he found it annoying. “Yes, but I didn’t
know
I was until you said so,” he grumbled.

Berillitha frowned. “The Wiser did not know?”

“The Wiser knows very little of anything at the moment.” He missed Dark’s flawless foresight. Why couldn’t the lad have shared a few more hints about Seagryn’s time with these beasts before disappearing to the south? Seagryn had already done the one task Dark had projected for him — he’d saved these creatures from starving. But there’d been nothing about a lengthy trek to any Great Wheel, and
certainly
nothing about bashing horns with an overprotective sibling and then being paired to the sister!

“Are you hungry?” Berillitha asked, and he glanced up to see great compassion reflected in her expression. She raised her eyes to the cliff face in a silent invitation to partake. When he shook his head she nodded, and waited peacefully for him to decide what to do. She was a kind beast, he thought to himself. She’d certainly make some other tugolith a very fine wife someday —

“We must go,” Yashilitha said again, swallowing the last of a great mouthful of eggs. The whole wheel turned to face Seagryn expectantly.

He looked back at them. “Am — I supposed to say something now?”

All but Berillitha looked back at him blankly. It was she who explained. “We will burn our toes.”

“Ah.” He nodded. They had to cross the lesef strip once again. He sighed wearily, took his human shape, and bent to the task.

As they traveled northwest across the new layer of powder in a column of pairs, Seagryn mulled over his situation. He didn’t need to be doing this — not really. What he should be doing was heading south, taking one of these tugoliths back to Lamath to trade for his restoration and his bride. One of the loners would do best — that one he’d seen driven away yesterday by another wheel might appreciate being wanted by somebody for something. Perhaps they would meet him or another lone tugolith on their trek. Perhaps they would meet such at the Great Wheel. What was the Great Wheel? He turned to Berillitha, who walked faithfully beside him, and asked her.

She didn’t stare at him for asking such a ridiculous question, for which he felt most grateful. She simply answered, “It is the center.”

“Urn. Of what.”

“Of all the wheels.”

“Urn. Are there many wheels?” he asked, but this question proved too difficult for her to comprehend. He decided that tugoliths had little occasion to count. “What do wheels do at the Great Wheel?”

“Think and pair,” she said without hesitation.

“Oh.” That again. Were they going to the Great Wheel to — formalize their relationship? Seagryn shivered at the thought. “Perhaps — perhaps you’ll meet a nice male there you can mate with,” he suggested hopefully.

“I am paired to you,” she said quietly, her eyes on the ground before them.

“Ah — but perhaps — there would be another there, someone — more to Gadolitha’s liking?”

“Gadolitha is gone.”

“What?” Seagryn said, startled, and he looked around at the rest of the column behind them. “What do you mean?”

“Gadolitha is a punt.”

“Oh, you needn’t call him names on my account —” Berillitha frowned and labored bravely through his confusing comment. “His name is Gadolitha. He is a punt.”

“Since when?”

“Since — ?” She struggled with the concept.

“When did he become a — punt?”

She studied him carefully, as if uncertain exactly what he was asking. “You chose me to pair ...”

Had she answered his question? “What
is
a punt, exactly?”

“Exactly — ?”

“What’s a punt,” he corrected, simplifying his question.

Berillitha tilted her head to one side and blinked, then took a deep breath as if preparing for another major recitation. “A punt has no pair. With no pair a punt has no wheel. A punt is a lone tugolith.”

The tragic truth began penetrating the fog of Seagryn’s pervasive humanness to speak to the tugolith sense that seemed to accompany his altershape. “But he had a pair until yesterday.”

“He was my brother pair.”

“Ah.” Seagryn nodded sadly. “Then I came, and ...”

“Gadolitha is a punt,” she finished for him.

He had an idea. “What if I could find him for you and bring him back? Could he be restored then?”

Berillitha narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. “We would leave the wheel?”

“I would leave the wheel, go get him, and bring him back. He was with us just a little while ago, he can’t have gotten too far away ...”

“You would leave me?” the female wondered, bewilderment upon her massive features.

“Yes?”

“Then
I
am a punt,” she said quietly. She spoke with great dignity, but also with great sorrow.

Seagryn swallowed with difficulty, afraid to ask — “If I leave that makes you a punt, too?”

“Yes.”

Seagryn recalled again the expulsion of a punt he and Dark had witnessed and asked, “What happens to punts? Where do they go?”

“All punts die,” Berillitha said. “I will die,” she added matter-of-factly.

Now Seagryn realized that he’d been the ruin of not just one tugolith’s life, but of two. Nothing in the ethics books of the Lamathian library had prepared him to handle this! What was he going to do? For one thing, he would not let this female become a punt by leaving her! Yet the question remained — how was he to resolve this situation?

He was still wondering that three days later when they reached their destination. They crossed through a narrow pass that separated the two most exalted mountain ranges Seagryn had ever seen in his life and stopped on its crest to look down onto an enormous glacial plain, populated by circle after circle of tugoliths. Seagryn had to pause for a moment and scan the horizon from the foot of one perpendicular peak to the foot of the other. There seemed to be not a spot in that vast expanse not marked off by a wheel of great animals, except for a raised area right in the center. That place was reserved for the Great Wheel itself — the first structure Seagryn had seen since he left the Paumer mansion at the foot of the Central Gate. That thought caused him to grunt, and Berillitha, who waited patiently for him to follow Yashilitha down onto the ice plain, looked over at him. “I was just thinking about a little pass in the south we humans have considered very important,” he explained to her, adding, “A tiny place, compared to this.”

Indeed, the Great Wheel had been constructed upon an awe-inspiring scale — understandably, since it had been built by giants for giants. Huge stones twice as tall as the length of the largest tugolith pointed up from their places in the ice, and each was paired to another by a traverse stone across its top. These pairs of stones formed a ring as wide in diameter as the crater lake of Paumer’s volcanic mountaintop. In the center of it was a high platform. Built of rings of stones, it ascended in concentric circles to a dais large enough for one tugolith to stand upon. At the moment it was empty.

“What’s the platform for?” he asked Berillitha quietly, his voice hushed by his sense of awe.

“The Wiser stands in the center.” Then she looked at him proudly, and — smiled?

“The Wiser,” he mumbled.

Yashilitha was already down in the bowl; he turned around and looked up. “Come down, Wiser. You must speak.” Seagryn was given no chance to refuse. The rest of the wheel crowded up behind him, eventually shoving him down the incline and onto the ice plain. Yashilitha turned around and led him regally to the Great Wheel itself and under one of the soaring arches. Moments later he found himself at the foot of the dais, being introduced by the leader of the wheel who had found him.

“This is the Wiser. He came to save my wheel. We have eaten. He came to save all wheels. He will speak.” Then Yashilitha climbed carefully down off the platform, and urged Seagryn to go on up. The time had come.

As he climbed the very broad steps Seagryn’s memory jumped back through the years to the first time he’d addressed the congregation in the High Hall of Lamath. He’d been terrified that day, too. He’d been tongue-tied. He’d wondered then why anyone would have any interest in what he might have to say, and especially the assembled host of the land of faith. But he’d been well trained and so he’d turned his thoughts to the One they did not name — and words, important words, had come.

When he turned atop the dais to look into the faces of this very unlikely throng, the differences with that former time seemed less important than the similarities. Without conscious thought, Seagryn turned his mind again to the Power who’d freed him from the megasin’s cave. The words came:

“You call me the Wiser! Perhaps I am. But if I am wise, it’s because I know this! There is One who is still Wiser! There is One who made us all. It is that One who has sent me to you. Hear the Power’s words!”

He paused then, and looked around. The sea of monstrous animals gazed up at him in rapt attention. He saw their gaunt faces, then viewed again with awe the massive wheel of stone they or their ancestors had built between these mountains. And — as had happened to him so many times before — the Power’s message came through him. He was always a bit surprised by this. His listeners appeared not to be at all.

“You are hungry! Your food is kept from you. Lesefs burn your toes! You cannot cross over their holes. Yet you have made the Great Wheel out of stones!” He looked into the faces of those nearest him, to see if they were understanding him. Some tugoliths frowned, but others — Berillitha, for one — nodded and stamped the ground in agreement. He spoke again:

“We will go to the cliffs of food. We will build a great bridge across the holes of the fur balls. This we can do! And you will not starve!”

Then, as abruptly as the words had come to him, the authority to speak any further disappeared. That was it. The message had been given. And with a slight feeling of embarrassment, Seagryn came down the stairs.

Berillitha waited for him at the bottom. There was no mistaking it now: As nearly as the heavy features of her tugolith face would permit, she was beaming.

He led the long trek back through a snowstorm that intimidated his human mind but caused his tugolith blood to pound with excitement. He danced, and the column of pairs that stretched out endlessly behind him danced to the rhythm he set. Berillitha danced at his side, her eyes sparkling with girlish pleasure. And somehow, when they finally reached the line of lesef holes again three days later, Seagryn felt himself gripped by a strange and powerful grief that the journey had to end at all. Berillitha caught his shifting mood. She gave him the solace of her somber silence as the wheels formed up again along the line of watching yellow fur. “Well,” he said at last and went to work.

He led the great migration through the lesefs the old-fashioned way, and let them eat their fill while he reflected on his future. He couldn’t remain a tugolith; he knew that. He had responsibilities in the land of humans, and he needed soon to return to them. But he realized now that he could not trick one of these fine creatures into going with him. He would need to find one who was willing to volunteer. Even at that, Seagryn’s conscience wanted to bother him. Was it the Power’s doing? Where was the Power in all of this?