Aranya Treasury - The Complete Shapeshifter Dragons Series, page 53
Ardan heaped his wheelbarrow load of ready-made fertiliser onto the village’s vegetable field and began to mulch it in with a wooden spade. The physical labour helped, or he would only brood over his growing mountain of unanswered questions.
The vegetable field stood on the edge of the inlet they had marched around – was it only yesterday? A stone’s throw from where he worked, the ground sheared away over a thousand feet into a ravine which rapidly descended in a westerly direction toward the Cloudlands. It cut over a league inland into the heart of this large Island, and was the outflow of a river he would dearly have loved to bathe in. He wondered why the river had never been terraced, unlike his Island. It was such an obvious location.
There, another detail of his past. He held the beads of sense, he just could not string them together into a coherent piece of jewellery.
Judging by the gesticulating marking that conference down in the village, he was about to start fielding some hard questions about his unquestionably hard skull. Ardan tapped his forehead experimentally. It didn’t feel like a skull that acted more like a stone, repelling scimitar blades and Sylakian hammers.
At least he no longer wore manacles. What was the point, if he could slip out of them at will?
Troubled in spirit, Ardan trudged back to the blocked-up latrine. He was still alive. The stench that threatened to cauterise his nostrils as he dug further beneath the latrine, confirmed he was alive. Soon, he would open the little sluice gate and let the diverted river water wash it clear. Except that there was no water in the trench. Oh, toss it into a Cloudlands volcano! There must be a blockage elsewhere. His muscles bunched as Ardan heaved the slop-laden wheelbarrow along a narrow, hard-packed footpath to the field. Here came Kylara. She marched up to him, taking care to stand upwind, he noticed. Her brow drew down into her habitual scowl.
“You’re a pain in the backside, slave,” she ground out. “Had you not saved us back in the village, you’d already be swimming in the Cloudlands. My troops don’t like you.”
Ardan decided to continue with his adopted persona. “That’s not what their eyes say,” he claimed, hitching his thumbs into his loincloth. “Maybe you ought to find me some trousers, Chief.”
Putting her hand to her scimitar, Kylara snarled, “Maybe I should finish the job I started on your head, you arrogant, insufferable piece of goat turd! How do you take a hammer to the skull and live? Or a scimitar blade? Oh, keep shovelling the dung, boy. That’s what you’re good at.”
“I’m not a boy, I’m a man –”
Ardan was not enjoying being obnoxious, but it definitely lit the fires beneath the already fiery Warlord. Kylara, with a pointed glare, said, “Trust me, keep mouthing off and you won’t be for long.”
Although, he preferred to keep all of his body parts intact. “Chief,” he said, in a more conciliatory tone, “I wish I could answer your questions. Maybe my memory will heal, given time.”
“I had my physician drill into your skull. It’s ordinary bone.”
Ardan’s hands leaped up to check the dressing on his head. “You did what?”
A hungry leopard’s grin flashed at him. “My blade split your skin like a rotten prekki fruit, slave, but didn’t so much as chip the bone beneath. It’s not metal or stone on your shoulders. You arrive beneath a tree on my Island, a man without a past. You’re a warrior. Had you not been wounded, you might even have made me work for my victory.”
“I could’ve spanked you with one hand tied behind my –”
“Then you slip out of locked manacles,” she continued, giving his boasting short shrift. “You singlehandedly carve up half a Hammer of Sylakia’s elite warriors, throw crossbow quarrels to an impossible height, destroy a couple of Dragonships, defend those who enslaved you, and then put yourself to work afterward without a word of complaint.”
Ardan grinned. “You want complaints? I don’t like shovelling faeces.”
“You hate Sylakians like I’ve never seen anyone hate before. I saw it writ on your face.”
“Aye,” he breathed, reliving that fragment of memory. “I remembered something – a woman, maybe my wife. Kylara, was there anything left of Naphtha Cluster?”
He swore at her headshake.
“You know how Sylakia operates, slave,” she said. “Burn it all. Naphtha was strong enough to hold out for two months. The Sylakians left nothing but charred stone on those Islands.”
To his dismay, Ardan felt tears splash on his cheeks. He turned away, shaking with anger, humiliated at showing any weakness in front of the warrior Chief. He was no warrior. He was already a slave in his heart, behaving like this.
“Burn them in a Cloudlands volcano!” he screamed at the heavens.
“Aye,” said Kylara, apparently unmoved by his vein-popping, fist-shaking explosion. “Finish your work, boy. Tonight you’ll march to our hideout. Behave yourself and my women might not toss you to the windrocs.”
He pointed with the spade. “Tell your warrior hiding beneath the white-currant bush to stop fidgeting. She has terrible woodcraft.”
Kylara muttered a curt, rude word and marched off.
Great Islands, he thought, he had better think twice about any attraction he imagined between himself and the Warlord. As warriors of Naphtha Cluster liked to say, she had the character of a leopard – as graceful as the dawn, and an expert at unexpected ambushes.
There, something remembered at last. Let the man called Ardan be warned.
* * * *
In the glow of twilight’s dying embers, Ardan finished digging out the collapsed culvert which had robbed the village of its water. He stretched his back and regarded the flow of water with a firm nod. Life. Life flowing into the village, bringing wholeness and sweeping away the filth. The chuckling of water had never sounded so agreeable. Setting the shovel to one side, he bent his head beneath the water and let the coolness bathe his aching head. That was good.
As Kylara and her comrades rode uphill to their position near the spring above the village, Ardan pointed with his chin and said to Mardia, his guard, “What’s bitten them? Hornets?”
“Shut up and wash, slave. You reek.” But Mardia was as curious as he was.
Rocia smacked her breastplate to emphasize a point as they moved into hearing range. “One conqueror’s the same as another, Kylara.”
“If those Immadians come here, we’ll show them our scimitars just the same as we showed the Sylakians,” growled the Warlord.
“What’s that, slave?” asked Mardia. “What’re they saying?”
“An Immadian invasion,” Ardan puzzled. “We called him the Immadian Fox – now, what was his name – aye, Beran of Immadia. His was the last Island conquered north of the Rift. What’s he doing in the Western Isles?”
That was exactly the question making Kylara scratch her head. “Sounds nothing like Immadia to me, Rocia,” she said. “Twelve summers they defied Sylakia. I heard his little Princess got locked in the Tower of Sylakia. Now he’s attacking our Western Isles? For what? Besides, the Warlords would never have it. Who wants another Supreme Commander?”
“We’ll ask him together,” grunted Rocia. “Ya girls hold ‘im, I’ll tickle his tummy until he begs to tell us everything.”
Ardan’s grin faded. That was a nasty euphemism for torture by pulling out the intestines and burning them on a fire while the victim watched.
Rocia added, “An’ his little Princess, bet the Sylakians made her grow up fast. Freakin’ Tower. Just a playpen for them War-Hammers. She come here, she’d be scrubbing pots. Smutty white-skinned Northern scum.”
A clamour of coarse laughter rose from the warriors.
“Take water,” said Kylara. “Quick. We’ve a long march ahead. Slave – quit dirtying the stream and hold our ponies while we drink.”
Ardan turned to Kylara, who regarded him with her usual acid-bitten sneer. He said, “We heard the Princess of Immadia was executed for treason, Kylara. What’s this rumour blowing on the wind?”
The dark eyes narrowed. “You remember something, boy? Who’s ‘we’?”
“I don’t remember.”
Kylara’s knuckles turned white on the hilt of her dagger. But she replied evenly, “Last we heard, Sylakia’s Northern Dragonship fleet was bound for Immadia Island to burn it to cinders, like they did Naphtha Cluster. Now King Beran’s in the Western Isles. Either he’s running like a cur kicked in the teeth, or he defeated Sylakia. Which do you believe?”
She was asking him a military opinion? Ardan was so surprised that his mouth fished for flies. Kylara’s handsome face hardened as she waited on a reply.
“Dragons.” The word popped out of his mouth.
“Dragons? What a load of fresh pony-manure,” said Rocia.
Ardan cudgelled his memory. “Some rumour I heard. A Dragon down in Remoy – a new Dragon, not the old rumour.”
Kylara knelt beside the flow of water and drank deeply, before splashing water liberally over her upper body. She rose with a graceful flexion of her thighs, her cheeks gleaming like warm coals in the suns-set’s radiant beams. He wished she would drop the iron-hard exterior to give him a glimpse of the woman within. Was all this tough-talk posturing truly her? She certainly cared for the villagers her troops protected. And she had not killed him or hunted him down like an animal, threats to the contrary.
He should be plotting out her weaknesses so that he could escape, but apparently, his motives were as clear as a mud-pool, even to him.
“Dragons?” she sneered, interrupting his thoughts. Ardan clenched his fists. “You shrivelling little fool. Every one of my warriors is braver than you. You spread any more lies with that snake’s tongue of yours, I’ll have it cut out just to save our ears the trouble of listening to your pitiful whining. Move out!”
* * * *
Ardan peered over the edge of the sinkhole. “We’re going down there?”
Kylara’s forbidding stare scorned the tremor in his voice. “Aye, slave. Scared?”
“That’s Cloudlands –”
“Seen through the bottom of the Island, aye,” said Rocia. “Half of this peninsula hangs over the Cloudlands, boy. Hold on tight.”
Kylara and her troops broke out compact gliders from their travel packs. Ardan measured the cavity yawning before them with his eyes, desperately unhappy. Two thousand feet across and many thousands deep, the bottomless pit made him imagine that a monstrous Dragon had chewed right through the underside of the Island. The hole was so immense that the couple of windrocs circling down below were specks against the turquoise Cloudlands. Ferns and whole trees grew from the sides, compounding his sense of insignificance.
“You’re planning to fly …”
Rocia and a number of the warriors chuckled cruelly. Rocia made a show of pinching her nose. “Dirtied our loincloth at the thought, boy?”
“Only a fool wouldn’t fear this,” said Ardan.
A dozen warriors led the ponies away. They must hide the animals nearby, he realised. Perhaps they also had a secret back entrance to their hideout.
Hanging a rope over the edge would do no good – it would simply dangle in space, because the hole grew conversely wider as it burrowed through the Island’s substrata. What rope could be that long, anyway? Ardan watched silently as Rocia and several of her warriors assembled a larger glider with a wingspan of around twelve feet. The simple wing had a frame attached to it for a person’s body. It was far too flimsy for his liking.
A cloudy dawn crept over the eastern hills as the warriors completed their preparations. The suns tried to pierce the heavy cloudbanks, but failed. The air smelled moist; rain before the morning was out, he predicted. A decent storm.
“We use these to travel between the smaller Island clusters,” said Kylara, breaking his train of thought.
Ardan asked, “Isn’t it dangerous?”
“Not that dangerous if you can find a high enough launching place. Less dangerous than keeping Dragonships.”
Ardan thought back to the first village, which Kylara’s force had been unable to reach in time. Crossing that inlet in flight would have been impossible, unless they had found a thermal or a higher launching place. The cliffs on the far side were too sheer. Flying between Islands by glider was a novel idea. He had never seen it done before.
“Buckle up,” said Rocia. “Ya let me do the flying, or you’re a dead man.”
He let Rocia strap him to her body. At her low command, he walked forward in concert with her until they stood right on the edge of the drop. Odd. Now he wasn’t scared any more – either that, or he was so terrified his brain had just shut off.
“Fly the winds!” cried a warrior, running past them. She launched off the edge.
Rocia leaned forward. “Jump, on three.”
His stomach surged violently into his throat, but then an unexpected whoop of joy escaped his lips as the glider sliced through the air. Ardan opened his eyes and whooped again, laughing.
Just above him, Rocia chuckled, “Thought ya were wettin’ yourself, big boy.”
They spiralled downward under Rocia’s expert control. Ardan’s neck swivelled as a flight of warriors, including Kylara, shot past them, hooting and shouting catcalls at each other as they raced neck-and-neck down toward the Cloudlands. The hole continued to open up, undercutting the basal rock until he found it hard to imagine how half the Island did not crack and tumble into the void. He spied a deep horizontal crack tucked beneath the overhang, hundreds of feet wide and deep. The warriors arrowed for the crack, where an excited crowd had gathered. He also noticed several Dragonships hidden beneath camouflage netting.
Rocia aimed their glider and made the landing look easy.
“Caves back there. Don’t ya go wandering,” said Rocia, unsnapping the harness that held them together. She rested her hand on his shoulder. “Caveworms digging all around here, boy. Ya seen a caveworm?”
Ardan nodded. “Aye.”
But he caught the tail end of a possessive frown Kylara directed at Rocia. So – competition between the women? He added this morsel to his ‘required to survive’ list.
He remembered stories about caveworms a hundred feet long. Caveworms were blind but highly aggressive. They ate through anything, even solid rock. How did the Leopards keep them away from this busy community? Again, he observed his own responses, learning about himself. Ardan scanned the wide ledge, noting a perimeter guard to the south which might indicate a cliff-edge trail to the top. A number of men patrolled the edge, not allowing any children to come to harm. His eye picked out defensive war crossbows placed cunningly amongst the rocks. He perceived the respect that Kylara commanded even among the older members of her community. Something about this scene felt familiar to him. Had he been a chief, too?
The porch of Kylara’s underground lair bustled with the sounds of arrival – children laughing and playing, men and women embracing and some weeping as people realised a loved one was not coming home. Ardan received a fair number of suspicious looks. Most of the men resembled slender youths compared to a man of his muscular bulk. No male warriors? Strange. Their women must do all the fighting.
After a period of being ignored, Ardan noticed a bent, elderly man beckoning to him from beside the farthest cave entrance. He jogged over lest the old man feel the need to approach him.
“Garganthan,” said the old man. “You can call me Garg.”
“Ardan,” he said, returning the proffered forearm-clasp. Garg had a grip like a vice.
Garg’s eyes twinkled up at him, startlingly green beneath massively shaggy eyebrows. “Aye?” he said. “From Jeradia Island, I am. Before you ask.”
Ardan masked his surprise. “Jeradia? I thought they grew giants there?”
“More of a hunchbacked tortoise, I am,” said Garg, with a self-deprecating laugh. “You from, let’s see – tattoos and a shaven head? Naphtha Cluster?”
“Aye,” said Ardan, liking the old man at once. His gaze lingered on the Warlord as Kylara issued orders to a troop of a dozen warriors. She had struck him again that morning after one too many smart comments from her slave. For a woman, she had a punch like the snap-release of a war crossbow.
“Liking something you see?” asked Garg.
Ardan flushed. “Just thinking how she punched me earlier. I’m her new slave, Garg.”
“Aye. So I hear. Broke a scimitar on your skull; has you sleeping in a secure store-room off her quarters. Smell Cloudlands stink on the wind, do I, young man? ‘Cause I warn you, that girl’s like my own daughter. Wouldn’t want to see nothing bad happen to her.”
“Tough story?”
Garg nodded. “Not for me to tell. Through here. Main assembly cave, this is. Living quarters back and left in those four tunnels, training caverns to the right, stores directly ahead and further along the caves. Down the third tunnel is my work room.”
“Blacksmith?” guessed Ardan, taking in the size of the place.
“Aye.”
“I know how to work a forge.” Truly? Ardan bit his lip.
But Garg welcomed his offer. Talking steadily, he filled Ardan in on the general layout of Kylara’s lair. Ardan knew there was much left unspoken, but he also knew better than to voice his questions. He offered the few morsels of knowledge he had gleaned in the five days since he woke beneath the prekki-fruit tree, telling the tale of the village battle without denying the truth of what had happened – whatever that truth was.
The bright green eyes gauged every word.
As Garg had noted, Ardan slept in a secure storeroom off of Kylara’s quarters. Each evening, after he had completed all of the distasteful, dirty and unmentionable jobs they could invent for a slave to do, he was locked in behind a triple-bolted metal door. The stone chamber beyond had not been completely cleared, so his rude pallet occupied a space between towering stacks of ready-to-be-fletched arrows and barrels of crossbow quarrels. Anything of real value had been moved. He saw the marks of several large chests left in the dust.
Ardan worked his fingers raw, but without protest, measuring the state of his wounds and waiting for healing. Soon, he stopped limping, and the cut on his skull turned into a knobbed, scarred ridge that spoke mutely of Kylara’s mighty scimitar blow.
