My first purpose, many seasons past and a hundred
miles away, when I left my mother and home, had been to
discover and make known the truth about Orestes and
Grandfather.
I had discovered. Now I must make it known. I would
salvage the truth in the last dissolving hour. And though I
assumed the words would never see light or catch a willing
eye, I brought forth quill and inkhorn, and said aloud,
canceling my father’s words as he had canceled Arion’s,
“The fires are extinguished. The land is free. I am alive.”
Dipping the quill, I began to write blindly on the
quivering stomach walls of the dragon.
DOWN IN THE ARM OF CAERGOTH HE RODE . . .
*****
Some men are saved by water, some by fire. I have
heard stories of happy rock slides releasing trapped miners,
of a ship and its crew passing safely through hurricanes
because the helmsman nestled the boat in the eye of the
storm, in sheer good fortune.
I am the rare one to be saved by nausea.
Credit it to the ink, perhaps, or the incessant, swift
scratching on the walls of the dragon’s stomach. Whatever
it was, the fishermen skirting the coast of Endaf, the good
folk of Ergoth who drew me sputtering from the water, said
that they had never seen the likes of it on sea or land.
They said that the caverns of Finn of the Dark Hand had
exploded, the rubble toppling down the cliff face and
pouring into the circling waters of the cape, that they thought
for certain it was an earthquake or some dwarven enchanter
gone mad in the depths of the rock until they saw the black
wings surge from the central cavern, bunched and muscled
and webbed like the wings of a bat. And they told me how a
huge creature pivoted gracefully, high above the coastal
waters, plunged for the sea, and inelegantly disgorged above
the Cape of Caergoth.
It seemed a clear, sweet grace to me, lying on the deck of
their boat as they poured hot mulled wine down me and
wrapped me in blankets, their little boat turning west toward
the Ergoth shore and the safety of Eastport, a haven in that
ravaged and forbidding land.
The fishermen’s attentions seemed strange, though – as
if, in some odd, indescribable way, I was one of their
fellows. It was not until we reached the port itself and I
looked into a barrel of still water that I noticed my scars had
vanished.
But the memory of the burning returns, dull and heavy in
my hands, especially at night, here in this lighthouse room
overlooking the bay of Eastport. Across the water I can see
the coast of my homeland, the ruins of the bandit stronghold
at Endaf. Finn, they tell me, dissolved with two dozen of his
retainers when the dragon thundered through their chambers,
shrieking and flailing and dripping the fatal acid that is the
principal weapon of his kind.
And the creature may as well have dissolved himself. He
has not been seen since that day on the Caergoth coast. But
the same fishermen who rescued me claim that, only the
other night, a dark shadow passed across the face of the red
moon. Looking up, they saw nothing but Lunitari and a
cloudless sky.
They saw an omen in this, and now carry talismans on
board, but sailors always were a superstitious lot, fashioning
monsters out of clouds and the wind on the waters.
At night I sit by the window, by lamplight, and watch the
constellations switch and wink and vanish in this uncertain
time, and I set before me a fresh page of vellum, the lines of
each day stored in my memory. For a moment I dwell on the
edges of remembrance, recalling my mother, L’Indasha
Yman, the reluctant knights, and the fortunate fishermen.
But, foremost, I recall my father, come down to me in an
inheritance of verse and conflicting stories. It is for him, and
for Grandfather before him, and for all those who have
vanished and been wronged by the lies of the past, that I dip
the quill into the inkwell, and the pain in my hand subsides