Читать книгу The Elvenbane - Andre Norton - Страница 9

Once again, Alara was tempted to simply fly off. There was no reason to become involved with this human. There was every reason not to become involved. She was going to die; there was no way that she would survive the ordeal she had just been through and childbirth as well. And Alara was appalled by her attitude towards her fellows.

The logical thing to do would be to abandon her to her fate. And yet –

Telling herself that she was a fool, Alara insinuated herself into the woman’s mind, to weave a fantasy composed of hallucination, old memories, and wish-fulfillment …

Serina tried to relax into the soft cushions holding her up, bit her lip until it bled as the pain came and went, and smiled at Lord Dyran, who patted her hand fondly. ‘That’s a good child,’ he said, with a warmth she had only seen him display with a favorite hound or horse about to give birth. She smiled thinly, attempting to give him the impression that this was nothing worse than a minor indisposition. Dyran hated a fuss, and hated even more being subjected to hysterics. ‘It will all be over shortly, and I will be truly thankful to have you back at my side.’

Her ex-rival Leyda, relegated to scrubbing the floors of the birthing room until they gleamed, scowled, but dared say nothing. When Dyran had tracked her through the desert, he had stayed his hand long enough to hear her side. Although he had not punished Leyda physically, what he had done was far worse. He had given the former concubine to Serina as a personal drudge.

What happened to that baby? she wondered for a moment. But it didn’t really matter. Dyran had probably rid her of it, then erased the memory from her mind. He could do things like that, if he chose.

‘You and that fine young stud will present me with a sturdy lad, I’ve no doubt of it,’ the Lord continued, as another pain came and went, and sweat poured down her forehead. She smiled through clenched teeth and nodded. ‘Just what I’ve been needing for my son’s own personal guard. If you do well, perhaps I shall ask you to present me with another, hmm?’

‘Aye – my Lord –’ she managed to gasp, although at the moment she would far rather he asked her to scrub floors as Leyda did! It was a pity he didn’t see fit to erase this from her mind.

‘That’s a good girl.’ He patted her hand once again, and left the white-tiled birthing room. He also hated a mess. For the moment, the only thing untidy about Serina was the sweat beading on her forehead; the rest of her was swathed in concealing masses of silk. But as soon as he passed the threshold, that all changed, as the nurses and midwives descended on her.

She hadn’t minded at all when Lord Dyran had requested – not ordered, but requested, her to breed him a special guardsman. He’d wanted something very particular, a child of the finest lines to be trained to guard his own son; a very personal guard, schooled to the task from the moment he could toddle and assigned to the boy as quickly as possible. He hadn’t dared entrust this task to anyone else, he’d told her – no one else had served him so faithfully; no one else would take enough care. He told her she would want for nothing, and he would reward her beyond her wildest dreams.

She would never tell him, but the young guardsman he had assigned to her for the breeding, he of the thoughtful eyes and rippling muscles, had been beyond her wildest dreams. He did everything she told him to; it had been altogether intoxicating to be the one in the position of power for a change. And equally intoxicating to be the one to whom pleasure was given, rather than the one who gave it.

Perhaps she would ask for him to be assigned to her permanently as part of her reward …

The pain came again, and she cried out with hurt and anger. What was wrong with the midwives? Why didn’t they do something? Didn’t they realize how important she was?

She tried to say something, to give them the tongue-lashing they deserved for their carelessness, but she couldn’t manage a single word. Only gasps of agony as the pains came closer and closer together, until she was reduced to moaning mindlessly, like an animal.

Alara decided that she didn’t care if Serina was a heartless beast. She didn’t care what Serina had done in the past. She was a female, about to give birth, and in that she appealed to the dragon’s deepest instincts. Alara had to help her.

The decision was hardly even a conscious one; Alara couldn’t help herself. There were precautions she could take against discovery, in the unlikely event that the woman came out of her delirium. It was foolish, it was sentimental, and it certainly violated the letter, if not the spirit, of the law against being discovered. But at this point, after spending so much time living in Serina’s thoughts, she felt she had to intervene, if only as recompense for the stolen memories.

One last look into the human’s mind before she brought her barriers up and gave her what she needed: the form of one of the midwives of the estate.

Quickly, she reached for the free power of the pool, and a ripple went through her as she shifted most of her mass into the Out. She shifted carefully, so as not to disturb the equilibrium of the child within her, and just to be on the safe side, as she shifted her own form into human, she shifted the child’s as well. It was a time-consuming operation: the sun was nearing the western horizon, and the woman was close to actual birth, growing weaker with every breath, when she finished.

As she knelt beside the laboring woman’s body, lifting her easily into a more comfortable position, she saw Serina’s eyes fix on her for a moment with sense in them. Sense enough to recognize what and who she was masquerading as, at any rate.

The woman opened her mouth, but no words emerged. Alara trickled a handful of water into her mouth. Then, under the pretext of supporting her head, Alara gently exerted a little pressure on certain nerves of the spine, at the point where the neck joined the shoulders.

Serina swallowed; her eyes went wide with surprise for a moment as the pain ceased. Then she closed her eyes against the light of the westering sun, and slipped further into delirium.

It was an easy birth only in the sense of being quick. Alara was appalled by the amount of damage and knew, as Serina began to bleed profusely, that there was nothing she could do about it. Within moments the child lay on a scrap of cloth torn from Serina’s skirt, cradled in a hollow scooped in the sand. A little girl – and as ugly as only a human child could be.

And as the child slipped from her, the mother heaved a great sigh, and then breathed no more.

Alara stared at the wet, red, wrinkled mite, revolted, and wondering why on earth she had bothered to save the child.

Fire and Rain! The creature wasn’t even finished yet! She should just leave it here to die with its mother; it would be better that way. She didn’t even know exactly what to do with it – she’d probably kill it by accident. What an awful little beast –

Then the little creature opened its tiny mouth – and a thin, unhappy wail rose above the desert silence.

That wail cut straight to Alara’s maternal heart, as sure as elf-shot, and as deadly … and she knew she couldn’t leave it here. Not after all this. It was only a baby. She ought to be able to figure out how to care for it. It couldn’t be that different from other cubs and kits.

She immersed the baby in the pool just long enough to clean her, and wrapped her in the remains of Serina’s dress. She didn’t look any better clean – but she stopped crying. Though Alara felt unformed waves of hunger coming from the child, she simply stared into the dragon’s eyes with odd intelligence, as if she was able to focus on things even at this early age.

It’s my imagination.

Fire and Rain, what am I going to do with the child?

Take it home, I suppose.

She reached again for the energy flowing from the pool, and let it ripple through her as she shifted back into her native form. The child lay in the sand, bathed in the golden rays of the sunset, and made no sound at all. Alara was beginning to be a bit unnerved by this silence, as well as by the way the infant seemed to be able to track on her.

The shaman stretched out her wings to their fullest extent, catching the last of the heat of the sun, her shadow falling long and black over the sand and the child. She’d better go now, while she could catch thermals, she decided. Keman had a whole little zoo. Maybe he could put this thing to nurse with one of his pets.

She hooked her foreclaws into the fabric cradling the baby, taking extra care not to scratch it, and launched herself into the cobalt sky with powerful beats of her wings and legs.

You know, she thought to herself, as she took her bearings from the sun and the evening star, and headed back to her Lair, there really ought to be something in the Prophecy about this. Hmm. Maybe I’ll put it there myself.

Now wouldn’t that sound impressive in the mouth of the old, blind holy woman! ‘Child of dragons, the Elvenbane …’

She chased the setting sun across the desert and into the high plains. Beneath her, herds of antelope and grass-deer moved out of the shelter of scrub where they had spent the day, heading for water and open grazing. When the shadow of her wings passed over them, they invariably took fright and ran for cover.

Not tonight, you juicy little creatures. I’m not out hunting right now.

Besides, that would be poaching. One of the other Lairs managed this part of the country; Leanalani’s Lair, if she recalled correctly. It wasn’t polite to swoop down on another Lair’s territory and hunt without permission.

The herds kicked up a lot of dust as they ran. It had been a very dry summer here so far. The clouds of dust glowed in the last rays of the sun, red and gold-red; shadows stretched out in purple fingers from everything, across the gilt-edged grass and scrubland. Before her, the sun died in a blood-red and gold sky; behind her the sky had deepened to indigo. Overhead, a thin crescent moon peered wanly down at her.

From below came the hot breath of the plains; redolent with the aromas of dust and sun-baked vegetation, with a hint of deer-musk and now and then a breath of hidden water.

As she continued to press westward, the setting sun seemed torn in half along its lower edge, a jagged line of black cutting across it before it reached the horizon.

Those were the mountains. Not long now …

Beyond the desert which the elvenkind would not cross, beyond the territories managed only for game, lay the Lairs themselves, nestled into valleys in the mountains. Home had never looked so inviting; and not even the halfblood child swinging from her claw had much importance.

In fact, Alara longed for her own place, her own cave, so much that she completely forgot she had never completed her meditations.

Alara circled over the Lair for a moment, waiting for the sentry on duty to acknowledge her before setting down. Old habits died hard; perhaps it was no longer necessary for dragons to worry about who and what came winging in over their Lairs, but sentries were still assigned, and no dragon would ever land without being acknowledged by the sentry. Weary as she was, Alara was not weary enough to violate that protocol.

:Who flies?: came the ritual question.

:Alamarana,: she replied, just as formally. :Have I landing right?:

:Landing and Kin-right, by Fire and Rain. Welcome home, Elder Sister!:

She didn’t recognize the ‘tone’ of the voice; probably because she was so tired. Must be one of the youngsters, she thought. She hovered for a moment over the cluster of ‘buildings’ set into the sides of the valley, orienting herself. Below her the buildings, of every possible form and style, were hardly more than darker shapes against the pale, weathered rock. There were no lights, which would have sorely puzzled any elf or human who approached, even more than the wildly disparate buildings themselves.

Alara finally realized why she couldn’t see; she’d been so tired she hadn’t bothered to shift her eyes from day-sight to night-sight. Cursing herself for stupidity, she made the tiny adjustment, and suddenly the valley took on a crystalline clarity.

And there was her home; or rather, the building that marked the entrance to her home. Some dragons actually preferred surface dwellings and tended to spend a great deal of time in forms other than draconic. The huge, manorlike constructions were theirs, though they were situated without regard to surface access or water supply. There was, in fact, one enormous castle built right into the side of one of the cliffs, close enough to touch as Alara glided past.

It was new. Alara wondered who had built that monstrosity; it looked like something a newly rich overseer would build.

Other dragons preferred caves, but not the deep caves of Home; they chose shallow caves high on the side of the mountain, where they could sunbathe on ledges all day if they chose. As she winged past one of these, she saw eyes shining at her out of the darkness. Three sets of eyes, all quite close together.

So Ferilanora had managed to coax her brood up the cliff at last. Alara had begun to think she would never get them out of the valley.

And some of the Kin, like Alara, felt most comfortable in extensive underground lairs, the kind of places the Kin used at Home. They felt more comfortable and secure with solid rock overhead, a myriad of hiding places, and multiple exits. This community of the Kin was blessed with a valley suitable for all three preferences.

Those that preferred caves or caverns tended to construct at least a semblance of a building to mark the entrance to their homes and protect it from storms. Alara’s was a copy in stone of V’Sharn Jaems Lord Kelum’s pleasure gazebo in his rock garden. She saw it once during a kind of open-house party, and had found it charming.

She couldn’t say the same for him, however.

The result was a hodgepodge of every type, style and size of building imaginable. Pleasure gazebos perched atop knolls or nestled into the sides of cliffs. Manors and fanciful castles huddled at the bottom of the valley like surly hens, or were balanced on the tips of peaks or on cliff ledges. Temples to gods long gone huddled cheek-by-jowl with human-designed pyramids and brothels.

It looked rather as if some tremendous windstorm had swept through a half dozen cities and deposited the remains here.

She circled the valley slowly, gently losing altitude. The child in her claws had been quite silent all through the journey, and if Alara had not felt strange little thoughts coming from its mind, she would have thought it asleep or dead.

Those thoughts – or rather, thought-forms; they were in nowise clear enough to be considered thoughts – were quite strong. Stronger, in fact, than a newborn of the Kin.

If this was any indication of how strong it was likely to be when it got older, she was not surprised the halfbreeds gave the elves such trouble.

Below her, she saw the rest of her Kin emerging from their lairs. From above, they looked very odd indeed, especially by night-sight, which lacked all color. Without the color patterns to tell her who they were, and shrouded in their dark wings, they made a very odd effect against the stone.

One, however, she recognized at once. Her son Kemanorel bounced in place, unable to restrain his excitement.

:Be careful when I land, dearest,: she said to him, as soon as she was low enough that she knew she was within his limited range. :I have a – a kind of new pet, I think. A baby one. I am going to need your help with it; it’s lost its mother.:

Keman’s reply was clouded by bursts of glee; if she’d been on the ground, she knew she’d have heard him squealing. Beside him was another dragon she recognized by the sheer size and the silver glitter of his scales in the moonlight: Father Dragon. She watched him drape a taloned claw over Keman’s back, as the youngster threatened to leap into the air with anticipation.

The little one looked up at Father Dragon, and even at this distance Alara felt waves of calm coming from the chief shaman.

Most especially she was glad to be back with Keman. Even if he did drive her to distraction occasionally, she thought indulgently; and then she was on the long, difficult approach to landing. Difficult, because she was carrying something, because she was heavy and unwieldy with her own child-to-be, and because this was not the open land of the desert. Her long glide was interrupted by quick wing-beats to give her little lifts over projections, and twists and turns of wings and body to avoid rock formations.

With weary pride, she fanned her wings as she approached the waiting group of curious Kin, and dropped down gracefully into a three-clawed landing.

She placed her burden carefully on the ground, and for the first time since the child had been born, it uttered a cry, a pitiful little mew.

‘Fire and Rain!’ exclaimed one of the others. ‘What in blazes is that?’

Within the time it had taken Alara to land, what had been a peaceful homecoming had turned into a spreading altercation.

Never mind that she had just spent the better part of a moon away from home. Never mind that she was the shaman of this Lair, and presumably entitled to a modicum of respect. None of that mattered once the Kin caught sight of the halfblood baby. The other dragons surrounded her, their presence, though nowhere near as threatening to a flighted creature as one held to the ground, was intimidating enough. In the thin moon- and starlight their colors were muted, even to her night-sight, but she identified them easily enough. She had never felt her youth so acutely before, surrounded as she was by those who were technically her Elders, and she drew herself up to her full height, determined not to show herself intimidated.

‘Whatever possessed you to bring that home?’ one complained loudly, his tail twitching and stirring up the dust behind him. ‘It’s bad enough that it’s uglier than an unfledged bird, but it’s not only ugly, it’s dirty and noisy. It’ll need constant cleaning, and it doesn’t have the decency to keep quiet, ever.’ His tail twitched harder. ‘Your lair is right next to mine. I don’t want that thing wailing because it’s got a problem in the middle of the night, and waking me up!’

‘Not to mention the fact that you won’t be able to get anything sensible or useful out of it for years,’ said another, raising her head contemptuously. ‘It will need special food, special care, and be a waste of time you could spend better attending to your studies and duties. We’ve done without our shaman long enough.’

‘And don’t expect any of us to help, either.’ That was a voice Alara recognized; Yshanerenal was as sour in nature as an unripe medlar, and carried grudges for decades. ‘You brought the thing home, you can take care of it. And if it makes a nuisance of itself, we’ll expect you to deal with it or put the thing down.’ He hunched his head down between his shoulders and raised his wings belligerently.

‘It’s not a thing,’ Alara protested, facing the opposition and giving no clue that she felt challenged. She raised her own wings, and her spinal crest. ‘It’s a child, and not a great deal different from our children.’

‘Maybe not from yours, dear,’ young Loriealane purred sweetly, looking down her long, elegant snout at the shorter shaman. ‘But the rest of us come from better stock than that.’

One of Lori’s older sibs smacked the side of Lori’s head with his wing before Alara could react to that insult. ‘Watch your tongue, you flightless lizard,’ Haemaena growled, as Lori mantled and hissed at him in anger. He batted her a second time to make her cool down. ‘Or are you trying to prove you don’t deserve Kin-right? If the shaman wants a pet, even a weird pet, that’s no reason to insult her lines.’ The tone of his voice conveyed as much that he felt a superior cynicism as a wish to conciliate the shaman. In a way that was just as cutting as Lori’s outright insult. Alara bristled a little more, but his spinal crest lay flat, and his ears were angled forward; he wasn’t trying to insult her, he simply didn’t think she and the child were worth getting into an argument over. His next words proved that, sounding positively patronizing. ‘After all, she’s breeding, and breeding females should be granted their little whims.’

Alara restrained herself from smacking him – with great difficulty. After all, he was on her side. Sort of.

Immediately behind Lori stood Keman; behind him, a protective claw on the youngster’s shoulder, was Father Dragon. Keman was the only child in the gathering, and looked from one adult to another as the taunts and acidic comments flew, puzzlement written in every tense little muscle. Alara spared a moment of pity for him, and repressed the urge to send him back to the lair until this was all over.

The child had to learn someday that the Kin were by no means of a uniform opinion on many subjects. And he had to learn just how cynical and coldly callous most of the older dragons were, and how indifferent to the troubles of any creature outside the Kin.

They were just like elven lords in that, she thought angrily, turning more and more stubborn with every negative comment, every aggrieved complaint. They didn’t care about anything or anyone else, and any other race was somehow inferior to them. Even though the Kin had been driven out of Home, they had no feeling for creatures who suffered the slavery they had escaped. The universe revolved around the Kin, and they wouldn’t see it any other way.

There was a larger issue here than simply the adoption of a strange pet, and every one of the dragons knew it, though none of them voiced it. Alara had breached the walls of secrecy, to bring in a member of another race to a Lair of the Kin. A child, a baby, helpless and wildly unlikely to be a danger to them – but still, there it was. She had bent the unwritten Law, if not broken it. Shamans were permitted that license, but she might have gone beyond the bounds of what even a shaman might do. Were they to uphold the letter of the Law, or the spirit? Most of the Kin would say, ‘the spirit,’ but most of the Kin were not faced with a halfblood child in their very midst.

That was what lay behind every taunt: the uneasy feeling that Alara had gone too far, and that no matter what her motive was, she had to be made to realize that she was in the wrong. That self-centered blindness was what had driven Alara from annoyance to anger, with an admixture of plain, simple stubbornness.

She felt that it had become a moral question. A child was a child, no matter that the child was a halfblood two-legger. It was a child of intelligent beings, completely deserving of protection and of shelter, precisely because it could not protect itself.

While the altercation continued, and the words grew fewer but more heated, Father Dragon simply watched, silently, restraining Keman whenever he looked ready to leap to his mother’s defense. He loomed against the star-spangled sky, the darkest of all the dragons, like a great thunderhead that promised storms to come, yet inexplicably held off.

Alara slowly became aware of his silence, and it occurred to her that he was watching all of them, but seemed to be keeping an especially careful eye on Alara herself. That close regard made her feel uneasy; it made her feel as if she were being judged or tested in some way.

He might truly be watching, testing her, simply because she was a shaman, and as chief of the shamans, Father Dragon was making careful note of her actions.

It might – and it might mean something else. Father Dragon had always, so far as Alara knew, been vitally interested in the actions of the elves and their human slaves. He had, at times, been a lonely voice advocating intervention in the humans’ condition. There had been many times in the past when he had urged more action than simple observation, when he had encouraged the Kin to go far beyond the kind of tricks and sabotage that Alara played among the elven lords.

It might mean a great deal –

And it might mean nothing at all. Alara knew that if she was contrary and difficult to predict, Father Dragon was doubly so. He might simply be enjoying her discomfiture. He was undoubtedly enjoying the stir she was making. Draconic mischief-making was not limited to races outside their own.

And Father Dragon was well known for playing pranks on his own kind.

Alara dismissed the whole puzzle. If Father Dragon wasn’t going to intervene, it didn’t matter. She could fight this battle on her own, and win.

‘I am going to keep the child,’ she said challengingly, planting her feet and raising head and wings, bringing up ears and spinal crest, and looking them all in the eyes in turn. ‘It will make a good playmate for Keman. He will be able to learn how to mimic the two-legs, human and elven, more effectively with an example beside him. And who knows what we shall learn from having a specimen to study from infancy! I learned more from the mind of her mother than any of you would believe.’

That caused a stir; heads turned, and crests were raised or lowered according to how the owner felt. ‘It’s an animal,’ Oronaera hissed, mantling a little. ‘I’ve no objection to keeping the thing as a pet, but raising it alongside our own young ones? Outrageous! As well bring in great apes and delphins!’

Alara mantled back at him, narrowed her eyes, and imparted a dangerous edge to her tone. ‘Perhaps that would be no bad idea!’ she snapped, her claws digging great furrows in the hard-packed dirt. ‘Perhaps then you who never leave the Lair except to feed and sun yourselves would learn the difference between animals and those who are your equals in mind – and certainly far more interesting!’

‘Equals? These animals?’ Lori snorted. Before Alara could stop her, she reached out and picked up the baby by one ankle. It wailed in distress and she wrinkled her nostrils disdainfully. ‘Shaman, you have lost your wits, what few you had. This is nothing more than a food beast, and you know it. I’ve heard that these young ones make good soup –’

And there it ended, for Alara did the unthinkable, goaded past anger into an act of aggression against another dragon. Lori was not prepared, for Alara had never fought back when stressed, even as a child. It was, in fact, something no one would ever have dreamt her capable of, despite her demonstrated bravery in the Thunder Dance.

She reared on her hind legs, her tail lashing wildly, which had the effect of clearing the others from behind her as they leapt to avoid it. Her right foreclaw shot out, caught at Lori’s shoulder before the other dragon could dodge out of the way and squeezed, hard. Her talons dug into the softer skin around the joint, until Lori squealed and started to let go of the child.

‘Gently,’ Alara growled from between her clenched teeth. ‘On the ground. Don’t bruise her, or by Fire and Rain, you’ll regret every mark on her skin, for I’ll duplicate them on yours, if I have to strip away the scales to do so!’

Lori lowered the child to the dirt; it stopped crying the moment it felt a firm surface beneath it. Alara released Lori, who lowered her ears and spinal crest in submission and backed away. Several of the others backed away as well, some as submissively as Lori.

She stood over the child and glared at the rest of the Kin. ‘I’m keeping it,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m raising it with Keman. It is a child of intelligent creatures, and it needs someone to protect and care for it.’ She glared around the circle, at the lowered snouts and downcast eyes. ‘It will be of no danger to us. It can’t betray us, for it will never know its own folk, unless we see fit to introduce it to them. And by then, if we have treated it well, it will be more dragon than human. I have broken no Law here, and you well know it.’

Father Dragon, who until this moment had not stirred, raised his head. ‘You should keep and raise the child, Alara,’ he said, his deep voice like the rumble of thunder in the far distance. ‘It has great hamenleai. Interesting things will befall around it, and because of it.’

Alara’s eyes widened in startlement. It was not often that any shaman could attribute hamenleai, the potential to make changes in the world, to a specific being or action. Alara had done so once in all the time she had been a shaman. And for Father Dragon to say that the child had great hamenleai was extraordinary – Father Dragon had never once been wrong that Alara had ever heard. Her own decision had just been vindicated for not only the Kin of this Lair, but all of the Kin everywhere.

She stretched her wings out to their fullest, her eyes shining with triumph.

And at that moment, a ripple of contraction surged across her belly, and she gasped and doubled over as she felt the first pain of labor.