“My condolences,” the emissary said. “For everything.”
“Very sensitive of you, I’m sure,” said Sulinin.
“When the egg hatches its new dragon, perhaps the High Queen will grant that you retain your old position,” Dolhal suggested, though he hoped not. He, Dolhal, had rescued the egg, after all.
“Do you think she would?” asked Sulinin. “That would be—convenient. I do think we’d better start soon, don’t you? If the egg hatches here, we’ll have to delay until the dragonet’s wings grow strong enough to support its body and by that time—by that time it will have bonded with this place and will not leave it.”
Dolhal sensed a lie in that explanation somewhere but he was too unfamiliar with this being and with dragonets to know where the lie might lay. “Then the mother—the dragon—is dead? You’re certain?”
“Certain,” Sulinin said. “I—you might say as how I was personally involved when she exploded.”
“How painful for you.”
“Friend,” said Sulinin, “you don’t know the half of it.” This time Dolhal knew that the halfling spoke the truth, for the grim humor twisted from his mouth and his eyes teared up with anguish.
“Perhaps it would help if you would care to talk about it,” Dolhal suggested. Emissaries were trained to be excellent listeners, and were trained to read the nuances of meaning behind what was said. He no longer felt tired or hungry or thirsty but he also felt disinclined to leave this spot for the moment. The egg, he felt, would be happier nesting here too. “I heard when I was very young about the Dragon of Tollin. They say it was like no other dragon in the history of the world and that it was the reason for the prosperity of Bellgarten and because of it, Bellgarten gained its hegemony over Northworld.”
“True, all true,” the former harper said. “The dragons in tales of old are ugly and fearsome, greedy and foul—”
“Nothing like that could ever come from this egg,” said Dolhal, stroking the shell.
“Yes—hmm, well, I felt much the same when I first beheld the egg. I found it in the Ogrebones the summer Doomspewer erupted. Do you have volcanoes in the south?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Then you’ll know that when they spew, not only the mountain changes but the landscape all around—lakes are filled in with ash and refill themselves miles away, rivers change their courses. I had never seen such change for myself and traveled to the Ogrebones with my harp to make songs of the eruption and the people who lived through it and who died in it. It seemed at the time to herald the ruin of Bellgarten, for the heat had seared the crops and the ash, as it does now, blotted out the sun so that winter came early and people sickened and died from breathing the thick air. I was a young, healthy fellow then, however, and hungry for novelty, which is part of why I took up the harp and followed the minstrel’s road. I confess I had grown heartily weary of it by that time, however. I hoped with these songs to winter somewhere comfortable, where my voice, my fortune, would be safe from sickness and my belly would be full.
“The road ended long before it reached the place where it once led to the easiest pass through the mountains. I set out upon land as different as if it had been reborn then. As different as—as different as this land is from the Bellgarten of my youth. As different as this land was from the face of the moon. I thought in my ignorance that I would simply find the Bellgard River and follow its parallel course to the range until I reached its mouth. When I reached the place where the river had once been, however, I was amazed to see that that mighty flood, so wide and deep in some places that it had seemed to be the sea, had completely disappeared. Molten rock cooled in the dry bed and to my surprise, I saw stonework, cut and formed into what looked like the tops of towers, and in one place, the ruins of a great door. I sat right down to write a song about the lost city beneath the Bellgard but as I was debating between ‘giver’ and ‘liver’ as a rhyme for ‘river,’ I became aware that a third rhyme—‘quiver’—was even more appropriate, for that was what the ground near my feet was doing.”
“The egg worked its way to the surface for you too, then?” Dolhal said. “What an extraordinary creature to be so intelligent even in the shell!”
“Quite,” said the halfling, biting off the end of the word with his ruined teeth.
“And was the mother’s shell as beautiful as this one?” Sulinin asked.
“Yes, and I was as smitten with it as you are with this one. When the shell cracked, I thought my heart would break, but then the dragonet bumped her jewel-like head through the shell and into the air, her pudgy baby features and legs as engaging as those of any youngling. I had to carry her in my arms most of the way to Tollin since her wings were still too weak to hold her and she wobbled when she walked. Furthermore, she was hungrier than anything I had ever seen before when she was born and I hunted for her time and again before she was full enough to allow us to proceed. This, of course, made her staggeringly heavy but her appetite, once slaked, needed only a little maintenance for most of the rest of the journey and she charmed me by contenting herself with grass and flower buds.
“More charming still, wherever we traveled, her breath warmed the fields around us so that they grew fertile once more. I barely noted this at the time, so enchanted was I with my new companion, but we always slept warm and dry whatever the weather and I thought my music was better. I was—comfortable.”
“Yes, yes I see. That’s how I feel too. Mind you this is a long way from the High Queen’s court and yet the egg is, as you say, comforting.” Dolhal shuddered to the tips of his wings. “What a terrible tragedy for you to lose her,” he added, wondering why he felt so much more truly the tragedy of losing the dragon than the tragedy of losing a continent and all of its other creatures.
“Her appetite grew as we traveled until she could eat the produce of whole fields and was looking longingly at the sheep and cows and I realized that I would not be able to keep her fed by my own efforts. That forced me to the difficult decision of presenting her to King Horhay. He was charmed, even when she ate the entire fifty-course banquet he had prepared for his daughter’s ninth birthday. He was a wealthy man so he merely ordered another banquet prepared. The dragon seemed a bit ashamed of her appetite, and hunted and cooked to perfection all of the animals she had gobbled before and then, by order of the king, we were given our quarters in the royal zoo and I sang her to sleep, while she hummed in her soothing way.
“As she grew, her appetite increased but I persuaded the king that he should give over to her her own fields and her own livestock for her nurturing. In order to do this, he levied a small tax on the people, and in return we made flights together and she warmed the fields so that they yielded more than ever and blew away the ash. In the winter, she kept the palace warm and eventually conduits were sent from her den to burrow under all of the houses in the town so that she might warm them. Later, it was found that her breath could be confined in clay stoves that heated without wood for days at a time. But though she more than earned her keep, as her appetite increased, the people grew fearful. Some remembered the stories of dragons of old, who devoured virgins regularly, although our dragon had shown no signs of desiring any such fare.
“There were those, in fact, who wanted her to be put to death so that they would no longer have to. pay for her maintenance. The invasion of Bellgarten by the armies of Orbdon stopped that talk.”
“What happened?”
“What do you think happened? My beauty drove their troops back to their own borders and with one short raid on their nearest town, a roar and a single blast of fire, the enemy was decimated, destroyed, and thereafter followed our ways and paid tribute to our king. He wisely used much of it for the maintenance of the dragon, who seemed to take pity on the Orbdonese and, using her great strength and fire judiciously, rebuilt their city and helped them prosper as we had.”