With a growl of pain and frustration I pushed myself up on shaking legs, my fingers finding cracks and crevices in the cliff wall before my eyes did. Just keep climbing, Nari. Don’t stop climbing.
But it was agony. The initial burst of energy had now given way to the limb-deadening sort of panic. I hadn’t eaten enough. I hadn’t slept enough.
“Pull, Nari – do you want to end up as dog food? Pull!” I could hear my mother berating me as I forced myself up higher, and higher still.
My efforts were rewarded by another of those deep guttural growls, only it didn’t come from below me – it came from the side. Huh?
I looked over to see that one of the stonedogs had abandoned scrabbling at the base of the cliff to run back up the slope to my right, and this time it was pouncing and bounding through the broken rocks at the top.
“Oh, come on!” I hissed as I hung there, two thirds of the way up the cliff and now as stuck as a fly in a web. Or a girl on the face of a cliff.
“No point in wallowing. Survive first. Be sad later.” That was another of my mother’s favorite sayings. She had been using it to stop me thinking too much about a failure when hunting. If I had failed to make my shot, or the animal had run away too fast then there was no point in getting downhearted. What I had to do instead was to survive. To take another shot. To find another source of food.
Which in this case, translated as climbing in the other direction. I couldn’t go right, and I couldn’t go up – so I reached out to grab the next handhold that would swing me towards the left-hand slope.
Except a waiting, growling stonedog had just appeared there, too. I froze. What was I going to do?
Then the creature on my right gave a short, strange sort of sound. Almost like a whimper. Why was it making that noise – like it was uncertain or afraid?
Looking up, I saw that the stonedog was trotting nervously back down the slope, and the one on my left was doing the same. What? With a short, gruff bark, the heaviest one at the base of the cliff, along with its smaller companion turned tail and loped back down the slope, looking back over their shoulder at me.
Okay, I thought, confused. I thought predators lived for the hunt? Why would they stop before the chase was completed, the kill made? But then I noticed how the sky was taking on a pink and purple sort of hue. The sun was starting to set, and nightfall wouldn’t be far off. Maybe that was why. Maybe the stonedogs were afraid of the dark? I had no idea, and it was hard to think of such strange and fearsome creatures being afraid of anything. But I wasn’t about to turn down any good fortune.
My arms were shaking, and it was too far to go back down again to the floor. Instead, it would be wiser to finish my climb. Either way, I didn’t want to go back down there just yet, where the Stonedogs had so recently tried to eat me.
With grunts and groans, I hauled my shaking and exhausted body up and over the top ledge of the cliff, to see that there was another rise beyond this one. It was crowned with outcroppings of rocks, creating a wide ledge on the top of the cliff, and with a large cave entrance right here.
And a whole heap of black dragon scales, looking like droplets of night on the floor.
“Ten, twelve, fourteen-fifteen-sixteen…” I couldn’t believe my luck as I gathered the scales and added them into my total. It almost made up for the fact that the light had become a dull crimson burn, glowing through the mountain valleys like fire.
No, it definitely made up for it. I didn’t care if I would be walking home in the dark. The stonedogs were scared of the dark, right? (At least, that is the only explanation I had). And even Dagan couldn’t get mad with me when he got a look at all of these scales that I had managed to collect, could he?
But there were still a couple more, right in the mouth of the cave. I could see the last of the daylight glinting on them in the dark. I started walking over to gather them and then paused, as a strange feeling washed over me. My heart thumped, and the hairs stood up on the backs of my arms.
It was nothing. I was just spooked from my recent encounter with the stonedogs.
“It’s only a cave,” I muttered to myself. There are lots of caves in these mountains. I spent most of every day crawling through them, didn’t I? I stepped forward into the dark.
Just as two large bronze eyes opened, and they were shot through with flecks of burning red.
Chapter 3
How To Talk To Dragons
“Sssss…” The dragon made a deep sighing sort of sound in its throat. Despite the fact that I was gazing into the eyes of a dragon – nothing else was that big – my first thought was:
It sounds like the Soussa winds in the long grasses…
But then with a snap, my senses came back to me. I was a sixteen-year-old standing in front of a dragon. And I had just been stealing its scales. I wasn’t sure – but did dragons care if humans took their scales? Or was it like discarded clothes? Either way, I didn’t want to insult a dragon.
“Don’t eat me?” I whispered into the dark, dropping the two black scales that I had been holding and starting to step backwards very, very slowly.
The creature blinked, just as slowly. And when it opened its eyes again there seemed to be fewer flecks of crimson red this time, and more bronze-gold. I didn’t know dragons could do that.
But then again, how much do I really know about dragons anyway? Only that there had been loads of them once upon a time, and that my mother had repeated the tales passed down by her Imanu of flights that had covered the sky, once.
But the dragons had faded, hadn’t they? They said that even Torvald – once the greatest city in the world – had lost its dragons, leaving only these wild ones. The ones that didn’t like humans. The ones that sometimes ate humans.
“Please, I’m only a slave. I don’t even want to be here,” I mumbled as I stepped back. I didn’t think that the dragon could understand a word I said, but my mother had once told me that you should always talk in a low, calm voice to a wild beast.
Apparently, my voice wasn’t very low and calming, as there was another sighing rattle of scales as the dragon moved.
“Aii!” I yelped in shock, springing back out of the way to the ledge – but in my fright I forgot my shackles, which pulled tight and made me trip, tumbling to the floor and spilling half the contents of my carry-basket all around me. Every fiber in my being told me to jump up and run – but I didn’t, because there was now a very large, solid black dragon crouching on the ledge over my prone body.
I scrunched my eyes, unable to believe what was happening. Not to me. I had plans. I was going to escape. I knew how to survive in the wilderness. I was going to use those skills to get out of Masaka, to get help, to return and save—
But it didn’t look like that was my fate right now, was it? Especially as there was a deep, resounding huff of hot air, laced with soot and something fragrant – that Frankincense scent again – that washed over me. The dragon had lowered its snout towards me, and I was sure at any moment it was going to pick me up between its massive teeth, toss me into the air, and gulp me down like a fish.