And the deep blues of the skies were marred by a rising column of black air.
Smoke, I thought at first. But the column of smoke was far away, and to be able to see it from this distance, and measure roughly how high it had drifted, it told me that the fire that had caused it must be great indeed.
Big enough for an entire copse to be burning. I thought of the spindle-stands of trees over the Savannahs. Not an entirely unusual occurrence for a brush fire in the Plains of course – but one fire so concentrated and on its own, without any drifts of the lighter, gray smoldering clouds?
Or, that column of smoke was large enough to be a small Daza village burning…
“The smoke was set up just a little while ago—” said the stern-faced Tiana, one of the Daza who had come with us from Inyene’s mines, out of servitude, as we crossed the Plains. She was one of the best scouts I had known from my village, and now it seemed that her year of imprisonment down the Mines of Masaka had fallen from her shoulders like last night’s blanket.
Our group was a large one, I found myself reflecting as I tried to listen carefully to what Tiana was trying to tell me. I felt a little distracted, a little feverish. Maybe I really was coming down with something—
But our numbers had swelled from the slaves and disgruntled workers of Inyene’s expedition across the open places, and now included a contingent of the Red Hound mercenaries who would rather have joined us than be eaten by Inyene’s mechanical dragons during the battle. We also had a good number of the old expedition guards and soldiers – those who had survived the various trials and hazards of crossing the Plains.
And finally, there were my fellow Daza tribesmen and women, under the new Imanu of my village – Naroba – who was even now limping as hurriedly as she could across the sands, with one arm using my mother’s old wood staff as a sort of crutch. Even though injured from the battle, the slightly older woman still managed to look determined and authoritative as she stalked, giving me a tight nod of recognition.
I used to resent you, I found my scattered thoughts thinking as the nominal head of our entire troupe continued. Naroba had never liked the fact that it was my mother, Yanna, who was the Imanu – or spiritual healer and spokesperson for the Souda tribe. And then, after my kidnapping and incarceration down the Mines of Masaka – and my mother’s apparent increasing instability (My fault! My fault! It was hard to stop thinking) – it was to Naroba that the task of leading our tribe fell, in both ways of war and peace.
But even with this apparent reversal of our roles – the battle and our bonding through it, and all of the calamities that we had been through had forged something between us. A sisterhood.
“I’m glad to see you on your feet, Nari,” Naroba said, her tone as tight as her mouth was, but still edged with something like respect. This was perhaps the most affection that you could get out of the strong-willed young woman, and it was hard not to cherish it. “I’ve just been chatting to the other scouts. We haven’t got any horses, but they think that they can move on ahead of us and check out that fire a day or two ahead of when we get there…” She nodded.
“No need.” I turned back to look at the thick, black and greasy-looking smoke. It reminded me of Inyene’s Mines, and of her mechanical dragons. Dangerous, ugly, machine-things that spared no joy or thought for beauty. “I can fly there on Ymmen—” And as soon as I had said the words, there was a booming shriek a little like birdcall across the sky, as the gigantic black dragon flashed out of the sun, growing ever larger in moments and flaring his wings to greet me.
Ymmen, my friend! My heart spoke quicker than I could voice it.
“Little Sister!” I heard his words in my heart and in my mind as clearly as if he were a human, standing here beside me with Naroba. Only a dragon doesn’t really sound like any human or speak with any human sort of language. Dragon-tongue might sound like chittering whistles, clacks, and hooting calls, but in reality, once you had become a heart-friend to one, you realized that it was really like a stream of ideas, images, and feelings. A dragon holds their past and their memories and all of their senses all in the same place, I was coming to realize, and although dizzying to understand at first – somehow our bond had developed so that my mind could understand and translate his speech into something as close to my own mother tongue.
Although Ymmen ‘said’ Little Sister, what I felt was warmth and pride, respect and belonging. I felt immediately safer in a way that no other friend had been able to give me.
Ymmen was large, even for a dragon I now could see – as the other wild dragons that had come to our aid in the battle had, for the most part, been a fraction of his size. As his great paws landed on the soft sands, sending up sprays of gold, I watched with my heart in my throat as I always did. He had scales that were glossy and dark, and flashed an iridescent indigo, green, and blue in the right light. His eyes were giant lakes of the deepest, richest golden red, which almost seemed to glow, they were so bright.
“You slept long,” Ymmen’s coal-smoke voice breathed through my mind as he met me, lowering his snout so that I could reach up with my hands to stretch them as wide as I possibly could – and still unable to hold the width of his head. As soon as my hands made contact with his cool scales, I felt a wave of peace roll through me. My nausea and dizziness subsided, and the buzzing headache which sat behind the Stone Crown on my brow faded to the lowest murmur.
“This isn’t right,” Ymmen said.
“I know,” I whispered, but I had to wear the Crown, didn’t I? I didn’t have a choice to take it off at the moment!
“The smoke…” I heard Naroba behind me saying, and I opened my eyes to look around to see that the young Imanu was once again squinting at the ominous cloud on the horizon.
“Fire. Fear. Battle and death,” Ymmen growled in my mind as he shared his own delicate awareness of the distant plume.
“Death!?” the shock I felt rippled through me. “We have to see what we can do—” I asked, lifting my hands up in the gesture that me and the dragon had found, allowing him to seize me in his great claws when we flew.
But this time, Ymmen cocked his head slightly and his forked tongue slipped between the daggers of is teeth. “No. It has been a long time since I had a rider. A proper rider,” he confided in me, and he leaned down on his right leg, lowering his shoulder and forming a scaly ladder up from paw to elbow to his neck.
You once had a Dragon Rider? I blinked, not sure how I felt. Ymmen had a long life, that much I could sense through our bond – decades of flying across lands that were familiar and strange to me. But he had never mentioned the fact that he once had another human rider. I wondered why, and Ymmen, as he always could, picked up on my thoughts with ease.
“I did. A woman,” Ymmen said gravely. “Her name was Keela, and we flew together for the span of her years, until her time came for her body to go on the final journey that I could not follow.” The dragon spoke these things to me without rancor or sadness or upset. Dragons feel things differently from us humans. Or maybe a better way of putting it was this: dragons feel more than us humans. I could sense the landscape of my dragons’ heart as so vast as to be able to encompass all of the sadness of that previous bond, but also the pride and the contentment that he now felt.