He squinted silver into the sun. “Yes …”
The dragon disappeared behind the stone.
“… I saw her flying.” He brushed sand and mica from his cheek.
I got up and hoisted my bow. “Let’s go on.”
Korga hoisted his.
We trudged.
We crawled under a fallen sheet of elephant lichen (ancient gift of the Web); it’s dried crust lay over a gully so close to the ground I wondered if we could get our bows through.
We did.
We climbed a red-rock slope with its black and orange pittings.
The dawn wind was steady south. Once I looked back to see, behind Rat, the Vyalou undulating away. The nearer sand-sifts were dark lines, now and then pricked with light.
“Around here and down …”
Rat caught up to me. I moved nearer to the ridge, parked my bow beside me on the rock, and leaned over. I heard Rat getting free of his own. Then his shoulder brushed mine; his rough hand came down half on stone and half on the back of mine.
Directly ahead, three beasts lazed and gentled on the air.
A wingless male was crawling down the rocks, going away.
Much higher up, another dragon, like a bit of sloughed tolgoth bark caught in a wind-swing, dove back and forth before Iiriani. As a child, when I’d first seen such configurations I’d always assumed the high beast was keeping guard for the others. Usually there’d be two or three males around—then I saw there was a second male, clawing around an outcrop of reddish stone to the right, talons making pink puffs as she scrabbled.
Two of the winged beasts planed toward one another and away.
The females’ wings were wide as mechanical worm-strainers, half again the spread of their intelligent evolutionary cousins’ and well over twice the area. Ethologists have described them, as I now whispered to Rat, as small herds of land-bound males, from two to ten, who roamed the rockier areas; and small flocks of females, from three to fifteen, who hover for a day or ten around them, before taking off to find another herd—while a lone neuter, almost half again the size of the females, flies high overhead, her singular flight patterns initiating intercourse among all three as she carries her load of nongenetic reproductive information. About seventy-five percent of the offspring are borne by the females, about twenty by the neuters, and five by the males. The male dragon birthing is violent, almost always injurious, and frequently fatal—it seems to be, evolutionarily speaking, on the way out. In the evelmi, only females and neuters carry—males sometimes have practically unnoticed abortions, though male births occasionally occur in folk tales and legends: it’s probably projection, not racial memory, though there are adherents to that theory, too, in the north. “The fertilized zygote,” I went on, “can end up lodging in either of the three sexes. Though only the females and neuters seem biologically equipped with an efficient way to get the infant out of the body. Mostly what the muscles that control their wings really do is help in labor. People are still speculating on what environmental conditions nudged evolution in this direction sixty million years back when the pattern got established.”
Rat pointed up at the highest flying beast. (Those immense hands could get dirtier quicker than anyone’s I’ve ever known!) “That’s the neuter …?”
“I think …” and squinted, “that’s probably a female. The neuters are usually much larger; and they fly so high you frequently can’t see them at all. Though that could be a younger neuter, coming down for a while …”
His hand came back to my shoulder again. We watched, as one female dropped to the soil and, with thrashing wings, beat up a gray-black cloud whose curling edges paled purple and shredded. She leapt away through her own dust, turning and cawing, as the males lumbered over, first one, then the other, pausing at the falling dirt, then one and the other nuzzling it.
“They’re going to eat any micro-sage or mural-fungi she’s turned up,” I explained. “Good deal, huh? You want to take a few shots here, or look for a more active covey?”
He turned to me with silver eyes and that blank expression I would eventually learn to read as gentle laughter. “You tell me, Marq.”
“Well, maybe we …” I gnawed on my back teeth. “But they’re going to be here a while. Let’s go on. If nothing better turns up, we can always come back.”
Suddenly I was very aware of the heft of his hand, of the brush of his hip against my flank—he turned blazing eyes on me, his jawbone working behind pitted skin. So we stayed to make love, in our parked bows’ angular shadows. He came twice, I, once, and we joked about it. Later, both our hands wet with his urine, we lifted our bows and carried them across the irregularly darkened sand he’d paused at to pour. I looked around for the Old Hunter, wondering if she had shot us already from some ledge, fissure, or cliff-niche. But neither her wing’s dark sails nor her bow’s bright ones were visible above rock or ridge.
We trudged on.
We found another covey.
We halted.
Rock rose to the oest. The ridge rolled up west. Over the remaining 215 degrees, sand and bramble fanned down from our crevice.
Dragons dove.
Dragons soared.
Three rose together, nipping at each other’s lips, wings working, turning above and below each other. One huge one tore loose and rose and rose and rose, till she was an ash of night flickering on the day.
“That’s a neuter.”
“She is much higher than the other one was.”
Dust at half a dozen places drifted around dragon wings.
“There’re at least nineteen in the covey.”
“Twenty-one,” Rat said.
I nodded, wondering how he could count them that fast. Though it’s something I had seen old hunters do. “The activity’s good. The energy’s high.” I hauled up my bow, got the brace around my neck, the stock into my arm. “Do you see one you like?”
“You said,” he said, “to pick one whose flight was beautiful.”
I nodded: “Get your bow up.” For a moment I really thought he was going to ask me: What is beautiful? “When you fire, try to think your own body into the same position as your quarry’s. That’ll make the transition less of a shock.” I slid one hand forward on the brace, the other to the release.
More slowly, he lifted his.
“Got one all picked out?”
He looked at me with eyes gone normal in the shadow of the rock beside us. We squatted together.
Dragons worked in dust and sun out on the sand and above it.
He fired first—I heard the release click; his body jarred, as though some subvelmian troll had sledged up at the ground under his feet. Rat looked at me in blank astonishment.
“You missed, that’s all.” As V’vish and Max had explained to me on my first hunt, when I was seven, it’s pointless to try to prepare someone for the effect of either a miss or a hit. I said: “Better aim a little more carefully. You probably don’t want that to happen again.”
He turned back to the flock.
I sighted through the cross hairs. “When you pull the release, make sure it gets to the second click,” I told him. “That throws in the automatic tracker and raises your chance for a hit by a factor of six or seven.”
At the same time as I realigned on a far female arching magnificently behind low dusts, I heard his bow, raised toward a flying form above mine, click-click. Then the black and silver creature cleared the haze and darted up through my sights. I pulled—click-click—and threw myself through myself—
—doubled in one sense, skewed in four others, my wings under-thundered gray sand in a dragon’s eye. Breast bunchings lifted. At the down beat of spiny wings, small bones bellied: hollow bones thrilled; my eyes shook with sand. Handless, high, bouncing in air six sets of claws could puncture, fluting through bone, I searched dragons for his eyes in hers, flapped through dust looking for his in his. (Sand burned my heels as I leaned back, twisted in bow thongs.) Amazed and lazy on the lifting gale o
f some other dragon’s wings, she soared. I sailed after, chasing him by chance. (It’s the feeling you can control your dragon’s body which is so strange, though it’s only because you know so well all she knows so well.) Double all syntax, wondering what his movements hold; she held to the air before me, and I spired away, spying some male below in which I was less interested than my hormones were. She turned on the spoke of a breeze, and my spine’s scales went quivery at the neuter beating above. Awareness in the splay and undulant vertebrae. The wing turned up in light like dust; lost in eyes with neither purple, rods, nor cones, the pattern of her dyed, and died on, my techtum. The more complex eyes of most velmian life see far more afterimages than we mammals: thus, we/they live under that different time her philosophers have storied. I saw her at a distance as a point-time event. I saw her up close as ten seconds’ history made synchronous by its multiple shadows. Rat, written all over her (at least to my tongue), rose up, flapping wings, body bending. I arched my hips down for other males under my belly. My mouth was big enough for the whole of this landscape, through which tongue, over and after tongue, licked and lusted. I rose and watched high dragons rise. Why do dragons fly, I mean according to them? Dragons and their hunters know: the nerve endings concentrated in the flesh below the joint of wing and body is of the same order as those in the human genitals or the lining of the human ear: the stimulation of rushing air excites them—the sensation dying at precisely the rate (established by ages of evolution) to make the wings flap enough for lift-off. A permanent around-the-body high? Fly! I flew. Dust settling on one of my tongues made a fine mud speaking of silver salts and tolgoth pollen which other females had passed over. I rose, torn from the dust-bound males. My breast crawled, anticipating descent. Sex and hunger sweep round in the human body, through the day, failing and driving like unentailed tides, peaking together, or ranged in opposition: the drive that drags and pummels a dragon’s body toward the behavior humans mistake for sex is almost three times as strong, far more pervasive, and concentrates in such different parts of the body—the pads of the middle set of claws, the flesh along the back culminating in two extraordinarily sensitive rings around the gills, the underside of the water-bearing tongue, and the upper side of the weakest taster—that humans, become dragon, sometimes cannot recognize it for hours. (Evelmi fare a little better, taking only minutes.) And there are two other drives that contour the actions of most trisaurian life, neither of them properly speaking hunger as humans know it. One is a yearning for a variety in tastes that can, if stifled, become true pain beating through the skull. The other is a gentle bodily urging toward certain kinds of motion. Together they can produce a behavior that looks, to a human, like a creature satisfying a ravenous appetite—only something, perhaps the darting about to different substances as avidly as a human would devour one, is off. But knowing the dragon’s body from the inside is an adventure of a different order: in human women, hunger and desire, each sunk deep in the body, are always present, either as a full or an empty field. In the dragon the three drives, the one raging, the other two at sift and drift, in their various rhythms, are inconstant. Afterimages of Iiriani arched and lingered, paler and paler, as it went further down, mapped against my oscillate rise. I glimpsed the wider wings of the neuter above, and chills detonated my spine; my gills erupted rings of excitation, and I arched away, borne under the beat of other urges, to drop through the world built in my mouth, while Rat, at my shoulder, rose, her wings wild over, a racket on all, all over our aural techta, the single sensory unit at cerebral surface that, neurally congruent, women and dragons share—
“I was a dragon …” he said, voiceless enough for a whisper. “I was a dragon? … I was a dragon! It was as if, for a moment, for a year, I was a dragon myself. I didn’t stop standing here, but I …”
“The radar bow hooks on to a pretty complete mapping of the dragon’s cerebral responses and, after a lot of translation, plays it back on your own cerebral surface.”
“Was it twenty minutes? An hour? I … I couldn’t tell how—”
“About seven seconds is the maximum it can hold. Your shot was probably two and a half to three seconds. That’s about what a good beginner manages. But there’s a time disorientation factor.”
“—how long I was a dragon. But I was!”
“Yes, you were.” I glanced at the higher rocks behind us, where the Old Hunter was removing her bow and drawing in her wings, settling back below her rocky rim; for the same seconds, she had been an alien male hunting dragons on her own world.
“It’s like reading,” he said. “It’s like reading a—!”
But I didn’t understand and turned instead.
Korga turned to look where I looked.
I guess he saw her—and understood.
He raised his bright hand to hail her. Sunlight cut his forearm where it cleared the shadow of the boulder I still crouched by.
“Hey, Rat?” I stood. “Are you ready to sing of your catch?”
His human eyes locked on mine, perplexed.
“Eventually, we’ll actually run into the Old Hunter—or maybe someone else.”
“I waved to her. Why didn’t she …?”
“She probably just wasn’t ready to sing about it yet. When we do run into someone, they’ll sing to us of the quarry they’ve caught. We’ll sing to them.”
“The Old Hunter will sing about … being us?”
I nodded. “There’re hundreds of traditional songforms to cover the traditional forms of the experience. Those from the last three hundred years that deal with evelmi hunting humans—to be sung to human hunters—are among the most beautiful. But I’m biased. Anyway, you can deal with it any way you want. Amateur enthusiasm is always appreciated. And most hunters don’t even attempt the traditional forms until after their seventh or eighth hunt.” (Was I going to tell him that, precocious me, on my third I’d improvised a perfect single-voiced kahoud’di’i’mar, whose syllabic counts, sound repetitions, and alliteration patterns I will eventually set out for you? Vondramach Okk, on one of her visits here, became interested in some of our local song forms. She wrote a set in her private language, including a kahoud’di’i’mar, which is actually where I learned it. She also wrote about them in her journal—on the same page with her notes on possible assassination techniques for Secretary Argenia.) “If you’d be more comfortable with it, I’ll teach you a short, traditional piece that will certainly do if we run into anyone.” Three years ago, we’d taken some Thants on a dragon hunt. The catch had been superb, but the singing had been one of the traumatic confusions that can only happen between world-widened cultures. “It would only take me about three minutes to teach you a ditty that—”
His eyes turned to the naked ridge. “I would rather wait and hear you first. And perhaps the Old Hunter.”
“Sure,” I said, hoisting up my bow. “Sounds fine with me.” The evelmi have high tolerance for the enthusiastic human amateur giving some local custom a go; in the north it’s probably one reason for the trouble, just as here it is the reason for the peace. But that tolerance has taught me much of use for my profession1.
Korga squatted to get his ringed hand under the haft, his bare one around the neck brace, and stood up with it.
We walked till we found another covey. And, with enthusiasm, I made two more shots—for there are a couple of songforms Vondramach never heard of that can be used to sing of multiple hits. Korga said he wanted to sit these shots out and simply observe me in my few seconds’ contact—which is perfectly understandable, though because I’ve already done it, I also know is rather dull. If you look like anything at all during those few seconds, it’s just mildly drunk.
Almost as soon as we turned from the natural blind of orange shales, two women cleared the ridge beside us, their braked bows glittering all about them under Iiriani. One was human, one evelm, both female; and both carried their bows with a surety that spoke an easy bowmanship greater than either Rat’s or mine. One flexed her
wings between the fiber cords that bound her daykit to her nape. Her companion, who had frizzy brown hair and freckles beside her nose, hung back a few steps, watching.
Momentarily I thought we would fall into that strained silence, resulting in meditation, that so frequently attends the encounter between strange hunters before song. Such silences may go on for half a day and baffle northern humans, who’d rather fall immediately into fighting than endure such protracted uncertainty. But above the ridge poked the broad and dust-darkened snout of the Old Hunter. “As I grow older,” she said in her booming, burry voice, “more and more my task seems to be to introduce you one to another. Stand, forward Ollivet’t.”
The woman with the daykit bound between her wings bent to let her bow stamp the gravel and came forward on claws whose steely black put her racial origins from about the same area in the south as our big algae-farmer back at Dyethshome.
“Ready yourself for song, Ollivet’t.”
The woman glanced at the Old Hunter, lifted first her left claw, then her right, and recited: “Thank you for permeating these dry healthful airs with the taste of my name.”
The Old Hunter, her own kit still bound with soiled human rags, her gumbone stained and pitted, her face scales dull and ragged, came a few steps down the slope. “Stand forward, Marq Dyeth.”
I set down my bow, stepped forward, then, in place lifted first my left foot, then my right. “Thank you for permeating these dry healthful airs with the taste of my name.”
“Ready yourself for song, Marq Dyeth.”
As the Old Hunter came down a few more steps, I looked at the woman across from me. Her facial scales, with only the light dust of a day’s outing, held none of the damages of a life addicted to cerebral radar transfers in the wild; her gear was strapped with the traditional cord, rather than the cultural intrusion of fabric; her sharp claws spoke of much time spent in the better-tended, frequently refloored runs; and her proportional age was not far above mine.
We were all quiet for five, six, seven minutes. Knowing the difficulty humans can have with such pauses in communication, I wondered whether it was the synapse-jamming or simply life on Rhyonon that held Rat through the silence.