Maelstrom Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The newly created Bond shone like a beacon in the sky, a great pillar of fire to those who knew how to see it. The last two people who knew to both had their gazes riveted on the Bond. One was busy hiding it from view; the other was busy trying to find it again. A search was mounted, and the chase began.

I spent the morning bathing. The tree, when it fell, had dropped a pile of sand into the stream at its most narrow point. The water behind it backed up, and as more rushed in, it swept the shale and sand away and to the sides. The pool there was waist-deep at the lowest point, and nearer to the mouth of the stream it was clear. It was into there that I waded, clothes and all. Dirt floated off in clouds as I submerged myself.Piece by piece I shed my garments and scrubbed them with a vengeance. They went from being dirty and splotchy to being a more uniform shade of grey, but I couldn’t even remember what color they had been when I’d started out.

Nine years of filth I scrubbed out of those clothes, and watched as it drifted away. Finally, they were all laid out on the grass by the bank, and I let the cool, refreshing water wash over my body. My hair in particular needed attention, so I began to run my fingers through it. I had rarely brushed it in the past, and had long given up trying to keep it untangled. Now that it was submerged, it was easier to tease the knots out. The Dragonet swam around a bit while I was thus occupied, but the little thing tired easily. It wasn’t long until she curled up in the sun and fell asleep.

I was becoming frustrated with how damn stubborn the tangles in my hair were, until I stepped on a sharp piece of shale in the bottom of the pool. Snatching it out of the sand, I brought the sharp edge up and cut the hair. My hair was ridiculously long anyway, so I cut it with my piece of shale until it fell down to my lower back. Who knows how long it had been before? But it was finally clean, though! It was wonderful, to put my clean clothes on over clean skin and tie my clean hair up with a clean strip of cloth. How sweet the feeling was!

I sat down next to the sleeping Dragonet and watched the slow rise and fall of her flanks as she breathed. The sun was warm and relaxing, and my hair and clothes dried quickly. As if it was the most natural thing in the world, my own breathing slowed to be in sync with hers. Maybe it was natural. That was how it felt to me, anyways: like there was nothing else in the world but her, and me alone in the middle of nowhere. The little Dragon was the best thing that had ever happened to me, however spontaneous the event had been.

As this thought occurred to me I realized that she needed a name. I couldn’t just keep calling her “the Dragon”, of course. She meant too much to me to be objectified. Slaves were treated as objects, as property, and she was anything but my slave. During my own forced servitude, my name had been practically irrelevant to the pale-skinned Dunians. It had taken Patricia a long time to even remember that I had a name, let alone to find out what it was. Not all Dunians were like that, of course, but I was determined that my Dragon would never know that kind of debasement. But what to call her, that was the question. How could I describe such a beautiful, precious creature in just a few letters?

I raked my brains for nearly an hour. I’d met a great many people in Dunia and knew lots of human names, but they all seemed too mundane. I thought back to my home on Selata. The names of people there were better, but they still weren’t good enough. What of my language? Could I find a word there? I tried to think, but it had been so long since I’d spoken my own tongue. I translated words like “beauty” and “perfection”, but none seemed to fit her. Staring at her gave me nothing except the desire to find the best name. Her sleeping face was serene, and I noticed how similar to a human’s her features were. In fact, looking at her was like looking in a mirror. That’s when it occurred to me that the only way to describe her was me. She was the same as I was in both her strengths and in her flaws. She was everything that I was, only better. There was a word for that, and though it was hard to translate, I thought it fit. The word was typically used in reference to a loved one; it was like calling them a soul mate. The Dragon was, if anything, my soul mate.

“My Limok.” I whispered to her.

Her eyes snapped open and she was on her feet in a heartbeat. “What did you just call me?” She shouted loudly.

“I called you ‘Limok’! Will you calm down, you’re making my head hurt!” I hissed over the ringing in my ears. She came up and put her front paws on my shoulders so we were eye-to-eye.

“Is that my name, ‘Limok’? Can that be my name?” She babbled eagerly.

“Well…yeah, if you want it to be. I was going to ask you if you liked it, once you woke up.”

“Like it?” replied the Dragonet, ”I like it very much indeed! I want that to be my name.” Despite myself, my lips twitched upwards in a smile.

I said, “Alright then, little heart. With the powers vested in me by… myself, I name you Limok!” I placed both hands on her forehead in a rather ceremonial manner. She pushed her nose into my hand and I responded to the demand by petting her.

“Now we are truly Dragon and Rider.”

We slept through the scorching heat of the noon. When we woke we were both hungry, but there wasn’t much to eat in the middle of nowhere. I glanced critically at the stream. It wasn’t particularly wide, deep, or fast, but I supposed that some parts might support some fish.

“How does that sound, Limok? Would you like some fish?” I addressed her as she stretched and yawned.

“Fish?” Scoffed the hatchling, “I would hardly count it as meat. The only reason I do not turn up my nose is because there is little else.” I nearly laughed at her superior tone of voice. It was strange how she was changing me; I’d laughed and smiled more in the past nine hours than I had in the past nine years.

“Well then come on, little heart, let’s go catch some.” I stood, and then nudged her to her feet. She rose eagerly to follow me as I walked upstream.

“How do you suppose to catch said fish?” asked the Dragonet.

“You.” I stated simply.

“What do you mean, ‘me’?”

“I mean that I don’t have a fishing pole, a spear, or even a belt knife to catch them with, and most of the fish in this stream are too small for me to get at anyway. You can swim faster and hunt better than I can. Trust me, fish are dumb; it’ll work.”

She mentally shrugged, and went a little faster. My long stride forced her to trot, so I slowed up a little bit. She had short legs, and she couldn’t fly yet. That brought a question to my mind. “So… why are your wings so tiny?” I wondered aloud. “Are you going to fly?” She snorted.

“Of course I am going to fly. There is no room on me for full-grown wings yet. They will be big enough for me to start flying in about a month, and they will be full-grown in two.”

“Two months? That’s not long at all. How fast do you grow?”

“As soon as I get some food, I will start growing very fast. It will taper off once I am old enough to fly, then get slowly bigger over the next year until I am big enough to carry you. Once I can do that, I will grow faster again until I am mature. I will grow very, very slowly from then on to the rest of my life.” She finished. I nodded silently, not needing to say much more. My mind continued to turn, however, and only half of my attention was on watching the water.

Fifteen minutes of walking found watercress growing in a clump by the bank. I stopped to pick some, washing it in the stream water before munching it. I normally enjoyed the peppery taste of watercress, but this particular bunch was more bitter than it usually is. Watercress didn’t normally grow on the plains, since it preferred the richer soil and cooler climates of forests.

I found myself wondering how it had gotten here, and looking to the East made me wonder if it had come down from the mountains. I could see them, a dark, jagged line dominating the horizon. I knew that across them was the eastern coast of Dunia, but I didn’t know what was on the coast. I had seen little of Dunia but Falaway’s peninsula. Falaway was the first city I’d seen on Dunia, and Patricia’s father owned a small plantation outside the city. Patricia’s father had married young Patricia off to the son of a noble who lived in Raska, and I had been accompanying her. Traveling through Falaway’s pass had been a novelty for me.

So what was the rest of Dunia like? I’d seen maps and I’d heard people talk, but I didn’t know much for certain. This land was called the Wide Plains, I knew that, but what was there here to see but grass and sun? There must be someplace else to go, someplace better for Limok and I. If there was even a slim chance that there was a forest there, I would take it.

My thoughts were interrupted when I spotted a place where the banks widened. Here the water slowed and the bottom was clouded in the shadow of a huge, flat rock that jutted into the pool. I stopped and slowly crouched. With movements that were smooth and deliberate, and stretched out on my belly with just my eyes peering over the edge of the bank. --------- Limok hunkered down next to me, in all likeness a statue. We watched in silence for a few minutes until she asked, tentatively, “So… what are we looking for?” I contained my humor with some difficulty, for I didn’t want to scare the fish. Instead of speaking the answer to her, I tried talking mentally. “We’re looking for flashes of movement under that rock. Hey, it works!”

“Of course it works. I do not need to hear your thoughts out loud to know them. Look, there! I saw one.”

“I saw it too. We need to see three more in the space of thirty seconds. I’ll measure the time, you count the fish.” I counted out thirty seconds as accurately as I could while Limok kept track of the movements.

“There were, at the very least, four.” She told me before I could ask. I mentally nodded.

“Good. Then here’s the plan: You see that patch of reeds way up there? Run upstream until you’re across from it. Slip into the water there and swim downstream. Tell me when you’re at the mouth of this pool. I’ll jump in and scare the fish out from under the rock, and you catch as many as you can before they escape.” She nodded her assent, then turned and loped off into the grass. As she went I realized that I wouldn’t need her to tell me when she was in position; I knew exactly where she was the whole time. This mental link was proving to be stronger than I thought, for I never lost track of her once. The strength of the connection never weakened or faded in the least. While she was swimming downstream, I began to draw my legs up under me until I was crouching. My shadow was beginning to loom over the water, so I moved downstream a few feet.

When the moment was right, I leapt into the water.

A number of things went wrong in that moment. Underestimating my own strength, I overshot the water and landed on the rock where the fish were hiding. I slipped and fell backwards into the water, on top of Limok. With my legs, I kicked out and pulled myself off of her, and she darted after the last fish. In my efforts to get up, me foot went under the rock, and all of a sudden something bit me. I pulled my foot out and found a large catfish latched onto my toe. Frantically, I tried to get it off.

Limok splashed out of the water and set her two small brook trout on the ground. After wrestling the catfish off of my foot, followed her with some difficulty. The thing was large and slippery, and it wriggled. Limok gave a wheezing kind of snort, and I looked at her sharply. Her shoulders were shaking with mirth, and I realized she was laughing.

“Look Mirayah, you caught one too!” she giggled. I was trying to ignore her while I tried to subdue the catfish; the damn thing kept trying to bite me again. Apparently it liked the taste. Groping for a stone, I simultaneously kicked the fish and Limok. She fell over on her side and lay there laughing helplessly. “You looked… so… funny, ahahahahaha!”

“Shut up, you,” I muttered darkly as I hit the fish on the head with the rock I’d found. I wasn’t sure which one of them I was talking to; I decided it was both. The fish, being the more agreeable creature, complied. Limok did not. The whole walk back, she was snarfing and giggling around the fish in her mouth. I steadfastly ignored her.

Back where we’d started, gathering enough fuel for a fire was difficult. With my newfound strength, I dragged broken branches from the tree out from under the wreck. I busied myself with breaking them down to the right size, using my hands and feet. One branch, as thick around as my arm, I simply snapped over my knee. What I had in the end might last through the night, if we kept the fire small. Where I found a natural dip in the ground, I cleared all the grass away and placed some rocks in a circle around. With a bundle of the dry grass as tinder, I looked to Limok. She was sitting by the pool with the fish at her feet, occasionally splashing water over them to keep them fresh and alive.

“Can you breathe fire?” I asked. She looked up.

“Of course I can. What do you need?” replied the little Dragon. Wordlessly, I held the handful of tinder out. She placed her nose close to it and spit out a little trickle of orangey-white flame, smoke issuing from her nostrils as she did. Quickly and carefully, I stuffed the burning tinder under the fuel and heaped more dry grass on top and around it. The grass burned hot and fast, which gave the flames a chance to catch on the wood. The fire would make smoke, since the wood was still a bit green, but there was no one to see us here.

I had no knife to gut the fish with while the fire heated up, but I used a rock to scrub the scales from them, and managed to twist the heads off. Cooking them was harder, since there was no pan, but I found and cleaned off a flat piece of shale to use as a hot plate. The smell of them cooking was delicious, and Limok grew more and more antsy.

“My my, little heart, you’re hungrier than I am.” I remarked as I used a green stick to pull the smaller of her two fish from the flames. Though I supposed that, having spent who-knows-how-long in an eggshell, she would be famished. She rapidly disemboweled the fish, consuming not only the flesh but the guts and the bones as well. I assumed that the fire in her belly was also good for digesting parts that were inedible to humanoids. I called myself a humanoid since little Limok had told me I was supposedly an elf. And yet I didn’t feel like one. I just felt like a newer, stronger, freer me. And yet I couldn’t call myself human anymore, I reflected as I dragged Limok’s second fish from the fire, so what could I call myself but a humanoid? The thought was an interesting one, and I pondered it as I stared into the dancing flames of the fire.

My fish, being larger than both of Limok’s, was taking longer to cook, so I made a short trip upstream to get some more watercress. I ran, light-footed and fleeter than a deer, for the sake of running. I returned with a handful of my quarry even quicker, for the sun had sunk to but a finger’s breadth from the rolling horizon. Somehow, looking at the sunset, it seemed more beautiful to me now; the oranges were brighter, the purples richer and the dark blue of the encroaching night was deeper. A few high, thin clouds blazed pink as they scudded across the tapestry of the sky, fleeing before the northern wind that sprang up. I ran parallel of it, feeling it try to push me south and rebelling; I went east, away from the sunset and towards the night.