“So who can master dragons and bid them depart?”
“The hominids, I suppose. They do shape the world to suit themselves, don’t they?”
“The world wins back, in the end,” Wistala said, thinking of the toppled, overgrown battlements around the home cave.
“We condors look to the day of the Last Swancall. Do you know what a swancall is?”
Wistala twitched her nose. “No.”
“It’s a great metal thing shaped like a dragon’s neck, and it makes a call as loud as the white swans you see on the lakes of the north. The hominids blow them before slaughtering each other. We carrion birds wait upon the war of the Last Swancall, when all the hominids kill each other off; then there’ll be the vast battle feast in celebration and the world will be given over to we of talon and feather again.”
She sniffed at the wound around the great shaft. It smelled evil. While waiting and dreaming of the condor’s last swancall might be pleasant, she’d have to venture along the slippery banks of the river in search of more dwarf’s-beard.
A clear morning sky brought rainbows to the waterfall upriver. If Wistala weren’t so weighted down with worry, the bright colors would have made her hearts glad. But Father still seemed to be worsening.
“Wistala, I’m so thirsty,” Father panted. “I’ll perish of it before I can move again.”
River, river all around, and not a drop within reach. Father chose a good location to collapse, for it would be difficult and dangerous to cross and climb all the slippery rocks for a hominid bearing arms, but he couldn’t reach the river swirling below as it bent back around the knob.
“But you must move!” She didn’t have enough digits to count how many times she urged Father to move. The blood around him had dried into a brown stain, still claw-deep and sticky under his scales.
Father pressed his back against a horizontal slab at the center of the knob, not a fallen obelisk but obviously a cutting of some importance, judging by how it stood on a little platform. His claws slipped against the stone. He rolled a little, got his claws under him.
Wistala had to look away; she couldn’t bear to see Father’s limbs trembling under him again. Father’s mighty head fell.
Gluck-glk-glub . . .
Is Father crying?
“He must have water,” Wistala called.
The watching condor looked at the sky, checking for rain clouds, perhaps. “Were you speaking to me?”
“No . . . yes.”
“Water flows up to down, not down to up. What you need is a train of pack-dwarves carrying waterskins.”
“Waterskins?” Wistala asked, thinking it was some sort of plant.
“Hominids make them. They scoop out the insides of sheep and lambs and fill them with water to drink on journeys.”
Hominids must have stomachs stronger than the condor above to drink water stored inside rotting flesh. Disgusting creatures.
Why did the condor spew such a useless detail? He might as well have said, “You need a good rainstorm,” or “A spring bubbling up through these rocks would help.” She wouldn’t begin to know how to scoop out a dead animal and fill it again with water. They had nostrils, throats, tailvents, never mind the holes one made while killing it. If she could reach up and grab the condor, she’d be tempted to try it with him . . . squeeze it out like mother bringing up a tenderized sheep for hungry hatchlings.>“Father, I’ll be right back. I’m going to help you.”
Novosolosk, the little black dragon, had just ventured above ground. . . .
She looked up at the condor: “Fair warning! I see any of you pecking at him, I’ll be venting feathers for a week.”
“Perish the thought.” The condor fluffed up his feathers and settled. “I’m eager to see how you manage this.”
While hunting rock rats, Novosolosk found himself trapped atop a low jungle kopje by a great tiger. The tiger prowled round and round the base of the kopje, growling and panting.
She looked off the east side of the knob at the river-turn. Sure enough, masses of logs had washed up against the rocks at the base of the peninsula, wetted by the constant spray of white water. Along with more mundane lichens, tufts of gray hung from cracks and knotholes in the logs.
Novosolosk tried to bargain with the tiger for safe passage out of his territory, but the tiger just spat abuse in return. He noticed an arrow through the tiger’s neck, broken shafts sticking out either side of his coat, the orange and white gone brown with blood and green with pus.
“Tiger, tiger, I can extract that arrow. . . .”