“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.
Would that work?
She hurried down to the river, gulped down mouthful after mouthful, felt her stomach swell until she became sick with the fullness. . . .
The water came back up easily enough, a little sour-smelling, thanks to her empty belly.
But it worked.
She filled herself even fuller, until it seemed as though she could hardly draw breath from the liquid in her stomach—dragon innards were built for gorging—and learned a lesson when it came back up of its own accord on the stairs.
She took in less for her third load and made it all the way to the top.
“I’ve got something for you, Father,” she said.
He opened a weary, bloodshot eye.
She cast about and settled on the central slab Father braced himself against when he tried to move. It had a gutter running down the center, perhaps designed to catch and hold rainwater? She hopped up onto the edge, and with a loudish belch almost filled half the trough with water.