George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

“Do you think anything in the world will be enough to assuage his wrath?” the monk asked.

There was little in Huang Fa’s saddlebags that might be worth the life of an only son. The silver was a soft metal, of less value than bronze to the barbarians. The spices. were questionable. Huang Fa answered, “I have a dragon’s tooth that was dug from out of the stone in Persia. It is worth the price of many horses.”

He went to his saddle packs and pulled out the tooth — eight inches long, serrated, and curved like a dagger. Huang Fa had seen the giant dragon skull encased in stone that it had been pulled from. It had been polished by its previous owner, so that the ancient bone glowed like amber.

“Perhaps,” Chong Deming said thoughtfully, “it will please. Perhaps to a sorcerer it will be worth enough.”

For four days, Huang Fa traveled with the monk and led his mare, skirting the grasslands at the edge of the desert, chasing the wizard’s caravan. Here there had once been wild asses, giant wild bulls, and red deer in abundance, and cheetahs to hunt them. But over the past twenty years the rising number of caravans had driven many herds away, and the plague of anthrax had killed most other animals. Some said that the caravans themselves spread the disease. It was well known that one could catch it from handling the skins of animals that had died from the plague.

Now, the red plains seemed barren, almost lifeless. In two days Huang Fa saw only a few wild ostriches and a couple of giant elephants that the emperor’s men sometimes harnessed and trained for war. Such beasts were difficult for the barbarians to hunt, he knew. The swift ostriches were a temptation, forever running just out of the bow’s range. The elephants, masters of the plains, were four times the weight of the smaller Indus elephants, and had rust-colored tusks that could grow to over twelve feet in length. The bull elephants sometimes became mad and attacked even caravans.

For Huang to travel past such a herd in a caravan was a bold deed. To creep past them with only a monk at his side, pulling his mare on a rope, was terrifying. Yet to his surprise, the larger bulls only sniffed the air with their trunks and flapped their ears in agitation. They did not stomp the grass or throw hay in the air. They did not charge.

Still, the young men kept a respectful distance, and traveled as long as they could. Such was Huang Fa’s urgency to find the caravan, to get home to Yan, that he did not want to camp until well after dark.

The monk spoke little as they traveled. He plodded along, staring ahead evenly, whispering poems that he composed in his head.

Huang Fa was bumbling along, eyes growing heavy, imagining what it would be like to take Yan into his arms at last when he dreamed of the feral children.

There were dozens of them, circling a campfire in a large cavern. They were thin creatures with protruding bellies and skin clinging tightly over their ribs. Their bare backs had been tattooed with images of snake-headed lizards. Their gaunt faces were just flesh-colored bones, and their teeth had all been filed.

There were children of all ages in the group, from toddlers to the ages of ten or eleven. They were practically naked, all bare flesh.

Now, a couple of the nearest turned, peered at him hungrily, and jostled their neighbors. They too turned to search for him, but many of the children seemed unable to spot him, as if he were far away.

Suddenly, in the midst of the bonfire, a sorcerer appeared, as if bursting up from the flames. He wore a mask of red jade, a demon’s face, and he wore a cloak made of tiger hide. He danced among the flames, hopping among the coals without apparent harm. He carried a huge rattle made from a giant cobra’s skull in his right hand, and held the dragon’s tooth in his left. He sang as he danced, his voice rising and falling in the quavering manner of one who grieves.

The children around the fire chanted words that Huang Fa could not quite understand. They pounded their right fists into their left hands, and one by one it seemed that all of the children became more aware of him. They began turning and peering at him with greater eagerness. Huang Fa spotted saliva dripping down the chin of one starving girl toddler, drooling down from a mouth full of fangs.

Suddenly the sorcerer snarled a curse, almost spitting his words, and hurled the dragon tooth through the darkness. Huang Fa jerked, as one sometimes will in his sleep, as he tried to dodge. The fang slapped Huang Fa in the chest.

His eyes sprang open.

He stood, heart pounding in fear at the terrible dream. It is just my guilt that haunts me , he reassured himself. Someday I will forget it .

The sun cast immeasurable shadows. He glanced behind and saw it sailing over the edge of the world, hanging beneath some clouds like a red, staring eye.

“Ai!” he whispered to the Taoist monk, still wrestling his fear. “I had a terrible dream.”

“Tell me what you saw, and perhaps I can divine the meaning,” the monk suggested.

It had been so vivid, Huang Fa could still feel where the dragon’s tooth had hit him. He reached down to touch the spot — and found the dragon’s tooth lodged in the hair of his sheepskin vest.

The monk gaped at the tooth.

Huang Fa peered all around the plains, to see if someone could have thrown it, but all that he could see was rippling fields of grass.

That’s when he knew. The sorcerer had thrown the tooth at him — a distance of more than three hundred li.

“It does not take a divine scholar,” the monk said, “to know that sorcerer has rejected your apology.”

Darkness came, and with it came the howling of wolves and the cries of hunting cats in the desert. Huang Fa and the monk loped up a hill, and far in the distance, miles away, they spotted the bright-colored silk pavilions of the caravan. The pavilions, made in the peaked Arab style, had lamps and campfires lit within, and each glowed a different color like radiant gems in the desert in shades of ruby and tourmaline, diamond and sapphire. The pavilions beckoned, but Huang Fa’s legs felt like lead. “A march of a single night would bring us to the wizard’s caravan.”

“I cannot go on,” the monk begged, panting. “The stars are strangely dark tonight.” He leaned over and grabbed his knees, trying to catch his breath.

It was true. There was a cloudy haze across the heavens, obscuring the River of Stars. Huang Fa had a star chart, painted upon a silken map, that could help guide a man across the desert at night, but on a night like this it would be no use. “We should camp,” the monk suggested. “A man who races headlong in the night is sure to fall in a hole.”

Huang Fa considered lighting a knot of grass and using it as a torch, but felt reluctant to do so. It might attract unwanted eyes. He glanced behind him, with an uncanny certainty that he was being watched.

In his dream that night the feral children stalked him.

He dreamt first that the moon was out, as bright as a mirror of beaten silver, and by its light he saw a strange creature — grand and majestic. It was an elk, he thought, or something like an elk. Its hair was as pale as cotton and it stood taller than two men; its antlers had many tines and were so broad that a man could have lain between them. At first he thought that there were cobwebs between the tines, but then he realized that it was a thickening of the horn, unlike any that he had seen upon an elk before.

The creature mesmerized him. Never had he seen such a regal animal, so full of power and strength.

Then he heard a rustling behind, and realized that something was creeping toward him through deep grass. He whirled and glimpsed pale bodies, naked children sneaking on all fours, like wolves on the trail of a wounded ibex. He was not sure if they were after him or the majestic elk.