Paul Cook - Children of the Plains

“Arrogant as ever. He and Pakito and that old man Konza took off after the oxen Hatu’s riders chased away. Your dragon still can’t fly, but his senses are keener than a falcon’s, so I guess he’ll be helpful tracking the wayward beasts.”

He smelled the sourness of larchit paste. Nianki had peeled off the dressing of damp jenja leaves to apply a fresh layer of soothing paste to his chest wound. His eyelids felt weighed down by exhaustion. Fighting against the darkness that pulled at him, Amero yawned and said, “And how do you feel, Nianki?”

“I wasn’t injured.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She continued her ministrations, loading a twig with a gob of larchit paste. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she told him calmly. “Ever. Stop asking questions and get well.”

“Yes, Karada.” He sighed and allowed sleep to claim him once more.

Amero’s fever waxed and waned. On one of his good days, he was visited by Pakito. The giant warrior lifted Amero as though he were a small child and carried him outside.

The villagers and Nianki’s loyal nomads had formed a long human chain from the cliffs to the dragon’s cairn. Stones came down the line, passing from one pair of hands to the next until they reached the ceremonial rock pile. With a final heave, some of the sturdier nomads added the new stones to the pile. They must have been laboring for quite a while, Amero realized, for the cairn had almost doubled in length and width.

Reclining rather stiffly in Pakito’s mighty arms, Amero asked what was going on. Nianki, who had joined them, explained how the villagers needed some place to put the rubble from their ruined houses. At first they hauled the burned and broken rocks to the lake, then someone — no one could recall exactly who — suggested adding the rubble to the dragon’s altar. The idea took hold, and everyone joined in to complete the task.

“The dragon saved us, at peril to his own life,” explained Pakito. “We’re doing this to honor him, and you.”

“Where is Duranix?” asked Amero. It felt as though he hadn’t seen his friend in weeks.

“Sleeping off dinner,” Nianki said.

They watched the work in silence for a while. The cairn grew ever larger.

“The way they feel now,” Nianki said. “They’d pull down the mountain and throw it all on the pile, if it pleased the dragon.”

A chill mist filled the valley one night, and the next morning every stone and tree limb in the valley was coated with frost. The highest crags of the mountains turned white, and when the wind blew down from the heights, it brought the bite of winter with it.

The day Amero walked without a staff was the same day Duranix discarded his wing brace. Man and dragon faced each other on the sandy spit below the falls.

“Are you sure you don’t want your stick?” teased Duranix.

Amero raised his thin arms over his head and flapped them up and down. “Are you sure you don’t want your brace?”

The dragon spread his long, leathery wings and mirrored his friend’s movement, raising a cloud of grit. “No more braces for me,” he declared. “Today I fly!”

He launched himself into the air, wings flapping slowly. He drifted hack to the sand. Launching himself again, and working harder this time, he gained height. His long neck stood straight out from the strain, but he climbed upward in a wide spiral, testing his newly healed wing. It was exactly ninety days since he’d broken it.

Nianki appeared, draped in a mantle of white wolf fur. She watched Duranix disappear into the low clouds that roofed the valley. He roared with delight, and the eerie sound reverberated down the lake, causing people on both shores to look up from their work.

“Someone’s happy,” said Nianki dryly.

“Yes, me!” Amero turned in a little circle, showing her he wasn’t supported by anything. “See? I’m walking on my own.”

“It’s about time,” she replied tartly. “I was about to take Targun’s advice and shorten your walking stick a little bit each day. He figured you’d give it up when you discovered you were bent double.”

“Ha, thanks!”

Nianki turned away, and he followed her. They strolled down the water’s edge together.

“How goes the planting?” he asked. It was past time for the winter crops to go in, but so much work had been needed to repair houses and pens in the village, the second planting was late.

“It goes. The ground seems too cold and hard for anything to grow.”

“That’s all right. If anyone can grow vegetables through ice, it’s Jenla.”

Nianki nodded. “Smart woman. She should’ve been a nomad.”

They reached the southern end of the village. Piles of loose stones filled the circular holes where houses had once stood. These houses on the periphery had been demolished and their undamaged materials salvaged to repair the other homes. Most of the people who lived in them had perished in the fight.

“I’ve been thinking — ” Amero began.

“Oh, not again.”

He gave her a mock glare, then continued. “We’ve relied too much on Duranix to protect us. He is, as he will tell you himself, only one dragon. Yala-tene needs to be a safe haven, a stronghold that can survive even if Duranix is away for ten days or more. What we need is not a series of strong, individual houses, but a way to defend all the houses at once.”

The chill wind had strengthened. It whistled around her ears, as Nianki raised the white fur hood of her cloak. “How would you do that?” she asked, not really interested.

“As we do the cattle: put all the little houses into one big house!”

That caught her attention. She stopped and regarded him skeptically. “You want to build a house large enough to hold every family in Arku-peli? That’s mad! Even if you could, all those people living together wouldn’t last. They’d kill each other!”

Amero went to the stump of a wall, carefully lowering himself onto it. Many weeks of illness had left him with little stamina.

“I’m not talking about building a whole house to cover all the others, though that would be quite a feat.” He looked up at the overcast sky, a far-off expression on his face.

She sighed impatiently. “Get to the point, will you?”

“Sorry,” he said, looking at her again. He gestured with his hands, making a circle around himself and continued. “A wall, Nianki. We can build a wall around the village. That would keep any marauders out.”

She folded her arms. “You want to build a wall around the entire village?” He nodded. “Sounds like a waste of sweat and stone to me. All you really need is a hundred stout fighters to defend the place.”

“Every man and woman in Yala-tene could be trained to fight,” he countered. “Spears would be provided to every family, to be kept at home for use when there’s trouble.”

“All very well, but pairing off your mudtoes and having them whack each other a few times doesn’t make them warriors.”

“That’s where you come in.”

Nianki scoffing expression froze. “Me?”

“I want you to train them — teach them to fight like your best warriors. With you to train and lead them, Yala-tene will never have anything to fear.”

She leaned against the wall of the fallen house, feeling the cold stones press against her knees.

“Well?” he said.

A tiny flake of white floated down and came to rest on the back of Nianki’s hand. For an instant, the perfect miniature net of feathery ice crystals stood out clearly against her deeply tanned skin. Then, warmed by her body, the flake vanished.

“Snow,” she said. Nianki lifted her hooded face to the sky. More snowflakes were coming down now, but only a few.

“Nianki, will you stay and teach the people of Yala-tene how to defend themselves?” asked Amero insistently.