Robin Hobb - The Dragon Keeper

She gave a shudder of weariness, and the memory faded beyond her recall. She was only a single serpent, struggling to weave the case that would protect her from winter’s cold while her body underwent its transformation. A single serpent, cold and weary, finally come home after an eternity of roaming. Her mind drifted back over the last few months.

The final leg of her journey had seemed an endless battle against the river current and the rocky shallows. She was a newcomer to Maulkin’s tangle and astonished by it. Usually a tangle numbered twenty to forty serpents. But Maulkin had gathered every serpent he could find and led them north. It had made foraging for food along the way far more difficult, but he had deemed it necessary. Never had she seen so many serpents travelling together as a single tangle. Some, it was true, had degenerated to little more than animals, and others were more than half-mad with confusion and fear. Forgetfulness shrouded the minds of too many. Yet as they had followed the prophet-serpent with the gleaming gold false-eyes in a long row down his flanks, she had almost recalled the ancient migration route. All around her, both spirits and intelligence had rallied in the embattled serpents. This arduous journey had felt right, more right than anything had for a very long time.

Yet even so, she had known moments of doubt. Her ancestral memories of the river told her that the waterway they sought flowed steady and deep, and teemed with fish. Her ancient dreams told her of rolling hills and meadows edged with open forests replete with game for hungry dragons. This river had a deep channel that a ship could follow, but it threaded a wandering way inland through towering forest thick with creepers and brush. It could not be the way to their ancient cocooning grounds. Yet Maulkin had doggedly insisted that it was.

Her doubt had been so strong that she had nearly turned back. She had almost fled the icy river of milky water and retreated to the warmer waters of the oceans to the south. But when she lagged or started to turn aside from the path, others of the serpents came after her and drove her back into the tangle. She had had to follow.

But though she might doubt Maulkin’s visions, Tintaglia’s authority she had never questioned. The blue-and-silver dragon had recognized Maulkin as their leader and assisted the strange vessel that guided his tangle. The dragon had flown above them, trumpeting her encouragement, as she shepherded the tangle of serpents north, and then up this river. The swimming had been good as far as the two-legs city of Trehaug. Wearily but without excessive difficulty, they had followed the ship that led the way.

But past that city, the river had changed. The guiding ship had halted there, unable to traverse the shallows beyond. Past Trehaug, the river spread and widened and splintered into tributaries. Wide belts of gravel and sand invaded it, and dangling vines and reaching roots choked its edges. The river they followed became shallow and meandering, toothed with rocks in some places and then choked with reeds in the next stretch. Again Sisarqua had wanted to turn back, but like the other serpents, she had allowed herself to be bullied and driven by the dragon. Up the river they had gone. With more than one hundred of her kind, she had flopped and floundered through the inadequate ladder of log corrals that the humans had built in an attempt to provide deeper water for their progress through the final, killing shallows.

Many had died on that part of their journey. Small injuries that would have healed quickly in the caressing salt water of the sea became festering ulcers in the river’s harsh flow. After their long banishment at sea, many of the great serpents were feeble both in mind and spirit. So many things were wrong. Too many years had passed since they had hatched. They should have made this journey decades ago, as healthy young serpents, and they should have migrated up the river in the warmth of summer, when their bodies were sleek with fat. Instead they came in the rains and misery of winter, thin and battered and speckled with barnacles, but mostly old, far older than any serpents had ever been before.

The single dragon that watched over them was less than a year’s turning out of her own cocoon. Tintaglia flew overhead, glinting silver whenever the winter sunlight broke through the clouds to touch her. “Not far!” she kept calling down to them. “Beyond the ladder the waters deepen again and you can once more swim freely. Keep moving.”

Some were simply too battered, too weary, too thin for such a journey. One big orange serpent died draped across the log wall of the penned water, unable to drag himself any farther. Sisarqua was close to him when his great wedge-shaped head dropped suddenly beneath the water. Impatiently, she waited for him to move on. Then his spiky mane of tendrils suddenly spasmed and released a final rush of toxins. They were faint and feeble, the last reflexive defences of his body, yet they clearly signalled to any serpents within range that he was dead. The smell and taste of them in the water summoned her to the feast.

Sisarqua had not hesitated. She had been the first to tear into his body, filling her mouth with his flesh, gulping it down and tearing another chunk free before the rest of the tangle even realized the opportunity. The sudden nourishment dizzied her almost as much as the rush of his memories. This was the way of her kind, not to waste the bodies of the dead but to take from them both nourishment and knowledge. Just as every dragon carried within him the memories of his entire line, so every serpent retained the memories of those who had gone before. Or was supposed to. Sisarqua and every other serpent wallowing dismally alongside her had remained in serpent form too long. Memories had faded and with them, intelligence. Even some of those who now strove to complete the migration and become dragons were reduced to brutish shadows of what they should have been. What sort of dragons would they become?

Her head had darted in, mane abristle, to seize another sizeable chunk of the orange serpent’s flesh. Her brain whirled with memories of rich fishing and of nights spent singing with his tangle under the jewel-bright skies. That memory was very old. She suspected it had been scores of years since any tangle had risen from the Plenty to the Lack to lift their voices in praise of the star-speckled sky above them.

Others had crowded her then, hissing and lifting their manes in threat to one another as they strove to share the feast. She tore a final piece of flesh free and then wallowed over the log that had stopped the orange. She had tossed the hunk of warm meat down whole and felt it distend her gullet pleasantly. The sky, she thought, and in response felt a brief stir of the orange serpent’s dim dragon-memories. The sky, open and wide as the sea. Soon she would sail it again. Not much farther, Tintaglia had promised.

But distance is measured one way by a dragon a-wing and quite another way by a battered serpent wallowing up a shallow river. They did not see the clay banks that afternoon. Night fell upon them, sudden as a blow, the short day spent almost before it had begun. For yet another night, Sisarqua endured the cold of the air that the shallow river did not allow her to escape. The water that flowed past was barely sufficient to keep her gills wet; the skin on her back felt as if it would crack from the dry cold that scoured her. And in the late morning, the sun that found its way down onto the wide river between the jungled banks revealed more serpents that would never complete the migration. Again, she was fortunate enough to feed from one of the corpses before the rest of the horde drove her away from it. Again, Tintaglia circled overhead, calling down the promise that it was not far to Cassarick and rest, the long peaceful rest of the transformation.