The Scribe: Once, we all rode dragons...
The Scribe
In a thousand years, we will not remember these days. What
Calla said to Mor, what secret loves were stamped upon trees.
What will be remembered is the scent of daffodils in damp
spring ground, the fire of the ship as it burned through the atmosphere and
tore pockets of earth. The particular pang of losing our last dragon.
Everyone will say they were there; how they'll remember it!
The little dragon, stunted and jewel green, mewling as the Other Men dug it out
of its bern and broke its neck. It was placed in a bag and taken back to their
ship. No one will remember how we crouched, frightened, with our useless
amulets and half-formed prayers in the heaps of our houses. They'll all recollect
marching against the interlopers, the dragon thieves. They all bore weapons,
but were struck down. Some died. Who? No one recalls.
It is the peculiar trait of our people that stories alone
are passed along through the centuries; audible and embellished, whispered and
shouted and turned into dance. But never written. A piece of the soul is taken
with each written word, it is said, and our souls belong to the dragons.
Who do they belong to, now that the last dragon is dead and
carted off to the world of the Other Men?
When I was a little mewling thing, I studied the way my
finger dragged through dust. Mor said, Better you not do it at all, but if you
must (perverted thing), do it on water. Let the traces disappear as soon as you
make them.
Ah, but they lived in my mind. For a few years, anyway. And
when I realized I could not make my mind remember everything I had ever
inscribed in water, I turned back to dirt.
Deep in the woods, where wolves and bears live, I first used
a stick. Then the knife of my brother, upon the bark of trees up high, so that
my people would not see. For they forage, and hunt the small game. They only
ever look up to see the dragons flying across the sky.
No one looks up anymore. They surround the charred bern and
hold hands, and tell stories of their bravery on the day the Other Men came. I
write on the trees deep in the woods, up high.
One per tree: the names of the dragons. There were five
hundred. And then, more trees for us: Calla, sister to Jena. Wife of Mor.
Another tree: My name, brother of Mor. Nothing else on that oak.
Five hundred of us. Our names peer at the dragon trees
through the branches, a labyrinth of memory in the deep woods. After half a
year, I climbed down and began again, brazenly low:
Felix, born when the crocuses were yet buds. Calla saw the
steam, brought us all to see the acorn in the earth. The acorn that would grow
to be a mighty dragon. His nostrils were still closed, tail wrapped tight
around, a sticky mess. In a week, he was unfurled, dry as old timber, bright as
the new grass.
Too small. No one mentioned it. Old Martyam was dying on the
mountain, her body part and parcel of the granite and snow. Mor said, She still
breathes! Only I said, It is clouds. Mor threatened to take his knife back. I
shrugged, and said maybe it was steam and smoke after all.
Calla drew us back to the infant dragon. Our hopes lit like
sparks, though it crawled on oddly bent legs.
We all remember when we were a great race. Everyone rode
dragons; we flew all over our planet, and returned with more stories. There was
even one dragon, a behemoth that could fly among the stars. Nahan rode him.
Nahan, who has not been seen in half a millennium. Was there ever such a
dragon? Or even a Nahan?
Perhaps, it occurs to me as I etch on a piece of cedar bark,
Nahan rode away on the magnificent star-traveler and brought the Other Men.
Perhaps Nahan is enslaved somewhere, along with his dragon, Gabriel. Perhaps he
is not enslaved, but lives as a king. Perhaps he sold us.
Felix was to be mine. This was known. I was the only one who
had lived without a dragon; the others had known them, had flown on hot, scaled
backs. But for centuries, the dragons had grown smaller, so that we carried
them. I didn't care that, now that my time had come, my dragon was barely
larger than a squirrel. Who needed to fly? I could climb trees and taste the
high winds, with Felix clinging to my back.
His wings weren't strong enough to lift him when the Other
Men came and broke his neck and took him away, and I am not standing around the
charred bern where he crawled.
Calla came to tell me she was going up the mountain to be
with Martyam. She is ancient; they are ancient. But still beautiful. She found
me with knife and birch; she saw her name but did not recognize it.
Your soul, she said.
Gone with Felix, I said, if it ever existed in the first
place.
I wanted to know. Why tell me, and not her husband?
She was silent, and after a while, she asked me to teach her
to write her name. Then she left. She will die with the old dragon on the
mountain, or die with the corpse of her. For those are clouds, I'm sure.
Four-hundred-and-ninety-nine, where once there were a
thousand. I have discovered a way of heating the blade, to make the mark deeper
and more permanent. It is not like breathing fire, not exactly, but here in the
deep woods, I am the first of my people to do this. We will not wither, and when
the Other Men come again, I will hold up my blade and mark them like trees.
