The Dragon Book (72 page)

It wasn’t the prettiest singing voice. It sounded like a man trying to sing around a mouthful of pebbles without spitting them out or swallowing them. But he sure knew a lot of verses to that old song, some changed around and others entirely new to me.

As he sang, he looked across the valley, as I had done, and I wondered how many leaf changes there were in a Dragaman’s life. Some say the Dragamen remember when there were no leaves, and no mountains either.

He sang and sang, and as I always was a fool for a song, I rightly lost track of the time. The air turned chill as the sun got lower, and just as it grazed the next ridgetop, the Dragaman turned his head and looked right into my eyes:

This gave me a start, and I flushed, embarrassed. The older magic-makers get, the better they are at spotting other magic-makers, and, of course, a Dragaman is older than just about anybody short of a rock. So I might have expected discovery if I sat still long enough. I squared my shoulders, pushed through the laurel, and walked down the hill toward the Dragaman, who continued to sing:

The words were harsh, but the Dragaman didn’t look angry. His eyes twinkled. Since they were the size of twin pie pans, that was a lot of twinkle.

“Well met, Grandfather,” I said, because that’s how one politely addresses the oldest beings, whether related or not.

“Don’t you ‘Grandfather’ me, Miss Cute-as-a-Bug,” said the Dragaman. “Your airs are wasted on someone as wicked as me.” He patted the mountainside, nearly knocking me off my feet again. “Come warm yourself, little one. You can’t sit in my lap, now,” he added, winking, “because I’m spoken for.”

“I wouldn’t have sat in it anyhow,” I snapped, settling myself onto the grass beside him, but my, he
did
put out the warmth. It was like getting neighborly with a steamboat boiler. “You ain’t even introduced yourself proper,” I said.

“That’s true, Miss Nose-out-of-Joint,” said the Dragaman, but he seemed in no hurry to rectify matters. Dragamen seldom hurry. He took a long draw on his pipe, then sighed and let the smoke roll out of his great nostrils to be lost in the evening sky. The sun had dropped out of sight as it always does in the mountains, all of an instant, and the glow of the pipe’s kettle-sized bowl was now our chief source of light. “My name,” he finally said, “is Pike. Cauter Pike. And when I say ‘my name,’ I mean only what I’ve gone by the past century or two, in the language that you know.”

“My name is Pearleen Sunday, and it’s the only name I’ve ever had.”

“You’ll earn others, in time,” Cauter Pike said. “You’re just a slip of a thing yet.”

I couldn’t disagree. In the complicated ways of wizards, I was physically about nineteen, but the cold drugstore-calendar mathematics of subtracting birth year from present year yielded a number that was pushing sixty, while in my own mind I was sometimes twelve and sometimes older than Methuselah, depending on my mood. A wizard’s adolescence lasts a long time, which is one reason I don’t recommend the life to anyone who has a choice in the matter. I had none, myself.

“So tell me, Pearleen Sunday,” said Cauter Pike, “why the mustache?”

“It’s not real,” I said, quickly. “It’s a hex, a glamour. Just like the short hair, the shoulders, the stubble on my chin.” I rubbed my face, felt only smoothness but heard the
skritch-skritch
that meant the spell still worked. Appearing as a man was one of my handiest skills. “A man traveling alone gets into fewer scrapes than a woman, in these troubled times,” I said. Those troubled times had lasted my entire life to date and likely would continue a lot longer, but you can’t explain to a Dragaman how tough things can be for womankind. I also didn’t mention, because I was ashamed to admit it, that hex or no hex, the mustache tickled my lip something awful.

“Seems a shame to cover up all that pretty,” said Cauter Pike, “but you know best, I’m sure. Of course, I can see right through any hex.” He dragged on his pipe, and in the light from the flaring bowl, his expression suggested that he saw through not just the hex but everything else I had on. I tugged my jacket closed and folded my arms together, and the Dragaman laughed, in deep volleys that echoed among the hills like cannon fire.

“So what brings you to my mountains, Miss Priss-and-Proper?”

“If they’re
your
mountains,” I replied, nettled, “then you ought to know.” But I went on to tell him that as a student of the art, I traveled the country, teaching myself the magics that were done in different ways in different places by different people. “Around these parts, for example, I’m learning my way through Hohman’s book,
The Long Lost Friend
. It’s from the Pennsylvania Dutch, and it’s hex-magic and Jesus-magic mixed together. Do you know it?”

“Never did much book reading myself,” said Cauter Pike. “They might be of some use if the dang things weren’t made of paper.” He poked a tree trunk with a slablike index finger, held it there a few seconds, and left a seared and smoking patch in the wood.

“I understand completely,” I told him, wondering how I’d get through even a week without reading, much less a Dragaman’s lifetime. “Mr. Pike, I heard something at the store in Catawba this afternoon that troubles my mind. Do you know anything about—”

Before I could finish the sentence, Cauter Pike had snuffed out his pipe and sprung into a crouch, his bulk silhouetted against the dark blue sky. He cocked his head and peered downslope.

I looked, too, and saw a distant swinging light. A lantern. Three lanterns. Men’s voices, coming this way.

Cauter Pike sniffed once, twice, for all the world like a frighted deer. Then he whispered:

“I got to go, Pretty-My-Pearl, but come up to Buzzard’s Rock one evening. We’ll have you to supper.”

He turned and, without another word, disappeared.

Now for a Dragaman to move from his man-shape into his flying-shape takes only about as long as buttering a biscuit, but Cauter Pike had not stayed put even that long. He had done something else.

Like some other creatures in the hills, and all the oldest ones, the Dragamen are sidewinders. They can turn themselves sideways to the world and slip out of sight—unless you know what to look for, and look quick.

What I looked for and saw was the Dragaman’s shadow, just a thin strip crawling along the ground like a blacksnake, and out of sight in an instant, as if it had poured through a crack in the earth.

I thought about hiding myself in a similar way, but curiosity got the upper hand, so I walked down the hill in my own man-shape as the men in the hunting party crashed through the laurel, rifles in their hands. At sight of me, they shouted.

“Who’s there?”

“Are you alone?”

“Your hands, mister! Show us your hands!”

I raised my hands, tried to blink away the brightness; someone was holding a lantern in my face. Another someone searched me for weapons, and none too gently, either. But the glamour held, and he felt nothing he wouldn’t expect to feel on a man’s rough body.

“Where’s your badge, son?” asked the man with the lantern.

“No badge, sir,” I said. “I’m no Revenuer. I’m a stranger in these parts, and mean no harm.” What I heard when I spoke was my own Pearl-voice, which still sounded childish in my ears but for the little rasp I had picked up in my travels, like I might need to clear my throat directly. What the men heard was a man-voice that matched the man-image and man-clothes that I presented in their minds. “Y’all hunting possums? I didn’t hear your hounds.”

The lantern was lower now, and by it I saw the bald head and heavy jowls of the old man who held it. I knew his face, and if I had presented myself true, he might have remembered mine, too, from the Catawba Grocery that day at noon. He had held forth loudly to the clerk, while I had eased about the shelves filling my basket, and listening.

“Law, nothing,” the old man had said. “Don’t talk to me about obeying the law!” He hacked at an apple with a pocketknife, not peeling it like a patient man but chipping away at the skin. On each outstroke he flipped a little red dot onto the floor. “Ain’t no law says we got to let them take our children.”

“Calm yourself, Ash Harrell,” said the clerk, watching the pile of red shavings like he wouldn’t appreciate having to sweep them up. “She’ll come back. She’ll be fine, you’ll see, just like the others.”

“Cut up like hogs, you mean,” said the old man called Ash Harrell. “She’d be better off—” But instead of saying the next word, he slung the flayed apple into the sandbox beneath the stove and stomped out of the store, slamming the screen door and knocking sideways the Colonial Bread sign.

“May I help you, Miss?” asked the clerk, looking relieved to speak to anyone who was not Ash Harrell. But when I asked what all the fuss had been about, he only shook his head, and said, “You’re best shut of it, Miss, believe me.”

Those things I had mused about, on that warm, flat rock up the mountain: who had run away from Ash Harrell, and who had been cut like hogs, and why the law was to blame.

Now here was Ash Harrell in front of me, looking no better tempered than before, and a good sight more scary.

“Ain’t hunting
possums
,” said the old man, nearly spitting his contempt. Lighted from below, his deeply shadowed expression was murderous. “You pass anyone, Mister? Up the mountain?”

“No, sir,” I said. A lie is the easiest magic there is. Just saying something can make it so, if you say it right. The old man looked unconvinced, but instead of replying, he reached a mottled hand into a pocket of his overalls.

“Mr. Ash,” said one of the others. “Mr. Ash, we got to go.” The four other men in the group were younger. The old man was stern as a deacon, but the boys were definitely spooked. They looked as if every swaying tree limb was about to dump a Behinder on their heads, or every wind-ripple in the tall grass was the wake left by a Flat with sharp teeth. If they’d ever been taught to keep their guns pointed at the ground, they’d forgot it now. I didn’t like the way those twin barrels waved around, like hard black eyes seeking a face to look into.

The old man had produced a cracked and crimpled photograph. He handed it to me, fingers trembling and slow as if he didn’t want to give it up. He aimed the lantern so the redheaded girl’s pretty face was bright in my palm.

“Come on, Mr. Ash.”

“Shut up,” Mr. Ash said, absently and without malice, as you would address a barking dog. “You seen this girl? You seen my daughter?”

“No, sir.”

“She hides it in this picture, but there’s a little gap in her front teeth, and she laughs deep like a man. You sure you ain’t seen her? Maybe in the next county?” He paused. “Or in Roanoke, with all the … the working girls?”

“No, sir, I’m sorry. How long has she been gone?”

“Three months this Friday,” he said. He snatched back the photograph and shoved it into his pocket without looking at it, as if it were a cash receipt.

“Mr. Ash, we’re gonna miss ’em.”

“No, we ain’t,” the old man said. “They got to drive around the spur and up the grade, while we cut across. We’ll beat ’em by ten minutes, easy.”

“If someone doesn’t warn ’em first,” said a new, rough voice, nearly in my ear. Its owner kneed me in the back, and I staggered.

After a moment’s thought, the old man gestured with his rifle. “Good thinking, Silas. You better come with us, Mister.”

“Why?” I asked. Silas seized my arm, as if to dig his fingers into my very bones. “Ow!” I said, less from the pain than from the anger that gouted from him. The Sight is the least developed of my gifts, but I can’t help thought-reading when someone takes serious hold of me. Out loud, I asked the question his touch was already answering: “What do y’all think you’re doing?”