The Mapmaker's War (7 page)

Once, you encountered a young girl who greeted you for no apparent reason. She twisted a blue hair ribbon around her finger. How odd that she knew your native tongue and was unusually helpful. She refused your offer of a coin. Others had insisted, for no better information than a suggestion to look below the sun and under the moon.

As wide a world as it is, you did manage to trail him. Remember, Wyl was likable. He didn't engender suspicion or fear. He might have been generous with his fellows at times. Cautiously, you hoped. Wealth like that wouldn't go unnoticed.

One day you received a clue that he had been seen. The one who wears a coin at his throat? someone said when you asked after him. A coin? you thought. The amulet was the size of a coin. He must have decided to display it for protection.

Then you got lost, or so it seemed. The road disappeared. It ended in the middle of nowhere. You remembered the incantation the young interpreter had told you. The wind quieted, and you could hear water. You walked toward the trickle and followed the flow for many miles. You were utterly alone, lost in the world.

Of those days and nights you remember little, as if you had dreamed them. The animals were familiar, although at times you saw a creature you had never seen before. Most of the trees and plants were similar to what you'd known but somehow not. You trapped game or caught fish. You gathered fruit, bird-pecked, worm-nibbled.

You used the incantation to guide you. Animals and insects caught your eye, and you followed them. Sometimes you misread what revealed itself. You were still learning how to use the power of those words. Once, you felt led to a small hut. Inside, the space was neat and spotless. On a table there was a large wooden bowl filled with dried peas, and a metal pot with a heavy lid. You filled a quarter of the pot with peas. You gathered wood and built a fire in the hearth. You fetched water, then cooked the stolen food. You returned everything as it was, clean. You left a piece of silver for what you had taken.

You made a point to observe the land. You watched the movement of stars, the peel of the moon. You who had lived by maps were without direction in an unknown location. No one knew where you were, if you were alive or dead. Although you thought you should be afraid, you weren't. You felt no concern beyond what you would eat or where you could sleep. There was a peace to the unmooring.

A part of you chanted. I escaped. I escaped.

Then one afternoon, unseen forces brought the two of you back together. You don't know how or why. So much cannot be explained. You almost didn't recognize him, or he, you. He had grown a beard, roughly groomed. His hair was long, with a blunt trim.

Wyl! you shouted.

You ran through ferns and fallen leaves. You watched his expression shift from suspicion to recognition. You jumped on him like a spider and wrapped him within your limbs like prey. You cannot remember whether you kissed him. | why does that still seem to matter? |

There was a task to do. You couldn't linger. Wyl expected the quest to be easier, and you sensed it wouldn't be. You wondered why the young woman had given you the incantation. You weren't certain how it worked, but you'd used the words. It led you to safety more than once, going through instead of around trees. There are links and gaps, said the young interpreter. Notice the trunks of trees. Yes, you would go into their hollows instead of around them. You thought about when you used the incantation. Did you need it for food or shelter? What was happening? You often received what you needed, but how would you find a dragon and hoard?

It was an accident, a test. A mental focus.

Where is the dragon? you thought.

You imagined the creature as best you could. You repeated the incantation quietly inside. Before, you had said it aloud, but then you were alone. You thought Wyl might think you mad. If he didn't, you sensed the words had powers best not exploited. You had been entrusted with them. No matter what you felt for Wyl, you were never thoroughly unguarded. It wasn't that you felt he'd take advantage. You though it possible he'd share it with someone who would. Someone nefarious like Raef. Or Raef himself. You two were there because of him anyway.

Wyl trusted you because of your work. You were a mapmaker. You had studied a navigable world in miniature, hadn't you? But you followed more than land. You looked to the skies, the stars, the movement of birds.

You were near a glade. You saw a swallow dash over the ground and disappear in the forest. Such a bird preferred open spaces. You were curious. You entered where it had, took several steps, stood still. You heard a buzz at your ear, then looked ahead as a small bright speck whizzed into the gaping hole in a dead tree. Its petrified trunk straddled the ground, hollow through and through. You approached it, then stopped. You called Wyl to follow. Another winged hum, a bee, flew into the hollow, the link.

As you walked into the hole, you entered a gap. You stepped through to the other side. You crossed into the realm. There, the air was light and conductive. Although it wasn't a cold day, the air had an autumn crispness. Had there been an animal to stroke, its fur would have snapped and stood on end. All was vibrant.

The surroundings looked as you might expect given the geography. The trees, the plants, the light. Yet it was different, somehow even more beautiful and alive.

You walked not so long, as long as it takes a good fire to boil a pot of water. The trees edged what you had expected to be another glade, but it wasn't. Beyond the narrow strip of sod was the foot of a mountain. You repeated the incantation in your mind. There was another swallow, a dart at your left, then out of sight. You and Wyl walked in that direction, around the mountain's base. The area smelled of metal, slightly of smoke.

You saw the wide welcoming entrance to a cave. Wyl wished to enter, so you did. The anticipated darkness yielded more to light. The great cavern was filled with objects made of gold, silver, and copper and decorated with jewels, stones, and designs. Vessels, pots, cups, cauldrons, daggers, swords, shields, helmets, rings, necklaces, buckles, bracelets. It was a hoard you couldn't have dreamed or imagined. You both were beyond words among such riches.

You noticed another entrance within. It was a glowing space framed in wood carved in a repetitive pattern. The horizontal timber was inlaid with overlapping circles of gold and silver. The union between them was amethyst. You stared long at the design's simple beauty.

Beyond the threshold was a step. Beyond that step, another. A spiral staircase had been chiseled into themountain's body. The corridor was a coil of soft light. Whoever had built the place covered the walls and ceiling with reflective metals, crystals, and jewels. You stepped through light hopeful as dawn, calming as candle glow. The space defied reason.

Neither of you complained of the climb. Neither wondered how long it would take or what you might find. You had not seen the size of the mountain, its height or breadth. You had no sense of its enormity or which dimension the staircase builder had chosen to follow.

The air became cooler. A breeze glided past. The light intensified. You squinted. Then there was sky, solid smooth blue. Your head and shoulders pushed into its depth. You emerged on the mountaintop. It was flat in parts, craggy in others. There was a copse of trees, some in fruit, some in bloom. You explored the landscape. Wyl went in one direction, you in the other. You reached the edge first.

What did you see?

You aren't certain.

Sometimes you remember a vast forest fed by the curve of a river. You recall a distant ocean, gentle as sleep, blue green blue green. There, too, was a desert, a broad seamless yellow. And still you ponder a valley that breathed in colors, a lap of flowers, an embrace of blooms. Impossible, all of it. It was one, or nothing. Wasn't it?

Wyl joined you at your side. He smoothed his hand against your head, neck, ended at your back. Neither of you spoke, but your eyes conveyed awe. You stood with him at the top of the spiral, where the world turned from the rupture from which it had sprung.

He led you to an indentation in the rock. The space was lined with moss and straw. The cozy nest of a giant bird, it seemed. Wyl lifted his arm. He held a clear elliptical object with a jagged top and rounded edges. A diagonal crack reached to its center.

A dragon's scale, said he.

You shook your head.

This is its lair.

Your head swung like a plumb. No no, no no.

You were suddenly starving. You picked fruit from the trees. Fruit that you knew grew in different seasons and climates, all ripe at once. You filled a pouch at your hip. You ate a perfect fig as small as your thumb. You remember that. It was the only raw one you had ever eaten.

When you descended and emerged from the cavern, night had come. Still, the wood-framed stair entrance glowed. You were dreaming, you decided. Only a dream. Yet it continued as you drank from a spring near the foot of the mountain, ate the fruit with Wyl under a light-splintered sky, and fell asleep in each other's arms on a cushion of ferns.

You dreamed more that you awoke and found him with the hoard. He cut the space in front of him to shreds with a sword. His movements were graceful, arousing, but not playful.

This is no mere dragon's hoard. It's the store of a great army, said Wyl.

He speculated that the wealth and weaponry were unlike any they could have imagined. He handed the sword to you. It was beautiful, with a balance even you could feel.

There are far more items for domestic use and adornments, you said.

The rest of the weapons must be in use. In hand.

No, perhaps not.

Likely so.

So literal, Wyl.

Good that I am. I must warn my father and our people.

You knew you couldn't reason with him. Not in the state he'd created for himself. He hadn't seen what you had in the settlement. He had not felt what you had. A deep peace that belied this evidence.

A day and a night cycled. The dragon didn't appear, not as you expected. Neither of you knew the habits of such a beast. Where it might go, for how long. You decided to leave. Wyl believed he had his proof. He wanted to take one of the fine daggers but chose not to in the end. The spontaneous thought came that Raef would not have been as honest as his brother.

You were not blameless, however. You wanted to take something, a bracelet or a chalice, but you resisted the gold's lure. A childish part of you wondered whether dragons took tallies of their possessions and sought their stolen treasures. If there were dragons, of course.

The task complete, you departed. Before you left, you turned back to look. What you saw perhaps was not a cloud.

A red fleeting shape.

You left accompanied by a man who was not your relative or husband, your captor or guard.

There you were alone with Wyl. You were more alone than you had ever been or would be again. Your lives before seemed distant, unreal, the rhythm of it jarring. Buttons, buckles, beltings. Walk again in those shoes on that soft forest floor under dappled light. Watch the man stripped of his title, his horse, his responsibilities, his future. Watch him move steadily, sure-footed. Feel that emptiness, the awareness of nothing but the ghost of your name and the pulsebreath of your body.

And his body. Wyl in the flesh.

Oh, you were caught in a timeless place where you both would always be young and firm. Infirmity, impossible.

You weren't ashamed that you found him beautiful and virile. That first time, you had no shame because there was nothing familiar about your life then to be so. Once it was done, it could not be undone. You had. You did.

One morning you woke up without him near your side. You found him and for a moment watched as he bathed in a stream, oblivious. You moved away from the shrubs to the narrow path that deer had trampled to the water. Wyl, lean, strong, bare. What was so long hidden plainly revealed. He glanced toward you. He sensed your stare. | woman, what happened to the impulse to turn your head? | Because you didn't look away and he didn't seek cover, he approached you. You could not believe how fast his blood rose. The air on your skin a caress. His skin on yours a shock. You wanted to bite him, so you did. His neck exposed, a taut tendon. When your forces joined, you laughed. Yes, you laughed, until the human in you became bestial again. Until Wyl's weight released you full to the ground. Until he lay flat at your side, attempted composure, and gave way to a mirthful howl.