Even now he could hardly look at the giant without having the image of Owen’s death flash through his mind. Draken often found himself wondering what misspoken word or deed might set the giant off again.
Myrrima saw what was happening, and she told Rain. “Now that we know Aaath Ulber’s problems, we must face them.”
“Face them how?” Rain asked.
“There are runes that I can draw on him—runes to bring forgetfulness from hurtful memories, runes to help calm him, like a troubled sea.”
With that, Myrrima got a bucket and threw it into the sea, then pulled up the rope.
With the seawater, she went to Aaath Ulber, who was at the helm, and drew some runes upon his brow to help soothe his mind—not that he seemed any great threat at the moment.
Though Rain tried to avoid Aaath Ulber, she couldn’t do so completely. Late in the morning on the third day he grabbed Rain just after breakfast.
“Right, then,” he said, staring at her as if she were a brood mare. He grabbed her thin biceps, squeezed, and then smiled. The effect was chilling, for his oversized canines showed as if he was baring his fangs. “Let’s see what we’ve got here, girl.”
Aaath Ulber had Rain come to the captain’s deck; there he gave her a heavy chunk of wood and had her lunge with it, practicing sword drills in order to strengthen her arms. He made her swing until Rain fell into tears, and then he stopped and let her rest, warning, “The wyrmlings won’t give you a break, child.”
When she was rested, he forced her to go through various routines of lunges and dodges, until she felt as if she’d faint.
“Too little food, and too little exercise,” Aaath Ulber had said gently. “But we’ll get you toughened up.”
Rain was furious with him, certain that he sought an excuse to criticize her. But Aaath Ulber forced everyone in the company to join in battle practice that first day.
He began his lessons by telling them, “Fighting a wyrmling isn’t like fighting a man. They’ll outweigh you by five or six hundred pounds. So you won’t be fighting level, eye-to-eye. Nor can you hope to take a blow from one and survive. You can’t parry their attacks—they’re too strong. A strike from a wyrmling ax will shatter every bone in your body.
“So you’ll have to begin by forgetting everything that you know about how to fight.
“Your best and only defense is to avoid getting hit. We’ll practice evasive tactics—dodges and leaps to help you get away from your opponent.
“You won’t wear heavy armor—a little silken armor would be best, if you wear any at all. Chain mail or plate will just slow you down, and it won’t do much to soften a wyrmling’s blows.
“But better than defense is a good offense.
“Wyrmlings have long arms. Their strike zone is larger than yours. So you must perfect your lunges. Your goal will be to lunge in, strike quickly, and get back out of the wyrmling’s strike zone before the monster can ever deliver a blow.
“More than that, your attacks must be effective. You must make certain that when you strike, you don’t just draw blood. Try to make every blow a killing blow, or at least a crippling blow. You’ll strike for the arteries in the groin, or a kidney, or a blow to the lungs. You want to fight with economy and grace, because as soon as you take down one wyrmling, the chances are that another will charge in behind to take its place.”
“What if a wyrmling just comes out swinging?” Rain asked. “I mean, you said that they put harvester spikes in their necks and then go into a killing rage.”
“When that happens, you must figure out how to steal the initiative. A feint, a shout, a misdirected gaze—any one of these can cause your opponent to freeze for just an instant, and in that instant you must strike.”
So Rain practiced lunges hour after long hour, day after day, until her thighs and calves ached from hard use, and her arms felt as heavy as lead.
They were under full sail, following the coast northward.
The captain’s cabin, being the finest room aboard ship, was given to Rain.
That left Myrrima and Sage in the crew’s quarters, while Draken slept in the hold with his father and the goats, when he could sleep at all.
But Draken could not rest, he found that first day. It wasn’t his father’s snoring that kept him awake, nor was it the goats nibbling on his clothes.
It was Rain that kept him awake, his desire for her.
He’d been in love now for two months, and he looked forward to the day when he could marry.
As was the custom in Landesfallen, he’d promised himself to the girl when he was young, but it would be years before they could wed—three or four, at the least.
He needed to purchase his own land, build a house, dig a well, then plow and plant his fields for a couple of seasons, in order to prove that the ground could grow crops. He needed to plant trees and berry bushes, and it would take a few years for them to mature so that they’d bear enough fruit to support a small family.
He needed to accumulate livestock—a milk cow, some pigs and chickens. If he was lucky, he might even be able to afford a horse.
Three years it would take to prepare for a proper marriage, maybe four or five.
But the world had turned upside down.
He couldn’t see himself buying land anytime soon, or planting crops. It was as if his dreams were slipping away, moment by moment, like the land that slipped behind them with each passing mile.
Draken’s father steered the ship through the daytime, while Draken took the rudder at night.
He found himself yearning to be alone with Rain. So he was glad that night when she came to him in the early hours and sat cuddling against him “for warmth.”
He wrapped his arm around her protectively, and struggled gamely to resist the urge to make love.
Draken broke out in a sweat as his desire for her grew; he often found his heart pounding.
As they sailed, the ocean lit up from beneath. Large gray squids had gathered in a huge school that spanned miles, and as they rose from the water, they would flash fluorescent blue and actinic white, driving the fish from the lower depths up to the surface.
So the ocean was alive with the sounds of fish leaping and slapping their tails in the water, even as the squids put on their light show.
Draken supposed that this was some new wonder in the world. Perhaps these squids hadn’t existed in the oceans before the great binding. Perhaps they had come from the shadow world.
Yet the spectacle was peaceful, beautiful. Sometimes entire fields of light would burst up at once, as hundreds of squids strobed. It was like watching a lightning show down in the water.
As Rain cuddled against him, she looked longingly to the east for a bit, to the dark woods of Landesfallen.
“You know,” she said. “You and I could get off this ship still. We could go inland and make a life for ourselves. We could forget about my family and your family, and just start over. We could be a family.”
There was such yearning in her voice that Draken wanted to agree. The idea had its attractions. They could try to live off the land, eat burrow bears and rangits.
It sounded like a grand adventure.
She was willing to forgo the comforts of civilization with him, the amenities that most girls demanded.
But as a young man, Draken had patrolled the inland with the Gwardeen, flying over the wastes upon the back of a giant white graak.
Landesfallen was a remarkably inhospitable continent, rocky and hot in the interior, with vast deserts of red sand that blew in raging sandstorms during the summer. The only habitable places had been on the coasts, which were now underwater, and along the banks of a few of the larger rivers. That prime farming land had all been claimed hundreds of years ago.
But there were folks who made a living in the interior of the continents—crazed treasure hunters who went exploring the deep caverns where the toth had once lived a thousand years before. Then there were the gold seekers and opal hunters who went scrabbling over the rocks all year long, living off of lizard meat and desert tortoises and the grubs that they dug up from giant termite mounds.