“No, wait!” Callio called out, hand upraised. “I have waited long enough, morsel,” Stegoman rumbled.
“Wizards, mount!”
But Papa turned to the thief before he boarded “What is it, then?”
“I thank you,” Callio said lamely. After all, there wasn’t really much more he could say. “Glad to help “
Matt settled in among Stegoman’s plates. “There is great satisfaction in having given even this small advice,” Papa assured Callio. The thief eyed him peculiarly. “You have a strange notion of pleasure.”
“I must, or I would never have become a teacher,” Papa told him. “Try it sometime. You may find that helping others is more rewarding than robbing them.” He gave Callio a parting smile, then climbed aboard the dragon. Stegoman ran away from Callio, huge wings beating, and climbed into the air. He banked around man and cart once, gaining altitude, then arrowed away toward the windmill… but that one circling was enough for them all to see Callio pulling a shovel from his cart and beginning to dig.
The owner of the mill, as it turned out had been ingenious, he had built over a well, and connected the sails to a windlass that pulled a chain of buckets. It took Papa only a few minutes to figure out how to put the contraption into gear, and the sails pumped him a tank full of water. They put the hams in to soak while Stegoman went hunting for stray mavericks, but it was a comfort to know that even if he didn’t find any, he was assured of a full belly in the morning. Meanwhile, Matt scrounged up a couple of sacks of meal that the miller had apparently overlooked on his way out, lit a fire on the hearth, found a cracked skillet that the family hadn’t thought worth taking along, and managed a reasonable facsimile of tortillas to go with their salt beef stew. They were just about to sit down when there was a knock at the door.
They traded glances of puzzled alarm, then Matt stood up and slipped toward the door, drawing his sword, while Papa called out, “Yes?”
“Shelter, gentles, I pray you!” called a voice they knew even though it was muffled by oak. Matt relaxed, sheathing his sword, and opened the door to find a dirty thief, sagging with weariness. “I think there will be rain,” he said, “and I’d liefer have a better roof over me than the bottom of my cart.”
“Good thought.” Matt waved him in, touching his wallet as the thief passed. He had a notion he was going to have to guard it closely. He barred the door and turned to find Papa on his feet, beckoning
Callio to a seat by the fire. “Welcome, welcome indeed!”
“I… I thank you.” Callio sat down on a rough wooden chair, but his eyes and his nose turned automatically to the fire and the cooking pot. “Surely you must share our dinner!” Papa told him. “It is rough fare, but travelers cannot be epicures. Matthew, a bowl for our friend?”
Matt pulled the spare bowl from his pack and filled it with stew. Callio accepted it with a sigh. “You are friends indeed, for the sky does indeed look like rain, and my things would have been soaked if I hadn’t buried them as you said!”
“No trouble finding planks, then?” Matt asked. “None at all… I’d found some near a sawmill, solid oak, beautifully grained, and even some sailcloth for mending another mill. The boards were part of my treasure, and I covered them with the canvas.”
“Well, that oughta do it.” Matt settled on the center chair and picked up his bowl again. “Hey, don’t burn your throat!”
“I shall try not to.” Callio picked a strip of meat out on the point of his knife and blew on it to cool it.
“But I am so very hungry!”
“Yes… the refugees seem to have been bound and determined not to leave any food for the invading army,” Matt said, frowning. Of course, Callio couldn’t bring himself to eat any of his loot. Callio nodded. “I’ve never seen a countryside so stripped of anything that could be eaten.” He tucked the meat into his mouth and chewed. Matt agreed “Good thing it’s so early in spring, and the crops scarcely sprouting, or the farmers would probably have burned their fields as they retreated.”
“What a waste,” Callio mumbled around his meat. “War always has a bad effect on crop yield,” Papa said. Callio swallowed heavily and asked nervously, “What of the dragon?”
“Oh, he’ll be okay,” Matt said. “He’ll find something to eat, even if it’s only a mountain goat… but if it really does rain, he’ll find a cave for the night.”
“He will not come back to sleep in the mill?” Callio asked, relieved. Matt shook his head. “Can’t get him through the doorway. He might try the stables back there in town, especially if they left a horse or two… but he won’t come back here until morning.”
“A lonely night for him,” Callio sighed. “He’s used to it,” Matt said. “Dragons are basically solitary creatures. Oh, they like company, but they don’t feel they have to have a whole herd around them.”
“Unlike people?” Papa asked, smiling. “We do seem to be social creatures,” Matt said. “Maybe that’s why empty towns are so depressing.”
“Places where the flock used to be, but is no longer?” Papa nodded. “There is sense to that.”
Thinking of the emptiness of the land loosed a tide of melancholy. Matt laid down his empty bowl and glowered into the fire. “Haven’t done much, have we? Most of Ibile is still a conquered Moorish province, its people fled to rally to their king.”
“True, but the Mahdi isn’t marching against that king yet,” Papa protested. “He has only mounted a diversion, then turned to camp by the Pyrenees.”
“Only because he’s waiting to fall on my wife as she comes out of the mountains with every soldier she’s got!”
Callio stared, wide-eyed and chewing, wondering what he’d wandered into.
“Meanwhile, Bordestang is besieged, and I’ve left my poor little mother to try to defend it!”
“Your ‘poor little mother’ is a holy terror, if she is angered,” Papa reminded, “and this war is scarcely begun. Be of good cheer, my son… it is not that you have lost, but that you have only begun to fight.”
Papa clapped him on the shoulder. “You must not blame yourself when you have done nothing to deserve it.”
“I know,” Matt mumbled, but he stared into the fire anyway, feeling the melancholy descend further.
“There is no cause for such darkness of the heart,” Papa said softly, “and this mood has come very suddenly, suspiciously so. Might it not be a spell cast by an enemy?”
“Yes, it could!” Matt sat bolt upright, staring as though he’d never seen flames before. “Try to bury me under depression, will he? We’ll see how far he gets with that!”
They talked for half an hour longer, Matt trying very hard to be cheerful… but when he lay down, sorrow still tugged at his heart, and with it, fear. As his eyes closed, he couldn’t stave off the feeling of failure.
Okay, so he was up against insurmountable odds… but even so, he had to be doing awfully poorly if the only ally he could find was a thief too inept to make a peacetime living, and too insecure to bury his loot when the countryside was deserted. So it wasn’t surprising that, when his eyes did close, he should dream of an empty land, bone-dry and breathless, under a lowering sky that darkened and deepened with a feeling of doom about to fall, the sun searing mercilessly in front of that purpling background.
Maybe it wasn’t even surprising that bare bones should begin to rise from that dead land, rise and pull themselves together, until a nightmarish horde of skeletons came plodding toward Matt, skeletons of extinct rhinoceroses, chalicotheres, giant lizards, and even a few Neanderthals.
We are the dead they seemed to chant. We are what you shall become very soon. Welcome among us, for you shall never leave. Matt screamed denial inside his head, but he couldn’t let the sound out, couldn’t utter, because he didn’t seem to have a body, was only a point of consciousness that the skeletons approached with a steady and inexorable tread. Then a shout sounded behind him, hooves beat a tattoo, and an armored figure on a spavined horse sped past him. A broken, poorly mended lance dropped down. The army of skeletons all turned their plodding gait toward the horseman, their very postures threatening to grind him beneath their hooves, their feet… but the broken lance touched the first bony mastodon, and it exploded into a shower of ivory.