The Door Into Shadow

"The proper frame' of mind," Hasai said, arching his head backwards to watch her. "After all, our people aren't built like the flying things you have here. We are light. Observe." Hasai lifted up the last ten feet of his tail and dropped it on her. Reflexively, knowing she was about to be crushed, Segn-bora threw her arms up to ward the tail away — and found herself supporting it on her hands. It was very heavy, but not at all the crushing weight she had expected.
"See?" Hasai said, flicking the tail away to lie at rest again.. Segnbora shook her head in wonder. The rough under-crusting looked like diamond, the' scales, looked like sapphire— "What are you made of?" she said, starting' to walk again.
"Flesh, bone, hide. And you?" Segnbora blinked. "About the same. …" "You're not quite as tough, however," the Dragon said, sounding mildly rueful. "1 remember the beast you will be riding, biting you there—" The glittering tail snaked up at Segnbora again, prodding her delicately in the chest. "You will be bleeding, and wishing for hide more like mine, that the beast would have broken its teeth on—"
As politely as she could, Segnbora undid the tailspine from her surcoat's embroider)', where it had snagged. She was wrestling with an unease that was no longer vague. She had noticed before, while fumbling for words, that in Dragon language there seemed to be several extra tenses for verbs. Now they all. became clear. 'They were precognitive tenses— future possible, future probable, future definite. Dragons, she realized, remember ahead as well as back. She shuddered, wanting to reject the possibility of ever doing that herself.
"We're not buUt to remember everything that happens to us," she said then to Hasai, resentfully. "Not consciously, anyway. Listen…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. I
can feel the mdeilm back there remember-ing everything that ever happened to them, every sunset and conversation and breath of wind. We don't do that."
"It makes seo.se that you would reject ahead-memory," Hasai said. "'You do not have it, the warders tell us. You even have trouble dealing with what is. But to reject our past-memories as well—"
Segnbora shrugged, "What good, are fifty generations of Dragon memories to a. human.?*''
"But you're not a human," Hasai said calmly. "Not totally. Not anymore." He looked, away from her, a Dragon shrug, matching hers, "Sooner or later you will look and see. Doubt-less not. soon."
Segnbora went narrow-eyed with anger at the Dragon's cool dare — and at the realization that this situation, was com-pletely out. of her
control. "'Show me now," she said.
Hasai bent, his head, down beside her and dropped his jaw slightly in an expression of mild amusement. His action gave
Segnbora a frightfully clear view of diamond fangs as long and sharp as scythes, and of the three-forked smelling-tongue in its recess beneath the blunt one used for speech. Worst of all, she could see the fulminous magma-glow of the back of the throat, where Dragonfire seethed blindingly. "Well," Hasai said, watching her calmly as a sleepy volcano, "will you put your hand in the Dragon's mouth willingly this time?" "Why not," Segnbora said, nervous, and irritated for being so. "Here, take the whole arm—"
Without giving herself time to hesitate, she went over to his great toothy table of a lower jaw and thrust her arm up to the shoulder between two huge forefangs, resting the forearm on the dry hot tongue. Slowly and carefully Hasai closed his mouth, holding Segnbora" s arm immobile but not hurting it.
(Comfortable?) he said wordlessly, his inner voice sound-ing, if possible, bigger than his outer one, "Yes, thank you." (Well, then. .)
Without warning, Segnbora found that her body felt won-derful. Her eyes could suddenly see colors she had been miss-ing: the black reds, the white violets. She felt for the first time the curves and planes of the energy flows that were as much a Dragon's medium as the currents and flows of atmosphere. Her muscles slid lithe and warm beneath gemmed skin. Her eyes held light within them as well as beholding it without. An old, yet delightful burning banished the cold from her throat and insides. Power was there, and strength. — the dangerous grace of limb and talon and tail. She felt reborn. She also felt hungry.
(We'll eat,) she heard one of her selves suggest, Agreeing, she crouched and coiled her way over to the door of the cavern, folded her wings carefully and slipped out.
(Wa.it a moment — that door's only a few feet wide!) (That, was your memory,) said one of the mda.heit a strong voice, fairly recently alive. (This is mine.) Out they went into the brilliant light, of noon at, Onoli. (This isn't my beach, either!) (No, my old one.)
Immediately she spread her wings right out to their fullest, to feel the sunfire soak into the hungry membranes and run through her like white-hot wine. She basked, drinking her fill of the light, lazing while the strange-familiar thoughts of a Dragon's day-to-day life flowed through her.
The mdeihei rumbled lazy assent, a placid rush of low voices blending with the sound of the waves. She got up after a while, raising her wings, feeling with them the flows of all the forces that Dragons manipulated and took for granted, as fish accept water or birds the air. It was an old delight: the chief joy of the Dragonkind, dearer even than, speech. (What else are we for?)
The wings were hands. She grasped the currents she felt moving about her, pulled herself upward, sprang and flew.
The first, leap took her high over the shore, and she watched with amazement and delight as she gained altitude. Boulders dwindled to
pebbles and the huge crash of the breakers shrank to a soft-spoken crawl.
(Inland, perhaps?) said the mdaha who had spoken, her song' calm with her own joy.
(Oh, please!)
She' wheeled, catching currents of air and fields of force with her wings and, her mind, gaining more altitude and speed as she soared south and west, over northern Darthen. Below them, the sunlit headlands of Sionan and Rul Tyn lay patched and quilted, with small field— squares. There were threads of brown road, and, toy houses like a child's carved playthings. Southward stretched wilder, emptier lands, tree-stippled hills, forests like green shadows on, the fields.
She leaned up toward the sky and gained, more height, watching the sunlight flash, on, a river-strung series of little lakes.. Upward still she dove, through a furry fog of cloud-cover, and saw the Darst below go pewter-shadowed. More distant lakes and. rivers seem to hover unsupported in the haze below. She dipped one wing, stretched the other up and out in a bank. Over her the patterned sky turned as if on a pivot., wheeled like a, starry night about her center. .
The higher and farther she went,, the lovelier it all became. Thick, clouds as white as drifting snow rose up before her,
balzing in the sunlight. Bounded by these mountains of the sky, drowned far down in the depths of air, the land lay dim and still. Pacing her above the silence, the white Sun rode, swimming soundlessly in an unfathomable eternity of blue.
Still higher she climbed. Above her the sky went royal blue, then violet. Her wings lost the wind entirely and began to stiffen in the great cold above the air. She stopped beating them and fixed them at full soaring extension. Her mind was doing all the work now, manipulating fields and flows, trigger-ing the shutdown of some body functions, the initiation of others which would protect her in the utter cold of the Empti-ness.
The sky went black, and the stars came out, the winter stars that summer daylight hid, burning steady as beacons. In the same sky with them hung the ravening Sun, unshielded now by the thick cloak of the world's air. It was a searing agony on her membranes but an ecstatic heat within. Quite suddenly the mdaha whose memory this was flipped forward, tumbling end for end—
Had she been breathing, breath would have gone out of her. Below her, she saw an impossibility. The flat world was curved. The black depths of the Mother's night rested against that curvature, holding it as if in a careful hand. The whole great expanse of the Middle Kingdoms, from Arlen in the west to the Waste in the east, could be seen in a single glance. Beyond them were unknown lands, unsailed seas — the whole of human experience and possibility held under a fragile crys-tal skin of air.
Awed, she spread wings and bowed her head to the wonder. Surely this was the way the Dragons had seen, the world on the day they came falling out of the airless depths: a jewel, a treasure, life—
(Perhaps you understand now,)' Hasai said, his voice hushed with old love, old pain, (why we decided to stand and fight for a home.) She hung there, unmoving in the silence beyond all si-lences, and understood. (Not that we've forgotten what we left,) said the other mdaha. (Torn and see—)
Something happened to the Sun hanging behind her back. It fell suddenly strange, but welcome, like the touch of a friend corning up from behind. She turned and found that it
had changed, was bigger, hotter, pinker. Close beneath her hung the memory of the ancient Homework! red-brown and dry; a harsh place, a birthplace, dear and dead.
A great mournful love for the lost lands where her kind was born rose up in her at the sight. But the mournfulness turned to something deeper and more piercing as she looked off to one side. Suspended there, seeming to cover half the endless night, was a great swirled pattern of stars. They seemed fro-zen in midturn — a whirlpool spraying drops and gemlets of rainbow fire, its arcs sinuous and splendid as the curve of a tail, its heart ablaze like the memory of the Day of Dawning, when, the World's Heart beat its first.