Three dragon-headed figures.
I clutched at the curtain for balance. It tore free from its moorings and we went to the ground together, the curtain and I. One of the figures stood, and I wanted to blame all of this on continued fever and delirium, but I knew better. I was awake, and alert, and the living cousin of the creature I had dug out of the snow was coming toward me with its claws outstretched.
I did not react with wonder, nor delight, nor scientific curiosity. Quite frankly, I shrieked. And then I tried to scrabble away like an upside-down crab—but the heavy curtain tangled me and my injured leg failed me, so I did not get very far.
The creature coming toward me went instantly still. On the other side of the fire, one of them jerked upright and popped its ruff as wide as it would go. The other lunged to the side of the second and clamped one clawed hand around its muzzle.
Body language varies from place to place around the world, and a good deal more between species. These draconic figures did not behave quite like humans, nor quite like dragons, but owed a bit to both. The expansion of the ruff was either hostility or a fear response, making the creature appear larger and more intimidating. These thoughts stabilized me, breaking me out of my own fear response… though the fear itself did not entirely dissipate.
I tried to behave like a rational being, rather than a bundle of instincts held together by a very tenuous thread. It was more easily intended than done, however, as was putting together a coherent sentence. I licked my lips, drew in a deep breath, and managed the following triumph of eloquence: “Where am I?”
As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew they were futile. Sure enough, the creatures looked at one another with no sign of comprehension. Of course: why should they understand Scirling? Though my command of Tser-zhag was very nearly nonexistent, I could manage that simple of a question; but it elicited no better response. Perhaps they could not speak at all?
A foolish thought. The creature that had approached drew breath and spoke, but I did not understand a word it said.
Fear threatened to choke me again. For all the strange and dangerous situations I have been in before, none came close to this. All of my previous captors had been human, and with most of them I had shared at least a modicum of language. Here I had nothing. I knew I must be in the mountain basin that lay beyond Gyaptse and Cheja; my speculation on the col, that the species might not be extinct after all, was proved correct. But that meant I was cut off from human habitation. I could not even ask whether the others were here, Chendley and Thu and Tom and, most of all, Suhail.
I tried regardless. Even though I knew they could not understand me, I asked; when my question got no response, I clung to names alone, repeating them in a louder and louder voice as if volume alone would accomplish what words could not. On the far side of the fire, the creature spread its ruff again, and the one at its side cast a glance toward—
A door.
I could not bolt for it, not with my legs so tremulous and one yet weak from the fracture. Still, I did my best, which was a rapid and unsteady hobble. I did not get more than three paces before the creature that had approached me interposed itself, half spreading its wings to block the way.
My voice shook nearly as badly as my legs, but I made it as strong as I could. “I have to look for the others. I do not care that you cannot understand me, I must—”
Before I could work myself up to a proper shout, the creature in front of me reached up and held its own muzzle shut, just as one of its compatriots had done to the ruff-spreading one. It is a thing I have seen people do to dogs who bark too much, and I realized it must be the equivalent of holding a finger to one’s lips. The creature was trying to hush me.
I almost screamed. Not out of fear, but out of defiance: if they wished me to be quiet, then perhaps the best thing I could do was to be as loud as possible. I had been a prisoner before, and had not liked it on any occasion.
But these creatures had taken care of me. I was not hungry, nor stained with my own filth; more to the point, I was alive. Whoever had rescued me from the snow, it had apparently not been my companions. Was it these three? Or others like them? Either way, it did not matter. They had looked out for my well-being, likely at a great deal of inconvenience to themselves. I owed my life to three winged, dragon-headed creatures out of Draconean myth.
No—not myth. I stared up at the tall figure in front of me, standing with its feet apart and its wings slightly spread, in a pose I had seen so many times before. The epiphany came upon me like a lightning strike, so astonishing it momentarily drove all fear and despair from my mind. All those statues and reliefs and painted murals, showing humanoid figures with wings and dragon heads, with humans making offerings to them… we had assumed those figures were gods. And perhaps, indeed, ancient humans had worshipped them as such.
But they were not gods.
They were, quite simply, the Draconeans.
That ancient civilization had not been a human edifice. It was the creation of beings like the one in front of me, who ruled over their human subjects until their downfall. The evidence had been before us for thousands of years… but when the Draconeans were overthrown, their existence faded into legend, easily disbelieved without the proof of it in front of us.
The one that had approached me gestured toward my bed, with words I still could not understand. It did not seem hostile. Numbly obedient, I limped back to my rest. Two of them worked together to hang again the curtain I had torn down, closing me into my little shelter, shutting away the sight of their hybrid, impossible bodies.
I lay under the yak fleece and shivered, but not from cold. The truth had crept into my mind while I was occupied with other things, but now, alone in my nest, I could avoid it no longer.
I was alone. Though the avalanche remained a terrifying maelstrom in my recollection, it was not so chaotic as to erase one simple fact: I had been torn away from my companions, from my husband. I went one way and they went another, and then in my disorientation I compounded that separation by staggering west. They were on the other side of the mountains, or—
Though I tried to tell myself not to think it, such discipline was beyond me. Or dead.
What the Draconeans made of my sobs, I do not know, but they left me in peace.
One of them brought me food some time later: porridge not much different from what the Nying ate. Accepting it, I tried to study the Draconean’s dentition, but it kept its mouth shut. Not wholly carnivorous, it seemed, although I had seen before, on the living and the frozen, that they had quite prominent cuspids. They could not give me porridge unless they farmed grain, and would not bother to farm grain unless they ate it. Which made sense, given the terrain; this region could not possibly support a large population of obligate carnivores. Perhaps their diet was like that of bears, omnivorous.
Such thoughts were the lifeline that kept me afloat while I ate my Draconean porridge.
They lived. They were real. How could I make space in my mind to accommodate that fact?
I found myself thinking of the egg from Rahuahane, and the cast I had made of the vacuoles in its petrified albumen. Lumpy and imprecise as it was, the cast had not given me a good picture of the lost embryo; but it had shown enough to be perplexing. The unexpected proportions, the odd configuration of the legs. All quite wrong for a quadripedal creature… but in hindsight, quite natural for a bipedal one.