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.
MY THREE SAVIORS
How was it even possible?
I will not trouble my readers by recounting every occasion on which I lost the thread of my reasoning and sank once more into tears. I could not think of Rahuahane without thinking of Suhail, who had been there with me; I could not think of the egg without thinking of Tom, who had puzzled over its mysteries with me. Moreover I was still quite weak from my trials, and weeping exhausted what little reserves I had, so that I spent far more time asleep than I would have liked. I knew that I must try to get out of that place and back to human civilization; I told myself the others were waiting for me there, as a spur to my determination. But I also knew that if I tried to flee now, then regardless of what the Draconeans did, I would be a dead woman in short order. I was in no state to face the mountains.
How long had I been in that house? My hands and toes showed clear signs of healing frostbite. I did not think it had been dreadfully severe, as I still had full sensation in all the affected areas, and my skin was not sloughing off. But it had been bad enough to blister, so I had been more than merely nipped by the cold. Judging by my current condition, and the state of my leg … I feared I had been there at least a fortnight, if not longer.
Even if the others were alive, they would be certain I was dead. I lost a great deal of time to that realization, and could barely eat the food laid at my side.
What pulled me up again was the conundrum before me, the inarguable existence of living, breathing, dragon-headed creatures. If I could not escape them, I would study them. And perhaps my study would lead me to some useful understanding.
But first, I had to reach some equilibrium on the matter of my companions. I forced myself through the possibilities with ruthless logic.