It’s not as though you’ve never slept rough before, and it isn’t difficult to find a good hollow between roots at the base of a tree, put your head on your bag, pull your cloak over you and go to sleep. But the dreams don’t come kindly. Physical exhaustion is one thing, and the body will do as it wills, particularly after walking twenty miles yesterday and twenty miles today; the body is an animal, Auntie always used to say. But the mind is a different beast, and yours paces and charts out the boundaries of its new cage all night long.
You dream about Auntie’s brown hands, one of them stroking a fox-bit peacock to quiet (quiet quiet quiet radiating from her silence), the other hand pinching a golden needle strung with the finest silk thread she could afford that season. The edges of the room are eaten away, bright with fire, and the peacock is quiet quiet quiet but your ears fill with its screams, over and over.
You dream about mending a hunting dog’s broken leg only to hear three weeks later that one of the minor lords ran the dog to death on a fruitless hunt.
You dream about blood under your fingernails. You dream about the young sphinx in her draped and upholstered room, coughing herself to death in winter’s chill. You dream about cages going uncleaned, delicate creatures unfed. You dream about your charges being treated like animals, the way the noblemen treat their animals, and you can’t seem to wake up, and you cry in your sleep.
You dream about an afternoon three days ago, and Lord Iragin’s angry face, eyes pinched tight as he watches you walk under the outstretched horn stumps of the lung his great-grandfather had captured as a young warlord in a foreign land. You were told that the lung had been a terrible enemy, devouring countless numbers of that lord’s men, but the creature has only ever been gentle around you. He is clumsy, stumbling, not graceless but with the sort of sweet inaccuracy of a drunk dancer–Iragin’s great-grandfather had poisoned him, then followed him to his nest and sawed off his horns while he slept, and so he could no longer fly nor even quite walk straight. His back legs didn’t seem to listen to his front legs.
In the old days, he’d been kept in a courtyard with silver chains on every ankle and around his body at regular intervals, but Iragin’s father needed that courtyard to house mercenaries during one of his own intermittent wars, and so the dragon was turned out to an ill-used cow pasture. He slept in a barn, and occasionally, on a sunny day like this, he would crawl his way out to the field, belly dragging on the ground to keep him from falling, and curl up in the sunlight for hours at a time. So many years had passed since his capture that the nobles barely considered him more interesting than a carthorse, and none of them came out to kick him with any regularity anymore.
You met the lung for the first time on a cloudy day, and his scales were the color of rain reflecting off a stream, his eyes glazed over and tired. But on a sunny day like today, he seems a different creature. You brought a pair of buckets of warm water, and a rough scrub brush, and you spend the next hour and a half polishing every scale clean. Underneath the dry, rough coating on the scales you can see faint colors swirling. His eyes roll back into its head in sleepy pleasure as you reach his talons, cracked and stubby. “I wonder if I should get you some sort of scratcher.” you say, and you can feel the usual hiss of the dragon’s voice, so distant but sharp in the back of your head. Scratch on bones, scratch through flesh. He agrees, and you tap him on the nose with the damp brush, scattering jewels of droplets across his cheek. “And then what would happen?” you say. “Eat some snotty fourth cousin of His Lordship and then fall over trying to get over the fence, and someone would spear you before you could get fifty feet away.”
Soon, the lung says, clearer than you have ever heard his voice. It makes all the hairs stand up on the back of your neck, but before you can ask for an explanation, you hear your name. You walk around the lung’s great head, so close that the shadow of his mutilated horns stripes over your eyes for a moment, and the brightness of the returning sun is dazzling.
The first thing you see when your eyes adjust is Lord Iragin’s face, and beside him, the Captain of his guard. And someone you don’t know, someone dressed in doe leather and blue velvet, with shoes far too clean to be this distant from the Palace’s paved walks.
And after that, everything happened very quickly. You were lucky that you were allowed to beg time to pack, and probably that was only due to the influence your Auntie’s name still held here. Lord Kyro, not even a third cousin to the Crown, would be taking over the care of all your creatures now. All your friends. “I have long thought that the worth of any animal can only be told by its strength in the hunt.” Lord Iragin said, smiling, his eyes never leaving yours. “What good are all these relics of my forefathers, eating my grain and my meat, lolling around like the fattened milch cow of some farmyard whore? Kyro and I are going to stage the greatest hunt in this kingdom’s memory, and even in your hovel on the edge of the country, you will hear of it.” In real life, his smile had come and gone, but in your dreams it lingers while he talks, twisting, his voice ringing out like the voice of one of the creatures, in your head but not in your ears. His smile stretches on and on, filling with teeth, and its mirth does not reach his eyes.
You dream, finally, blessedly, of soft feather bedding, of silk over your body. Of square, golden hands brushing the hair back from your face, of being warm enough. Of a gentle voice saying your name, much sweeter than you’ve heard from a human mouth in a very long time.
The sound of your name rings in your physical ears, and you startle awake.
There is a massive shape coiled around your tree, weaving through the trees beyond it, and beside you is a paw whose talons–glimmering in the setting moonlight, so sharp they could cut air–are the length of your entire arm. His scales catch the moonlight too, but more than that they seem to hold their own light. It is the lung, you would recognize him anywhere. But his horns curl metallic over his stormcloud eyes, and his perfectly smooth, shining scales roil with colors you can’t name. “What are you doing here?” you gasp. He tilts his head, looking down–and down, and down, how did you never notice he was so tall? Had you never once seen him standing straight with his belly off the ground?–and you hear him speak:
He sought her and found her not, And waking and sleeping he thought about her. Long he thought; oh! long and anxiously; On his side, on his back, he turned, and back again.
the lung says politely, and his voice is the moving of mountains, the singing of the highest string on the sweetest instrument. Instead of being the voice of a dreamer far away, he sounds close and immediate and as plain as the cut of a razor. His tongue flickers out from his mouth, once, catching you beside the ear, and with his mouth he speaks. “It was time, at last, to shed.” he says. “It has been a tiresome season, and I am ready for something to change.” His long head lowers until his chin is on the ground before you, looking you eye to eye. The streamers along his face and spine curl lazily in a wind you can not feel. And again his communication rises up like a wave beneath you, engulfing you.
My sword I polished for ten years,
The frosted blade has never been used.
Now, I am presenting it to you;
It’ll cut down injustices without fear.
You swallow heavily. “Wouldn’t you like to go home?“
His response is not in words, just in a fierce, bright delight. “Oh, yes, I will go home.“ he says, blowing the bangs back from your face. His breath smells like incense. “But not alone. And for now, I can not leave behind these cousins.” And for the first time since you woke, you notice anything other than him, and you realize all at once that the woods are much more quiet than they would usually be. As quiet as if they are full of predators. The sphinx’s eyes glow green on the other side of the lung, and balanced on her back is the grandchild of your Auntie’s peacock, and huffing all around them are Lord Iragin’s prized hunting dogs.
“Oh, no, your feet!” you say without thinking, remembering twenty miles yesterday and twenty miles today. The dragon laughs, and all around you rises a bright mist. “Worry not for their poor feet.” he says, fond. “I have other ways to bring them where they want to go.” You remember, belatedly, the stories groomsmen told you in an attempt to scare you. “He was five hundred feet long if he was an inch, but faster than a viper.” they said. “He could fly if he cared to, but more than once the King thought he was cornered only to find nothing in the trap but mist, and his own men standing about confused.”
The lung–Oh, dear, I am going to have to learn his name, you think, not just what they called him–is chuckling much closer and warmer in your ear than you had any reason to expect, as around you the forest melts away to mist. For a moment you feel a strong hand at your back, an arm around your shoulders. “So.” he says. “What would you like to do? I have some ideas, if you find you need to think a while.”
(with apologies to Frank Yue for shamelessly stealing his translation of Jia Dao’s “Jian Ke.”)
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