Auron heard a cough, and looked to see Naf standing there with the loaded camel on a lead. Naf pointed to a pile of supplies he had scavenged. The man winked at him and led his camel out of the canyon while the girl kicked her feet into the water.

With Naf gone, the circling carrion birds swept into the canyon and alighted near the bodies, transformed from graceful fliers to ungainly, ugly walkers. The girl pointed to them and barked out a word.

“You can’t speak Parl, can you?” Auron asked the girl. At the rumble of his voice in her ear, the girl ceased playing in the water and started to gabble in her own tongue, though whether it was a language of her own invention or not, Auron could not say. He set her down and swung the end of his tail gently before her. She grabbed on to the point Djer had fashioned, and then dropped it again.

“Iss,” she said, definitively. Auron somehow knew she thought it was cold and hard, not like the rest of his skin. How would he know that?

He forgot the sound of Naf whistling as he walked out of the canyon, forgot the vultures now dropping to the corpses piled in the dead-pit, forgot even the little girl who had dropped to her knees to look at his toes. He concentrated hard and tried to send a mind-picture of her sitting on his back. Nothing came back, but she jerked her head up and looked around. He continued to project the picture. Her face screwed up as she shut her eyes. Auron snorted. If Naf were just here, he would think her face worthy of a laugh.

The picture faded from his brain, and the girl looked at him, little eyebrows together. She slowly got to her feet and climbed on his back, at the deliberate pace of one who is trying to do something just right. When she was perched atop the central arc in his long spine, she set her hands on her hips, as if to say, “Now what?”

What was a journey toward the mountains. The little girl found it more comfortable to sit on the saddlebags over his rear legs and lay her head along his spine, the food-filled blanket cushioning her from the knobby ridge of his backbone. Auron looked back at her now and then and decided she was sleeping, perhaps the slight back-and-forth motion of his body as he walked reminded her of the cradles humans kept their children in. He slowed his pace and was careful to choose an easy path. The flat ground was beginning to give way to the first foothills of the reddish mountains. He found a watercourse that looked as if it led to a notch leading to a mountain’s shoulder. He could get a decent look-round from there.

If NooMoahk claimed this part of the waste, he did not patrol it often. Auron smelled no hint of dragon, just more of the little rodents, and hawks above hunting them. The girl explored the contents of his saddlebags and pack, and ate and drank when it suited her, which was often. She went to pains to conceal herself behind a rock when she had to answer other needs, but giggled and hung off his back to watch when Auron paused to do the same. They spent their first night in a little notch at the base of the watercourse wall; Auron wrapped himself like a snake around her.

The second day she talked less and ate more. They came to the shoulder of the mountain, and from it Auron saw valleys of scattered tall trees, with fernlike leaves sprouting from the top. Auron took her into the valley and found a trickle or two of water, and he set Hieba down to drink and bathe while he looked at the strange trees. They came in two varieties, a short kind with a wide base that narrowed before the fronds sprouted at the top, and a taller kind with a more slender trunk. Both were armored with thick growths of bark that stuck out like a phalanx of dwarves in a circle holding swords to their enemies. Vividly green lizards hunted bugs on the trunk, and Auron moved from tree to tree swallowing them as the girl washed herself. Farther above on the hills, he saw shaggy things that might have been skinny sheep or woolly-haired goats.

He let the girl walk on the flatter, sandy floor of the valley, and she clung to his tail as he explored.

Some prowling catlike thing on four paws growled at them from behind a rock. It stared at the girl but seemed wary of Auron. When he showed his teeth and extended the fans down from his crest to cover his earholes, it slunk away.

They exchanged words rather than conversation. Hieba would touch things and announce their names in her tongue, and if it was easier than the word in Parl, he would use that. Otherwise he would teach her the Parl. She imitated some of his growls when he saw the hunting cat, and as an experiment, he tried a word or two of Drakine on her. That she found a terrific game—trying to make the sounds he produced—though she tired of it and went back to her native chattering. She chased some ground-running birds into a tangle of bushes and emerged with a red mouth and fingers. Auron startled for a moment and almost loosed his fire on the bushes, when he realized it was just the remainders of some berries she had found.

The valley widened, and Auron found the remains of a settlement. Hominids of some sort must have lived in the valley once, but whether they were men, elf, dwarf, or blighter he could not tell from the old walls and roofless shells. They settled down for another night on a tiled floor sprouting red wildflowers from the accumulated dirt and cracks in the masonry.

Hieba slept that night with her arms around the drake’s neck. Auron had to hide the dwarsaw out of her reach, and his neck ached from staying curved around her the whole night, but for some reason the discomfort seemed worth it.

Chapter 16

Auron and Hieba shared explorations, hunts, romps, and adventures that summer. They also shared a patois of their own making: a mixture of Parl, Hieba’s tongue, and Drakine.

The explorations consisted of shallow caves. Auron found a crack or two that wind whistled out of, hinting at caverns beneath the mountains. One cave must have been a refuge at one time; they found hoops of iron that had stood around the remains of wood long since devoured by insects as well as tools and weapons rusted into unrecognizable shapes. They climbed trees to raid birds’ nests, first with the girl clinging to Auron’s neck and later with him following her. Her clothing began to disintegrate, and Auron was at a loss until he chewed a hole in a length of blanket, which she wore as a poncho. They made it in easy stages to the south face of the mountains, a well-watered expanse that looked out on forested hills as far as the eye could see, dipping into a valley that paralleled the mountains.

Hunting was a necessity, of course, but she helped him by acting as a game spotter. Her young eyes were better at picking out motionless game than Auron’s, and a number of thick-furred rabbits met their end thanks to her vision. Auron found nothing strange in a child tearing into a rabbit or goat corpse with her fingers, extracting still-warm organ meat and conveying it to blood-smeared maw, though he expected if she were ever reunited with her kind, she would have to be taught to eat differently.

The romps were even more frequent than the hunts. She ran more than she walked. The child lived at a pace that had only two speeds: full sprint and rest. After an hour or two of running, climbing rocks, trees, and Auron—who approached pony-size in height even though he had long ago passed it in length—she would collapse into a softly snoring heap. She imitated Auron in eating anything she could catch, including beetles, though he kept her away from the badgers, porcupines, and skunks that he had become acquainted with while he ran with Blackhard. But she also found nuts and berries, and would sit in front of a bush and eat until her face was smeared with purple juice. Auron licked her clean, wincing at the horribly sweet taste of the fruit.

She offered him a mashed mass of pulp and skin, sticky in her hand.

“Rotten,” he said.

“Sweet!” she insisted. “Sweet sweet sweet. Berry-sweet!”

He took to calling her “berrysweet,” because something about the way he pronounced the word made her giggle, and something about her giggle made him prrum with pleasure.

She wrestled with Auron, and instinctively picked up sticks to poke and clobber him, abuse he would tolerate for a while, and then he would take the weapon in his jaws and break it. Her feet, knees, elbows, and hands became as rough as Auron’s skin. Then there were days when she was content to collect stones or flower petals, and nights when she would refuse to sleep and Auron had to follow her close, futilely transmitting mind-pictures of sleeping little girls as she chased fireflies or the mysterious croaks and hoots from the trees.

There were adventures, too. Another cat followed them for a day or two, perhaps waiting for Hieba to leave Auron’s side. Auron left her at a stump gathering termites with a stick, and changed color in a patch of tall grass. The cat made a wary approach, but failed to out-jump Auron’s flame. The flaming explosion and colorful fire sent Hieba running for Auron’s back, but she soon lost her fear and began to tend to the fire by dropping deadfalls into it. It must have stirred some memory in her, for she stood awhile looking around, as if expecting other people to gather.

That night she wept beside the fire, and could not be consoled, so Auron left her to her mewling. Though he did not sleep until she did.

They dodged a group or two of blighters. Auron never chanced following them to find their holds, and he was not about to turn Hieba over to them, so their origins and intent remained a mystery. His father had once told him that the blighters worshipped dragons. Perhaps they had settled the mountain range to be near NooMoahk.