Chapter 17: Survivors II

By that point the fire had begun, at last, to win.

The worst of the shaking had gone out of the smaller ones, and people were slowly beginning to doze off, and the ones that had not could sit still now without their whole body fighting to get closer to the flames.

Beyond the ring of light the plaza opened wide and pale under the moon, the broken columns throwing long black bars across the stone, as the wind moved through the dead city with a low steady moan.

Eventually, someone had to say it.

"It can surely be killed," he affirmed across the fire, into the quiet.

It was Rum. His eyes had gone hard before he ever opened his mouth.

He was big, near as tall as Haaland. But where Haaland had gone quiet under his years, Rum had gone the other way.

He had lost a son on the crossing, on the galleon, a boy of nine, to the cold and the damp of the hold, and the grief had only hardened him.

"Whatever it is, it bled tonight. I saw it bleed. A thing that bleeds can be killed."

"It killed nineteen men with its hands," chuckled the goatherd.

There was a hesitation before he said it. He probably did not much want to remind himself of it.

"Nineteen drunk men who did not believe their own eyes," Rum muttered. "We are neither. We have their swords. It sleeps somewhere on this rock, the same as we do."

His voice trailed off and failed to disguise the venom in it.

"And then what?" The goatherd again. "Say we do it. Say we kill that thing. Then what?"

"Then it is dead," said Rum, "and I sleep well for one night, the first since my boy..."

"You will get people killed," someone to the side hissed. "Chasing it. You will get everyone killed."

"People already got killed, it's a beast, a demon, it will come for us sooner or later," Rum chuckled, his eyes hardening. "I am only proposing we even the count."

The argument caught and spread among them.

There was an irony in it. Of all the slaves, only the men with actual experience in the battlefield were the ones to shut their mouths and silently shake their heads and say nothing at all.

It was a long exchange.

The talk was climbing toward something close to another fight when Haaland finally spoke. He did not say much, but he put the whole weight of himself behind it, and the fire went still.

"No."

That was what it took to end the conversation.

Haaland had not talked since he set the watches, not because he was tired, but because he was pissed.

"Think. Use that mind the gods gave you and think."

"That thing gutted an entire slaver crew, nineteen armed men in less time than it takes to gut a fish, with nothing but its hands, and not one of them slowed it down."

His eyes did not leave the fire, dark and heavy.

"A beast does not walk away. We are alive at this fire because it decided we would be." He scoffed. "Hunt a anything on its own turf is not brave. It is not even foolish. It is courting death, and dragging the rest of us down when it decides he'd rather not take the risk."

That last part was hissed with a venom. No one had anything to say to that. For a few moments, at least. Then a voice came out of the edge of the firelight, quiet and almost reasonable.

"You saw it too. It is badly hurt. We won't get that chance again." A pause. "If we wait for it to heal, it may decide to hunt us."

He let that sit exactly as long as he needed to.

"A man might almost think you wanted to protect it." It was an accusation. Haaland heard it for one. He only looked into the fire.

An outrageous thought. But they were scared, and some of them shared it.

This time it was the old man who answered.

Oddr's voice was light, almost amused. The voice of a man who had watched a great many fools talk themselves into their graves.

"Haaland is right on this matter," Oddr chuckled. "It clearly spared us. On its own ground, when it had every reason not to."

"You do not put your hand into the mouth of a wolf that has decided not to bite, and pull, just to find out whether the teeth still work."

He let that sit. The man talked with the cadence of someone who knew he would not get interrupted. "I will tell you something else, for whatever an old man's eyes are worth. That humanoid thing is the smallest of the problems on this island."

The plaza went quiet enough to drown in.

That got everyone's attention. Even Rum and Haaland opened their eyes in surprise.

"You all saw it," Oddr went on. "The fire that took the ship. That blue. You have burned wood your whole lives."His eyes came up off the coals and moved slowly around the ring, face to face.

"Did any of you ever once see wood burn blue?"

He almost laughed.

"That was no demon's fire. There is a dragon in the sky over this rock, and it is the oldest terror by a long way." He prodded the fire. "In the country I was born in, the grandmothers had a name for it. The unholy child of lightning and death. A dragon of legends."

His eyes circled everyone, one sagging and slightly more open than the other one.

"Not your raiding-season dragon, not a Nadder or a Nightmare you can chase off a roof with a torch and an axe. This one is black as the gap between the stars."

"You do not see it. You do not hear it, not until it is already too late. They say no man has laid eyes on one and lived to tell how it looked."

Eivind's voice was very small.

"Oddr," he shivered, he took his time finding the words. "Do you think the dragon answers to the demon? A thing like that..."

The fire popped.

Far below, where the wreck had gone down, the shore was only dark.

"I do not know," Oddr replied at last. "But it was a great deal of coincidence, both of them showing up at the same time, not fighting each other."

He tucked his hands into his rags, into wherever it was he kept them warm.

"I have lived too long to call anything impossible. Sleep, if you can. We will all be more sensible in the daylight, and the daylight is a long way off yet."

Emerald said nothing through any of it.

She could only sit with her knees drawn up and her green eyes in the dark, and keep her own counsel. She had not told them all of it. She had not told them the last thing.

Was that a mistake? Should she say it? It played over and over behind her eyes. On the beach, in the half-instant before it lowered its hand, the thing had spoken.

I'll make it quick.

She realized now she had been the only one close enough to hear.

It could talk.

She turned it over and over in the cold as the fire died and left behind its embers.

It could talk. However, she knew exactly how it would sound if she said it here, and she knew exactly who was sitting across the fire sharpening his grief into a blade, so she kept it, for now, behind her teeth.

A week passed, near enough, and they did not see it once.

They did not look for it either. That was its own quiet decision the whole camp made without need to say aloud.

They went out, in the days that followed, because they had to, for wood and water and food and a way off this rock. No one walked toward the deep ruins. No one followed the prints.

To explore was to live, to go deliberately following trails was to die, they knew the difference and did not cross it.

So the days went by, the island was wide, enormous even. They did not find the demon, the demon did not find them, and so slowly, against all sense, things began to turn better.

It was Haaland the camp leaned on, and no one who had crossed the sea with him was surprised. He took the watches no one else wanted. He gave the biggest fish to the children and ate the heads himself and made it look like he preferred them.

When the men fought again, some days in, over nothing, he stepped between them and took an elbow across the jaw and did not hit back, and the fight simply died of shame.

He never once asked to lead.

He only did the next needful thing, over and over, until one morning people were bringing him their troubles and the last say on most decisions.

One night, late, when Haaland came back from the far watch grey with tiredness, the old man was still awake by the coals.

He did not so much move over as take hold of the younger man's sleeve and pull him down beside him. "Sit. You carry burden like a child carries his first heartbreak," chuckled Oddr.

"As if setting it down for one hour would drop the sky. It will not. Sleep for a while. I'll watch over." It did not sit well with Haaland back then. The days were heavy and only getting heavier.

So they began to argue, which was useless, because it was Oddr we were talking about. They argued until Haaland stopped, and sat, and after a while slept.

The old man watched him sleep with the look a man might give a son.

Of course, Oddr and a few others could not haul logs or spear fish. Or do anything too physical, for that matter. He was far too old.

However, he was an extraordinary mentor and confidant.

He knew which of the strange berries would feed you and which would empty you out. He knew how to lance a blister, and how to talk a woman out of the certainty that she would die here. Not by arguing with her, which, according to him, never works, but by listening to her all the way, and then, in an amused tone, agreeing:

"I am also going to die any moment." He looked at her. "We can die together if you want. I'll ask someone to dig our tombs close by, in the pine forest, or on the fields, those are pretty..."

He continued rambling on for a while, until he eventually stood up. "Either way, I'm dying some other day, I heard there is seal for dinner today."

Which somehow got her to the morning.

As cheerful and unserious as the old man was about most things, he always kept a small knife hidden somewhere in all those rags.

"I'm too old, no one will expect it, hi hi hi."

He giggled the one time Emerald caught the glint of it by accident, he winked at her, and she understood she had seen a thing she was not meant to see, and so she said nothing.