Page 8 of River Dragon’s Song

That was when he understood that she was hungry. And that she was trying not to be.

She spent most of that day exploring, although she didn’t go far. He followed her along the opposite bank, keeping to the shadows and moving so quietly that even the water didn’t notice him.

Her progress was not smooth. She didn’t know how to read the stone. She couldn’t tell by the color and the gleam of it where the footing was sound and where it would crumble underneath her. She didn’t know which rocks were slick with the fine green film that grew near the water, or which ledges had been hollowed out from below by the current. She walked with her head down and her light pointed at her feet. Every few steps she stopped and tapped the rock with a small hammer and listened to it ring.

That, at least, was wise. He watched her do it with growing interest. She would strike the stone and tilt her head, and sometimes she would nod and move on, and sometimes she would frown and step around it. Once she knelt and scratched a mark into the rock with the point of her tool, a quick line and a cross, and went on her way. When he crept over later to look, he found that the stone beneath her mark was cracked all the way through. So she was not entirely helpless. She simply didn’t know this place yet.

But the air troubled her. He saw it clearly when she tried to climb.

The path along the stream rose steeply past the second spillway, climbing over a jumble of broken rock where the old channel wall had fallen long ago. He could have taken it in three strides. The female went up it slowly, hand over hand, and halfway to the top she stopped and pressed herself against the rock with her eyes closed. Her breath rasped through the mask, fast and shallow and harsh, as if she had been running for a long time.

She stayed there for so long that he started to move towards her without thinking. He had crossed half the distance, low and silent through the shallows, when she finally lifted her head and blinked hard and started to climb again.

He sank back into the water and watched her reach the top and sit down heavily on a broad stone. She pulled the mask away from her face for just a moment to wipe her cheek, and she gasped. Her body jerked. She pressed the mask back into place at once and sat there with both hands holding it, her shoulders heaving.

He stared at her with his heart pounding. There was something in the air that she needed and could not find. He breathed it easily, but this chamber was not made for her. The mask on her face was helping her somehow, pulling what she needed out of the thin air and giving it to her. But it could only do so much. When she worked too hard, it could not keep up.

He thought of the gardens far downstream, where the vines grew so thick that the air itself tasted green and sweet. The air was richer there. It had always been richer there. Would it help her?

He honestly didn’t know. He didn’t know anything about her, except that she was small and stubborn and alone, and that she talked to her tools. Every time she stopped to rest, he held his breath until she started moving again.

Later, when her breathing had eased, she unclipped the small box from the strap of her bag. It was the one she had talked to on the first day. She held it above her head and turned slowly in a circle, and then she frowned at it and shook it impatiently. She pressed something on its side, and pressed it again, and held it up to her ear as if it might whisper to her.

Nothing happened. He could tell from her face that nothing ever did.

“Come on,” she muttered. “Half a kilometer of solid rock, they said. Guaranteed, they said.” She shook it again. “I bet the guy who wrote that has never been more than two meters underground in his entire life.”

She talked to it for a long time. She coaxed it and scolded it, and at one point she even apologized to it, which made no sense to him. But the box stayed silent. At last she let out a sharp, exasperated breath, snatched up a pebble from the stone beside her, and flung it hard at the stream.

The pebble struck the water less than an arm’s length from his head, and he ducked instinctively beneath the surface. When he rose again, very slowly, she was staring at the ripples with a guilty expression.

“Sorry,” she told the stream. “That wasn’t your fault. You’re doing great.”

The tone of her voice was so clearly apologetic that a strange pressure built behind his ribs and rose up into his throat. Before he could stop it, a low, rough sound escaped him and was half swallowed by the water. It took him a moment to understand that he had laughed.

He sank quickly out of sight again with his heart racing, but she hadn’t heard. When he dared to look, she was sitting with her chin on her knees and the silent box in her lap, gazing sadly at the dark water.

He stayed quietly where he was and thought about the sound. He had forgotten that he could make it. He had woken alone in the dark with his head full of empty places. He had cleared the channels and sung to the silence night after night, and not once in all that time had anything made him laugh.

She had done it by apologizing to a river.

He watched her clip the box carefully back onto her bag, and he found that he was smiling. He didn’t stop for a long time.

She found her way back to the hollow as the moss began to dim. She moved more slowly than she had in the morning, and she was limping a little on the left side. When she reached her blanket, she sank down onto it and just sat for a while, staring at the water.

Then, very softly, she began to hum. It was nothing like his song. It was thin and wandering and it didn’t seem to go anywhere. She hummed a few notes, and paused, and hummed a few more. Some of them were not quite right, even to his ear. But the sound of it washed over him like a warm current as he lay quietly in the shallows.

When had he last heard another voice lifted in song?

He didn’t remember. The memory was one of the empty places in his mind. He reached for it and found nothing there. But his body remembered, and his chest ached with it. His throat tightened, and something deep inside him wanted to answer her so badly that he had to press his mouth against his arm to keep silent.

She didn’t sing for long. She stopped and ate another small piece of the food from the crinkly wrapper and drank from her bottle. Then she took off the hard shell and lay down on her silver blanket, curled on her right side with her knees drawn up.

He waited. He waited until her breathing slowed and deepened, until her fingers uncurled from the edge of the blanket and her body softened in sleep. He waited until the moss had dimmed to its darkest glow. Then he slid out of the water and crossed the gravel to her camp.

He moved slowly, placing each foot with care. The gravel shifted under him but it made no sound, because he knew exactly how to step on it. He crouched at the mouth of the hollow and looked at her.

He had not been this close to her since he pulled her from the pool. In the faint blue light, she looked different. Without the hard shell on her head, he could see her hair, a long dark braid coming loose around her face in soft, curling strands. The mask still covered her nose, but her mouth was bare beneath it, small and pink, her lips slightly parted. There was a smudge of dirt along her jaw. Her neck curved down into the collar of her grey covering, pale and smooth, and he could see her pulse beating slowly in the hollow of her throat.