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“Oh, an awful journey y’had, to get so lost and confused. To get back y’be having to make it to the Antiope for the southward flow, and there’s no good road, in the sun or in the dark, not hereabouts. M’taking another pull and think on it. Hey! Y’be getting out of it, you greedy beggars!”
Mamedi and her relations fought for a place in a wing-jostling heap at the cut in his tail. One of the bigger ones, more enterprising than the rest, had opened another wound in his tail.
“This is a bit much,” the Copper said. He dragged his tail away from the greedy mouths.
“Y’be molesting our good host,” Thernadad yelled from above.
“Faaaa!” Mamedi answered back.
“Off me mum, you!” Thernadad dropped down on one of his mate’s relations who’d shoved his frail mother aside—less vigorously than her own son, it seemed to the Copper, but he was learning that the insult wasn’t as important as who offered it. A full-out bat brawl started.
He curled his slit tail around himself—it bent in a funny and uneven manner, with bends more like a dwarf tunnel, thanks to the rod injuries to it, and alternately licked and blew on the cuts until the bleeding stopped, as the bats lashed one another with leather wings and tried to bite off oversize hairy ears.
He woke feeling tired and hungry. He checked his cuts and discovered a new wound in the soft spot just behind his shoulder. Though bat bites did heal clean and fast, and he could hardly feel the injuries. His head hurt, and he walked down to the river for a drink.
He sucked cold water, and his head began to feel better almost immediately.
Thernadad swooped by. “Sir, y’be wanting to get away from the river!”
Bing-bing. Bing-bing…Bing-bing! The metallic clatter was regular, and therefore alarming. He saw a light up the tunnel from upstream, reflected on the flowing water.
“Hurry!” Thernadad urged.
BING-BING!
He scrambled backward and set himself against the cave wall.
A long wooden trunk, a clattering bell anchored at the front and swaying lanterns hung in reflective hollows in its sides, rushed down the river, pushed along by the fast-flowing water. Through long, narrow slits he saw dwarves within, sweating backs rising and falling as they worked at some mystery on their craft. He caught one glimpse of a dwarf at the tail, hanging off a flange and working some kind of apparatus that descended into the water from the safety of a metal cage, and it was gone, moving as fast as a quick-walking dragon.
BING-bing…Bing-bing…Bing…Bing.
Thernadad alighted and smoothed his face fur. “Careful at the river now, sir.”
“What was that?”
“The dwarves. They get about on those things here in the Lower World.”
“It came from the same direction I did, with the current.”
“Of course e’did, sir. Always a’coming from that direction.”
“Then how do they get back?”
“Mother! Mother!” Thernadad called back, but not in answer to his question. The Copper heard air move above, and saw the old white-flecked bat turning tight circles low over the underground river.
“M’knew it,” she screeched as she flapped back into the cave and rested. “Flies be riding with the dwarves. Snapped up two while y’be working your jaw.”
The Copper’s appetite had woken with a vengeance, and he began to sniff around the bank of the river. Perhaps fish lived within the fast-flowing current.
“Y’flying days be over, m’thinking!” Thernadad said. “Enjor, e’be saying you could hardly glide nomores.”
She alighted next to the channel bearing a trickle into the cave interior and took in water with her quick, darting tongue.
She smacked her thin lips. “Oh, Thernie, just woke up hale this morning, m’did. Full of guano and ginger. M’wanting a bit of air under me wing.” She brushed the fur forward on her face and dug in an ear and gobbled down whatever she found within. “This young dragon—yeeek!”
A translucent tongue shot up from where it rested next to the channel. It was segmented, with countless legs a blur, its body like living, mottled eyejelly. To the bat, thicker around than she and many times her length, it was a mortal danger, pincers at the front opening for her….
To the Copper it was breakfast.
