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He even encountered one being laboriously drawn back up against the current by dwarves using poles and hooks, sweating and grunting and chanting as they worked.
They clung and splashed to another vast lake, and Enjor advised them to make for the other side. It was easy enough for the bats to fly, but the Copper had to fight his way through a waterfield of spongy pads anchored to the bottom by long roots. A black slime thick with biting water mites infested the underside of each pad. The slime caught in his scales, and he began to itch immediately.
All the Copper could do was curse the bats for their ability to fly, and his curses were all the more venomous thanks to the foreknowledge that he would never fly, even if he lived to see his wings uncase.
They lingered at the edge of the lake for a day or two in a warren of half-submerged rocks and sand and muck. He had no way of telling time other than his body’s natural rhythm, as he tried to scrub out the nits with sand and freshwater, scratching himself until he was raw and bleeding. In this case the bats were a positive blessing; their saliva took away the itch as they worked over every sore spot.
But the nits always rallied and returned. Each time he woke, fresh masses had gathered.
He’d never forget the fish of that deep, vast lake. They were bony, and had thick hides with horny dimples running the back and side, with long shovel noses. But the softest, tastiest flesh he’d ever sampled ran from just behind the jawline and along the underside down the long tail. If he dipped his tail in the lake and poked at the bottom, overturning rocks, the fish would often come, drawn to whatever creatures were stirred up by his probe. And more often than not he could get his jaws on one before it could flee, though he once was taken on a wild underwater ride by a specimen three times his own length.
He came back bloody-mouthed, having lost a pair of hatchling teeth.
He feasted on fish and the bats feasted on him and the nits feasted on both—though the bats were better at digging the creatures out of their fur. Scale had its disadvantages.
But after a period of rest and feasting on fish he felt the urge to move on. The bats took some convincing, for there was good insect hunting, especially over those awful pads in the middle of the lake, but after one of their number was eaten by some swooping thing that was all mouth and wing, they saw the wisdom in moving on.
Just when he thought it was time to strike off downriver again, they were delayed by one of the younger bats giving birth to a trio of young. The bats had a strange system of feeding their young in which the newborns lapped fluid from their mother. It struck the Copper as being wasteful; to his mind the sooner young learned to feed themselves the more likely they were to survive. But considering the utter helplessness of a pink newborn bat, their system had been literally born of necessity.
Thernadad cadged twice-daily feedings of dragonblood for the nursing mother. The Copper agreed, mostly because Thernadad said a well-fed mother would mean well-fed young, and well-fed young would soon be able to cling to their mother as she clung to the dragon, and thus they’d be able to get going downriver all the sooner.
It meant more fishing, and as fish were growing scarce at that end of the lake, the Copper explored its edges. He found a few old dwarvish camps and exploratory tunnels filled with little but mold and slime.
During one of these trips, swimming back with half of one of the bony fish floating along in his mouth, he came across the wreck.
He’d missed it during his climb across the rocky edge of the lake because it was more than half-submerged. It was a strange sort of vessel, hardly large enough for more than three dwarves, only a quarter the width of the other vessels, and entirely lacking in machinery. Parts of it were charred, and the wood that was in contact with the water had rotted.
The Copper found a few tasty metal pegs made out of a greenish heavy metal. They smelled hearty, and he extracted one with his teeth. Finding it palatable, he pulled out a second one, and the vessel parted from its lower half and rolled over, breaking into two pieces, one of which was dry and still floated.
What dwarves could do, he could. He hopped into it and, after a moment of precarious rocking, found that it supported him. It was curved, and about half of it went under the water. He found that if he lay between the two raised arms he could be mostly out of the water.
He pushed off and paddled with his saa, alternating with tail swipes when his legs grew tired. With this, he didn’t need a dwarf boat. It wasn’t quite swimming, nor could it be called riding, but it would do.
He paddled it back to the rocks where the bats waited, clinging to the cavern ceiling, and showed off his prize. The bats were more interested in the fish than the find.
The Copper had gotten better at pounding ideas into minuscule bat skulls. Or perhaps the bats had grown used to following his orders. “This way you don’t need to fly all the time. You can rest on the wood edges, there.”
“Ooo, m’be not liking that,” Mamedi said. “Bit of dwarf craft. It’ll go wrong and end up on top of me in the water!”
“Then cling to my back. I won’t roll over. Here, try.”
She stayed where she was on the rock until Thernadad gave her a shove. Then she fluttered down and settled on his head.
“You’re blocking my good eye with your wing.”
“M’regrets, sir,” Mamedi said.
He pushed out and swam in a slow circle. He wondered how the piece of wreckage would handle in the stronger current of the river tunnel. But even if he bumped his whole way to the Lavadome, it would be easier, and warmer, than swimming. The dwarves, for all their faults, knew how to get from one bit of cavern to another with as little discomfort as possible.
Another advantage of the Copper’s discovery was that it allowed the young mother bat to travel with her young.
Looking back on matters later, he counted the final leg of the journey as one of the key turning points in his life. A thousand tiny circumstances might have caused him to miss the camping demen and their egg. Had he ridden lazily in the piece of wreckage instead of paddling, had he not passed up likely landing places because of dwarf-smell and pushed the bats, had it been another season when the river flowed more slowly, or more quickly…
The strange chain of events started when he saw a distant shape in the dim light of the tunnel. A brighter patch of light that marked a tunnel mouth revealed it as three hominid shapes rowing in a little shell of a boat not much larger than his own bit of wood.
He reached out a saa and arrested his drift.
Three demen struck the tunnel mouth. Two dragged their boat out of the current while a third scouted, spiny projections on his back bristling. The two began to take baggage out of their craft.
