The Door Into Shadow by Diane Duane
“I don’t much care whose idea this whole thing was,” Segnbora said. “But won’t you creatures please—” She fumbled for the right word, but there was no word for undoing the mdahaih relationship. “Won’t you just go away?” she said finally, feeling uneasy about the vagueness of the term.
“Where?” the Dragon said, puzzled.
“Out of us!” Then she hissed with annoyance at the choice of pronoun. But in this language there seemed to be no true singular pronouns: even what she had been using for first person singular was a plural, me-and-the-rest-of-me, that implied the mdeihei. The only genuine singular forms in the language were either for inanimate objects, or human beings and other such crippled, single-minded entities.
“That’s impossible,” the Dragon said, lowering its voice into its deepest register, the one used for addressing the very young. “You’re sdahaih, and will be until you die.” The word it used was res‘uw: lose-the-old-body-and-move- into-a-new-one. Segnbora rubbed her aching head in bewilderment.
“If you were one of us,” the Dragon said, “you’d bring about hatchlings in time, and the soulbond between you and them would be established once they broke shell. The bond would grow stronger in them as they grew, and weaker in you as you became old. Finally, when you left your body, you would be drawn into them: become mdahaih. And so it would be with their hatchlings, on through the generations, forever…”
“Forever,” Segnbora whispered, feeling weak. “But all those voices—they can’t all be your ancestors…we wouldn’t be able to hear for the noise!”
“The ones furthest back are hardest to hear. They fade out in time—which may be for the best. The mdeihei are for advice, among other things; and advice from someone gone mdahaih fifty generations ago may not much benefit the sdaha, the out-dweller. At any rate, the strongest voices are the newest, the first four generations or so.”
Segnbora sat down on the floor, miserable. The great head inclined slightly to watch her, causing another brief storm of rainbows.
“What happens,” she said eventually, “if I die, and there are no children, and no one is close by to accept the linkage, the soulbond, as I seem to have done for you?”
She could see no change of expression in the iron-and-diamond face, but the Dragon’s tone went grave. “A few have died and gone rdahaih,” he said: not “indwelling” or “out-dwelling,” but “undwelling.” “They are lost. They and their mdeihei vanished completely, and from the mdeihei of every Dragon everywhere. They cease to be…”
Segnbora shuddered.
The Dragon’s wings rustled in its own unease. “Your people have a word,” he said. “A Marchwarder taught it to us: ‘immortality.’ He said that humans desire it the way we desire doing-and-being. We have ‘immortality’ already; only rarely do we lose it. Had you not come to the Fane, we would have gone rdahaih. Mercifully the Immanance at the heart of what was-and-is saw to it that you were there.”
No children for me, then, Segnbora thought, heavy-hearted. And no marriage. Humans had a responsibility to reproduce themselves at least once, and until that Responsibility was fulfilled she was not free to marry any man or woman or group. Worse, it was now going to be hard to die without knowing whether she’d ever go on, in the normal human way, to see the final Shore—
“O sdaha,” the Dragon said quietly, “since we’re going to be together for a long time—regardless of your plans for hatchlings—perhaps we might know your name?”
She stared upward, angry again in the midst of her pain. “I don’t remember asking you to listen to me think!”
“Among sda’tdae, there’s no use asking for permission or refusing it,” the Dragon said. “One hears. You’ll find there’s little I can hide from you, or would. Nor do I understand why so many of your memories lie here sealed in stone, though doubtless answers will become plain in time.”
The pattern of notes the Dragon wove around them said plainly that he considered her something of a disappointment. Still, there was compassion in the song behind the words, and amusement mixed with wry distaste at the situation he found himself in.
Segnbora rose slowly. She was finding it difficult to be angry for long with someone who was so relentlessly polite while also being so large. She was also starting to get the feeling that all the courtesy and precision built into the Dracon language might well be there to control a potential for terrible savagery. “Segnbora d’Welcaen tai-Enraesi,” she said, giving the Dragon the eyes-up half bow due a social equal.
“Hasai s’Vheress d’Naen s’Dithe d’Rr’nojh d’Karalh mes’en-Dhaa’lhhw’ae,” the Dragon said, giving his name only to the nearest five generations. The named ancestors sang quiet acknowledgment from the shadows beyond the sunlight as Hasai lowered his head almost to the floor and raised his wings in greeting, spreading them fully upward and outward in an awesome double canopy. Membranes like polished onyx stretched between batlike finger-struts, and the sunlight was blocked suddenly away.
Segnbora’s breath went out of her again in sheer amazement. “Oh, my,” she said, awed, “you are big. May I look at you?”
“Certainly.”
She walked around to her left, putting some fifteen yards between herself and Hasai so she could see more of him at once. Fifty feet of jeweled neck led down to two immense double shoulders, from which sprang both the backward-bent forelimbs, now folded underneath Hasai, and the first “upper arm” strut of the wings. Each of these struts ended at the first bend of the wing in a curved crystalline spur, as sharp as the diamond talons on each forelimb’s four claws, but much longer.
Segnbora walked the length of the Dragon, out of the shadow of his wings, past the great corded hindlimbs, which were taloned as the forelimbs were. Slowly she walked along the crystal-spined tail, scaled in sapphires above, crusted in diamond below—and walked, and walked, and walked. Finally she came to the end of it, where the sapphires were small enough to be set in an arm-ring, and the last crystalline barb, curved and sharp as a sword, lanced out ten feet or so from the foot-thick tailtip.
She looked back up the length of the body between the wings. It was like looking at a hill wrought of gems and black metal. Even supine on the stony floor, the slenderest part of Hasai’s body, his abdomen, was at least fifteen feet high and perhaps forty around. His upper shoulders were at least thirty feet across. There was just too much of him. “I can’t understand how you fly,” Segnbora said, starting back up the other side.
“The proper frame of mind,” Hasai said, arching his head backwards to watch her. “And our people aren’t built like the flying things you have here. We’re light.” And without warning, Hasai lifted up the last ten feet of his tail and dropped it on her.
Certain she was about to be crushed, Segnbora reflexively threw her arms up to ward the tail away—and found herself supporting it on her hands. It was heavy enough, but not at all the great weight she had expected.
“See?” Hasai said, flicking the tail away to lie at rest again. Segnbora shook her head in wonder. The rough undercrusting looked like diamond, the scales looked like sapphire— “What are you made of?” she said, starting to walk again.
“Flesh, bone, hide. And you?”
Segnbora blinked. “About the same…”
“You’re not quite as tough, however,” the Dragon said, sounding mildly rueful. “I remember the beast you will be riding, biting you there—” The glittering tail snaked up at Segnbora again, the terminal spine prodding her delicately in the chest. “You’ll be bleeding, and wishing for hide more like mine, that the beast would have broken its teeth on—”
As politely as she could, Segnbora undid the tailspine from her surcoat’s embroidery, where it had snagged. She’d noticed before, while fumbling for words, that in Dragon language there seemed to be several extra tenses for verbs. Now uneasily she realized that these were precognitive tenses— future possible, future probable, future definite. Dragons could apparently remember ahead as well as back.
“Perhaps it makes sense that you don’t desire ahead-memory,” Hasai said. “The Marchwarders have told us that your kind even has trouble dealing with what is. But to reject our past-memories as well—”
Segnbora shrugged. “What good are fifty generations of Dragon memories to a human?”
“But you’re not human,” Hasai said calmly. “Not totally. Not any more.” He looked away from her, a Dragon shrug, matching hers. “Sooner or later you’ll look and see what’s available to you. Not soon, I suspect.”
Segnbora went narrow-eyed with anger at the note of humorous disdain in the Dragon’s song. “Is that so,” she said.
Hasai bent his head down beside her and dropped his jaw slightly in an expression of mild amusement. The action gave Segnbora too clear a view of diamond fangs as long and sharp as scythes, and of the three-forked smelling-tongue in its recess beneath the blunt one used for speech—all lit by the fulminous magma-glow of the back of the throat, where Dragonfire seethed. “Well,” Hasai said, calm as some sleepy volcano, “will you put your hand in the Dragon’s mouth willingly this time?”
“Why not,” Segnbora said, nervous, and irritated for being so. “Here, take the whole arm—”
Without giving herself time to hesitate, she went over to his great toothy table of a lower jaw and thrust her arm up to the shoulder between two huge forefangs, resting the forearm on the dry hot tongue. Slowly and carefully Hasai closed his mouth, holding Segnbora’s arm immobile but not hurting it.
(Comfortable?) he said wordlessly, his inner voice sounding, if possible, bigger than his outer one.
“Yes, thank you.”
(Well, then…)
Without warning, Segnbora found that her body felt wonderful. Her eyes could suddenly see colors she had been missing: the black reds, the white violets. She felt for the first time the curves and planes of the energy flows that were as much a Dragon’s medium as the currents and flows of atmosphere. Her muscles slid lithe and warm beneath gemmed skin. Her eyes held light within them as well as beholding it without. An old, yet delightful burning banished the cold from her throat and insides. Power was there, and strength—the dangerous grace of limb and talon and tail. She felt reborn. She also felt hungry.
(Let’s eat,) one of her selves suggested. Agreeing, she crouched and coiled her way over to the door of the cavern, folded her wings carefully and slipped out.
(Wait a moment—that door’s only a few feet wide!)
(That was your memory,) said one of the mdeihei, a strong voice, fairly recently alive. (This is mine.)
Out they went into the brilliant light of noon at Onolí. (This isn’t my beach, either!)
(No, my old one. But just taste that sun!) And immediately she spread her wings right out to their fullest, feeling the sunfire soak into the hungry membranes and run through her like white-hot wine. She basked, drinking her fill of the light, lazing while the strange-familiar thoughts of a Dragon’s day-to-day life flowed through her in a slow rush of song and imagery—in this case, that mdaha’s memory of watching some other Dragon in flight, turning and twisting against the sunset sky, seemingly dancing with the air. A graceful statement of a frightening thesis. But there’s plenty of time before a decision’s required…
Other mdeihei rumbled lazy assent, a placid rush of low voices blending with the sound of the waves, themselves considering flight. Not willing to wait for a long discussion of the pros and cons, Segnbora got up and raised her wings, feeling with them the flows of all the forces that Dragons manipulated and took for granted, as fish accept water or birds the air. It was an old delight: the chief joy of the Dragonkind, dearer even than speech. (But what else are we for?) some one of them said.
The wings were hands. She grasped the currents she felt moving about her, pulled herself upward, sprang and flew.
The first leap took her high over the shore, and she watched with amazement and delight as she gained altitude. Boulders dwindled to pebbles and the huge crash of the breakers shrank to a soft-spoken crawl. (Inland, perhaps?) said the mdaha who had spoken, her song calm with her own joy.
(Oh please!)
She wheeled, catching currents of air and fields of force with her wings and her mind, gaining more altitude and speed as she soared south and west over northern Darthen. Below them the sunlit headlands of Síonan and Rûl Tyn lay patched and quilted with small field-squares. There were threads of brown road, and toy houses like a child’s carved playthings. Southward stretched wilder, emptier lands, tree-stippled hills, forests like green shadows on the fields.
She leaned up toward the sky and gained more height, watching the sunlight flash on a river-strung series of little lakes. Upward still she dove, through a furry fog of cloud-cover, and saw the Darst below go pewter-shadowed. More distant lakes and rivers seem to hover unsupported in the haze below. She dipped one wing, stretched the other up and out in a bank. Over her the patterned sky turned as if on a pivot, wheeled like a starry night about her center…
The higher and farther she went, the lovelier it all became. Thick clouds as white as drifting snow rose up before her, blazing in the sunlight. Bounded by these mountains of the sky, drowned far down in the depths of air, the land lay dim and still. Pacing her above the silence, the white Sun rode, swimming soundlessly in an unfathomable eternity of blue.
Still higher she climbed. Above her the sky went royal blue, then violet. Her wings lost the wind entirely and began to stiffen in the great cold above the air. She stopped beating them and fixed them at full soaring extension. Her mind was doing all the work now, manipulating fields and flows, triggering the shutdown of some body functions, the initiation of others which would protect her in the utter cold of the Emptiness.
The sky went black, and the stars came out, the winter stars that summer daylight hid, burning steady as beacons. In the same sky with them hung the ravening Sun, unshielded now by the thick cloak of the world’s air. It was a searing agony on her membranes, but an ecstatic heat within. Quite suddenly the mdaha whose memory this was flipped forward, tumbling end for end—
Had she been breathing, breath would have gone out of her. Below her, she saw an impossibility. The flat world was curved. The black depths of the Mother’s night rested against that curvature, holding it as if in a careful hand. The whole great expanse of the Middle Kingdoms, from Arlen in the west to the Waste in the east, could be seen in a single glance. Beyond them were unknown lands, unsailed seas—the whole of human experience and possibility, held under a fragile crystal skin of air.
Awed, she spread wings and bowed her head to the wonder. Surely this was the way the Dragons had seen the world on the day they came falling out of the airless depths: a jewel, a treasure, life—
(Perhaps you understand now,) Hasai said, his voice hushed with old love, old pain, (why we decided to stand and fight for a home.)
She hung there, unmoving in the silence beyond all silences, and understood.
(Not that we’ve forgotten what we left,) said the other mdaha. (Turn and see—)
Something happened to the Sun hanging behind her back. It felt suddenly strange, but welcome, like the touch of a friend coming up from behind. She turned and found that it had changed, was bigger, hotter, pinker. Close beneath her hung the memory of the ancient Homeworld, red-brown and dry; a harsh place, a birthplace, dear and dead.
A great mournful love for the lost lands where her kind was born rose up in Segnbora at the sight. But the mournfulness turned to something deeper and more piercing as she looked off to one side. Suspended there, seeming to cover half the endless night, was a great swirled pattern of stars. They seemed frozen in midturn—a whirlpool spraying drops and gemlets of
Oh, My Maiden, my Queen, they know You too—
She could find no other thought. Thinking was driven out of her by the immensities. After a while she realized she was leaning against Hasai’s face, her cheek resting on the great sapphired one, her left arm holding the Dragon close and her right in his mouth up to the shoulder. And her face was wet. She straightened up, abashed.
Hasai let her arm loose, and Segnbora spent a few moments brushing herself off and trying to find some composure. Hasai watched her gravely, waiting.
“It felt real!”
“And so it was.”
“But that happened a long time ago!”
“Certainly. And it happened again, right then.”
“But it was a memory,” Segnbora said, confused. “If I’d tried to change what was happening, I couldn’t have.”
“Of course you could have changed it,” Hasai said, courteous but confused. “We wondered that you didn’t try.”
Segnbora shook her head again. I’m missing something here:just not thinking well in this language yet. “That was very beautiful…” she said.
“We’re glad you find it so, sdaha. It’s well that you find value in who we were and are, for there’s nowhere else for us to be. Henceforward you will have to deal with us as we are—as we shall with you.”
Segnbora looked up in sudden anger at the immense face above her. “Who are you to dictate terms to me in my own mind?”
“You say ‘your own mind’,” Hasai said, impassive. “You imply ownership, or at least control. Prove your claim. Leave this ‘mind’ and then come back. Or better still, remove us.”
There was a long silence, during which Hasai watched her, and neither of them moved.
“So the realities assert themselves,” said Hasai, “for you, as for us.”