So would Sydney, the first time she heard Gauda sing. Almost anywhere, anyway. Exactly where Gauda kept that voice, Sydney could not fathom, the girl being otherwise small-boned, slender, with a habitually absent look about her young, round face from listening for dragons. She had begun to sing before she learned to speak. For her, the dragons showed themselves, recognizing, even before she knew, what she was born to be, even before she could say the words: dragon-singer.
Her voice, sometimes deep and lovely, at other moments soaring outrageously only to slow suddenly, soothingly into a tranquil lullaby, held the camos in thrall, told them what to do. Come to me, she said now. Come out of the winds, the clouds. Come and be trees.
Sydney watched them settle among the branches. The trees had great, strong, feathery, deep green boughs that swayed in the harsh winds as easily, as gracefully as kelp in the flow of the tide. As the camos swooped down and clung to the trees, they shed their misty, cloudy lines to mirror the massive, fringed limbs, the colors of trunk and needle, until they themselves became the windblown, soughing giants. Gauda could recognize the dragons instantly. Sydney, looking carefully, constantly lost the boundaries where tree stopped and camouflage began. They had grown very quickly, she knew: from a sweet handful of dragon into a small aircraft of camo. It seemed impossible that a winged plane parking itself up a tree should be so difficult to spot.
“All home?” she asked Gauda. They had put together a mixed jumble of language: something Latinate mixed with various local expressions, along with a few well-traveled gestures and slang phrases of merchants and traders.
Gauda nodded no, still singing. In her culture, a nod was a no. She held up one finger, indicating the missing one. Then the finger rose high, pointing at the sky, whose vague blur of color was fading rapidly beneath cloud. She caught the brief glimpse of a great, frosty eye before it dropped among the branches and became a pinecone. Gauda shook her head then: All home.
Under the fading daylight, enormous fires had turned the stark peaks, snowy ledges, and distant slopes into a field of fallen stars. Shadows rapidly melting into dusk moved endlessly through the flickering light: a city on foot, the numbers incalculable on two feet or four. Soldiers and beasts of various kinds hewed and hauled what seemed entire forests; others shoved the wood onto the fires. Huge milling crowds circled the fires like the rings of exploded moons and planets. Beyond the forest, within which entire herds were spitted and roasted, a chasm of black cut through the mountains, marking the human boundary. On the far side of the chasm, the storm flowing across it had dropped snow endlessly onto empty crags and slopes.
Within the grove of camo and tree, there was no fire. Gauda and Sydney were both cloaked head to foot in thick, furry cloaks gleaming with animals’ claws. Sydney was a mage; Gauda was magical in unpredictable ways. Between them they knew a dozen different ways to produce fire. But fire was a complex language to the dragons, and Gauda was singing them to sleep now. Before midnight, she would rouse them again, send them to feed among the leftovers fallen, along with smoldering spits, into the embers of the massive fires.
She held up her finger again, this time to her lips, which were smiling. “All asleep,” she said softly.
And then they weren’t, head after head untucking from wing, wings uncoiling, claws causing the huge trees to shudder as they stretched, searched, eyes appearing and disappearing, colored like cloud, then tree bark, then gold. A sudden flame from one of the camos, like a brief question, flared in its mouth, reflected in its eye, and directed human attention to something in the dusk beyond them.
A man stood in the distance down the sloping meadow, riveted and staring at what he should not have been able to see. The camo-dragons, all awake now, stared motionlessly back at him. He seemed to have drawn the storm over their heads. Snow began to fall, most likely caused, Sydney thought, by the way he was dressed. At that altitude, in that harsh, blanched season, he wore khakis and a short-sleeved shirt.
Startled, Gauda reverted to her own language.
“Whathu?” she said, or maybe, “Farlu?” The words were muffled behind her hands. The dragons shifted, rousing at her uncertainty, her tension. The young man, his wide eyes flicking incredulously from Gauda to the camos to Gauda again, took a step backward and sat down abruptly in a snowdrift.
Sydney, reading his mind without compunction, gave a sudden laugh.
“Tell them there’s nothing for us to fear,” she said to Gauda, adding a gesture: opening her hand, tossing fear away, making light of it. Tension, a palpable danger, melted out of the girl and, as quickly, out of the dragons. She hummed gently, soothingly, and they settled their claws, refolded their wings, melting again into tree.
Sydney walked down the slope to the stranger, held out a hand, and hauled him out of the drift. He was trembling badly, and his eyes, still wide, were full of dragons.
“Are you ever a long way from home,” Sydney marveled. His eyes came back to her, seeing her a little more clearly, and with sudden hope.
“Are you taking the final for one of Dr. Seeley’s classes, too?”
“No,” she said briskly. “I’m studying the camo-dragons. I work for the War Department.”
He almost sat down again; she gripped him, held him upright. “Where are we?” he pleaded.
“Oh, about twenty-two centuries ago. What on earth kind of class is Dr. Seeley teaching these days?”
“History of Ancient Sorcery.” His voice had all but disappeared. “Please. Where are we?”
“Crossing the Alps. Along with give or take fifty thousand men who speak a dozen different languages, thirty-seven elephants—no, twenty-nine now; they don’t like the cold either—five camos, two mages or four, depending on who’s talking, and one of the greatest generals in history. Make that three mages. You see them better than I do.”
“See what?” he said faintly.
“The dragons.”
He was silent, staring at the trees again. “They flicker in and out . . . I think I’ll just flunk the test and go home. I never much liked history anyway.”
“Don’t be afraid. As Dr. Seeley says, no one ever died taking one of his tests.” She felt his surprise and smiled. “I’ve looked into his methods. The War Department keeps track of everything that could possibly be useful. And it’s very interested in camo.” She tugged at him; he still seemed frozen in place. “Come on. Gauda has ways of kindling a fire that won’t disturb the dragons. You don’t have to fear them. They’re part poda, and very intelligent.”
He took a step finally, and spoke. “Poda?”
“Cephalopoda.” His silence exuded a blank, a question mark; she answered it, preparing now for a startled flock of question marks. “Octopus.”
The war-mage had left Will speechless again: he kept looking for huge eyes and bulbous bodies, long, long legs—or were they arms?—dangling down between the trees boughs. Nothing but dragons and trees, his eyes told him. The dragons looked big enough to carry him aloft on their backs. He studied their shifting shapes, picked out their silhouettes against the true trees, whose boughs rode the wind, gesturing, flowing, conducting invisible orchestras. The camo-dragons were the calm within the storm. They only rippled now and then, mostly at the edges, as though stirred by a gentle flow of water. Tide, he thought incredulously, and made a noise the woman interpreted as a question.