Dragons in the Earth Read online

  DRAGONS IN THE EARTH

  Horses of the Moon, Book I

  Judith Tarr

  www.bookviewcafe.com

  Book View Café Edition

  September 20, 2016

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-625-7

  Copyright © 2016 Judith Tarr

  Acknowledgements

  This book could not have happened without the help of many friends and fans and lovers of horses. Many thanks to you all.

  Rick Kirka, Carole Nowicke, Emily Lyman, Alice Ma, Meredith, Kitter, Mary Kay Kare, Ingrid Emilsson, Gwyndyn Alexander and Jonathan Farr, Heartsease Farm Lipizzans, Lisa Clark, Lisa Horwitz, Joni Teter, Donna Penz, Chris Coen, Freya & Mincka, Paula Whitehouse, Pico, M.L.K. Ondercin, Ashley McConnell, Rachel Narow, Kerry Stubbs, Alan Hamilton, Tanya Koenig, K & K Case, Dearbhla Sheridan, Charles Dunkley, Rob Woiccak, Patch, Candace R. Benefiel, Anja, Karen Grennan, Catie Murphy, George Olive, MD, NF, Cora Anderson, A B Warwick, Janet Oblinger, Nancy L Barber, Oz Drummond, Sarah Williams, Linda Antonsson, Ruth Stuart, Kathleen Hanrahan, Jackie Duckworth, Leah Cutter, Amy Sheldon, Kathryn Young, Mary Spila, Nancy Pimentel, Jenna Erbele, Anne Walker, Cristina Potmesil, Jon Chaisson, T Arnold, Alison Farrin, Amanda Lee-Riley, Caitriona Lawrence Magee, Nancy Weston, Amelinda Erin Webb, Rachel Neumeier, Michael Spence (who learned from the examples of Judith, Susan, and Harry that one can be both a Ph.D. and an accomplished SFF writer, and was encouraged to follow suit), Horse Yoga Jenny, Lynne Glazer, Karen Robinson.

  In memory of Luna, a horse of the moon. And for Cori Killian, who loves her still.

  With special thanks to Doranna Durgin of the deadly editorial sword, whose clear eye and ruthless attention to detail made this a much, much better book.

  1

  Dragons sleep in the earth here.

  I feel them. Sometimes I see them—in my head, in dreams, in the hunched shapes of mountains curled around the flattened bowls of the valleys.

  They’re always there. I’m always aware of them, but sometimes the awareness sinks down deep, till I can almost forget them.

  That day, for example, when I’d finally had enough of failing to make a living.

  I don’t exactly live at the back of beyond, but a mile and a half of ranch road and a pair of dry washes can keep the worst of the city folk at bay. Unfortunately, my client was desperate. A phone consult wasn’t enough. She needed to see me in person. Now. Immediately.

  She cruised past the long-empty horse pastures in a hot-pink limo, parked herself on my weather-worn deck, and brandished her fashion accessory.

  Somewhere under the hot-pink dye was a teacup poodle. He knew exactly what he looked like, and he was not even remotely happy about it.

  “Dorrie says you’re the best,” said the owner of the arm he was draped over. No human emotion could penetrate the Botox mask, but her voice had a raw edge. “I need the best. Bruno hasn’t been himself, and he won’t talk to anyone. He bit his masseuse. His astrologer says there’s no cosmic reason for him to be so difficult. Will you please ask him—”

  I’d had a bad morning. One of the swamp coolers had died with a puff of smoke and a smell of something burnt and electrical, and it might be October but it was still ninety degrees in the afternoons. I needed that cooler.

  I also needed this appointment, or there wouldn’t be any money to pay for the cooler repair. I braced myself to nod and look sympathetic and tell the client what she wanted to hear.

  The dog under the pink fluff looked me in the eye.

  There weren’t any words. There seldom are. I have to translate.

  “He says,” I said, “that all that’s wrong with him is you. Dye him pink one more time, and he’ll bite you harder than he bit the feelgood-hands lady. He wants to be a dog. You want a handbag, he says, get one that’s dead already.”

  When I snap and say exactly what the animal is saying to me, sometimes their captors start screaming. I got slapped once.

  This one fixed me with a flat, hard stare. “Bruno loves me,” she said.

  No, he doesn’t. I bit my tongue to keep from saying it aloud.

  Bruno sank his teeth into her arm.

  That shocked a shriek out of her. The limo driver had a first-aid kit and paramedic’s training, which was a good thing. Bruno had strong jaws for a tiny dog, and teeth like needles.

  They roared off in a cloud of dust. I stood on my front step, with the heat already coming up, and my bank balance no happier than it had been before.

  Down in the shade of the mare motel, Rosie’s long ears angled toward me. The two horses were out of sight in the mesquite bosque, deep in the shade, but she’d heard the commotion and come to catch the end of the show.

  “Dorrie is going to kill me,” I said to her.

  Mules don’t do metaphor. Rosie looked pointedly at the empty hay feeder.

  I looked equally pointedly at her well-upholstered ribs. “You’ll get lunch when it’s time for lunch.”

  Rosie farted eloquently. I showed her my teeth and stretched.

  The knots in my shoulders protested. I tried to pour the tension out into the ground, but this wasn’t letting go. Maybe the ground was full already, with what I’d been dumping into it for the past dozen years.

  I had better luck filling my eyes with desert. You’d never know from where I stood that there’s a fair-sized city a few miles down the road. All I could see were the remains of the old Arabian farm that used to anchor this end of the ranch, barns and corrals and fences abandoned except for my tiny herd of equines, and all around them, sand and scrub and cactus rolling toward the mountains.

  North was the tallest of the ranges, rearing almost straight up over the valley. West, the desert stretched for miles until it fetched up against another, smaller, spikier line of peaks. East and south wrapped us around with ridge and range, protecting us from the winds that blew the summer rains out of Mexico. There were more mountains past those, though I couldn’t see them through the ridge: a wall along the southern horizon.

  Four ranges. Four points of the compass. Navigating’s easy around the Tucson valley, if you know your mountains.

  I wished my life was that easy to find my way through. I was stalled out, and damned near tapped out. Claire Bernardi, unregenerate horse kid, refugee medievalist, animal communicator to the stars, needed a new swamp cooler, but mostly she needed a new—something. Job. Consuming passion. Life.

  A dust devil roared and spun down the wash past the barn. Big one: so tall I couldn’t see the top of it.

  People out here believe that dust devils are spirits of the dead. Whoever this was was strong, and seriously pissed. It ricocheted off the barn and veered toward Rosie.

  She laid her ears flat back, spun her rump, and slammed it with both barrels.

  It collapsed in a pile of dust and tiny whirligigs. “That’s telling it,” I said in the sudden silence.

  Emma came early to ride Ricky. Emma had horses in the blood but no place or funds to keep one, and Ricky is the kind of gelding who, to put it gently, needs a job. Emma and I between us kept him just busy enough to stay on the right side of absolute evil.

  Usually on days when she couldn’t make it in the cool of the morning, she drove out to the ranch an hour or so before the horses had their dinner, rode for a while and played with Rosie and Aziza, then helped me feed and tuck them in their stalls for the night. After that she’d head back to Tucson to teach a yoga class or a dance class, or very occasionally to sleep.

  Emma is twenty-six. Her energy reserves are bottomless, and she’s still as close to immortal as humans get. She and Ricky are a perfect match.

  That day she showed up at midafternoon. I’d abandoned the house, which was an oven even with the one remaining cooler turned on High, and tr
ied to find a bit of cool in the old show barn. It was still solid, if empty and dusty, with stalls that sometimes stirred with long-maned ghosts.

  I’d brought my laptop with me. I was supposed to be working on it, but the barn was warm and dim, and I hadn’t slept well for longer than I could remember.

  I have to be careful when I sleep. Things come to me, and they’re not always either safe or sane.

  Sitting in the barn aisle with the wind blowing through and a decades-dead stallion sweet-talking his ghost mares next to me, I had the whole ranch wrapped around me. Nothing bad could get in. That didn’t stop the not-bad things, or the things that crawled up out of my own subconscious.

  This dream was an old one; I’d had it for as long as I could remember. A marshy landscape, a line of mudbrick walls, and something large and somehow realer than anything around it, walking past. It looked like the offspring of a lion and a cobra, stalking on four long legs, with its tufted tail high and its snaky head questing on its long flexible neck. Its scales were gold and its tongue was carnelian.

  It turned its head and looked straight at me. In Emma’s voice it said, “I fixed your cooler.”

  Emma doesn’t look anything like a Babylonian dragon. I blinked at her, too brain-foggy to remember what words felt like.

  They came back in a rush. “You what? How did you—”

  “The pump died,” she said.

  “And you just happened to have one in your truck?”

  “No,” she said, “but you did. You bought two the last time.”

  I hadn’t even remembered. Emma patted me on the shoulder and loped on out of the barn.

  No one in Arizona wants to save daylight. By the time we’ve fought our way through the white-hot summer to October, we’re painfully glad that the sun has started to go down before six, giving us that much less heat for the day. Before the end of the month, if we’re lucky, the heat breaks altogether, and then it’s winter, when human beings actually want to live here.

  After Emma finished riding and hosed the sweat off Ricky and herself, she helped me feed the equines. She hauled the hay and I measured out the grain: a token cupful for Rosie and Ricky and a full bucket for ancient Aziza, soaked till it was soft enough for her to chew it.

  I leaned on the pipe rail for a long time after Emma left—she was teaching a yoga class tonight, down by the University—and watched Aziza eat. At thirty-three she was well up there for a horse, and she had the missing teeth and the dropped back to show for it. But her speckled grey coat was shiny and her ribs were nicely covered, and she’d made it through the summer without losing condition. I could be reasonably sure she’d stay with us for a while longer.

  Over her elegant little ears I watched the sky turn to flame above the jagged teeth of mountains. It was a little less hot already, and the wind was almost soft. Down in the wash, an owl hooted.

  It was out early tonight. The doves were still settling in the big pepper tree by the house, and the coyotes hadn’t begun to sing.

  I let the peace of the place sink into my bones. Too often I forgot how, but tonight for once I remembered to stop and breathe.

  This is old land. Humans have lived on it, off and on, for twelve thousand years: since the ice receded, before the mammoth died out. I could see them if I slanted my eyes just right, huge hairy shapes shambling across the horse pastures.

  I could see every sentient thing that had spent any time here, if I wasn’t careful. Hundreds, thousands of them, so many I could have drowned, except for Aziza butting me with her head and half knocking me down.

  Then all I was aware of were the two horses and the mule, the coyote hunting in the wash and the owl on the dead saguaro above her. I felt the Old One, too, up on the hill by the palo verde tree.

  That was one of the things that had never lived, not as humans or animals knew life. I’d never been able to see it with my eyes. When I bent my mind on it, I got the sense of a person wrapped in a blanket, very old, very calm, and perfectly still. It didn’t react to anything around it. It just was. Sitting there. Being.

  The breath left me in a long sigh. The light was nearly gone. The stars were out. No moon tonight: it was the new moon.

  I left the equines to the rest of their dinner and walked up to the house. My feet knew the way in the dark. It was cool and quiet inside, and the cats were hungry, weaving in and out through my ankles and giving me hell for being late.

  I fed them and then myself. I was stalling, but once I had food in my stomach, I couldn’t justify any more excuses.

  My phone was sitting on the kitchen table where I’d left it this morning. I thumbed it on while the computer worked its way around to connecting to the wi-fi.

  No messages. Dorrie hadn’t heard about today’s adventure, then. Maybe I’d be lucky and she never would.

  The laptop, like the coolers, was cranky and old and sometimes forgot what it was for. It finally allowed as how it could load email if it had to. I scrolled through the usual clutter of mailing lists and Buy This spam. No clients. The weekly hello from Mom. And all the way down the screen, one from Dorrie.

  No subject line. One line of text.

  Tomorrow. Ten a.m. Listen when they talk. Don’t screw it up.

  My fingers twitched toward the keyboard, then toward the phone. Then away from both of them.

  She wouldn’t answer. Dorrie doesn’t get into arguments. If she has anything to say, she says it. Once she’s said it, that’s it. She’s done.

  I might have more chances left, but I was skating close to the edge. Dorrie and I went back all the way to grad school: Medieval Studies for me, Theatre Arts for Dorrie. I lived on Dorrie’s family’s ranch, caretaking the west end where the horse farm used to be, keeping the barns from falling down and the pastures from turning into tumbleweeds and cactus.

  That wouldn’t end because I kept driving away the clients Dorrie sent me. But Dorrie would stop sending them.

  Dorrie works in television, writing for shows that even I have heard of. She could spread the word in ways I couldn’t begin to, even if I had any talent for selling myself. I needed Dorrie and her Hollywood connections.

  I took my headache and my cup of tea and all three cats to bed. I refused to worry about the appointment in the morning. I’d be up and ready for it, but I couldn’t answer for what might I might say.

  2

  I'm that justifiably rare bird, the medievalist Ph.D.: drastically overeducated and completely unemployable. All the endowed chairs are occupied, and the occupants aren’t going anywhere. Anything that pays more than will-you-have-fries-with-that will tell you you’re overqualified, and adjunct slavery in a community college doesn’t even pay as much as will-that-be-paper-or-plastic.

  I’ve had this . . . thing . . . with animals as far back as I can remember. Not just animals, either. There’s a reason, besides chronic lack of income, why I live where I do, on land so old and so sacred that nothing unwanted can get in.

  I don’t do well in cities, or in crowds. Or anywhere, really, where sentient beings hammer at me with their hear me, see me, help me, save me. The living, the dead, even things that never lived but still have minds and wants and wills: they won’t let me be.

  I work by phone, email, and video chat. It takes real desperation, on both sides, for me to see a client in person. Yesterday’s had been the first in over a year.

  Today made two in a row, which hadn’t happened since I moved to the ranch.

  With a new client, I want to know absolutely nothing before I see them. If it’s a return—and most of them actually do come back—I don’t want to know why they called. Either I’ll get it right or I won’t.

  I almost never get it wrong.

  This morning started off hot and promised to get hotter. That meant humidity in the air, which was not normal for mid-October. Surge up the Baja, I thought.

  Morning barn chores were sweatier than they’d been since the monsoon wheezed and died, a week or so after Labor Day. The equines
ate their breakfast and drifted down toward the wash. I showered off the sweat and dust and cranked the coolers, for what good they could do. Humidity and evaporative cooling don’t mix well. You have to have dry air for the system to work.

  Usually I’d set up the session in the kitchen with the floor fan going, but I was too twitchy. I parked on the chaise lounge under the pepper tree, where there was shade and a breeze and I could see anybody who came up the road. I had the laptop, and today I really meant to finish that article—still not giving up on academia, though it felt like trying to talk to deaf people in the dark.

  The words refused to come. I had my research lined up and marching, my academic-ese turned on full, and my brain was blank. I gave up halfway through a paragraph of bird tracks and gibberish.

  Clouds were piling up already over the mountains: shades of the long-dead monsoon. The peaks looked more than usual like sleeping dragons.

  The mountains are rock and earth and growing things, but there are Powers under them, as old as the Old One under the palo verde tree, and much less benign. Picacho, the lone peak thrusting up out of the desert on the road to Phoenix, the one whose name I always hear as Picasso—the dragon coiled under it is sound asleep, but sometimes it dreams.

  That’s why there are so many accidents up that way. It’s not all about a crowded highway, sharp angles, and prevailing winds that blow blinding dust or killer fog straight up there where the semis and the RVs pack in together.

  There was nothing like that here. This land was peaceful. The dragons beneath were deep asleep. The dragons of air were unusually quiet. None of them meant harm to anything that lived in this place.

  That, I realized even while I thought it, wasn’t exactly true. I felt something very big over me. In the sky, hovering over the mountain.

  It was looking for something. I couldn’t tell what. That made me rethink the silence overhead. Peace? Or trying very, very hard not to be noticed?

  What in the old gods’ name was I supposed to be reading today? A whale? An actual dragon?