Episode 04
Heidelberg
I want it on record that I said no. To the cart, to Europe, to the twelve hundreds, which were wet. Nobody wrote it down, so I'm writing it down now, on a beach, with sand in places I didn't know I had.
My name is Weakling. It isn't. He called me that, to my face, for two hundred years, and I called him old man, and we were both right.
I'm from Emeraldo. It's a place, or it was: green, wet, on the far side of the border. I'm the size of a boot and I talk. I correct people. I'm afraid of everything and I say so, which is not a flaw. It's a service. Somebody in a cart has to say the bridge looks thin.
Five of us and a bag. Three people, two dragons, and a leather bag of diamonds that he cut things into at night the way other men whittle.
I belonged to a Kralle. One of the first ones. She'd been in the war room, she'd been in the crater, and she could keep her mouth shut, which in that cart made one of us. She already had a dragon when I came to her, late: a big one, the old kind, who walked beside the cart and looked like a horse if you didn't look. I looked. Constantly. I sat on her shoulder. He walked.
The old man went under names. A new one every country, sometimes every inn. He had a green thing in his left eye, small, like a star somebody had left on, and I asked what it was. Twice. He answered once: it was where his own dragon had been, before a woman with gold hair pulled its head off in a hall, and it was all he had left of it. I didn't ask a third time.
He said that in eleven thousand years of meeting creatures I was the most annoying one he had met.
I said that for eleven thousand years it was a small sample.
The third person was a copy. I'm not going to explain that; he never explained it to me. A copy of a boy he'd known when he himself was a boy, which by my arithmetic is a very long time ago. The ancient kingdom's own plan had produced him, and produced him well: he walked beside that cart through the whole of Europe wearing a face the old man went quiet at, and never once put a hat on, and the old man never once asked him to. I asked, once, why not. Nobody answered. I've filed it.
And Chanel.
Hair up. Flat voice. She'd run a city once and the city had gone and the ledger inside her hadn't; it went on without anything to run, and you could hear it at night from the cart roof, where I sat, because I'm afraid of the ground. Clicking. Not her teeth. The columns.
The town where it started was on a river. Children were going missing. Not poor ones; that was ordinary and nobody counted. The children of important people. Chanel had the lists, because Chanel always had the lists, and read them out in the inn.
"A bishop's nephew."
"A margrave's daughter."
"A banker's twins."
"Twins," I said. "That's a pair. Pairs are worse."
"Noted," said Chanel, and wrote it down.
One here, one there, across the whole continent, and nobody joining the dots, because the dots were in different countries and it was the twelve hundreds and there was no such thing as a dot. We joined them. That's what the lists were for; that's what she was for. And every one of them pointed the same way, which was east, and back, and down a service stair, to a woman with gold hair who was still kind to everyone individually and had run out of children to calculate with in her own city and had started, quietly, taking other people's.
That was the plan. Not the first plan; the one after. What she wanted them for I can't tell you. He went into a cellar in a house on a river and found out, and came up grey, and that night he cut it into a diamond, the way he did, and put the diamond in the bag with the others, and I said what was it, and he said:
"Weakling. For once. Be afraid of something useful."
It was the year fourteen hundred by the count we were using, and I'll explain the count, because I count things and this one's mine. A year is what you get when you sit under a city's gravity for one turn. The city we'd left sat heavy. So fourteen hundred is a count of turns by the weight we were used to, not by the sun over Europe. He said it was near enough. It wasn't. I said so.
And somehow, and I have swum an entire ocean thinking about how, the woman with the gold hair got a version of it.
Not the cellar diamond. The older one. The film from the crater, the creative message, the one he'd cut the night after the Nymphen came, with the faces in it. Not mine; I came late and I'm in nothing. A version of that, edited by a hand that knew exactly what to leave in and exactly whose faces to keep, let loose in the year fourteen hundred in a town where it could be read by people who had never seen a diamond turn in light and had no idea what they were looking at, except that four strangers in their town had done something in a crater a very long way away that ended a city.
They were extremely quick about it. We were taken on the Tuesday and it was done by the Friday, in the square, with a machine they'd built specially, which was three hundred years ahead of its time and which nobody in that town could have drawn. Somebody sent the drawings. I have a guess. So did he.
Heads off. All four.
I'm not describing the square. I saw it from the river and I'm not describing it.
Yes. The river. I went in on the Tuesday, when they took us, without a word to anyone. I'd like to say I went for help. I went because the water was the only thing in that town I was less afraid of than the town. And then I stayed, under the third arch of the bridge, for three days, because I'm afraid of open water and I was also, it turned out, afraid of leaving.
Three of them went down on the Friday.
My Kralle. Her big dragon went down with her, the way they do; that's the thing about being a dragon that nobody puts on the brochure. The copy of the boy, with no hat. And Chanel, who said, on the way up the steps, in the flat voice, to the old man, and I have it from a boatman who repeated it on the Saturday, and boatmen repeat things wrong but this one had the flat voice right:
"Well. Now we know what the H was for."
I don't know what the H was for. I've thought about it the width of an ocean. I'm allowed one thing not to know, and it's that.
And the old man.
He'd explained it in the cart, at night, because I'd asked, more than once. An avatar can't die. Not directly. He said it like a rule, not a comfort, and I said so what happens, and he said:
"The body goes. The thing that was in it comes loose. It woke up on the edge of a bath at thirty and it's got a star in its eye and it doesn't get to stop. It's nowhere. It has to decide."
"Decide what?"
"Where to be."
"And if there's nowhere?"
"Then you do what pages do when the room's finished with them. You leave the room."
"What's outside the room?"
"The spirit world. It's a place. You learn to wear bodies." He thought about it. "I'd pick something nobody looks at twice. A forgettable man. In a cardigan."
"What's a cardigan?"
"Two hundred years from now, Weakling, you'll know."
By that Friday his name was in ruins across a whole continent, cut into a diamond in an edit he hadn't made, and there was nothing to go back to and no one. So from the third arch I watched a body go, and I don't know what the thing in it decided. I'm afraid he's somewhere in a cardigan and I wouldn't know him.
Then I swam.
Down the river, which was bad. Out to the sea, which was worse. And then, and hold this next to everything else you now know about me, across the entire Atlantic Ocean, being afraid the whole way and saying so, out loud, to nobody, until I came ashore in a place that will one day be called São Paulo, and climbed out, and shook myself.
If anyone ever asks how a dragon came to be on this side of the water, it went like that. A weakling in a river. Afraid. And went anyway.
He'd have said I did it on purpose. I've got a whole beach to think about whether he was right, and the sun going down on the wrong side, and the first thing I did when I'd stopped dripping was look for somewhere to be frightened in.
There's a lot of it. It goes all the way up.