That was fine; that was exactly as he expected. He got up, and started back towards the exit, and the little side cave where he stored the supplies he needed to care for his animals. First he needed the mint-oil and a rag, then he would take Hoppy’s kid away from her. He would rub all three of them with mint, and Hoppy wouldn’t know which baby was really hers, so with luck she would nurse both of them.
It had worked before. Keman figured it would work this time, too, even though this cub was a great deal more helpless than the orphans he’d usually given Hoppy to nurse, and certainly wasn’t shaped anything like a two-horn.
The cub gave a cry, and this time the hunger in it was unmistakable. Keman turned, suddenly apprehensive and unsure what Hoppy would do; the cub’s cry was so unlike the bleating of her own young.
Hoppy stared at the cub, startled, her ears up. Keman took a single step, ready to put his foreclaw between the cub and the two-horn if she showed signs of aggression.
But Hoppy stretched out her nose and nuzzled the cub curiously – then, before Keman could move, she rolled the infant toward her while the baby continued to wail in hunger. Alarmed, and afraid of what this rough-and-tumble treatment might have done to the cub, Keman bounded over in a single leap.
Only to discover that the cub was nursing contentedly beside Hoppy’s own kid, just as if they all had known exactly what to do.
Keman lured the last of the one-horns into Hoppy’s paddock with a sweet-root, taking care to stay clear of those long, wicked claw-hooves. The one-horns tolerated him, as they tolerated the members of their little herd. They extended him no affection, and no kind of license. They regarded Hoppy and her brood with resigned disdain for a moment, then settled down to guard her.
Keman they ignored, but he was used to that. He padded wearily back to the lair, hoping to find his mother reinstalled, but found the cavern as echoingly empty as before.
It wasn’t a very large lair as these things went; it was, in fact, part of a chain of limestone caves that extended under the mountain on this side of the valley. The caves were no longer connected; each dragon wanting an underground lair had laid claim to a certain number of caverns and dug his or her own entrance, then sealed his or her section off from the rest.
There had been numerous limestone projections, formations made over the centuries by water dripping from above. Alara had arbitrarily cleared some of these away; others she had simply left because she liked the look of them. Smoothly polished by the endless drops of water that made them, they shone softly in the dim light. In the main cavern the ceiling was high enough that Alara could fly quite easily, and she had cleared and flattened most of the floor under the main dome. A few projections remained; the most impressive stood in the center, directly under the highest point of the dome. It was a large stalagtite, still growing, that would meet its partnering stalagmite in a few centuries. The lower half of the pair looked strangely like a stylized sculpture of a tree-covered mountain, and Keman and his mother both found it fascinating to stare at. It stood in a reflecting pool that surrounded it totally, so clear that Keman could see the bottom, deeper than he was tall.
Cold-glowing globes of glass, that his mother made and set mage-fire within, illuminated whatever portion of the lair she wished to see. The ‘tree-mountain’ and the pool surrounding it were always lit with a soft blue, and Keman’s sleeping-cave as well as his mother’s shone with a muted green. Currently that was all, for Alara had not been home in a month, and the rest of the lair seemed terribly dark and not particularly friendly. From time to time the silence was broken by dripping water or the scuttlings of Keman’s lizard pets, but that was all.
He tried to get to sleep, curled up within his egg-shaped cave, in his nest of sand and the gems of his own tiny hoard. It was a fairly useless attempt. He kept starting awake at the slightest noise, and then spent a dreadfully long time listening wide-eyed to the noises out in the dark.
Finally he just gave up. He couldn’t just lie there anymore. Maybe he could do something.
As he trotted out to his menagerie, he saw that the sun was just rising.
Well, he’d have had to get up to feed them all anyway, he thought with a sigh. So he might as well take care of that right now.
Most of the grazers could be turned out into the big field he’d fenced off, but not Hoppy and the one-horns, not if he was going to keep the human cub fed and secret. So that meant laboriously tearing up grass, piling it all up on a hide he’d rigged, and pulling the lot to the paddock. Several times. Grazers, he had learned to his sorrow, ate a great deal. The sun was well up by the time he’d completed that job, and he was hungry and thirsty.
The predators among his menagerie were actually easier to deal with. He simply went out to hunt his own breakfast and brought back an extra kill for them. Sometimes it bothered him, pouncing on a fat two-horn and thinking that this same animal might easily have been one of his pets – sometimes he even had trouble at first nerving himself up to a kill. But then the herd would run, and instinct would take over, and before he knew it he had a mouthful of sweet, tender flesh.
Sometimes instinct was awfully hard to fight. The mere sight of a herd-beast running away was enough to set Keman’s tail twitching with anticipation and make him ready to pounce on anything else that moved.
Right now he was getting hungry enough that even gentle Hoppy was starting to look edible.
Better go hunt something. He climbed to the top of a rock, spread his wings and lurched into the air clumsily; while he was old enough to fly, he wasn’t terribly good at it yet. At least not at the takeoffs and landings. He tried to do those in private, where no one would laugh if he fell over on his nose.
As he flapped as hard as he could to gain altitude, his hunger grew. He decided to hunt the herds of wild horses today, feeling very sensitive about two-horns at the moment. He found some rising air at the mouth of his canyon and caught it, letting it take him out through the little twisting cuts and arroyos leading up to the Lair. Most of the adults didn’t bother to hunt this close to home, and sometimes he had been able to find good hunting in here. Occasionally the good watering spots would lure little family herds of grazers in, despite the nearness of the huge, ever-hungry dragons.
Luck was with him; he surprised a herd of sturdy, dun-colored mares up a dead-end canyon with a tiny spring at the end of it. He spotted one without a foal at her side, nerved himself, and dove.
She was too confused to do anything but stand; he hit her full-on, talons digging into her back as he landed heavily right on top of her. He felt her neck and back snap as she went down beneath him without a struggle.
A clean kill. He felt enormously proud of himself. And a horse was a much larger beast than he usually took, too.
As the rest of the herd pounded away in panic, he feasted contentedly. He’d never bothered with the wild horses as members of his menagerie; they were just too stupid, too nervy, and too intractable for him to care about. Father Dragon said that the elves had somehow managed to get three-horns to breed with horses, and that was how they got one-horns. If that was true, it looked to him as if all the worst traits of both species had come out of the cross. One-horns were as stubborn as horses, as aggressive as three-horns, and meaner than both. Keman had the feeling that they liked killing things. It figured that elves would breed something like that.
Keman decided that from now on he’d eat three-horns and horses exclusively. Most of the other dragons didn’t care for horse, anyway, which left a lot more for him to hunt. So what if the meat was tough and a little gamey? At least his conscience wouldn’t be bothering him, and he wouldn’t be seeing Hoppy’s eyes looking at him reproachfully every time he came back from a hunt. Maybe it was imagination, but it always seemed to him that she knew when he’d been eating two-horn.
The mare was more than he could eat; more than enough to take back to feed the rest of his zoo. But, carrying that much extra weight, he’d have to get some altitude before he could take off.
This was turning out to be a lot of work and he grumbled to himself. He wished they’d all just learn to feed themselves.
He climbed the side of the valley, clinging to the rocks as he hauled the carcass up after himself. It was pretty battered by the time he got it up to a ledge, and he was winded.
Oh well, the loupers wouldn’t care what it looked like.
He had to rest in the sun, spreading his wings to catch the heat and restore his strength. He basked for quite some time before he felt up to grasping the thing in his rear claws and launching himself into labored flight.
It was a good thing the Lair wasn’t far; with all the work he’d done so far, and short on sleep as he was, he was ready to drop with exhaustion.
He’d better get everybody fed before he fell over, he thought ruefully, as he tried to maneuver for a landing.
The landing was a bad one anyway, despite his care. He spilled too much air at the last minute and hit the ground too hard, falling over his kill and crashing face-first into the hard-baked adobe clay. Dust flew everywhere.
He picked himself up and winced as he felt yet another bruise on his chin.
He wondered if he was ever going to learn how to land as gracefully as his mother. Right now, it didn’t seem likely.
Turning his attention back to his kill, he tore the carcass apart and distributed it among the carnivores in his menagerie. There were only the lizards, the loupers, and the spotted cats, and of the three, only the loupers were captive. The loupers came to the front of their enclosure at his call, pointed ears up, tongues lolling out of toothy muzzles, tails wagging. They took the horse shoulder from him directly and dragged it off to the back of the alcove. Loupers couldn’t jump well, though they could run like streaks of gray lightning, and another of the ubiquitous stone fences kept them penned. One of the pack was blind; one, like Hoppy, lacked a leg; and the remaining two were too old to hunt for themselves. They were friendly little scavengers, and were perfectly willing to look to him for pack leadership.
The spotted cats came to no one, but he knew he could leave the haunch just inside the exit to the lair and they’d find it; they always did. The rest, scraps mostly, he scattered among the lizards, also kept in a common pen, who would eat when they felt like it. All except for the ones who lived in the lair itself, who were very happily eating the insects there.
He went to the little spring that watered the canyon, and washed himself off thoroughly. He didn’t want to approach the one-horns or Hoppy with the smell of blood on him. He wasn’t sure what Hoppy would do, but he knew what the one-horns would do; they’d charge him, and mean it. Anything that smelled of blood brought an immediate reaction from them. And they knew very well how to use those long, wicked, spiral horns; that seemed to come inborn with them, even the fawns would charge a perceived enemy with head down, nubby little horn aimed correctly.
Father Dragon said the elves had tried to breed the one-horns for fighting, but that most of them had proven impossible to tame, much less break to saddle, and so they had turned loose the beasts in disgust. Many of those had proven so aggressive, charging even creatures like dragons, that were more than a match for them, that the breed attacked itself into near extinction.
He wouldn’t have bothered with them either, Keman thought, as he edged his way into the corral. They really were more trouble than they were worth, except as herd-guards. They were good at that, and they’d leave the two-horns alone, too. Maybe they figured killing two-horns was just too easy.
The one-horns seemed disposed to accept him today, perhaps because he’d fed them earlier; they just gave him a warning glare and went back to keeping a wary eye on the ground beyond the fence. Two-horns posted guards, but one-horns were always on guard.
It was a real pity that they were such nasty beasts, he thought a little wistfully, as he watched them posing against the red rock of the canyon. They really were pretty …
The single horn, a long shaft that seemed to be made of mother-of-pearl, spiraled up to a needle-sharp point from a base as thick as Keman’s talon. The base rose from the beast’s forehead, at a point directly between the eyes. Those eyes were the first clue that this was not a creature that could be commonly regarded as sane. The eyes, a strange, burnt-orange color, were huge, and the pupils were in a constant state of dilation, as if the beast were forever in a condition of extreme agitation. The head was shaped like that of a horse, graceful, even dainty, but the eyes took up so much space that it was obvious even to Keman that there couldn’t be much room for brains there. The long, snake-supple neck led to powerful shoulders; the forelegs ended in feet that were a cross between cloven hooves and claws. The hindquarters were as powerful as the shoulders, though the feet there were more hooflike than clawlike. The beast had a long, flowing mane, tufted tail, a little chin-tuft much like a beard, and tufts on all four feet. The whole beast was a pure white that shone like pristine snow.
Father Dragon said the things came in black, too, but he’d never seen one. As with everything the elven lords did, the one-horn had been bred first for looks and second for function, and they evidently thought that pure white and black were more impressive than the natural colors of the two-horns and three-horns.
At least if they were pure white or black, that let more harmless creatures see them coming.
The crowning touch to this contradictory beast came when it opened its mouth, as one of them was doing now, in a bored yawn. Those dainty lips concealed inch-long fangs. One-horns were omnivorous, and Father Dragon had warned Keman about ever letting his get used to eating meat – because if he did, before long they’d start hunting it themselves.
Keman had kept them on a strictly vegetarian diet.
They made effective guards, though. Nothing much was going to get past them, that was certain.
Keman had more than a year of experience in handling himself around the one-horns. He moved very quietly, and very slowly, in the direction of Hoppy and the enclosure at the rear of the paddock, being very careful never to look directly at the one-horns or to present them with his full profile. The first action they regarded as preparatory to attack, and would attack first; the second they would consider a challenge, and would attack first.
