Feathered Dragon - Douglas Niles [72]
Erixitl slowly regained her strength. Her skin, darkly tanned and dried from the desert, grew smooth and fresh again. Every day, it seemed, the baby within her grew larger. Halloran rejoiced to the sensations of its kicks against her abdomen. For long hours, the journey became a pastoral adventure for them as they forgot about their mission, forgot about the dangers that lay before them. But then
thoughts of the looming confrontation with the gods returned, and it would be as if a heavy cloud had moved across the sun.
Several days after leaving the sea behind, they called an early halt so that the dwarves and Jhatli could hunt While Coton and Lotil rested in the camp, Hal and Erix went for a quiet walk on their own. It was their first opportunity to be alone together in a very long time.
“These are good lands here,” observed Halloran. Beautiful and fertile. I wonder why there are no settlements of humans.”
“I don’t know. We have not yet reached the lands of Far Payit. Yet [had always thought nothing but desert lay beyond. Perhaps this place has not been discovered by humans yet.”
The thought was an intriguing and pleasant one. For a while, it seemed as if they were on an exploration. However, the long trek had been marking their days, and it seemed wrong somehow to stroll aimlessly for a few hours, as if they had nowhere important to go.
“It seems that life has become nothing but a series of long marches,” Erixitl sighed wistfully. “I look forward to the time when we can make a home again and live there in peace:
“It will be soon,” Halloran promised. “When this child it born, he-or she-will not have to run from enemies or chase after gods! And neither will we.”
How much longer will that be?” she wondered lightly. “I’m afraid I’ve lost track. 1 think 1 have about two more. months.” They both knew that their estimation was rough at best.
For a while, they walked through a shady vale, past meadows of brilliant flowers. They approached a rocky niche where, earlier, they had observed the top of a waterfall Now they pressed through mossy underbrush, hearing the growing noise of a cascade that told them they were getting closer.
Finally they broke from the brush to stand on the smooth sandy shore of a small pool. Before them, tumbling from
high above into the other side of the pool, flowed the object of their exploration.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” she asked him. He could only stare in
wonder at the falls, a narrow plume of white far above that grew from a whispering ribbon of water into a foaming cloud on its plummet into the clear pool.
“A place made just for us,” he said softly. He took her hands in his, and for a moment, the despair wracking Maztica was forgotten, an unwanted intrusion into this splendid Grotto and its quiet solitude.
A slight movement off to the side of the grotto drew Halloran’s attention, and he turned with shock to stare into the face of a feathered warrior. The man was naked, with black and red paint in alternating stripes covering his face.
More significantly, he carried a short, sturdy bow, with a wooden arrow. The tip of the missile pointed unwaveringly at Halloran’s face. He saw a gummy liquid, brown and thick, smeared on the tip of the arrow.
Poison!
Only then did he notice that the man stood barely three feet tall.
From the chronicles of Coton:
THE MAKING OF THE LITTLE
PEOPLE
When the great gods created humankind, according to the wishes of Qotal and Zaltec and their children, they made man tall and strapping, fitted for war and for hunting. Soon, they knew, he would become master of his world.
But other gods-Kiltzi and her younger sisters-stole the mold used to make man. They found their brothers’ tastes too warlike and saw that man was too big. They desired a toy, a little person that could become part of (he forest world without becoming its master.
So the sisters began to work on their own mold. They copied everything that they could from the shapes created by
their brothers, but they made their humans smaller, that they might more