The Old Races Read online

  "No," he answered, knowing it might be a lie and yet somehow certain of it, "No. Not forever."

  Seals, with their single pups and small sleek heads, had an easier time of birthing than humans did. Roisin's mother was there, thank the tides, and two aunties and half a dozen daughters and Eoin himself, stuck into the corner of the small house he'd learned to build. They chattered and laughed among themselves, breaking only when Roisin's bellows drowned them out, then began again, while Eoin sat agog in the corner and was as glad to not be much needed. The cursing and sweating and hobbling about with pain, crouching into a birthing squat and swearing and standing up again, had been going on for hours, for most of a day, and the best any of the aunties and daughters could offer was, "The first is usually hardest," until Eoin himself could take it no more. He elbowed through the women to reach Roisin's side, there to murmur, "Do you want them all here, Roisin? My people birth more...privately." It was the wrong word; seals had little concept of privacy. But they would and did retreat to give birth, not relying on a dozen others to help them.

  Roisin, who was human, managed a short laugh and blew a strand of sweat-damp red hair away with a puff of breath. "Me ma and aunties would be enough, but you know what it is I want, Eoin? Water," she said, mystified, before he could ask. "A bath of warm water to dunk myself in and push until the baby comes, but that would drown the babe, would it not?"

  "They're born in a sack of water already," Eoin said. "I don't know why two minutes longer would drown them when their birthing sac didn't. But the water, Roisin, if the blood breeds true..." His voice dropped with the warning, and his wife gasped another laugh around a ripple of pain.

  "It's bred true, I'm sure of it, and that's why I want the water so."

  "I'll get it for you," Eoin said with determination, "if you can tell me how to get all these women away."

  "Out, so!" Roisin's bellow bounced off the little house's stone walls. "Out, all of ye's! The air's too thick to breathe and it's dying for a breath I am! Out, and come back when the birthing's done!"

  In two minutes they were gone, all of them save Mairaid, Roisin's mother, and she herself stood arms akimbo and gave them both a withering glare. "I've never heard such madness as a bath for a birthing woman. Don't look at me so, I heard ye's clear enough."

  "My people do it all the time," Eoin said, which was not untrue. They would take shallow water or shore, whichever seemed safer in the moment, and the pups were no worse the wear for either birthing spot. Surely a human infant would be safe as well. "Have we anything deep enough for Roisin to squat in?"

  "A cow's trough at home," Mairaid said dourly, and spluttered outrage when Roisin said, "Get it." But she went, and Roisin sagged into Eoin's arms a moment before sighing and whispering, "Get me to the sea, then, I'll freeze me arse but I'm not waiting for her to go to the village and back again. The aunties and all will have gone with her, it'll be only the two of us and the babe."

  Her shout had cleared the room. Eoin thought it wisest not to argue with a woman who could do that, and scooped her into his arms to bring her to the shore.

  Seals awaited them. Half a dozen or more, barely in the water when they approached, though all but one scampered into the bay's safety. Megan remained, her pattern of faint spots distinctive to Eoin's eye, and he kissed Roisin's hair reassuringly as he waded into the water and toward Megan. "A friend," he murmured. "As good a midwife as you could ask for."

  Roisin huffed acceptance, then shrieked as Eoin lowered her into the water. "Brigid's tits but it's cold! Oh holy mistress but I'll be frozen through and through!" Complaints turned to a growl that rose from her depths, and Eoin caught her beneath her breasts, offering support as she crouched and shouted at the world.

  Megan shed her skin mere feet away and came forward in time to lift a startled, soaking seal pup from the water. Roisin went limp with shock as Megan, eyes shining, ran a fingernail down the pup's belly and split its skin to reveal a squalling, outraged human boy.

  Roisin's shock fell away. She took the babe, curled him close even as Eoin lifted them both and carried them from the water. Megan followed a few steps behind, the baby's seal skin clutched safely against her chest. "Glendyr," Roisin whispered. "His name is Glendyr."

  Megan gave Eoin a curious glance, but he was smiling. "Of the valley and water," he whispered in response. "A fine name, my rose. A fine name." Then he lifted his eyes to Megan, who folded the seal skin and, offering it to him, nodded once.

  The blood bred true.

  Half a dozen selkies, females all, went into the sea with that knowledge held close to their hearts.

  Glendyr was preposterously weak and slow to grow, by selkie standards. Their children were born and lived their early lives as seals: Glendyr lived his as a human, only occasionally slipping into the skin that was his heritage. Selkie pups might nurse for three months, or four; Glendyr was at the tit for over a year. He swam naturally, even in human form, but it took a full turn of the seasons before he walked. Eoin watched with astonishment through all of it, equally horrified and delighted at the child's slow growth. Selkies kept closer to their parents than seals, forming a more lasting bond, but even so it was nothing to the years of dependency a human child had on its parents. Glendyr needed so much, so constantly, that it seemed incredible he could survive at all. But he did, and thrived.

  Within a year, Megan came from the sea and Eoin built her a house of her own, and then more as other selkie females caught with human fathers and birthed children in whom the blood ran true. In five years Glendyr had a brother and a sister, and the selkie exiles had a village at the river's mouth, standing small but strong between two worlds.

  The eighth summer, the warriors came.

  None of them, not even Eoin, recognized them for what they were, not in the first minutes. Familiar faces, long-since unseen. Mostly males, coming out of the sea with their skins already set aside. Coming out of the sea with such weapons as the selkie used in human form: spears and nets, knives and sharp shells. Megan was the first to shore, the first to greet them, her smile wide.

  The clan chief, her own father, gutted her.

  She fell, blood spilling bright and red against the sand, and the children, screaming, ran for the water. Ran for the safety of the waves, the one place human fighters could never catch them.

  Later, Eoin still did not know how Roisin did it. How she was there so quickly, when the selkies were among the slowest of the Old Races and humans were by far slower still. But she was there, red hair flying loose from its plaits, and she went not for Megan, not for the selkie warriors coming from the sea, but for the children who saw nothing of danger in a pod of seals splashing in the waves. Her voice rose and carried, sharp over the sound of screams: "High land, high land, not the waters at all! Get ye's to the hills now, go, go on with ye's, go!"

  Glendyr, as red-haired as his mother and wise enough to listen, spun on his heel and grabbed the two nearest children to drag them with him. He was oldest, most respected, most adored by the younger pups, and they wheeled after him like sharks chasing fish. The smallest of them who could walk, the toddlers, were close enough to the village that their mothers scooped them up and ran while human fathers, knowing what their wives and children were, went to face the males on the beach with sword and shield and rage.

  Roisin, between sand and sea, snatched the last of the children from knee-deep water and sent them running after Glendyr before turning to the oncoming selkie with all the courage of a warrior herself.

  She saw it, Eoin thought. She saw the sleek-headed spear that caught her in the chest, though when it was thrown it had been intended for her back. Saw, but could not escape: its force collapsed her in on herself, arms flung forward as her shoulders caved, as her feet left the earth, as her spine bent and she fell. She had saved the children, and died facing her enemy.

  Much, much later, Eoin thought she would have liked that, his bold and beautiful Roisin, but in the moment he thought nothing, only f
elt the pain of life going out of him, and ran to do battle.

  "Eoin. Eoin, wake up. You've slept two days, and your children need you. Wake up." Familiar voice, but the wrong one. Eoin opened his eyes slowly, saw the thatch of his rooftop by the dim light of embers. Saw Megan sitting beside his bed, thin-lipped with grief and worry.

  "You should be dead," he said after a time, and touched his own chest, his own belly, his own thigh: places where he remembered, almost, that pain had scored him. Not so deeply as the hollow in his chest, the emptiness of where Roisin had been, but deeply enough that life should have fled his body. "I should be too."

  "Glendyr." The name broke from Megan's lips. Eoin sat up, stomach clenched with fear, and his age-mate, his oldest friend, wiped tears away and put her hand on his shoulder. "No. No, I'm sorry, I didn't mean that. He saved us. He got the children to higher ground and came back to the village to get our skins. The fighting was over then, I think. It was so fast, and you were..."

  Her silence was louder than any words. Eoin had only sketchy memories, images of violence. He had seen seals fight one another at mating season, even kill one another. He had known the same capability, the same astonishing strength and potential for rage, lay within a people who shared so many aspects with the sea mammals, but had never imagined it within himself.

  "Our men," Megan said, "they fought well, they protected the children, but some of them have left now. You're the only male who has left the clan," she said awkwardly, as if it was explanation enough. "We females aren't as strong as you. We frightened them, I think, with our strength, but you terrified them."

  "But the warriors struck me down." Almost a question. The idea that his mortal friends had turned on him was too much to bear, in the fresh raw shock of survival and loss.

  "My father," Megan said bitterly. "The same as he did me, and we would both have died, and most of the others as well, if Glendyr hadn't brought our skins so we could change." She swallowed. "My father and his warriors were less fortunate. They'd left their skins safely in the sea. By the time the others brought them..."

  Shifting healed. They all knew that; it was part of their longevity, and more, it was part of what made the Old Races so very difficult to kill. It also, perhaps, had led the clan chief and his warriors to overconfidence: they would have imagined they could retreat and heal long before a puny army made mostly of mortal men might ever do them real damage. They had come, Eoin was certain, for the children, and had not imagined that those childrens' mothers would fight. They had struck Megan down, breaking one of their few sacred laws, and yet had not thought females who had chosen motherhood and exile over the clan might disregard those other ancient laws as well. "Roisin had no skin to save her."

  Megan closed her eyes. "If she hadn't been so brave, I don't know if the rest of us would have been, ourselves."

  Eoin's fingertips found new scars across his body, and thought they would heal more quickly than the sick emptiness in his chest. "You would have been. For the children."

  "If Roisin hadn't been so quick, there might not have been children to fight for. She was...you had better come to see, Eoin. You'd best come and see." Megan offered a hand and Eoin rose with her help, moving stiffly and knowing he shouldn't be walking at all.

  Glendyr and his brother and sister waited in the next room, pale faces streaked with tears that flowed anew when their father joined them. He knelt and held them all, wordless with the same shock and sorrow they shared. Megan left them for a long time, but finally said, "There's more, Eoin. More you need to see."

  They went together, Megan ahead and Eoin with his children hand in hand behind her. She stepped aside as they left their home, and for long moments Eoin did not understand what he saw.

  Selkies, male and female alike, working to restore the village, patrolling the nearby water's edge, laughing and playing with children. Faces he knew and face he didn't: strangers from other clans, dozens of them. They slowed as they noticed him, facing him with respect, with hope, with pride, and Megan whispered, "They've been arriving since my father's defeat. They're telling tales of schisms within the clans, of the battle here being a breaking point. They've come to see our people survive, Eoin. They're here to fight for us, because other warriors will think as my father did and will come to try to wipe us out, because this isn't over, it can't be over, not until those like my father change their minds or die away. They're here for the children, Eoin. For the hope of children, when we've had none for so long."

  He was nodding, had been nodding since before she began to speak, understanding not just what the new arrivals meant, but what Roisin had meant as well. She would be the death of him, he had thought, but no. Instead, he had been the death of her, and she, she, his bright and clever Roisin, she had been the life of him.

  The life of him, and of all their future to come.

  the end

  SAINT GEORGE & THE DRAGONS

  At the heart of the River Seine, a dragon. Spoiling waters, fed on sheep, but in thrall to maidens fair. Daughters, never wives; a treasure trove, until the daughter is the daughter of a king, and a kingdom is bereft.

  A saint with sword and cross: a princess saved, and a dragon slain. He is Quirinus, he was Perseus, Marduk, Tahrun and Thor; and his dragons Cetus, Tiamat, Illuyankas and Jormungandr. He has slain dragons for a thousand years, and will slay them a thousand more.

  "He is a menace!" Outrage, rumbling like thunder through caverns near a shore. Well enough, that: there was little thunder to be had in this land, and the roar of a dragon's fury might at least be mistaken for heavy seas. Or they could be if the seas were heavy at all, but beyond the cavern mouth they lay serene and calm, cerulean skies reflecting on still waters.

  "He is a mortal." Insouciance, uncaring; even boredom. Not at all the desired emotions, when the question at hand is the survival of a species. But the water was very blue, a jewel in itself, and there should have been a way to claim it.

  "He has murdered one of us!"

  "It happens from time to time." Hardly the right answer: new outrage rose from some twenty throats. Janx sighed and turned from the view. Mediterranean blue could neither be equaled nor captured, and the beasts at his back were losing patience. "For the third time, will you not take human form to hold this discussion? How do you think they find us, these dragonslayers? They listen for storms where the sea is calm, they follow stories to cities of gold, they come to where legend claims virgins are sacrificed to mighty wyrms, and there we are, awaiting them in all our ancient, vulnerable glory. Humanity's guise may be distasteful, but it will also save your lives."

  He had made the argument countless times over countless years, and it had fallen on countless deaf ears. He, at least, took his own advice: lanky with red hair cropped close to his skull, and a beard too tidy and sharply pointed to meet the approval of Roman matrons. There were, after all, limits: he couldn't bear the thought of his own fine features hidden behind one of the curly monstrosities worn by the wealthy. But details of fashion aside, with his skin warmed to gold by the sun's caressing touch and jade eyes, Janx was by all immediate appearances human. His brethren knew better; they could sense his dragonly mass, shuffled to some unreachable spot until it was needed. That he chose to wear a human shape did nothing to undermine his presence.

  But they, all of them, kept to their serpent forms. It had taken months to find caves large enough to hold them when they would not shift, and even so there was sinuous life to the walls as they moved and made minute way for another. They did not, as a whole, bear each other's presences well; dragons were large, and largely solitary because of it.

  Large and greedy, and all the more solitary for that. "Virginity," Janx muttered, "is a stupid thing to treasure anyway. It doesn't last, you know."

  "Nor do treasure troves." One of the dragons--a young one, no more than twenty or so feet in length, and nearly as blue as the seas outside--shifted the balance in the caves by releasing his dragon form. Two of the much larger, much o
lder dragons slipped into the space the boy had been using, and one gave Janx a baleful look, as though the extra room to stretch was unwelcome.

  "Toka." Janx watched the boy come forward, less graceful than he should have been in human form. His beauty distracted from his awkwardness, though: he had hair so black it glimmered blue, and eyes of heated sapphire. Bold child, all things considered: bold to have come at all, when this was tacitly a meeting of elders, and bolder still to side with Janx, who said, "Thank you," with genuine sincerity. "Thank you for seeing sense."

  "Sense? Sense to claim treasure doesn't last?" Biru, as large as Janx himself--perhaps larger--and white as snowfields, with shadows gone to glacier blue beneath his scales--spoke for those who had no intention of seeing Janx's point. He had named Quirinus the dragonslayer a menace, and would gladly flatten the foolish child who dared disagree with him.

  Coltish in human form or not, Toka was confident enough to face a dragon at least six times his elder with a shrug nearly as insouciant as Janx might offer. "Scrolls burn, gold melts, virgins die, shells shatter, stones crack. Treasures don't last, dragonlord. But we might be able to if we're careful."

  Biru thrust his head forward, dwarfing the boy. White whiskers danced on thin streams of smoke, Toka half-immersed by them, but although he would make no more than a mouthful for the older dragon, he stood his ground. Janx lingered on the idea a moment, wondering what would happen if a dragon in dragon form ate a dragon in human form. Reversion, he expected: all the Old Races reverted to their true forms on dying, and a mouthful of brave infant would be a bellyful not even Biru could digest.

  The same thought, perhaps, occurred to Biru. He snapped his attention to Janx, pale blue gaze cold enough to take warmth from the Mediterranean air. "Will you let children argue your cause now?"