Crawling Between Heaven and Earth Read online

  The man jumped. A tick pulled his left eyelid. “A…?”

  George cleared his throat. He knew that the man couldn’t possibly be intimidated by him as he looked now. In his human form, George was small and dark, with the Mediterranean features that must have been his father’s, and green eyes like his mother’s. He could have been a little Greek merchant, the owner of a corner grocery store or restaurant. The idea made him smile a little, as men smile at dreams they can’t own. “A whiskey,” he said.

  Dropping his rag on the edge of the table, the waiter scurried away, as if his back brain felt something, knew something that his conscious brain willfully ignored.

  George covered his face with his hands. If he had enough will power, he too would scurry away. The waiter’s behavior made perfect sense for any simian whose instincts told him something was wrong, though his reason could think of no danger.

  Half simian himself, George could feel the same panic surge through him, tightening his heart, closing his throat. But he’d been called here, and the magnet that had pulled him remained, strong. He looked at the dancing girl and shivered.

  Unlike the waiter, George knew what he feared and his reason concurred with his instinctive panic. He feared death.

  The death he’d hastened here to meet.

  George counted the men that sat, each at his own table. Twenty. He groaned. Far too many of them, running the gamut of the types of mankind: Scandinavian giants, small oriental men, dark towering colossi. All of them stared through red-rimmed eyes at the female. All were bigger than George. And they’d be stronger too, since they were, presumably, full drake.

  George had no chance. No chance at all to win this game. Not that it mattered. The outcome would be death, win or lose.

  The female danced beneath the strobe light, seeming oblivious to them all.

  She swayed hypnotically, her perfect figure encased in a tight silver sheath dress. Her long golden hair glinted with a metallic shimmer.

  Staring at her, made George’s head spin. A hungry need that he’d never known writhed to life in his belly. He clutched the edge of the table, glad of harsh wood against his palm. No. He wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t fight for the female. Yet, he felt his lips pull back in a teeth-baring snarl. The drake wanted to do battle and conquer.

  The waiter glided across the bar, carrying glasses on a tray, and slid a condensation-dewed glass onto George’s table.

  George breathed deeply, forced his lips down, made his mouth close.

  The man looked even paler than he had before, though that should have been impossible. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed.

  On an impulse born of empathy, of his own fear pulling his lips tight and making his hair stand on end, George pulled a handful of coins from his belt pouch, threw them on the man’s tray. “Go home.” His voice ground out with the ominous sound of gravel sliding down a ravine, the sound of claws scraping stone.

  The man’s mouth worked, opening and closing. “My—My job.” His mouth closed with a snapping sound.

  George shrugged. Even through his all too human empathy with the man, the sneering disdain of the drake came through. They were foolish, these apes, bound by stupid rules and codes of conduct that came not from the belly—like those of the drakes—but from the head. “Those coins are gold,” he said. “And many collectors would give their eyeteeth for them. Go home.” He looked away from the man, barely conscious that he still stood there, by his table, looking stunned.

  George’s gaze followed a blond barbarian type who’d got up from one of the tables and crossed the bar to stand at the edge of the dance floor, watching the dancing girl. The first challenge.

  Seconds stretched into eternity.

  The girl danced, as if she didn’t know the ritual she’d initiated, the challenge she’d called.

  From a table near the dance floor, a short oriental man in a jade-green business suit stood up. The two males looked at each other, nodded. Together, they walked out.

  The waiter whimpered.

  George drank his whiskey, savoring the caustic burn down his throat. The fights had began. The fights and the madness. He did not want this. He wanted to be left alone to live his life.

  From outside came a sound of wings, a sound of rushing, a heavy thud that shook the bar.

  The waiter put his tray down on George’s table and, clutching the handful of gold coins, and scurried away, knitting himself with the wall.

  Soft happiness suffused the female’s features.

  The oriental man came back in, smelling of sulfur. He walked confidently to the edge of the dance floor.

  Another man stood up. They glared at each other with open enmity.

  The waiter keened and ran for the door.

  The oriental man and his new challenger headed for the door, too, close behind the waiter, but at a more leisurely, stately pace.

  George closed his eyes, gripped his glass tightly, tried to force drink past his tightened throat.

  Images of his mother’s dancing by candlelight in the sacred precinct of her temple, mingled with the image of this girl dancing beneath the strobe light.

  In the untold centuries of his childhood, George had watched his mother lure lover after lover to his death.

  Now, he, himself, had been lured, betrayed by a code ingrained in his loins; pulled by a need woven into his genes.

  Fear and excitement coursed through him; dread and heat played his nerves like skilled fingertips drumming music out of a fine harp. His throat twisted and worked, seeking to shape a song the world hadn’t heard for millennia.

  If he could still the madness of his own desire, perhaps he could wander off into the night, unnoticed, like the waiter. He closed his eyes and groped in his mind for a memory of a safe time.

  George remembered the blind worm he’d once been; the fledgling who had slumbered beneath the temple’s floorboards, receiving tidbits from whatever his mother savaged—princes in their silk wrappings, merchants redolent of spices, priests perfumed with incense and fire.

  He could almost feel the mattress of rubies, diamonds and coins of that first nest. But not quite. Reality pressed him on all sides. The metal chair held his body at an uncomfortable angle. The wood of the table felt too warm against his hands. He heard the soft music playing over the sound system of the bar, the steps of men coming and going. He knew that the challenges went on. From outside came the sounds of giant wings, the shaking booms of sudden falls.

  He opened his eyes

  Only the small oriental man in the jade green suit remained.

  With his back to the girl, he stared at George. From beneath his heavy eyelids, his eyes shone an incongruous green.

  Fear and excitement brought George upright. Hot in his belly, cold in his heart, he stood up to take the challenge.

  He glanced at the girl, then back at the other male.

  At this point, the female was irrelevant. What mattered was the fight and the surge of power and blood in your mouth, and strength in your minds. What mattered was siring the new generation.

  This wasn’t love; not human love. He’d longed for love, once.

  Love, as humans knew it, with lifelong companionship. He’d been quite young, then, yet he still remembered his Elisha, his bride, dead centuries ago, killed by the drake who’d emerged from George and taken her sacrifice in his own way.

  He’d tried love the human way, but drakes could not love humans.

  The oriental man nodded to George.

  George nodded back.

  Outside, the warm air stank of burning flesh and scorched hair, mixed with briny sea and damp sand.

  Waves whispered against the soft shore. Far in the horizon myriad lights glowed. Closer, giant, malformed corpses burned on the sand, their flickering light sputtering between orange and blue.

  Moloch. The Phoenician word for burnt offering came unbidden to George’s tongue. He’d first learnt human speech back in Tyre, and it still felt more true
to his tongue than any other words it had shaped it the endless centuries since.

  George’s foe stopped and bowed, a neat bow. He undressed, folding each piece of clothing and setting it down on the sand.

  The smell, nerves and fear, spun George’s stomach into a tight knot of nausea. Smoky air stung his nostrils and burned his lungs.

  He didn’t care about his suit or his appearance after the fight. His preparations were more urgent. He must change; he knew that. He must summon the drake. Not being fully drake, he couldn’t simply command the transformation, but he must woo it, tempting it to him, like a distant lover.

  He clenched his fists and tried to feel the surge of emotion that would trigger the shift.

  But his muscles hurt from their long journey and his mind felt detached, much too human, strangely amused by this alien game of lust and death.

  His opponent finished rolling his socks into a neat ball, and setting them on the sand, atop his patent leather shoes.

  George tried to force his heart to beat faster, longed for the pulse of madness in his blood. Nothing happened. He willed his muscles to writhe and twist. They did not respond.

  A slow panic, a useless horror paralyzed him.

  As from a long distance, he watched as his opponent started coughing; his body writhed and twisted and changed.

  George would die now. His centuries-long journey would end here, on this beach. His body would be only one more bundle of burning flesh on the sand.

  His adversary’s face twisted into a long, golden muzzle; his eyes flashed jade-green under their heavy lids; his arms distorted into heavy paws. Wings grew on his back as he tripled in size and essayed a lumbering leap on the verge of flight.

  He was larger than George expected. Which explained how he managed to kill all the others. The true advantage in dragon fights was the difference between the human form and the dragon form. Only the spacing between atoms changed in the transforming, but the mass remained the same. A small man who became a large dragon would weigh less and therefore have the advantage of agility in aerial combat.

  George had never compared himself to other dragons. He did not know how his size measured up. All his life, he’d been too busy avoiding drakes. His knowledge of them was only that which came through the flesh, not the brain—the blurred sort of knowledge that filtered, imperfect and fractured, from his sinews into unformed thoughts.

  The newly formed dragon must have thought that George didn’t change because he was afraid. He gloated with triumph. In lumbering steps, half-man, half-beast, now biped, now four-legged, he advanced on George.

  He’s not even going to use fire, George thought. Why use fire on the halfling, the half-human one? I’ll live as nothing but a pitiful joke in the racial memory of my people. He took a step back, another, trying to stop himself from running. If George ran, he would seized. If George ran he would be rent limb from limb by the drake’s diamond claws.

  He should never have lived. His mother had told him so. Centuries ago, she’d let him know that he should have been killed at birth. Half human, half drake, he lived as an abomination to both races. But it had pleased his mother to let George live. As what? Her joke on the world?

  In his memory, George heard his mother’s silvery laughter.

  His belly twisted, in mingled revulsion and need.

  Staring at the maddened drake advancing on him, George wondered for the first time whether his mother had lured his human father with drake magic to her deadly embraces. Or had he come obediently in cold-blooded sobriety led by his family to the temple to become a victim to the sacrifice, great Ashtoreth’s ephemeral lover?

  George knew nothing of him, except his end. However he’d arrived, he had become a Moloch, a burnt offering.

  George cringed and reared.

  Something awoke in him and uncoiled. A blind emotion, half-rage, half-pity, flooded his mind at the thought of that human father he’d never known, who’d been killed for the pleasure of the drake.

  He was his father’s son and he would not be killed.

  Cough shook him and pain ran through him like an electrical shock. His hands and arms spasmed. Bone grated on bone, as the bones changed shape. Muscle twisted and augmented and wrested from its own substance the alien. Wings grew from his back and spread, a lacework of blood vessels and intricately knotted skin and nerves.

  George grew. And grew.

  George’s opponent backed up, one step, two, his gloating dance cut short.

  The smaller golden dragon stepped back, abashed. Like a cornered cat, it hissed and spit. It hunched into itself seeking to appear bigger. It snarled impotent threats at its larger foe.

  George advanced, preparing to fire.

  The golden dragon lifted off, at a panicky tilted angle. He flew above George, darting tongues of flame downward.

  Still shocked at finding himself at an advantage, George flapped his wings. Fistfuls of sand, caught in his claws, rose with him as he pursued his opponent.

  He flamed once, and again. Red flame engulfed the golden dragon.

  It screamed and fell from the sky; a flaming meteor.

  Like Prometheus, George thought.

  Human again, George sat on the ground, naked, trembling, sweat-soaked, cold.

  His opponent’s body burned, near the corpses of those he had defeated.

  Sulfurous smoke stung George’s nose. He looked at the clothes the man-dragon had so carefully folded before the fight. He looked down at his own naked body.

  He’d survived the fight, but no male survived the mating. He willed his legs to run. They didn’t obey. Drakes didn’t run from their females. They presented themselves to the slaughter as meekly as the humans offered drakes sacrifice.

  The awareness of her presence—smelled and felt and sensed—enveloped him.

  She pulled him to her as inexorably as though she had him bound hand and foot with unbreakable chains.

  No humans remained inside the bar.

  No male drakes, either.

  Only the girl who stood under the strobe light, staring expectantly at the door. When she saw George, she smiled. “I was hoping you’d be the one left,” she said as she took his arm.

  He shrugged. It was polite of her to lie. His was a polite executioner.

  George escorted her outside.

  She breathed in the sulfurous smoke. “Beautiful night, isn’t it?” she asked.

  George nodded.

  Overhead, straggling bits of cloud veiled moon and stars.

  These were the last clouds, the last stars George would ever see. He’d seen both stars and clouds for the first time from the tower of his mother’s temple. Strange to human form then, he’d felt fragile and ridiculous and his silk robes had scratched his skin.

  His mother had looked splendorous in pure white silk, her black hair loose down her back.

  “Those lights,” he’d asked her. “Those lights there, what are they?”

  And he remembered his mother’s laughing voice as she answered, “Why, the mating fires, cub. The mating fires of the divine dragons, lit in the moment of passion, when the female flames the male, that only her progeny might live.”

  George closed his eyes and shook his head.

  His beautiful, capricious mother had died when Alexander took Tyre. Her temple had been torn from its foundations. Scared into worm form, she’d been slain and thrown into the sea by Alexander who claimed to be half-serpent himself, and probably was.

  Long before that, she’d sent George from her, to meet his destiny in the world of men. Over the centuries he’d been sailor and soldier, dancer and teacher, priest and slave. Finally, he’d run from both humans and drakes and hid in the unpeopled wastes, where he could be himself.

  Now, he’d die.

  He clutched his companion’s arm. Her skin felt colder than his, slick as finely woven satin.

  This gilded female would flame him after he’d sired a new litter of dragons.

  “Sit here,” she said. �
�And rest a while. And you’ll tell me of yourself, that I might tell the cubs about their father.” She sat on the sand, leaned against the cliff.

  “There’s not much to tell,” he said. “I was born in Tyre in Phoenicia, so long ago that I can’t tell you the date.”

  She raised arched eyebrows in questioning surprise. “One of the ancient ones?” Her voice was all breath and awe. “One of the worshiped ones?”

  He shook his head, sighed. “No. I was born at the twilight of gods, when men grew ill-disposed to worshiping us. There were too many of us by then, too few of them. Human sacrifice… it didn’t happen that often. But my mother had a temple. Baalat, they called her.”

  The golden haired girl-dragon laughed. Her long-nail scraped his bare arm and slid along it, bleeding pain and an odd excitement from every pore. “There will be gods again.” Her voice slid, honeyed, like silk upon velvet. “From you and I, there will be gods. New gods for humanity to worship in their temples. We’ll usher in a new era.”

  George closed his eyes. “There are too many of us,” he said.

  She laughed again. “No,” she said. “There are too many of them. They will be all too willing to sacrifice their fellows and mates. We’re the last ones. Our cubs will be the only drakes in the world and all humans their herd.”

  “The only?”

  She nodded. “The only. All of those were the only ones left of the males.” She made a sweeping gesture towards the strewn corpses. “In all the world.”

  “But you’re only supposed to summon the males in your province,” he said. “You’re only supposed” He’d been halfway across the world, he remembered, living the life of a hermit in a sparsely populated forest. She’d called him, through snow and scorching sun. That meant”—You’re the only female?” he asked. “The only female left on Earth?”

  She smiled. “We grew so few,” she said, “that mating calls became difficult. Our females, born of those weakened matings, didn’t have the power to summon males anymore. We dwindled. But II am one of the ancient ones. I went to sleep when Carthage burned, at Roman hands. I felt… had a premonition, so I hid. I’ve slept long beneath the sand of the desert. I knew one day I would be the only one left to keep our race alive. And I am. And I was powerful enough to call all of you, from all the Earth.”