The Elvenbane. Andre Norton
but he hadn’t the foggiest how to take care of them. For now, at least, Hoppy seemed on top of the problem.
So there was only one thing that needed taking care of.
‘You need a name,’ he told the mite, which paid no attention to him. ‘I can’t go on calling you “the cub.” It doesn’t seem right. Even the one-horns have names. They don’t answer to them, but they do have names.’
He gave the matter careful consideration, choosing, then discarding, at least a dozen while he pondered. Draconic names seemed somehow inappropriate, but the kind of names he’d given his pets seemed even worse. He knew a little of the elven tongue, not too many names. Still, the elven language seemed fitter than the language of the Kin as the vehicle of her naming.
Finally he decided to call her simply what she was: ‘Orphan.’ In the elven tongue it sounded pretty enough, and almost draconic.
‘Your name is Lashana,’ he told the child gravely. ‘But since you’re so little, “Shana” will do for now. Do you like it?’
The baby, who had finished nursing, waved her hands in the air and gurgled a little. Keman took that as a good sign, and went to take a nap, feeling he’d done his best for her.
Keman rested his head on his crossed forearms and watched his newest little charge wave her arms in the air and coo at her hairy foster mother, and sighed. No matter how hard he tried, or how he braced her in her nest of straw, she would roll out into the sun – or Hoppy would nudge her there because the two-horn didn’t want to leave her orphan, but wouldn’t give up her morning doze in the sunshine either. Keman wasn’t certain how much sunlight Shana could take, but her pale skin didn’t auger well on that score. He’d seen albino animals scorched and blistered by the sun, and they had fur to protect them.
And that brought up another problem. Besides being exposed to the sun far too much, she was getting scratched by the straw. Hoppy was keeping her clean easily enough, but her little body was criss-crossed with a series of thin pink welts from the straw-ends poking into her.
No doubt about it, something was going to have to be done. He was going to have to improvise some sort of covering for her; a garment of some kind, as he’d seen the adults wear when shape-changed to elven lord or human. It would have to be made of something that was tough enough to protect her, soft enough not to hurt her, and impervious to the various bodily functions that she was exercising at the moment.
And it would have to be something that wouldn’t hurt Hoppy, frighten her, or make her stop tending Shana in any way.
Keman pondered the problem, his tail twitching in the dust behind him. He’d rooted through his own family’s storage areas often enough, and knew what kinds of things were kept there. The Kin brought home plenty of souvenirs in the way of fabrics, among other things; the lair was full of things Alara had carried off, then forgotten. But none of them seemed to be quite what Keman wanted. A good half of them were likely to end up in Hoppy’s stomach, in fact; the two-horn’s notion of taste was a catholic one, and Keman was often amazed at what she considered edible.
Keman toyed with several possibilities, discarding them all eventually. Try as he would, he couldn’t think of anything in the storage area that was suitable. He would be able to make something for her now. He was better equipped to manipulate small and delicate things than he had been when he’d first taken over Shana’s care. Over the past several days he had discovered that if he concentrated very hard, he could shift the shape of his foreclaws to give him something like human hands.
There had to be something back there in the lair. Mother was as bad a collector as a miser-mouse. While he thought, he scratched at an itchy spot on his ankle; the skin around his joints was dry and had been bothering him since he came out to the pen.
The itch became a torture, and he scratched harder.
The skin on his ankle finally broke and tore along the claw-lines. He peeled the strips away and got at the new hide beneath with a sigh of relief, scratching the delicate skin lightly with just the tips of his talons. The new scales had to cure for a bit before they were as tough as the old hide, and until then they were easily damaged.
It just figured he was starting to shed. He could never think when he was shedding, he just itched all the time –
He stared at the shred of metallic-blue skin in his claws, something tugging at his mind. Slowly it dawned on him that he was holding the answer to the problem of Shana’s protective garment.
Skin. Shed skin. It was supple, soft, yet so tough it took his claws to tear it. It was proof against everything. Hoppy wouldn’t eat it, and wouldn’t be afraid of it either. The one-horns didn’t like it, but they were back in their own pen now that Alara was in the lair. Keman didn’t need them to guard anymore; Shana’s presence was no longer a secret, and no one seemed inclined to object to her or threaten her or Keman, given Alara’s ‘ownership’ and Father Dragon’s unexpected interest in the mite.
This newly shed skin wouldn’t do – the pieces shed at joints were much too small, and he wouldn’t be able to peel off the larger pieces for about a week. But that didn’t matter; Alara’s hoarding extended even to something as ‘useless’ as shed skin.
He sprang to his feet, leapt the fence, and hurried back into the cave complex, hoping that Alara had left a light in the storage area in the back of the caverns. The last thing he wanted to do now that he had his solution was to disturb his mother’s uneasy slumber. The new baby was being a pest – or so Keman thought privately – demanding food at all hours, and fussing when she wasn’t eating.
He was mortally certain that he had never caused Alara half the problems this new baby had. Furthermore, he’d been perfectly capable of caring for himself and the lair while she was gone, and he was taking care of the human cub she’d brought him, without any help at all!
The storage caves were dimly lit; once he got beyond the bright glow of the ‘mountain rock’ he saw the pale, weak yellow light of a guide-globe just barely visible against the darker stone ahead. That was really all anyone needed for the storage caves; the things kept back there were generally the kind of useless items most dragons brought back from forays into the world beyond the desert. Things like Alara’s fabric collection; she couldn’t use them in draconic form, her scales would slice them to ribbons. But they were pretty, and she liked occasionally to shift form and play with them and in them, and even to sleep on great piles of the costly stuffs.
Alara was unusual in that she saved bits of her shed skin, and Keman’s; the tough hide made good pouches, though the pieces were never big enough for more than that unless you patched them together. She needed a lot of pouches to keep mysterious things, in her capacity as shaman, and she told Keman that nothing worked better for that than her own skin.
The Kin shed their brightly metallic, multicolored skin once every five or six years when they reached their full adult size, and once every couple of months when they were youngsters and growing. Even on a baby, the hide was very thick and tough, and a dragon grew an entirely new set of scales with the new skin forming beneath the old. That was one reason why a dragon needed metallic salts; when he was growing new skin and scales, the metals went into the scales, making them a lot tougher than the simple scales of snakes and lizards, very hard, and yet lightweight. For that reason, the shed skin stayed colorful even after shedding. Keman thought it was rather pretty, as attractive as some of his mother’s fabric collection, and sometimes spent an idle afternoon laying out patterns with the smaller scraps.
His own skin from the last shed should be soft enough to use on Shana, he thought, groping his way across the smoothed floor and hoping that his mother hadn’t left anything lying about that he was likely to trip over. And Shana would be used to the color and smell. So would Hoppy.
His eyes adjusted to the dim light fairly quickly, and by the time he reached the globe itself he could see reasonably well. He passed several caves filled with oddments from Alara’s travels. The riot of fabric spilled out onto smooth stone of the floor, the colors wildly bright even in the dim illumination. Next to