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What dwarves could do, he could. He hopped into it and, after a moment of precarious rocking, found that it supported him. It was curved, and about half of it went under the water. He found that if he lay between the two raised arms he could be mostly out of the water.
He pushed off and paddled with his saa, alternating with tail swipes when his legs grew tired. With this, he didn’t need a dwarf boat. It wasn’t quite swimming, nor could it be called riding, but it would do.
He paddled it back to the rocks where the bats waited, clinging to the cavern ceiling, and showed off his prize. The bats were more interested in the fish than the find.
The Copper had gotten better at pounding ideas into minuscule bat skulls. Or perhaps the bats had grown used to following his orders. “This way you don’t need to fly all the time. You can rest on the wood edges, there.”
“Ooo, m’be not liking that,” Mamedi said. “Bit of dwarf craft. It’ll go wrong and end up on top of me in the water!”
“Then cling to my back. I won’t roll over. Here, try.”
She stayed where she was on the rock until Thernadad gave her a shove. Then she fluttered down and settled on his head.
“You’re blocking my good eye with your wing.”
“M’regrets, sir,” Mamedi said.
He pushed out and swam in a slow circle. He wondered how the piece of wreckage would handle in the stronger current of the river tunnel. But even if he bumped his whole way to the Lavadome, it would be easier, and warmer, than swimming. The dwarves, for all their faults, knew how to get from one bit of cavern to another with as little discomfort as possible.
Another advantage of the Copper’s discovery was that it allowed the young mother bat to travel with her young.
Looking back on matters later, he counted the final leg of the journey as one of the key turning points in his life. A thousand tiny circumstances might have caused him to miss the camping demen and their egg. Had he ridden lazily in the piece of wreckage instead of paddling, had he not passed up likely landing places because of dwarf-smell and pushed the bats, had it been another season when the river flowed more slowly, or more quickly…
The strange chain of events started when he saw a distant shape in the dim light of the tunnel. A brighter patch of light that marked a tunnel mouth revealed it as three hominid shapes rowing in a little shell of a boat not much larger than his own bit of wood.
He reached out a saa and arrested his drift.
Three demen struck the tunnel mouth. Two dragged their boat out of the current while a third scouted, spiny projections on his back bristling. The two began to take baggage out of their craft.
“Kuu! Kuu! Kuuuuu!” a chorus of voices shouted.
The demen shoved their boat back into the river.
The Copper heard a scream, and he saw one of the demen fall toward the boat, sprouting new quills in the chest and leg where none had been before. He dropped some light-colored orb into the water as he fell. His companion shoved their craft into the water and fell on board.
The Copper saw sparks fly as missiles struck the tunnel wall.
A group of dwarves charged into view, striking at the deman who’d gone ahead to scout. He fought like a mad thing, lashing out with blades in each hand, head-butting dwarves with his spiked helmet, but fell when an ax caught him across the horned spine. The dwarves didn’t stop to celebrate, but threw wide, flat-bottomed craft of their own into the water and pursued the wounded deman and his companion.
The Copper waited with the bats, who filled the time by complaining of exhaustion and hatred of the river and travel. He ignored the chatter. The only bat he couldn’t afford to lose was Enjor.
“Keep out of sight,” he told the bats. “If I jump off the craft, just drift with it for a while.”
He approached the tunnel mouth. He caught the smell of burning flesh—heard the dwarves chattering as they burned the body of the slain deman.
A pale white object just beneath the river’s surface caught his eye. He arrested his silent drift and retrieved it by pinching it between his good sii and the crippled limb. The dwarf watching the river stiffened and took a step toward the bank.
It was an egg. Smaller than a dragon egg and wider at one end than the other, it had a faint, clean smell that reminded him of wet sand.
He released his grip and let his raft continue downstream. The dwarf looked out onto the river, unsure of his own eyes, but by the time he called his fellows over the Copper was rounding a riverbend.
He heard a distant hammering sound. Not long later they came upon the dwarf boat, anchored just beneath a series of cracks in the cavern wall that led to another hole in the cavern roof. He smelled demen here, and a little dwarf.
The dwarves had anchored their craft with an arrowlike piece of metal driven into one of the cracks. The Copper bumped up against the dwarf boat.
He dug his teeth into the line holding the boat. A quick grind of his teeth and the boat commenced drifting. He tossed the egg into some canvas at the bottom of the boat, hopped in after it, and sniffed around the bottom. He found some bread and dried meat wrapped up in waxy cloth, ignored the bread, and swallowed the meat.
As he ate he sniffed the boat. It was a clever thing, with canvas sides held up by wooden slats. It leaked a little through the hinge at the bottom. He guessed the dwarves folded the boat up to carry it through the tunnels.
