I rode along it, extra alert, and Tango became more and more fidgety as we went on. The road descended and then bent to follow the curve of the mountains. It was more a track than a road, not particularly well-constructed—used infrequently. It ran along the base of a sheer wall of multilayered rock—a slump, perhaps—and there Tango became frantic. He rolled his eyes back, dug in his feet like a mule, and refused to proceed. So I tied him to a tree there and continued on foot. As I walked, I considered my own mortality and decided I would rather be a live rat than a dead lion.
I returned to Tango, fetched a few vital items from my saddlebag (including my City Key for Landuc) and built a fire, a big one using most of an old fallen tree, looking over my shoulder often, as you can imagine. Then I opened a Way to Landuc, but didn’t use the Key. Instead I left the fire burning there next to Tango and left the spell uncompleted—that was a trick I learned from good old Dewar, accidentally. I trudged back up to the dragon’s lair with the Key on a string around my neck, inside my breastplate.
The road disappeared here. The ground was hard and stony—no vegetation—and the sun beat down mercilessly. It occurred to me that this would be a good place to bask, if one were a large lizardy heat-loving creature. I poked along and found a sort of crack beneath an overhang. The crack grew wider and wider and became a dark opening, broad but not higher than about six feet. A chill draft from it bathed my face, the air having a peculiar chemical sort of smell. I wet my handkerchief and tied it over my nose and went in.
Of course it was dark.
I backed out, rummaged around in my pockets for a small electric torch, and found it. Those things are a hell of a lot more reliable than an ignis and easier to turn on. I don’t know why more people don’t use them. I checked for the extra batteries and tiptoed back in.
“It never rains but it pours,” I heard, before I had gone three feet. My light didn’t show me much. I went on. Something moved ahead of me.
Suddenly the whole passage was flooded with light, and with it came a blasting wave of chemical stink and a roaring sound. The dragon was testing his jets. I saw him clearly by the blue-white flames he breathed from his nostrils. The flames hit the wall and splashed about. He was very big. He filled the cavern beyond me, and he was perched on a mound of something white and glittering like ice …
His voice was huge, and his eyes were hypnotic. I forced myself to shut mine. His flame went off.
“I shall have to get a maid and have regular teas if these visitations continue,” he rumbled, a gravelly sound as of an earthquake thinking out loud. “Stop right there.”
I stopped.
“Your name and lineage?” he asked.
“Are you Hunnondáligi?” I asked.
“You are the intruder here, Knight,” he said. “You must identify yourself. I am testy today and I am little inclined to play guessing games. Kindly show your face.”
Great. “Call me Otto,” I said. I pulled the handkerchief down.
“Otto? Otto of where? Of what?”
“I think I’ll keep that to myself until I know more about you, if you don’t mind,” I said, and that was the smartest thing I’d done so far.
“Hmmmmm.”
I set my light on its most diffuse setting and saw him dimly—his head was up, and he was studying me. I realized that the pile of stuff was something like glass or quartz or crystal—though I suspected a dragon with a penchant for cut crystal would have different storage arrangements. His hide was of varying shades of green and gold, very pretty probably. I had difficulty not looking at the eyes. I looked at the claws instead. They were hypnotic in a different way.
“Hmmmmmmmm,” he mused, and hummed a scrap of Mozart. “Interesting, interesting. You’re not a tax collector, I take it.”
“No,” I said.
“Not working for Mokis, either, I’d guess. That sort tends to swagger in and announce he’s going to cut one’s head off.”
“What happened with the tax collector?” I asked.
“Apparently they’ve decided to tax savings accounts,” he said, “and someone interpreted my bed here, which I have painstakingly assembled over centuries for my own comfort and pleasure, as a savings account. Six per cent.! I ask you, Sir Otto.”
“Scandalous,” I agreed. “Mokis must be hard up for cash.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t know. I stay out of local politics … So do you, hmmmm?”
Whoops. “I’m not from around here.”
“I’d guess not.” He moved. “If you’re not working for Mokis, and you’ve actively sought me out, I can only assume you have some silly feat of derring-do in mind. I suggest you abandon it. As I said, I’m in no humor for it.”
“Tax collector disagreed with you, huh?” I asked.
“Nasty little man. I never did trust people who wear too much scent. It’s taken me days to get the stench out of here.” His tail lashed and swished inches from my feet. I kept myself from jumping back with difficulty. “I came up here just to avoid unpleasant scenes like that. It will take me years to recover my composure. Years of meditation …”
Holy cow, a religious dragon, I thought.
“… of exercises, of contemplation …” He picked up something round and sparkly—about as big as my head, but like a one-carat diamond in his claws—and examined it, then tossed it down. It rolled to a stop in front of me. I punted it back onto the pile. Too big anyway. He rumbled, laughing maybe. “If you are interested only in saying you have spoken with me, you should leave now.”
“We’ve hardly chatted at all,” I said. “I understand you’re a vegetarian.”
He sighed. “Lapsed, now, I fear,” he admitted. “As I said, I shall have great difficulty disciplining myself anew.”
“How’d you get into it?” I asked. “Aren’t dragons carnivores by nature?”
“I encountered a philosopher, long ago, and after a most enjoyable discussion found myself agreeing with him on a number of fundamental points. Malcastraeus was a hermit, occupying a cave into which I had intended to move—and I did move in, but he stayed and I became his disciple. He was quite elderly and feared me not at all, which was why I had bothered conversing with him … At any rate, among the practices of his religion was the renunciation of all flesh. I did try, but potatoes and vegetable marrows simply didn’t agree with me, and after some most unfortunate intestinal disturbances we compromised on fish.”
“Did you try eggs? Milk? Nuts?” I wondered.
He puffed disdainfully, an ozonish whuff of breath. “It’s difficult to get them in decent quantities in the quieter locales I prefer. I always disliked eggs anyway—so slimy—and frankly, cheese becomes monotonous in all its guises.”
“So he was vegetarian, huh?”
“Yes. Actually he was so desiccated and insubstantial that he hardly ate anything. Herbal teas and nuts and roots were his diet. Once he had some wild strawberries, and he liked them so much he abjured all fruit thenceforward.”
“A real extremist,” I observed. “What happened to him?”
“He died, of course. He did live a very long time, and we passed years in illuminating discourse. The local peasants revered him as a saint and started hanging about the cave praying and the like after word of his death somehow got out. I had to leave; it was simply too much public attention. I dislike being treated as a novelty to be gawked at.”
“Were there miracles?”
“The usual nonsense. Spontaneous cures, resurrections, and divine interventions. I rather doubt that Malcastraeus was responsible. He had so little interest in the physical realities of life, it seems improbable that he would suddenly respond to importunities from women with clubfooted children and villagers fearful of plague. But there it was, and the ignorant hordes were unbearable in their adoration.” Hunnondáligi snorted with disgust, then picked up another glittering pretty and scrutinized it, polished it against his breast, and set it down carefully. “Since then I’ve continued to meditate on my own, attempting
to better understand the principles my teacher tried to convey to me.”
“What are those?” I asked, still buying time, trying to think of a way to get something and get out of there in one piece. I hoped my fire wasn’t burning out too quickly.
“Primarily they concern the denial of the self and attempts to distance oneself from the corporeal world, concentration on the unity of all Nature.”
“I see,” I said. “So your philosophy states that all things are one.”
“All is one. In one is all contained.” He took up another faceted stone and gazed into it for a moment.
“The universe implied in a single hydrogen atom …”
“… or less,” he agreed. “You are not the uneducated thug I took you to be, Sir Otto.”
“I’ve been called a dumb jock. I did go to university.”
“Oh? Where? There is a goodish college at Dom-Daniel.”
“I know the place. I wanted a more grounded education than they give. More in the practical line.”
“There is much to be said for that if one intends to lead a worldly life.”
“Isn’t Dom-Daniel primarily for sorcery? That can be a pretty worldly pursuit.”
“It’s best known for wizardry, yes, but the rest of the faculty is also quite sound, particularly the rhetoricians.… So it can, when misapplied. Pure sorcery has nothing to do with the physical, rather with the study and appreciation of the Elements and the ethereal energies that make up the world as it really is, in its most fundamental and natural form.”
“Well,” I said, “my appreciation of it is largely pragmatic, though I’ve known the other sort of sorcerers, the philosophical guys.”
As we talked, I had continued to avoid his direct gaze and to glance around for something small enough to take away without slowing myself down and close to the exit. My eye had finally lit on what looked like a ribbon of small diamonds an inch or so wide, not too long. Part of a sash or something, perhaps. It had something blue and glittering near it, making it easy to spot, and I decided that was my prize.
“The problem is,” I went on, “that it’s very easy to talk about the purity of Nature as it exists fundamentally and very difficult to maintain anything in that state of purity for long—because Nature, as it exists fundamentally, isn’t pure anywhere but in the formless Void outside the worlds or in the great Sources, whose natures are fundamentally opposed.”
“I am finding it very difficult,” Hunnondáligi said, “to return to my former state of repose, yes. You are suggesting it is futile to try?”
“It’s going to take a lot of effort,” I said. “Perhaps you should start by fasting.”
He rumbled with dissatisfaction. “It appears that I shall be fasting involuntarily. The village with which I had my agreement for the provision of fish no longer exists.”
I deemed that he might be feeling hungry. “There are still a few people living around the fringes down there,” I reassured him. “Certainly new inhabitants will come, or old ones return, given time.”
He stared into an irregular chunk of diamond—I’d decided that that was the preferred bedding of this particular dragon—and tipped his head this way and that to appreciate the way the bluish glow from his nostrils colored the stone.
“It will never be quite the same,” he said at last, and exhaled a long, slender flame like a propane torch jet. “Indeed perhaps it was doomed to fail from the beginning, to deny my own nature in myself. The world entices, seduces …”
“Rise above it, Hunnondáligi,” I urged him, having no desire to be his hors d’oeuvre. “Think of the bliss of enlightenment.”
“Nirvana, or whatever one wants to call it. Yes. Have you known anyone who achieved that state?”
“Uh, no. Heard of a few, but none personally. I have known people who denied themselves things, who led lives of strict discipline, in order to serve an ideal, a goal, or to make of themselves a certain kind of person.”
“You yourself, for example, you would never consider this rigorous life.”
“I’m afraid I’m firmly stuck in the physical world. I can respect and admire the set of mind it takes to do that, but it’s not the life for me, though I can work single-mindedly enough when I’ve something to work toward.”
“You are the man of action by nature, I take it.”
“Well … yes.”
“Such usually come to an end in some action, Sir Otto. I recommend to you, for longevity, forgoing the riskier sorts of action …” His tail twitched erratically.
“We have a choice,” I said, “of striving against our innate nature to conquer it and better ourselves, or of wallowing in it. One is certainly easier than the other, but holds less reward and attraction for the intelligent being.”
“Innate nature,” he puffed. “Elementary notion, Sir Otto.”
“Elementary, yes, and like all elementary ideas profound in its simplicity,” I agreed. “Mind if I sit, by the way?”
“I am a forgetful host. Please do.”
I settled myself on a rock.
“Continue,” he commanded, shifting about and reclining more indolently. The bulk of his body was great. It slithered and rattled over the diamonds, which tinkled as they rolled. “Are you implying that one must assume that one’s own fundamental nature is base?”
The chain was near my right foot. I put my chin on my hand and looked down at it, thinking about how to answer his question. I realized it was a collar, about eighteen inches long or less, and the blue stone was a pendant. “Uh, no,” I said, “but to overcome one’s own most basic desires and instincts and do something superficially unnatural can bring deeper insights into what is truly natural. By controlling Nature, one understands it, and the best place to begin is within oneself.”
“You exhort me to deny my own nature.”
“You were doing well enough at it before you were interrupted,” I pointed out. “One tax collector is no reason to throw it all over.”
“There will be others to follow him. It is as certain as day following night.”
“Relocate.”
He twitched one of his wings around and looked at it for a few seconds. “Disagreeable, disagreeable to be forced to so much effort for so little return,” he mused. “And I am still disinclined to accept your point, that denial of one’s own nature yields better understanding than plumbing it.”
“It is the privilege of a thinking creature to realize that he has a nature,” I said. “Unthinking beasts follow theirs because nothing else is natural to them, and for them it would be unnatural to deny Nature—they do so only when rabid or ill. Thinking creatures such as we are able to view ourselves in perspective to the greater All, as you have spent so long doing, Hunnondáligi, and to alter our perspectives in order to gain new, deeper views of Nature.”
“You are a nimble sophist, Sir Otto,” he rumbled, exhaling twin streams of orangish smoke, appearing to grin behind them.
I didn’t like his teeth. “You found your contemplations illuminating, didn’t you? Didn’t you find it rewarding to conquer your own nature and become something more than just yourself, something supernatural?”
He chuckled up and down a basso profundo scale. “Are you a natural creature yourself?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Aaaaah,” he said, and lifted his head and looked at me, and I continued to look more past him, not directly into his face. “So you are. So you are.”
I had made a mistake, I feared. His air of recognition was too knowing, too shrewd—I recalled now Dewar’s remark that dragons used the Roads and Leys as we did and that they sensed sorcery. Could he tell that I was a son of the Well?
“What is your nature?” he said, more than casually.
“What is your nature?” I retorted.
“I am Nature,” Hunnondáligi said, stirring, half-rising. “I am made of Nature, of the most fundamental natural truth.” His voice boomed and echoed, deafening me. “I am formed of the indestructible, th
e incorruptible, the Elemental. In my very existence I incarnate the ideal of Nature.” He chuckled, a brazen, mellow sound but unbearably loud, like being in the tower when the bells are ringing.
I covered my head with my arms and bent forward, then fell to my knees. The object of my desires was between my knees and shins. “Calm down!” I yelled. “Nobody’s questioning your existence!”
“None would dare,” he chuckled again, but more quietly, and half-curled himself on his brilliant bed again. “Frail morsel of Nature, if you cannot bear my mirth, would you dare my wrath?”
I hit my ears, one and the other, trying to make them stop ringing. “Frankly, no,” I admitted, straightening but not rising. “I’m not one of those heroic types.” I brought my left foot forward and knelt on one knee, rubbing my forehead. As I did, I pushed the necklace under the top edge of my right boot, which fit loosely, and as I shifted my weight I felt it under my knee, just where I wanted it. If this didn’t work, I would have to try something else, assuming that failure didn’t kill me. I hoped it worked. I was running out of philosophy.
“Not the heroic type,” he repeated. “Yet there cannot be much of cowardice in your nature, Sir Otto, else why would you be here? It is preternatural for a sane, intelligent creature such as yourself to deliberately invite a fiery death.”
“Preternatural isn’t quite the same as unnatural,” I said, a little desperate. I had a sneaking, uncomfortable suspicion, with this reference to deliberately inviting a fiery death, that my origins were pegged, which was Not Good. That’s just what you do at the Well of Fire. Of course, thinking back on it now, Hunnondáligi might have just made a lucky guess or a chance reference. Everything they say about talking to dragons is true: you’re your own worst enemy. That’s true of most Elemental creatures—dragons are just better at it, I guess. I went on, “There are plenty of things which exist in Nature which mimic other things in Nature, some indistinguishably. It’s not wise to make conclusions about the nature of a thing until you’ve tested it rigorously—as you’re certainly aware. Even diamonds can be made artificially, so well that the manufactured stones are all but indistinguishable from the natural.”
The Well-Favored Man Page 8