The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt

by Jonathan Schlosser

  That life not depleted, but elsewhere. Somewhere other roads with the sounds and life this had once borne. Those too to be abandoned and forgotten in their own time. As others had before and would after.

  But here the dragon had never been and Brack saw Juoth looking at him and he did not return it for he knew the other man was no fool and knew he was not hunting but just riding.

  They came at noon to the Fall of Revian. A towering stone cliff rising up before them, the rock running up in straight lines to a crest covered to the very edge of the cliff in moss and cedars. The moss running down the face of the rock. The river above entirely lost in the trees but the waterfall pouring out like the rock itself was broken and this river a living thing born from it. Cascading down in showering white and falling over the break in the stone where the road tunneled through. That stone endlessly drenched and dark and the foothills very green where the land moved away from the wall and they rode on through on the stone roadbed and the horses shying at first and then going through the spray. The air full of color and light in the mist, the sound everywhere and filling the world entire for that passage.

  Coming out the far side through the gap in the rock with the fall thundering behind them they found a small pool and the ground flattened out around them and they could see little beyond this clearing for the trees. The road picking its way forward ahead of them as the river curved around. Somewhere the bridge and gorge and then the shorter rise of that last hill. Lost now and only the rise visible slightly before them and the jagged mountains at their back. How the descent moved them into this other world.

  He pulled the horse up at the edge of the pool and the boy dismounted and he followed and then he led the horse over to the water and put the reins down to let him drink. Juoth doing the same and looking about at these thin trees with their paper bark and the empty sky.

  Brack looked at the boy. “You feeling all right? You've been quiet.”

  “So have you.”

  “Why don't you tell me something.”

  The boy went to the water and knelt and drank with it cupped in his hands. Dripping through his fingers and from his chin. Beading brightly. “What is it you want to know?”

  “It's you I want to know.”

  “What's that supposed to mean?”

  “It means where'd you come from and how'd you get to be where we found you.”

  “I told you that.” Sitting back on his haunches as if unsure if he wanted another drink or not. “We met a man selling his horse. Told him he could come with us.”

  “Go back farther. How'd you get there?”

  “You figure now you don't trust me? We've been riding for days and just now you decide it.”

  “I never said I didn't trust you.” Brack went also and bent and drank. Perhaps that similarity would put the boy at ease. If not the water was cool and fresh and in its own right a relief. “I just want to find out how you ended up there and where you're going.”

  The boy looked at him a minute. Squinting into the sun. “All right,” he said at last.

  II

  The story the boy told was this:

  He and his sister had set out from a town deep in the mountains, a place with little farming and nothing else and which had been beset with plague. Their parents dead and many others. Rotting bodies in the streets. Those still alive determined to leave and as they left the others burned to the ground every house and store and chapel and barn. The bodies of the dead dragged inside to burn also and the smoke horrible and they rode with their cloaks over their faces until they couldn't smell it anymore and still he could smell it in his cloak for days and at last threw it away and carried on without.

  The next town they came to knew where they were from and drove them out in the night. Holed up as they were in a field left fallow. The men came with torches and pulled them from their tent and their bedrolls and put them outside and told them as blades glinted in that torchlight that they'd never be seen again or they would die. His sister pleading and crying. And in the end they left and they walked two weeks with nothing and were almost dead when they came to the third village and there no one knew them.

  In this place they found work and it was hard but it was work. The boy a farmer's hand and rising with the sun to work the fields and turn soil and tend crops. The girl also but her duties to the animals. Milking cows and scattering feed for the chickens and when those chickens had fowled their pen moving them as a flock to a new place where they could live while the old sat in rain and sun and turned all back to dirt.

  This a small farm and the flock not large and the wages as meager as all that would bring. But they had a place to sleep and food and they needed little else and lived there for some time.

  Brack asked him the name of the town and he could not recall. Could say only the name of the farmers they'd lived with but it could have been anyone's name and Brack had met more men with it than he could count.

  But this too had come to an end for the blight had followed them and soon the village was sick. The town began to die and the farmer's wife and then the farmer himself fell ill. Laid all day in his bed and the field rotted and the chickens died in their pen and the cattle called to be milked. The boy and his sister at first doing what they could but they could not do it all and then the farmer was dead and they left.

  That town did not burn when they were there for the people did not know what was on them or what it would do. But it burned a few days later, he said. They were living then in a cave in the mountains and could look down to that valley and the scattered farms and for seven days people flooded by on that road, some sick and dying and others healthy and terrified and all going where they went. He called out but they would not stop and some looked at him with fear and others told him to run.

  He woke that night and the whole valley was fire. He could smell the bodies and somewhere off a man screaming. The next morning they left the cave and the smoke was still heavy and everywhere and the fire was in the timber. Burning and rising and thick. They rode out on the stolen horse with the fire at their backs and hours later when he looked again the whole mountain was in flame and he did not know if it had ever stopped but they continued on.

  The fourth town they came to their last. This one the same the boy had named before: Canntal. Here they had looked for work and not found it and already rumors had followed them. The hooded glances of strangers. Men who would not look at them nor speak to them when they asked for work. Talk of plague and fire and a faceless god of wrath or judgment. Others walking these same roads.

  And so they had left, he said. Heading for the road and the other man selling his horse for food and people would not speak to him either and they three had set out and hoped perhaps in the plains and not these close mountain towns they would again be unknown and they could carve out for themselves something that was a life.

  III

  They stood in that depression with the fall roaring and the horses drank their fill and the boy took off his clothes and walked out into the water to wash the rest of the blood from his body. Juoth checking the ropes holding the girl in her blanket and Brack standing beside the horse and looking up the side of the far mountain where starkly silhouetted against the sky moved a line of travelers. All on foot and leading pack animals. Too far away to see anything but the black shapes of their forms where they came out of the trees and walked along the spine of the mountain and then went back into the trees again.

  These vagabonds with an unknown origin, a destination the same. Perhaps wandering without end or perhaps even now approaching some place where their journey would cease. He could not hear them over the waterfall and they moved as ghosts. After a time he lost count and then he looked away and when he looked back they were gone as if they had never been.

  The boy finished and dried himself with his own shirt and pulled on all but that shirt and held it out to dry in the sun and the thin air and they remounted and moved on. Forward through the stands of trees and here the gr
ound level and easy for the first time in days. Littered always with green and brown needles, those dead and those dying. Shot through with grass. The horses walking slowly and eating as they did. The sun so close to hot now but still a deep cold when they moved through shadows of trees or clouds. The boy shivering and then putting on his shirt when it dried and all three riding in silence.

  For perhaps to some others they were the vagabonds and the whole world the opposite of what Brack saw now and those other men and women with their lives and desires and dreams watching them move across the valley floor and disappear into their own trees.

  All men so alike and so blinded to it.

  It was a half an hour riding through that forest before they came to the edge of the gorge and the old stone bridge standing across it. The span four hundred yards and the bridge as wide as six men lying down and sweeping gently upward as it rose. The rock faces below it red and dark and jagged. Far below the sound of water rushing, but visible from the edge only that sheer face dropping away as if it descended to the center of the earth and the hell that waited there. The stones of the bridge dark with age and ivy running long and heavy along the sides.

  They stood the horses in the road and looked at it and Brack looked at Juoth and the other man shrugged. In this all that needed to be said. The horses were shying from the edge and did not want to carry on but they would do it if they were forced and once they were on the bridge itself and those stones too wide to see below they loosened and walked as they should.

  Every step hard and echoing and then lost. The rushing of the water now louder and in the air that faint feeling of mist. Everything in cloud and a perpetual wetness.

  They passed a man at the crest of the bridge. Walking along in robes dark and heavy and his eyes downcast and nothing on his back and no animal to be seen. He did not look up as they went by and the boy tried to hail him and still he did not look. He was not armed and carried nothing. He stopped as they went by and stood at the edge of the bridge looking the way they'd come and Brack looked back twice as they rode and both times he stood in the same place.

  A man now carved of stone. The world and its weight all about him. Perhaps only with that drop below him that weight negated or somehow less.

  They came to the far side of the bridge and back to the land and the horses stepped upon it eagerly and they continued on. Brack looked again and could no longer see the man. Thinking about how all this country lay in some sort of silence and wondering what brought it to that. How maybe when a road died all that was left were the dead and the dead did not speak even as they traversed the forgotten pathways of the earth like some grim cartographers seeking always not to cut out for themselves new maps but to force the world itself into agreeance with the old.

  It would be a day's climb to the top of the next mountain and Brack pulled the horse up as the ground began to rise again beneath them. Turning to look. The day now in mid afternoon and still with much light but they would not reach the summit and he was thinking perhaps they should camp now and climb it entire in the morning when Juoth said:

  “We have to bury her.”

  The boy got off the horse so fast he nearly fell and in his hand suddenly a knife and Brack called out but had hardly spoken when Juoth turned and leapt from the saddle, pushing with the leg still in the stirrup, and came down on the boy. Lashing out as he hit and the knife glinting and turning in the air and skittering then in the dirt and the boy's cry as both fell to that hardpacked earth and Juoth with his own blade in his gloved hand and pressed to the boy's throat.

  “You have something to say?” Juoth said.

  The boy worked his jaw and did not speak and his skin as white now as his sister's. Juoth held him for a moment more and the boy closed his eyes and only then did the islander get off of him and let him stand.

  “You ever come at me with a knife again and it'll be the last thing you do,” he said. “Not all men are like the one you killed in the river.”

  The boy raised his chin and in his eyes danced fear and pride and determination and he said: “You're not burying her.”

  “I'm not?”

  “You're not.”

  Juoth scowled and turned to the blanket with the dead girl's body in it and he pointed at it with the knife. “You smell it, boy? Don't tell me you don't smell it.”

  The boy was silent.

  “You know what we have to do.”

  Brack leaned forward on the saddle and looked up at the rise and thought of her face the way he remembered it and closed his eyes for a long time and then thought also of Kayhi's face and both knew what he was and hated himself for it and opened his eyes again. “We won't bury her,” he said.

  Juoth looked at him. “We have to.”

  “I said we'd take them to the city and we'll take them to the city.”

  “She won't make it that far.”

  “She'll make it,” the boy said.

  They stood all three looking at one another and then Juoth grunted and shook his head and mounted his horse. Not looking at the boy again or stopping him when he bent to get his knife. Putting his heels into the horse and sitting far forward and away from the body and starting the climb. Brack watched him go and held out his hand and after a moment the boy gave him the second knife and climbed back up and then they followed.

  IV

  It was late that night or early morning sitting in the darkness without a fire and the boy standing a ways off and looking toward the lights of the city far down in the plains that Juoth came over and sat in the pale moonlight and looked at Brack.

  “I'm sorry,” Brack said. “But I told him.”

  “I know what you told him.”

  “It's only days now.”

  “If the weather holds.”

  “It'll be all right.”

  Juoth took his knife out and began to move it between his fingers and looked at the boy and back again. Off in the night the calling of some bird Brack hadn't heard in he did not know how long and he knew it really was the plains again. Thinking of other times coming through them both alone and with companies and once with an unquenchable fire at their backs that they could only outrun and pushing the horses for days in the heavy smoke before they found a river and crossed it and there collapsed in exhaustion.

  “I know why you don't want to carry her,” Brack said. “But there are other things to worry about.”

  “Maybe we make the boy carry her.”

  “It's more than that.”

  Juoth tipped his head, his voice dropping. Looking again toward the boy and back. “With him?”

  “It's what he told me,” Brack said. “The whole story about him and his sister. It was all a lie.”

  “All of it?”

  “All of it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I've been in these mountains a long time and there aren't that many towns I haven't heard of and I haven't heard of any he named. Haven't heard of a plague cutting through the mountains. Or people burning their towns and running. None of it. It's all just built so we can't go back and check it. Towns we've never been to where now everyone's dead and his family too and the whole thing. He and that girl and the man they killed the only ones who can back that story up and two thirds of them dead as well.”

  “You think it's too convenient.”

  “In my experience if you think it is, it is.”

  Juoth held up the knife and began to stand. “Then let's just be done with him here. You know he's a liar and we know he killed that man and maybe he killed his damn sister, too. Either way we leave him and we ride on and that's the end of it.”

  Brack shook his head. “You saw his eyes.”

  “That doesn't make a difference.”

  “Everything makes a difference.”

  “So what, we bring him? Knowing all that we know, we bring him.”

  Brack nodded. Thinking of the kid lunging and how fast his knife was gone and Juoth on top of him. A boy and not a warrior. Perhaps able t
o kill another man when the situation presented itself but only if that man was just like him and also older. He was like the men in the village taking up their picks and axes to fight a dragon and none knowing that they carried nothing but kindling to a furnace for none knew what it was to fight a dragon or how quickly he would devour and destroy.

  “I don't think he'll try it again and it won't matter if he does,” Brack said. “We'll just do what we said and we'll bring him and leave him in the city where someone else can watch him. Then it ends.”

  “Does it.”

  “It does.”

  “You always stick to your word like this?”

  “You knew my grandfather,” Brack said. Grinning slightly in the half light. “And you already called me a damn mule.”

  “Then I guess I don't have anyone to blame but myself.”

  “I guess you don't.”

  The boy stood looking out for a long time and then went back to where he'd laid the body of his sister and Brack watched him the whole time and when at last a cloud came swiftly over the moon they were all three asleep and around them the world moving in its shadows and depths and turning forever as the night spun on.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I

  She was being hunted and she could feel it crawling beneath her skin, her very bones alive.

  Turning off one street and down another and then yet another. The heavy dust of this place rising and breathing it and tasting it there on her tongue. Each street smaller than the last and the buildings closing in and in the fronts of those buildings men and women opening shops or windows and watching her pass in her filth and always running. Feeling as if behind her the castle itself gave chase and swelled and threatened to consumer her and she could not put enough distance between them.