by Philip Reeve
So they lied too, he thought. They didn’t say a word of what they’d done. They’re liars just like Brock and me.
He wanted to comfort the woman, but he wasn’t sure how. If he’d had the words he would have told her that there was no dragon, so her child was safe. But of course that wouldn’t have been true. He could feel the vast cold bulk of the mountain out there in the night behind him. It was brewing up blizzards. It was dreaming of storms. He could hear the wolves again, throwing their cold voices at the moon. A child left up there might be safe from dragons, but she’d not be safe.
The woman started to cry again, elbows on her knees, head in her hands. Ansel backed away from her, feeling helpless in the face of her huge grief. He let the hide curtain fall and ran to the byre, burrowing into the safe, comforting warmth between the horses.
BEFORE DAWN ANSEL FILLED THEIR SADDLEBAGS WITH HARD black bread and dipped the water skins in the villagers’ spring. At the villagers’ urging, Brock was taking tall ash staffs and a long, strong coil of hempen rope, and those too had to be lashed to Brezel’s load. In the underwater glow of first light Ansel tightened girths and lengthened stirrups and double-knotted the bag ties. Then he went back to the headman’s hut and helped the dragon slayer into his marvelous metal skin.
It didn’t matter that the armor always had a scurf of rust on it, no matter how often and how carefully Ansel scrubbed and polished it. It shone in the blue dimness of the hut like a garment of light. Ansel forgave it its awkward weight and forgot the times he’d cursed it on the road, where it had been just clumsy, cumbersome baggage. He watched Brock pull on his leather cap, and then his loose coif of shining mail. He helped him into heavy, slinking sleeves, and buckled their straps across his tunic, and closed the breastplate over them. Tassets attached to the waist flange locked in place with a sneck hook right and left. Pauldrons fitted over Brock’s shoulders, a vambrace cinched around each forearm. On his legs, for ease of movement, he wore just thick, studded breeches and his tall boots. On his head, over the fish-scale hood, went his helmet. It flashed like a halo as he stepped out onto the tramped earth in front of the hut, drawing a soft “Oh!” from the audience that had gathered there.
The villagers had dressed up too, to see the hunters on their way. They wore their festival clothes, bright tunics and bodices whose hopeful colors the half-light could not quite dim. Sunday bonnets perched like butterflies on the heads of the women and girls. As Ansel pushed past them to where he’d left the horses, they mumbled blessings at him and wished him luck. Their hands patted kindly at his shoulders and his head, but their eyes slid away when they met his. He didn’t feel sorry for them anymore. He wondered which of them had taken that woman’s child from her and left her on the mountain.
He held the horses while Flegel flicked holy water in Brock’s face and grumbled some Latin words. Then they all three mounted and rode uphill with the villagers shuffling aside to let them pass.
The bereaved woman was watching from outside her shabby hut as the hunters passed. She ran forward and reached up. “Take me with you, sirs!” Ansel heard her say, as she clutched at Brock’s stirrup. “My daughter’s gone to the dragon. I must find her bones and give her a Christian burial.”
“Pay her no mind, Brock,” called Flegel. “She’s mad.”
Brock glanced at the woman without much interest. He jerked his foot to shake her away, and banged his heels against Snow’s side, urging the mare to a brisk trot. Ansel followed, keeping his head down, ashamed to meet the woman’s gaze. He noticed that Flegel did the same. Did the friar know what the villagers had done? Or was it just fear of the mountain that made him cringe like that? When he looked back, the other villagers had clustered around the widow and were guiding or forcing her back toward her hut.
When they had passed through the gate in the wall at the upper end of the village and were riding up the steep track that led between the crags above the tarn, Flegel said pettishly, “I still don’t know why you had to drag me along with you.”
“Because I don’t trust you enough to leave you behind,” said Brock. The words clanged off the flat walls of rock that rose on each side of the track, and scared up jackdaws from the overhanging bushes. “What if you blurt out my business while you’re drunk on that vile beer of theirs? This way’s better. And you can sing my praises to the villagers when we come down. That’s the one trouble with a speechless servant like young Ansel here; he can’t back up my story. But a holy friar — what better witness could I ask for?”
“You are a proud and vainglorious man, Johannes Brock!” shouted Flegel. “And pride goeth before a fall! I will not follow you any higher up this accursed hill. I’m staying here!”
But Ansel knew he wouldn’t. That was too desolate a place for anyone to stay alone, unless he was someone like Brock who did not fear wolves, or brigands, or the dark. He urged Brezel on uphill after his master, and when he looked back he saw that the friar was still following. The village was already far below. The gravel shallows at the edges of its tarn showed palely through the slate-colored water. Then the track humped over a shoulder of the land and it was all hidden from view. Brock pulled off his helmet and his mail coif and slung them to Ansel to stow somehow among the rest of Brezel’s cargo.
They rode on into a blustering wind, through quick falls of rain and sudden splashes of sunlight. Above them the mountain came and went, banners of cloud billowing around its summits. A stream ran down the middle of the track. Now and then there was a cross or a cairn at a bend in the way, but otherwise that country was as wild and untenanted as if no one had been there since the Creation. The hooves of the horses slithered on broad pavements of blue-gray rock that stretched across the path.
“In the beginning, the world was quite smooth,” Flegel told them helpfully. He still kept a few scraps of knowledge from his monkish past, and he liked to share them. “A perfect sphere. It must have been, for it was the work of God, and how could a perfect God make something that was not perfect itself? But when the Devil was hurled out of Heaven he hit the earth with such a violent blow, and clawed so fiercely at it in his anguish and his rage, that it was marred and scarred. Rucked up like a rug into the horrible peaks and awful chasms we see about us. No wonder dragons and evil spirits are thought to haunt places like this. All mountains are the Devil’s work.”
“I like mountains,” said Brock, unimpressed. “I like the silence of them. So stop your chatter, and save your breath.”
They reached a place where the track narrowed to a stony shelf. On their right side, like a wall, a cliff went up into mist. On their left, a precipice dropped away sheer into a chasm filled with tumbled shards of rock the size of castle towers. A white river thundered down in the bottom of that gorge, filling the air with fine spray and a steady, ominous roaring. They dismounted and led the horses along the path, still climbing steadily, Brock at the front, Flegel in the middle, Ansel coaxing the nervy Brezel along behind. The friar grumbled ceaselessly. “This is as bad as fighting dragons! We’ll break our necks! The horses will bolt and drag us to our doom! This isn’t fair, Brock! This is madness! Mountains weren’t made to be climbed, and men weren’t made to climb them.”
“Petrarch climbed Mount Ventoux, I’ve heard,” said Brock. “Moses climbed Sinai. Didn’t Christ himself go up a mountain?”
“Yes, and the Devil sat on the top and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth. I don’t want to meet the Devil. We’ve gone far enough, Brock, haven’t we? Can’t we stop now?”
A curl of black cloud came over the mountain high above them, and the wind howled. Hail came down at them like slingshots, and there was nowhere to shelter. The horses skittered, shoes sparking on the rock at the brim of that appalling drop. Over the crackle of the hail Brock shouted, “The villagers told me of a high pasture, with a shepherd’s shelter built beneath an overhang of rock. That’ll serve as our lodgings. It can’t be far now….”
The hail passed. The sun came out and drew t
he shadows of men and boy and horses on the rocks. They crept on, up and up, past a black and shattered-looking crag from which great stones had fallen in the past and now lay scattered down a steep slope of scree that looked ready to slide down and sweep the travelers off the path. But once they were past it the path widened, and led them away from the cliff’s edge at last and up onto a ridge where whitish grass hissed in the wind. Beyond the ridge lay a bowl of high grassland, patched with the shadows of clouds. Around its edges there were bogs, and pools of water shone out here and there amid the grass like little slices cut from the sky and dropped upon the mountain. A stunted tree grew by the track where it curved down into the valley, and there were ropes tied around some of the lower branches, a few frayed ends flapping in the wind.
Ansel thought at once of the girl they’d brought up here to give to the dragon. Was that where they’d left her? Tied to that tree? But where had she gone? What could have cut through those thick ropes and taken her?
For a moment the dragon fear lurched up in him again, and he wanted to get Brock’s attention and show him those ropes. But Brock and the friar were already moving on, down the grassy slope into the meadow. Brock was pointing ahead, toward the wall of rock that barred the head of the valley. At its foot, among the mounds of boulders piled there by nature, a few courses of laid stones showed. A haze of smoke hung there.
“That’s the shepherd’s shelter,” said Brock.
“There’s a fire!” said Flegel nervously. “Someone’s here before us!”
Brock laughed. “Or perhaps it’s dragon’s smoke….”
They climbed onto the horses again. There was a slough in the bottom of the valley where the mud came up to Brezel’s knees, but apart from that the going was easy. Bones lay in the dry beige grass, the long, knobbled spine of a sheep with its splayed-out ribs like the tines of a white rake.
“Not your handiwork, I suppose?” said Brock.
“Of course not!” replied Flegel. “Do you think I’d climb all the way up here to murder sheep? I told you I killed only two, and they were down by the village. A wolf took this one.”
The shepherd’s shelter was a natural cave, across the mouth of which a loose wall of dry stones had been piled up. An old wooden beam dragged up from the village made a lintel above the doorway, and a hide hung from it to keep out the cold. Someone had wedged two more old timbers across the doorway in an X shape, like a barricade.
The riders reined in outside. Something moved behind the hide curtain. A scuffling sound. A cloud hid the sun, sudden as a door shutting, and a cold wind touched the back of Ansel’s neck.
Brock swung himself down out of Snow’s saddle and went to the doorway. He kicked away the barriers, pulled open the curtain, and jumped back with a grunt of surprise.
In the low doorway a girl crouched, watching him. Her eyes were wide and mad and she bared her small yellow teeth at Brock like a cornered dog. In her hand there was a knife.
CHRIST’S BONES!” SAID BROCK. “WHO’S THIS?”
No one answered him, so he snatched the knife out of the girl’s hand and dragged her aside and flung her on the grass while he went inside the shelter. A girl of twelve or thirteen summers, dressed in the remnants of the same bright Sunday garments the girls in the village wore. A broken-winged butterfly bonnet came loose from her hair as she fell on the ground and the wind took it up, up, up over the crags and away.
Brock came out of the hut with the girl’s small knife still in his hand. “Those fools!” he said. “They left her here. Like a gift for the worm. Sweet Christ! The landgrave spoke to me of this. Of how in pagan times they’d leave a maiden on the mountain as a sacrifice. But I didn’t believe they’d really do it!”
“I knew they were keeping secrets from me,” said Flegel, trying to sound as if the truth was just dawning on him. The girl had sat up, staring at the dragon hunters. Flegel flinched when he met her eye, as if her look burned.
Brock lifted the girl’s arms and looked at the rope bites on her thin wrists. “They tethered her to the tree over there,” he said. “They didn’t wait to see if the worm came for her, just ran back to Knochen. Lucky for her she had that knife about her. She must have managed to cut the ropes through, and came and hid in here.”
“Can’t she talk for herself then?” asked Flegel. “Is she another dumb one, like your boy here?”
“She’s scared,” said Brock. There was a stillness about him, as he looked down at the girl, that Ansel hadn’t seen before. All those years of make-believe dragon hunts, the easy routine of it, and now, here, he had found something different at last. He was probably wondering how he would fit the girl into his plans.
“You’ll die,” said the girl suddenly, surprising them all. The wind gusted, smelling of rain, lifting the corners of her soot-black hair. She said, “If you stay here, you’ll die. The dragon will come.”
“There is nothing to fear,” said Brock.
“Brock’s a mighty dragon slayer,” said Flegel. “Look at his armor, and that sword he wears. He’s God’s soldier, appointed to rid this mountain of its monster.”
The girl looked skeptically at the armor and the sword. “Those won’t do any good,” she said. “It’s too big. It come last night. In the twilight. I heard it growling and rubbing its sides against the wall.”
“A wolf, I dare say,” said Brock. “She heard a wolf and thought it was the worm.”
“I’ve seen wolves before,” the girl said doggedly. “I know wolves, and this weren’t no wolf. I saw its eye peer in at me between the stones. I smelled its breath.”
“It can’t have stunk any worse than she does,” said Flegel uncharitably. But it was true, the reek of stale fear came off the girl; sweat and urine had soaked into her tattered finery and mingled with the smell of the uncured sheepskins she’d wrapped herself in against the cold.
Flegel turned to Brock and Ansel. “She’s mad. Yes, I recall her now. They pointed her out to me in the village the day I arrived. She’s the brat of that shepherd who vanished on the mountain. Her mother’s crazy, and she’s worse. You can’t believe anything she tells you. Do you think they would have left her up here if she were whole and sound? She’s mad, and that’s why they chose her for their sacrifice.”
“You didn’t try to stop them, then?”
“I didn’t know!” the friar said squeakily. “She was there when I came, and then she was gone. I knew they were agitated about something; I knew they were keeping secrets, but I had no notion of what wickedness they had worked!”
He had known, though. He’d known all along. You could hear the guilt in his voice and see it peeking out from inside his hurt, angry eyes.
“What are we going to do with her, Brock?” he asked.
Brock looked at him. His nostrils flared. Up above the mountain, thunder shuddered and rain came spattering down. “We’d best get us inside,” he said. “Bring the horses too. It won’t do to leave them out here if there are wolves about.”
Ansel coaxed the horses in through the door in the wall. The front part of the cave was broad and high-roofed. A kind of pound had been made there for animals, separated off by a lower wall from the shepherd’s quarters at the back, where the cave roof sloped down to meet the floor, black with the smoke and soot of many fires. Ansel tethered the horses and went back outside to fetch water for them in a leathern bucket while Brock made Flegel and the girl help him carry the baggage deeper in.
By the time Ansel hurried back from the stream the rain was coming on, veils of it swaying over the valley and falling on the grass with a hard hiss. The thunder banged like slammed doors, echoing about between the crags. The rain turned to hail again and they crammed together into the back of the cave, coughing on the smoke from the heather-root fire that was burning in the stone hearth. A stack of uncured sheepskins lay piled in a corner.
“I don’t like this,” Flegel grumbled. “I don’t like it at all. There was no need to come so high, Brock. What if a tempest
of snow comes down and traps us here? We have only food for two days. What will we eat? And what about the girl? She’ll spoil your plan, won’t she? What will we do with her?”
Brock watched the girl. The fire gleamed in his armor and on his silvery-smooth scar and in his dark, secretive eyes. He was remembering all the tales of chivalry he’d heard when he was a boy. How he’d dreamed of one day being one of those shining knights who won battles and rescued maidens from giants and monsters. Those dreams hadn’t stayed long, of course. One glimpse of a real battle had knocked them straight out of his head. But now, finding himself suddenly the protector of this sniveling, shivering girl, they came sneaking back. Slaying imaginary worms and tricking mountain villagers out of their small savings wasn’t the sort of job that made a man proud of himself. But if he could save this child from the mountain and her credulous neighbors, that would be a sort of chivalry, wouldn’t it?
“Why did they bring you up here?” he asked the girl. “Why you, out of all the village girls?”
The girl gave an unhappy shrug. She kept her eyes on the earth floor while she answered. “They said my father woke the dragon, or angered it, or something. He said there weren’t no such thing as dragons. He said it must be some great bird or something that laired up here, and gave rise to so many tales. He went climbing all over the mountain, looking for its nest. And one time he went up and never came down again. And soon after that the sheep started being killed, and people heard the dragon howling, and everyone said it was Father’s fault. Said he’d gone into its lair and woken it and now it wouldn’t sleep till it had eaten of the flesh of his flesh. That’s me, see. Mother tried to stop them taking me. She prayed that Friar would stop them. She thought they’d listen to him. She paid him to stop them. But he didn’t.”