“You’re mad!”
“Oh yes? You see what’s coming out of the ground down there?”
A clearing of the throat and then a weak “I do.”
“Then I’m either as mad or as sane as you are. Get the air vice-marshal and see what he says. In the meantime, I have an unarmed kite and nothing’s standing between these things and the rest of the country except for you. I’d appreciate a little containment.”
Hardy had caught up now. “Do you have authority to be flying that plane?”
Chris couldn’t help but laugh for scorn, even though the white dragon was airborne again, circling above him, with lemon-yellow flames streaking out of the sides of its mouth and what looked like a wicked smile. “For fuck’s sake, man! What kind of a pilot are you? Make a decision, damn it.”
“Even if they’re real,” Hardy began, “there’s no evidence of hostile intent. And frankly I think they’re some kind of…”
Hardy had been swinging his plane around while he spoke, now he came screaming in from the right, swooping over Chris’s stationary kite like a crow mobbing a blackbird. The rockets on his right wingtip all but grooved the Perspex of Chris’s cockpit as he shot over at high speed and cannoned past, over the hedge, into the field of the Nine Ladies.
Right under the wings of the dragon, Hardy’s small jet shrieked, steering as though he had every confidence that it really wasn’t there at all.
The dragon turned its head and raked Hardy’s Typhoon from nose to tail with boiling golden fire.
“Shit!”
“Control.” Laurel’s voice cut over him, clipped and businesslike again. “Relay that message to Air Vice-Marshal Henderson please. Hostiles on the ground and in the air at my location. Over.”
“Confirm hostiles at your location, 910? Over.” The controller was a woman with a precise, well-modulated voice in which every syllable conveyed her scepticism. She wasn’t unprofessional enough to blurt out you can’t be serious, but it was clear she was thinking it.
Hardy broke in. “Control, this is 231. Yes, confirm hostiles. They just got me with some sort of flamethrower. Tell the brass to scramble everything. Over.”
He might not deal well with a sudden influx of dragons, but Hardy was a hell of a pilot. He flipped the Typhoon on its axis, its jets wailing needle sharp, and he was fifty feet off the ground, in danger of grazing the tops of the standing stones, coming straight at the white dragon as it flapped its heavy way up into the moonlit sky.
White wings beat like a flurry of snow against the darkness. With a burst of red fire, the Typhoon let fly one of its wingtip rockets.
It locked on and as the dragon folded its wings and dived away the slim rocket left a glowing trail as it spiralled in pursuit. Chris had a moment of fierce satisfaction—this would teach the woman with the sharp face not to mess with humankind—before the white dragon whipped itself around so fast he almost expected to hear the crack and let out a focussed white sword of plasma heat from its lips.
The rocket plunged into that laser intense burst of heat. With a blast he had to turn away from, shield his eyes to protect his night vision, it exploded short of its target and a little rain of shrapnel pattered down onto Chris’s cockpit.
He pulled his binoculars out of the navigator’s seat pocket and focussed on the now-gaping hole in the hillside. “Keep them busy, boys. Something else is happening over there.”
Around the portal, an elvish army had emerged. There were chariots and naked spearsmen painted all over with knots and vines. There were moving trees and women with sulky faces and very red lips, armed with nothing but their overlong fingernails. There were faceless soldiers in dull grey-green armour, and some in boiled leather, whose skin was so heavily tattooed they might as well have been wearing masks. Their eyes shone strangely out of the patterns. When they closed them, the eyelids too were tattooed, and the face altogether disappeared.
Another five dragons were there, the largest an equal of the white dragon, the smallest closer to the size of a T-Rex. A clear liquid dripped from its fangs and smoked on the grass, leaving perfect round burns.
All of them had begun to form themselves into rough companies and to move out, drawing away from the portal, but had been frozen in place, looking up, with dismay, at the two jets unexpectedly there to meet them.
Now, however, the soil of the hill was moving again, pattering down from the portal to pool around the stones. The side of the slope bulged out and with a movement that looked like a landslide, an eagle’s beak broke the surface. It gave a harsh cry and wriggled itself free as if it were hatching out of the ground. But there was a warrior on its back and a dozen others beneath it, holding tight to a net it was grasping in its talons. As soon as their feet hit the earth, the net was dropped and they ran out, making way for the others who followed.
The army already in occupation turned, raising their shields. If he focussed as far as the binoculars would go, Chris could see the thunderstruck look on their faces and tell that they hadn’t been expecting this at all.
Who was who? He had no idea, but when the eagles dropped their load and flew up to engage the white dragon in combat, he could have cheered regardless.
A knight came through on horseback, his banner of cloth of gold. Chris recognised the device, the rearing horses which had run in a band around that circlet Ben had been wearing, and his heart hit him in the throat and stopped him breathing. They wouldn’t, would they? They wouldn’t let him through? Bring him with them?
Skirmishes had started up all about the bottom of the mound as impatient warriors of the horse army engaged the white army’s rearguard. In the air the other five dragons soared up to join their leader, and together they grappled and burned the eagles.
The Typhoons had disengaged, were circling again, at a loss. “Come in, Mosquito? Which side are we on? Over.”
“Neither. Both are hostile. Repeat, both are hostile. I…”
A blue snout poked its way out from beneath the hill. With a snakelike squirm, another wyrm was through, shaking the fine soil off itself. Earth fell away as though it was metal repelled by a magnet, leaving the riders pristine.
Chris forgot what he had been going to say, slid back his chair, had put down the radio headset before his brain caught up with him and he snatched it up again, pressed it to his cheek. “Listen, boys, I have a rescue mission to go on. There’s a civilian down there being held captive. I’m going to go, infiltrate, try and get him out, okay? Cover me? Over.”
“This whole fucking thing is mad.” Hardy’s voice, sharper now and focussed. “And they can’t get hold of Henderson. He’s up to something hush-hush and isn’t answering his mobile. We’ve asked for confirming flights from London, but the Met boys are quibbling over the fucking volcanic ash. And bloody hell, if we’re just going insane…”
“He means yes, Wingco. Go, we’ll cover you. Over.”
Chris landed on the tarmac of the deserted road, the noise of the battles covering his footsteps. A little way down the road, a stile cut through the hawthorn hedge. The path there approached the hill from the north—keeping the bulk of it between him and the two confused armies. Crouched down and in his dark clothes, he thought with luck he could get there with no one seeing him. Coming back again with Ben… Well, he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.
He reached the hill without difficulties. The sentries on top of it were fighting each other. Pulling his hood farther down, he began to edge around the fosse at the base of the hill, keeping to the patches of long grass, the rhododendrons and gorse.
He was breathing hard, winded with haste and nerves, as he rounded the final shoulder and saw the ribbon of blue dragon still with its tail embedded in the mound. There was another queen atop it, this one in scale armour, with no helmet, her white hair floating like cobweb about a face so midnight black he could see nothing of it in the dark but the bright blue eyes.
Ben sat behind her. There had been seven eagles, now their corpses l
ay on the field and burned with a crackle of fat. In their corpse light, and the light of the jewel on Ben’s forehead, Chris could see the blank bemusement on Ben’s face, and it sickened him. That wasn’t staying voluntarily, it was being drugged and chained. It would have to stop.
The horse queen yelled a command, her piercing voice like a needle through Chris’s eye. It wasn’t a big army she had—little more than a bodyguard. At her words they drew up in a circle around her, as if to begin the battle with a last stand. Certainly the larger white army lapped them round on every side, facing inwards now. There was an exchange of formal taunts and posturing that reminded him of rival gangs of football hooligans on a match night after the pubs were closed.
While they were focussed on each other, Chris edged along the hill until he was close enough to reach up and grab Ben’s ankle. He was conscious, with a sickening intensity, of the heat of the dragon’s flank behind which he sheltered, how easy it would be for the massive thing to shrug him into the side of the hill and squash until he was pulp.
Over to starboard one of the Typhoons dispatched another rocket, caught a dragon on the ground. There was a whoomph of explosion, a mushroom cloud of orange gas and blast front of heat. Everyone looked, and Chris grabbed Ben and pulled with all his might.
Ben swayed in his seat, caught drunkenly at the spine ridge of the dragon but couldn’t seem to close his fingers. As Chris pulled again, he came sliding, reeling off, his arms windmilling, with a great shout of shock.
He landed in a sprawl. Chris tried to catch him but only ended up half-pinned beneath Ben’s dead weight, as the queen turned and fixed him with a gaze as sharp as broken glass.
Chris wrenched his face away from the glare, twisted out from beneath Ben and looked down at him. He lay inert and absent, a shell of himself, and Chris shook him hard, wanting the man he knew back more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life. “Wake up! Ben! Wake up!”
The queen laughed, took the spear from its rest on the side of her saddle and with a move so fast Chris could not even see it, she pressed its tip to his back. It was like sticking his finger in a light socket. Everything in him clenched painfully and stopped, his heart felt iced in place, his muscles petrified. An intolerable strangeness itched its way through all his cells, came out of his mouth in a strangled whine.
He’d just had a mad and poetic idea, didn’t know if it would work but it was bloody well worth a try. Barely able to work his limbs, he managed to bring his knee up in a staccato, broken-clockwork movement, and pin Ben’s hip to the ground.
The semi-paralysis left a terrified, metallic aftertaste in his mouth as his heart stuttered into life again. His first breath felt like the touch of a fork to a bad filling. “I…” He coughed, wishing he could wipe his streaming eyes. The ballad of Tam Lin did not mention the faithful rescuer having to sniff back snot as she held tight to her abducted lover. Perhaps that detail had been edited out by the minstrels over the years.
“There are rules about this,” he said. “I want him back. You know how this works.”
Flinging a long leg over the saddle, the queen slid down, landing with the kind of grace and elegance that could have inspired a whole verse. There were white triskeles that glowed like pearl painted on her blue-black face, and she looked as if she had all the time in the world. Regal, amused, perhaps even a little bit charmed. “You’re no Jenny Fair.”
Chris didn’t dare shrug, made do with raising his eyebrows, while Ben came alive beneath him—tried to simultaneously knee him and prize his grip undone. “Times change. But it’s the same thing underneath.”
“True love?” she mocked, putting the heel of her mailed boot over his hand and pressing down. He yelped and pulled it away, keeping hold with the other, while he brought his bruised fingers back and tangled them in Ben’s over-embroidered collar.
“Well let’s see.”
Chris had the thought only just in time. He shifted his grip to the skin of Ben’s flailing wrist, getting hit in the nose for the trouble. The young man’s left elbow cracked him in the jaw, but it had been worth it, as the collar he’d been gripping only a moment ago turned to mist and flowed out between his fingers.
Ben growled deep in his throat, the sound growing hoarser, deeper, wilder, as the skin beneath Chris’s fingers shifted into fur, the teeth by his cheek lengthened and the blank, ferocious eyes turned tawny. He found himself trying to hold down a lion by its front legs, ducked his head at the last moment and twisted so that its powerful jaw closed on his shoulder, the flesh-ripping teeth locked in the muscle.
Fuck! Oh, you, goddamn fucking shit! Pain like acid tore through his veins, stopped his heart again, but he gritted his teeth, choked back the automatic recoil and held on, nothing but sheer willpower keeping his hands closed, though the nerves in both arms felt shredded and incapable, misfiring in panic and agony.
When he could control his fingers again he let go with the right hand, grabbed the lion by its muzzle, two fingers in its nostrils, his grip sliding in the mess of saliva and blood. He clamped down hard and felt it shift again, the teeth withdrawing from his flesh more painfully than they went in.
The flesh under his fingers had begun to liquefy, his hand sunk in. As it did, he realised the blood on it had disappeared. His shoulder still throbbed and burned as if wounded, but when he turned to look, the material of his shirt was undamaged, the skin beneath untouched. He flexed his fingers to be sure he still could and gasped in a shaky breath of relief. Illusion. Thank God!
Yes, thank God, because the form beneath him had now reshaped itself into something he couldn’t at first understand. The head had flattened but expanded outwards into a wet, gelatinous mess stained flamingo pink. There was something a little harder in the body that rolled with a damp suggestion of gristle under his knees, and the arms in his grasp had become long, beautiful, slippery streamers.
All of this he saw in a moment’s burst of sight, photographic in its brevity, but that was the last thing he saw before the agony of the sting hit him and turned his brain and viscera to boiling lead. The pain ate him out from inside. He’d never felt anything like it—scarcely felt it now, it was too huge to comprehend, too raw to process. He couldn’t think, breathe, move or weep, but the long ribbons of the creature’s arms were slippery in his hands, pulling away from him.
Somewhere in the back of his skull that he hadn’t visited since the crash, was a little reservoir of calm. In there the part of himself that was greater than the animal, separate from the flesh, still watched and thought. It’s a man-of-war jellyfish, it told him. You think you’re paralysed, but you’re not, because it’s an illusion. Move now. Hold on! But he couldn’t move and he couldn’t hold on. He could feel it drawing away and could not force his hands to close on the stinging spines, to grip hard enough to make this worse.
You’ll lose him.
Scarcely managing to breathe, he tipped himself forward until gravity could take him farther, make him fall face first into the pulsing bell of the creature. There was no more pain that he could take—he’d reached overload—so opening his mouth and biting down, holding on tight with his teeth, didn’t do more than make him feel as if the inside of his mouth had been scoured off with pumice. He thought he heard the queen laugh again, behind him, and he was surprised, because he’d forgotten she existed.
The burning in his veins changed. He could feel the shape begin to writhe into something new, and wanted to weep. How long? How long was he supposed to keep this up? Forever? How many shapes did they expect him to go through? But the despair eased as his paralysis ebbed away with the disappearing man-of-war. Holding on tight with one hand and mouth, Chris reached farther up, trying to get at that circlet on Ben’s head so that he could yank it off.
But the agony in his hands had returned. He looked down, did a double take, saw his right hand clamped about a steering yoke. The body beneath him had become a seat, a bank of dials, glowing phosphorescent beneath the ruby red light that sh
one into the cockpit. Oh God, Chris thought, feeling his stomach drop and cold sweat break out down his spine. This isn’t playing fair. He could already smell the stench of combusted wool, the sticky sweet, horrifyingly mouthwatering smell of roasted airman.
This isn’t…this isn’t fair. The steering yoke of the plane was now red hot, he could see his own hands shrivel and smoke, watch the skin burst and the blood underneath boil. Flames raged from all four engines and the rush of falling flattened him to his seat, the ground spinning and hurtling towards him. He knew it wasn’t real, but he couldn’t make that knowledge connect with the overwhelming swell of loss and grief and panic. I can’t do this again. Don’t make me do this again. Please God!
How to even work out where Ben’s head was in this scenario? Chris’s fingers were nothing more than charred bones now, but he locked his elbow around the yoke, and with the club of his other arm flailed at the cockpit above, half hoping to knock the circlet off, half madly intent on breaking the Perspex so that he could fall out of this hell-kite, fall through clean sky and break himself painlessly, instantly on the ground beneath.
As he flailed, his foot impacted with something soft. He looked down and saw he’d just kicked through the crisped and brittle bones of Archie’s head, and his boot was embedded in the skull. He heard a little high-pitched whine come out of his mouth, and then he was letting go of the already shifting yoke, curling up, weeping salty tears on his quickly healing hands. No. He couldn’t do it any more. He couldn’t—there just was a limit beyond which a man couldn’t go, and he’d reached it, and if there was a God up there, then thank God he was a forgiving one because Chris simply couldn’t measure up. He’d tried, but he couldn’t.
“Chris?” Someone was shaking him. He hardly noticed at first, overloaded with sensation and grief, but it went on, gentle shaking, and Ben’s voice saying urgently, “Chris? Come on! We’re still in a war zone, wake up!”
Dogfighters: Under the Hill Page 13