Dragon's Trail

by Joseph Malik

  “Really.”

  “Mm hm. And in his own bed, fancy that.”

  “Yee-owch,” Jarrod agreed. “So, we’re going there to check things out.”

  “Yes. This will be a great opportunity for you.”

  “Opportunity? I thought I was going to be some sort of field adviser, or somesuch.”

  Javal pulled a potato off its spit and set it in his wooden plate. “Oh, you will. But you’ve got a thing or two to learn first.” He blew out a laugh, “At least I don’t have to teach you how to fight. But I’m supposed to make a knight out of you. You need to learn how our military works, and most importantly why. Lucky for you, I’m really good at that. And we won’t have to spend the whole summer beating each other up. Unless, of course, you want to.” He flashed his teeth, his eyes mischievous.

  Jarrod reached into his pack and pulled out his flask. “Drink?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Javal took a pull, swished it around in his cheeks, and nodded appreciatively.

  “Good stuff,” he said as he handed the bottle back. “Really good stuff.”

  Jarrod took a swig and corked it.

  “I’m out,” Jarrod said. “Good night, sire.”

  Full and sore, Jarrod went to bed. He had brought a lightweight, ripstop hammock with integrated mosquito netting and a rain fly, a RidgeRest pad, and a three-season sleeping bag. He’d slung the hammock between two trees, unrolled the pad along the bottom, and opened the sleeping bag into a duvet. His weapons trunk rested beneath the hammock and the rifle case on top, both on the lattice of poles to keep them out of the mud.

  “And that’s how your people sleep?” Javal asked.

  “When we’re traveling light,” Jarrod answered. As far as you know.

  Javal spread his own bedroll at the base of the cedar tree and settled loudly upon it, leaning his armored torso against the trunk with a creak and a thud. He then threw his own tarp over himself. “You’re an unorthodox man, King’s Rider Jarrod, but I think I like you. Sleep easy.”

  “And you, sire. Who’s taking watch?”

  Javal closed his eyes. “It’s not necessary. The horses would wake us.”

  Jarrod was beginning to doze when he heard the rattle of armor. He looked out to see that Javal was laughing quietly to himself.

  “Sire?”

  “No one’s taken Argyul to the mat in years.”

  Jarrod walked out from the tree line and tossed Sir Javal the roll of parchment toilet paper. “I could sharpen my sword with that stuff,” he griped.

  He hadn’t thought to bring his own.

  On the plus side, it had stopped raining. It was still overcast, though.

  He was itching for a look at the ringed moon Carter had told him about.

  Across the camp, Javal was readying his riding horse. He tucked the roll into his saddlebag without comment. Jarrod washed his hands in the water from the now-cooled kettle, using a chunk of soap fragranced with flowers that Javal had tossed him. The soap was handmade but stamped with a logo of some type.

  A soap industry is a good sign.

  He had brought a couple of bars of soap just in case, in a leather dopp kit.

  He dumped the remainder of the water into the coals and hung the kettle on the pony, tucking the shovel back into his pack just as it began to sprinkle again.

  He and Javal had had a hell of a time mounting Jarrod’s arming trunk. It weighed nearly a hundred pounds, and rested on four poles that buckled onto a simple saddle. The trunk was strapped down tightly onto the wooden cross-braces, lengthwise along the pony’s back. A suit of high-impact plastic practice armor in a duffel bag—which Javal hadn’t yet seen—was tied down just behind it, and Jarrod’s backpack hung off one side, supported by the straps through one of the poles of the lattice. However, it was a sturdy, muscular pony with a good sense of humor and didn’t seem to mind the attention or the load.

  His horse had a few things to say about his climbing on, however.

  “Hey, up yours,” he snarled, and clapped his gloved hand onto its nose to steady it. Its teeth clomped where his fingers had been a moment before.

  Swearing, he grabbed the saddle and swung up as she moved aside, and he managed to get up as she kept turning in a circle away from him. She reached around to bite at him, and he met her skull with the flat of his boot.

  That pretty much settled it. He kicked her around the edge of the firepit and out the path they’d forged, back to the King’s Road, ducking branches and plunging through the dense undergrowth not two meters from the pack pony’s tail.

  Here, in the Gateskeep Northlands, the trees grew to be ten feet in diameter, and the undergrowth, off the marked trails, was virtually impassable for all but the hardiest and best-armored.

  Jarrod commented on this.

  “The Faerie Stronghold is worse than this,” Javal spoke from what sounded like experience. “A hundred times worse. And the Faerie use the trees as their sentries. The vines are alive, and the thornbushes, if so commanded, will open up and swallow an intruder whole. They’ll sting you to death.”

  Jarrod shivered as their mounts skittered down the shallow embankment to the road.

  On the road, where the canopy opened, it was raining in sheets. Jarrod beat his oilskin hat into shape and put it on, raising his voice above the downpour. "And this is summer, is it?"

  "In Falconsrealm," Javal returned.

  A caravan of several wagons was weaving its way down the road ahead of them some fifty yards to the south.

  Javal kicked his mount to a lope, taking the pack horses with him. Jarrod's horse was quick to follow the others, and he caught up as the train of horses slowed to pace the caravan.

  The caravan’s four guards, in black quilted armor with spears and leather helmets, looking soaked and ragged, saluted.

  Javal exchanged a few words with the leader of the wagon train, and offered his and Jarrod’s support as far as Beggar’s Creek, which the merchants accepted. One of them tossed Jarrod an apple, which was green and wet and hard and exactly like a hundred apples he’d ever eaten.

  Jarrod spent the next several miles watching Javal four horses ahead, blurred in the downpour, his dark cape sad with rain. And then he’d take a bite of apple and think back to school buses, autumn afternoons in New England, and old girlfriends, and then a blast of rain would jar him back to the immediacy of the chill, and the rain dripping from his beard, and the mud spurting from the hooves of the pack animals.

  Back and forth, bite after bite, mile after mile.

  He finished the apple and raised his hand for another.

  Gateskeep’s walled capitol, The City of the Gate, sits high atop a grassy knoll with her back to the Falconsrealm Mountains.

  The mighty square towers of Gateskeep Castle look out across a rolling sea of rippling grasses and farmland, and on the misty horizon the jagged mountains which border Falconsrealm, blue and purple and capped with snow year-round, are a reminder of the motherland’s isolation from her principality.

  Jarrod and Javal had crossed into the city nearly at sundown. It had stopped raining and it was actually getting colder. Jarrod thought he could see the outline of the moon Carter had mentioned. It made his heart jump and he wished the night would clear.

  Sir Javal noted to Jarrod that allied knights didn’t have to pay city tariffs, and demonstrated as the sentries at the barbican waived the “entrance tax” and the two were let into the city proper.

  They rode past a maze of thatched cottages and longhouses on the outskirts of town. As they neared the town center, the cottages turned to wooden houses. Soon the wooden houses became houses of stone, and smoky taverns, and darkened shops and lit apartment dwellings reminiscent of gingerbread dioramas, the twisting streets mostly deserted save for a few knots of haggard-looking men scurrying home from a day’s late work and an occasional itinerant dog, black and brindle bulldoggish monsters.

  The middle
of the city was quiet and the world smelled of food. A boot-slapping tune spun along on a gentle breeze that smelled of roasting meat and frying garlic as they rode past a tavern. Jarrod’s stomach roared so loudly that he swore it rattled his armor.

  Nearer the inner wall of the city, where a central barbican would lead them to the great keep, the wooden houses turned to rich manors set more widely apart and walled separately, their gates decorated with heraldic banners that flapped and rustled as if competing for attention.

  “This is the gentry’s quarter,” Javal pointed out. “Most houses here have their own troops on the grounds to defend them if the city’s overrun. Of course, we’ve never been overrun,” he admitted with a good deal of pride. “This is a great land, Gateskeep. Rich, and vast. King Rorthos is well-learned in the cultures and sensitivities of our various peoples.”

  “Probably keeps them from knocking him off,” Jarrod concluded.

  Javal shrugged. “Real, ruling power lies in the legislative body and the advisory—the palace lords and the High Council. They’re the ones who are constantly having pitchfork accidents. The people here love their king. There’d be riots if he was to meet with an untimely end, and besides, it wouldn’t put an end to his reign. His daughter stands to inherit the throne someday, as you probably know.”

  “I’ve heard of this,” Jarrod acknowledged. “She’s Prince Albar’s, ah, babe.”

  Javal sighed, long and slow. “Yes, Albar’s babe,” he agreed.

  Sensing a touchy subject, Jarrod dropped the matter, and a quarter of an hour later they arrived at the main gates to the keep.

  “Incidentally, what are we doing here?” Jarrod asked, as they were let through.

  “Getting a decent night’s sleep,” the knight replied.

  Jarrod had been to castles. He knew a big castle when he saw one.

  No Cinderella Special, Gateskeep is squarish and massive, with thick walls and fat square towers that give her a squat, broad-shouldered appearance. The keep is squarish as well, and the great tower’s silhouette can be seen for a day’s ride.

  The night had cleared to a cold wind as they’d traveled the last half-mile through the city. The moon, a full tenth of the horizon, was a deep, French lilac pink with soft stripes and splotches and a slender pale ring, casting magnificent slate shadows.

  Jarrod saw very well by the moonlight.

  Sore and stiff, Jarrod had to follow a page up eight flights of stairs, in heavy wet clothes plus armor and weapons, before he was led to his room in the keep. Four pages behind him carried his equipment.

  The girls, and there were a lot of them, noticed the new guy with the entourage carrying his gear. He caught half a dozen unabashed smiles as he climbed the stairs.

  He noted that there seemed to be many more women at this castle than at Regoth Ur. They dressed in clingy, embroidered silken gowns—lace-up sleeves and spring colors seemed the fashion—and some of the older women wore ornate affairs in richer colors.

  Castle girls, Jarrod deduced, must have amazing legs. The girls he’d seen here were willowy, even the shorter ones, and they all moved with an athletic grace. Which made sense; there were a hell of a lot of stairs to be negotiated in the course of a day.

  That’s why this feels so weird, he thought. Everyone’s in garb and there are no fat chicks.

  His apartment was small, a single room with a fireplace and an attached water closet with the trapdoor. He heard running water just like he had at Regoth Ur.

  The furnishings were sparse but rich—he was sensing a theme—and included a wide bed heaped with quilts, a leather armchair with a footrest, and a mannequin-like wooden torso in one corner for his armor.

  I’m gonna need more mannequins.

  He set a log on the coals and blew until flames engulfed its underside.

  The page had lit an array of candles over the fireplace, and also a thick, bright candle in a sconce beside the bed. Jarrod shed his armor and arranged it properly, hung his jacket over the arrowslit to dry, changed into a set of hemp pants, and set his trousers near the fire. He stared out at the lights of the city beyond, the rooftops glowing, the ring of the moon throwing light against the sky and blotting out the stars above.

  He tried to imagine the intensity of the fear that shadows could cultivate when you grew up in a world that rarely saw true darkness.

  He’d asked Javal about the moon and they’d discussed it at length, but it was difficult; the last few days had been overcast so there was no frame of reference, but also because after a thousand years nobody had ever bothered to do anything more than keep track of what it did.

  One thing that it did, which freaked Jarrod out when he really thought about it, was every hundred and four days it would disappear along with the sun, turning the world pitch black for just over six days straight. He'd learned that they called it, creatively enough, The Dark.

  These guys, he decided, really sucked at naming stuff.

  He stared at the moon while he warmed his aching ass by the fire, wincing as he dabbed tea tree oil into the blisters on his thighs. The canted ring of dust scattered into the starlight and silhouetted the hills on the horizon. The sense of enormity clobbered him.

  We’re orbiting that thing, he figured. Or it’s a binary planetoid system. Either way, I will bet what they’re calling the moon is orbiting the sun.

  He reminded himself to break out a blank book tonight and start doodling to see if he could figure it out. Then he decided it didn’t matter.

  What matters, he told himself, slowing his breathing, is this: you are no longer standing on a dirt clod orbiting a very ordinary star in the Orion Arm of an unremarkable galaxy in the backwaters of the Virgo Supercluster. You are standing on a different dirt clod, orbiting some other very ordinary star, only God knows where, and you have work to do.

  He figured he felt much as Coronado must’ve, looking out over the Grand Canyon for the first time; or perhaps Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon.

  Neil Armstrong went home again, he reminded himself. The Conquistadors burned their ships.

  Plus, Neil Armstrong was first. Somebody else beat you here by twelve years. And he’s a king by now. You’ve got some catching up to do, Sergeant.

  He rolled the phrase The Dark around in his head a few times and realized that the words for dark and dead were identical. He needed a drink.

  Sir Javal rapped on his door and let himself in. “Are you all right?”

  “Overwhelmed, sire.”

  Javal handed him a folded black article of clothing, atop which was something small and gold; a brooch in the shape of a horse’s head. “Your cape and rider’s pin. The page will show you to the baths.”

  The baths were in a round, one-story building adjacent to the keep. Steam surged up into the night from slits in the ceiling.

  This, Jarrod recognized, was where it all came together. A hot bath with mineral salts, and a scantily-clad girl rubbing soap into his hair and massaging his shoulders. Her name was Ryana, and she was one of the tall, willowy types he’d been keen about earlier in the evening. She was marvelously put together, sinewy and doe-eyed with hands like stones and an interest in up-and-coming knights.

  Javal was in the adjacent tub. “How long can we stay here?” Jarrod asked, gently kneading the aches from his thighs as the girl poured a bucket of hot water over his scalp and massaged it in.

  “At Gateskeep?” Javal’s words slurred. “Just tonight.”

  “No, I mean in the baths.”

  Javal grinned and splashed water at him. “You’re done. Out.”

  Jarrod stood, and Javal stared.

  “That’s a hell of a place for a wound!” Javal exclaimed.

  Now the bathing girls were staring.

  Jarrod looked down at the long scar on his stomach. “I told you I’ve put my time in, sire.”

  “Not that,” said Javal, gesturing lower. “That.”

  “Oh, that.” His
circumcision. “Yeah. It’s a rite of passage among my people.”

  “For going through that, I should knight you right now.”

  Javal waited with his hands folded patiently outside the feasting hall’s double doors. His hair was still damp, and he was again clean-shaven and looked freshly scrubbed. He wore a V-necked leather jerkin with gold embroidery on the sleeves that matched the silver embroidery on the edges of Jarrod’s cape. Over this he wore a red shirt of what Jarrod figured was either fine hemp or rough silk, a gold horsehead pin prominent on his chest holding his gold officer’s fourragères under his arm. Behind him, the nobles’ hall was bursting its seams with revelry.

  Jarrod was clad in drawstring hemp pants and a black cashmere sweater over his black velvet warrior’s tunic and a long-sleeved polypro shirt beneath, with his black and silver cape secured with his rider’s pin, and leather trail runners. It was getting cold, despite being summer. The women he’d seen on his way down to supper were wearing stoles of fur and silk.

  Javal opened the door to the bedlam and let Jarrod through first, and there, spanning the hall, were perhaps a hundred people, some brightly dressed, some looking quite plain, the majority in every shade of regalia in between.

  The food was coming in plates and piles, and the myriad smells sent Jarrod’s feet wandering. “So, where do we sit?”

  “There’s a member of our order over there,” Jarrod didn’t see where Javal was pointing, but it was of little matter, because Javal steered him down the stairs and through the tables. “Privilege of being my sergeant,” Javal said at that point. “You get to eat with the nobles.” He flashed such a self-satisfied smile that his teeth gleamed. He raised his voice above the flute and drum, “King’s Rider Jarrod, this is the gallant Knight Lord Sir Durn.” Javal stopped before a bald, bearded, beady-eyed gorilla of a man who rivaled Carter in height and exceeded him considerably in mass. Jarrod guessed him at six and a half feet tall and the fitter side of three hundred pounds. College lineman big. Professional wrestler big. That guy would pound me into the ground like a fence post.