Dragon Rescue

by Don Callander

  “For heaven’s sake, why?” cried his watch mate, a confirmed bach-elor. “What can marriage offer that barracks life and frequent leaves cannot?”

  “That,” said the other, pointing his thumb over his shoulder at the young couple seated on the parapet.

  His partner sighed and nodded. They swung away to patrol the rest of their section of wall top before Captain Graham came to check on them.

  rs

  Lady Mornie of Morningside, wife of the fur trapper Clematis of Broken Land, vigorously plied a willow-twig broom to clear newly fallen snow off the slated front porch of their sturdy log cabin.

  “We may be here all winter!” she called to her husband.

  Clem appeared at the door, gazed at the white world without, then glanced up at the overcast sky.

  “Entirely possible,” he said. “And not the worst fate we could suffer, I say. I’ve spent many a long winter cozy in this cabin, snug as a bear in his cave.”

  “Well, I won’t complain—except that we promised Manda and Tom to go to Hidden Lake with them this wintertime,” replied his wife, handing him the broom. “Here, I must wake the boys. They’ll want to make snow-people on the lawn and tell the animal and bird tracks in the first snow.”

  “Best sort of life for them! Better than being held prisoner by winter in a stony, chilly old castle,” exclaimed their father.

  He quickly finished the sweeping, clearing a path also to the stable and the high-lofted barn, and down to the wellhead near the edge of the steep cliff.

  “Better’n crammed in a stuffy castle, I adds,” he repeated, resuming the conversation when he came back indoors after stomping the wet snow from his boots.

  He placed on the kitchen counter two brimming-full pails of milk he’d just coaxed from the family dairy cows.

  “There are things to be said for both, castle and cabin,” his wife insisted.

  “But,” Clem went on, “if we’re to help Tom and Manda with their house building, we should leave here before the really deep snows begin.”

  Gregor, aged four, and Thomas, two and a half, tumbled out of the cabin door and raged across the soft snow, ignoring the swept path their father had made, shouting joyously at the tops of their voices, causing great dollops of wet snow to plop from the pine boughs at the edge of the forest clearing.

  “Will it be safe, love?” Mornie said worriedly. “I mean, to travel in this snow over Summer Pass?”

  “As safe as anything we might do, I suppose,” said Clem. “If we waited for a safe day, we’d never do anything.”

  “You have me to consider, however,” said Mornie. “And the boys, too.”

  He thought a moment of her objection while she laid a hearty woodsman’s breakfast on the smooth-scrubbed plank table—toasted sourdough muffins and wild berry jams; strong, steaming coffee in white mugs; and sausages with fried eggs.

  “There is some danger, but we can withstand it, Mornie,” he said at last. “And I’ve a hunch...a feeling, that...well, that things are happening that call for us to go east now, rather than wait for spring.”

  “I do respect your intuitions,” Mornie said with a sigh, “and I for one would dearly love to sleep behind stone walls again, and laugh at the cold and snow.”

  “You agree to leaving at once, then?” asked her husband.

  “Never any doubt!” she said laughing aloud, and she kissed him on the top of his head as he bent to sip gingerly at the steaming coffee.

  “It’ll snow no more this week,” her husband said. “The wind’s turned to due west, and it’s already warmer. We’ll leave as soon as the boys are fed and I can saddle and pack the horses.”

  rs

  It always surprised the woodsman how much faster time and work flew, now that there were others sharing his once-lonely life. He was used to great, empty, silent spaces, and having the world to himself. To have Marnie and the bright, noisy little lads to love and help and to do for made the hours whirl by like leaves in an autumn gale.

  Before noon all was ready. Each was mounted on a sturdy, shaggy forest pony. For each saddle pony, there were two pack horses, and during their journey, especially where the going was rough, they would switch horses frequently.

  “We’ll soon look like four of your snowmen on horseback,” said Mornie to her older son, Gregor Clemsson.

  The boy grinned up at her from a deep nest of woolen scarves, down mufflers, and a fur-lined parka hood.

  “We’d better go, or we’ll become too hot for comfort,” said the father, swinging into his saddle. “All right, Hedy! We’ll break the trail for these city-and-castle folk, shall we?”

  “I’m a woodsman!” protested little Thomas Clemsson, stoutly. “I live in Broken Land!”

  “But it’ll be nice to stand once more between the fireplaces in Overhall Great Hall,” his mother reminded him, tucking an errant cloak tail under his saddle blanket.

  “No more talk!” cried Clem, waving his arm and touching Hedy with his heels. “Keep your eyes open, lads! You, too, Mother! Snow changes things in the woods and sharp eyes are needed to avoid mis-steps or hidden deadfalls.”

  The four saddled ponies and the eight pack ponies filed from the clearing in front of Clem’s winter quarters, down a long, wind-cleared slope, across the creek, not yet frozen over but rimmed with clear, starred ice.

  Once across, they rode into the dense pine forest where everything was still and soundless. The normally raucous blue jays and the energetic brown squirrels slept in trees coated with a fresh blanket of snow.

  Even the little boys fell quiet, impressed with the wintertime hush.

  Gregor insisted on taking his turn at breaking trail when they started out the next morning. The family had spent the night in a cozy camp under the lee of a bank of broad-leaved rhododendrons.

  Under the trees the snow sifted through the boughs was only a few inches deep, so Clem allowed him to lead the way while he checked the pack ponies once again.

  Every hour or so they paused while the father and his sons scraped the horses’ hooves free of caked ice and pine needles. The going here was relatively easy and they made good time, ever climbing toward the open meadow at the foot of Summer Pass.

  In the open, however, drifts were deeper where the wind had been trapped about clumps of bare-limbed birch and outcrops of stone.

  Under the icy crust, the snow was clinging and wet. The west wind was almost warm, and the travelers shed and stowed away their heavier outer clothing before noontime.

  *’Lunch soon!” Mornie called to her menfolk.

  She knew her husband would go without lunch if he had his way, pressing on in order to reach the bottom of the pass before dark.

  “If you say so,” Clem sighed. “We’ll stop over there, where the alders edge the tarn, you see?”

  With their destination in view, Gregor and Thomas urged their mounts into a quick trot and quickly disappeared into the grove of leafless trees beside the mountain lake.

  A moment later Gregor reappeared, waving silently for his father to come to them, fast.

  Clem spurred Hedy forward along their track and quickly closed the gap between them. Little Thomas had joined his brother, waiting just inside the edge of the alder grove.

  “Men on the lakeshore,” whispered Greg. “I heard them talking.”

  “Well, we’ll move with some caution, then, sons,” directed Clem.

  “No telling out here if they’re friends or foes. Most likely they’re friends.

  Maybe lost in the snow. We can help them, then.”

  He dismounted, leading Hedy by her reins, and followed Greg and Thomas’s beaten track through the close-set trees.

  rs

  “We can go ahead on foot, I suggest,” said Hoarling to Murdan.

  “Not nearly as pleasant as flying, but...”

  “We’d better camp here for the night,” decided the Historian, shaking his head. “It’s sure to get colder after the sun sets, even though it’s gotten somewhat w
armer, if you’ll notice. The slopes will be slippery at night. By the morrow we can fly up to the top of the pass, if the day is clearer.”

  “It’ll still be mighty deep underfoot,” predicted Peter of Gantrell.

  “But I agree we shouldn’t press on tonight under the circumstances.”

  Neither man thought to consult Plume, who sat in a clear spot under a pine, nursing a bruised knee and an elbow scraped in their crash landing.

  “Hello!” came a sudden cry from the fringe of bare alders behind them.

  Murdan and Peter spun about in surprise. Plume slunk deeper under his tree.

  “Hoy!” cried the Historian. “Here we are!”

  Clem’s mount came plowing through belly-deep drifts, churning her powerful legs to keep balance over rounded stones hidden under the cover.

  “Lord Historian!” Clem cried in surprise as he dismounted in front of them.

  He and Murdan clasped each other, as much to keep from falling as in greeting.

  “This is Clematis,” said Murdan to Peter. “I don’t think you’ve met before. This is Peter Gantrell, Clem.”

  “Ha!” snorted Clem, drawing back a step in surprise. “The exile?”

  “Yes, the exile, but much humbled now by great adversity,” said Peter, shaking the woodsman’s reluctant hand. “I’ve heard naught but good report of you, Clematis of Broken Land.”

  “Anyone living in these parts learns to forgive and forget,” Clem observed slowly. “If you say he’s to be trusted, Lord Historian, I’ll accept your word on it.”

  “And yet keeping your eyes peeled, I suppose,” said Murdan with a chuckle. “We hoped to cross Summer Pass. We must get to Overhall quickly.”

  As Mornie rode up and the boys stared curiously at the strangers from behind her, Murdan recounted recent events—the Relling invasion, his arrest, and the escape with Peter and the Accountant by way of the Ice Dragon.

  Clem glared at the former Lord of Gantrell, saying, “We’ll see how you work out, shall we?”

  He turned back to the Lord of Overhall.

  “We were headed for the pass ourselves, and down to your Ramhold, then to Hidden Lake to meet Tom and Manda, Historian.

  Not today will we make it over the pass. With luck, perhaps tomorrow.

  Hello! What’s that?”

  Hoarling, who had been exploring the surrounding countryside, had just now plowed into view.

  “Our noble rescuer,” said Murdan dryly. “Hoarling the Ice Dragon, meet Clem the Woodsman.”

  “Pleased, I suppose,” muttered the ice-hued Dragon, nodding his head as cordially as he ever did to anyone. “Lovely weather you’ve got here, Clem! Could be colder, however, for my liking.”

  “Wait a few days, at most,” said Clem with a dry laugh. “It’ll get almost as cold here as it does where you come from, Ice Dragon. My old friend Retruance Constable spoke of you, of course.”

  “We were attempting to fly over the pass to Overhall,” explained Peter. “But the beast’s wings got too heavy with ice and forced him—

  and us—down here.”

  “Unlike the Constables,” said Hoarling in his own defense, “I cannot generate internal heat to melt ice from my wings.”

  “What can you do, then?” asked Clem, who was really quite interested.

  “Freeze just about anything I breathe on, if I choose to,” snorted the Ice Dragon. “Turn anything...or anyone...to solid ice.”

  He blew on a patch of tarn that had melted in the afternoon sun.

  It at once shivered, blurred, and solidified.

  “Impressive,” admitted Clem, “although I fail to see its usefulness when you live in a place where it’s below freezing most of the year anyway.”

  Hoarling chose to ignore his comment and sat down in a convenient snowbank instead. Actually, the thought had occurred to him in the past. Why should an Ice Dragon live in a land of ice?

  “Wait until morning, what with this change in the weather,” Clem advised Murdan. “By noontime, when we reach the summit, you should be able to fly without danger. If not, he looks capable of plowing our way with ease.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that,” said Murdan, shaking his head.

  “I had,” muttered the Ice Dragon. “Hoping nobody else would think of it.”

  Clem and Murdan ignored the beast’s boorishness. “We’ll make camp here among the alders and get an early start in the morning,”

  decided the latter.

  “Children? Out here in this terrible winter wilderness!” cried Peter, catching sight of Gregor and Thomas for the first time when he turned to greet Lady Mornie politely. Mornie was cool but proper, as they had met before at Morningside.

  “Our sons—Gregor and Thomas Clemsson,” she said proudly.

  “My lads do fine as fish hair in this lovely country. They’ll fairly keep your ears from frostbite with their chatter alone.”

  Murdan, who had spent the previous night huddled miserably under a giant fir before a tiny and rather smoky fire, was amazed when, within an hour after their meeting, the woodsman had assembled a clean, dry, and cozy camp in a sheltered nook between tumbled boulders the size of houses.

  Supper was soon bubbling merrily on the fire. The smell of fresh-baked biscuits filled the air and even the sullen Plume moved closer, licking his lips while still trying not to be noticed by the newcomers who knew him of old at Overhall.

  After the generous and hot supper, spare fur robes furnished by the Broken Land trapper, and a sleeping place of soft pine needles out of the worst of the night’s cold, the joined parties set out at dawn greatly refreshed, to climb drift-clogged Summer Pass.

  Despite his dire grumblings, Hoarling broke their way through the deepest of these heavy drifts, and swept lesser accumulations away with his batlike, silvery wings. Where, in sunny places, the snow turned to deep mush, he blew his frosty breath on the path, refreezing the slush for firmer, if slippery, walking.

  By high noon the party had topped Summer Pass and were looking down on the tops of clouds concealing the hills and plains to the south.

  “Now will you tote us?” asked Murdan of Hoarling. “No snow falling and it’s all downhill to Overhall.”

  “It’s pretty hot! Suppose we call our deal quits and I go my way north again,” the Ice Dragon suggested. “Or you could increase my fee.”

  “I’ll do no such thing!” shouted Murdan indignantly. “I’ve had plenty and enough of your lousy, un-Dragonly carping and complaining, icy beast! If you’re not prepared to carry us to Overhall—well, just say so and we’ll proceed afoot, and save the fee you’ve already extorted from me!”

  “Now, now, now, now!” sputtered Hoarling, taken quite aback in surprise. Few ever spoke thus to any Dragon, of course. “Calm down, fiery old Historian! I’ll do my best to carry you onward. No need to get angry! But even if I wanted to, I can’t carry all these new people, the woodsman and his lady wife and the tireless little boys who’ve been playing jump rope with my tail all morning, not to mention the horses.”

  “I suspect he’s telling truth,” sighed Peter.

  “We’re headed to Ramhold anyway,” said Mornie. “You must fly quickly to aid the King, Lord Historian. Clem and I and the boys will ride on, just as we originally intended. We’ll be perfectly safe, I assure you. My husband knows how to make travel easy, even in the worst conditions.”

  “As we’ve already seen, Lady Mornie,” said Peter, bowing deeply to her.

  “Let’s go on, then,” said Hoarling impatiently. “The sooner we reach this Overhall place, the sooner I can get back to the comforts of my ice cavern.”

  Before they parted, Clem laid a fire in a sheltered cleft and warmed the last of Mornie’s good soup. The boys toasted bread from the day before on cleft sticks, offering some to the Dragon in apology for playing games with his tail.

  When they’d all eaten, Murdan followed Peter and his sour syco-phant up onto the Dragon’s broad back, turning to wave good-bye to Clem’s fami
ly.

  “I’ll send word to Ramhold as soon as I can, so you’ll know whether to come to Overhall or go on to the canyon,” Murdan called. “Stay cozy with Talber for a few days. I’ll send a Dragon to fetch you, if we need you.”

  Clem and Mornie waved farewell and the boys jumped up and down with excitement to see the Dragon fall off the steep mountainside in a long, shallow glide, heading south and east beyond Summer Pass before turning due east toward Overhall Castle.

  Chaper Thirteen

  Back to Sinking Marsh

  A soldier carefully stamped his cold feet on a narrow and slippery walkway atop tall Middletower, sixty-five feet above the inner bailey, and shouted the news to the sergeant of the guard, below the wall. The sergeant in turn leaned over the inner parapet and relayed the warning to Graham, seated on Gugglerun’s curbing and picking his teeth after an early dinner.

  “Dragon a-coming!”

  Graham shouted, “Man the battlements!” and sent a runner to tell the Queen and her party, just finishing their evening meal in Great Hall.

  “Which Dragon, I wonder?” asked Manda, putting down her dessert fork.

  “Furbetrance, I suppose,” said her stepmother. “Returning from Lexor. We’ll get news, at last!”

  Tom was out of his seat and through the door when a second call came from above.

  “Another Dragon! A second Dragon! From the west!” they heard the tower-top sentry scream.

  “Not Retruance,” said Manda to the Queen. “Certainly not Arbitrance, would you think?”

  She caught up with her husband when he paused on the steps outside.

  “Here’s Furbetrance, at least,” cried the Librarian.

  The younger Constable brother bumped to a stop in the center of the courtyard.

  “I don’t know who he is,” Furbetrance shouted, even before he was asked. “Stay under cover, all! I’ll check him out.”

  He crouched, then leapt back into the air, roaring his wings and climbing steeply to meet the unknown beast coming from the west.

  “Whoever it is,” said Tom, shading his eyes against the westering sun, “he’s carrying passengers. He doesn’t have the coloration of the Constables, do you see? Silver and black, it looks like. Hard to tell in this light.”