The hall at Aëlorix… the young archers at practice… the singing passengers flying to the impromptu dragon hunt… the incredible moments while the great bull-dragon failed to be diverted… the stumbling through the forest… barking dogs… musty tunnel… cyclopean and secret-keeping Kar-chee castle… training the rogue… blood spattering… midnight raid and smoke… free and open, life in the nomad camp… the heat of the fire and Thorm straining to place his knife… gliding down the broad moonlit river… the stinking prison room, the cold, impassive face of the Drogue Chairman, the mob raging…
But gradually these images faded and were gone, were replaced by others: the central lawn at the Collegium, like blue-green velvet… a crowd of boys taunting one of their number, black-haired and white-faced and defiant…
Then, slowly, slowly, this too vanished. He continued to lie on his couch, increasingly tranquil, and the afternoon sank beneath the weight of night. Only when the great red sun hesitated on the horizon he arose. And it was then that the shot pierced the transparent wall and shattered the panel lamp no more than an inch or two over his head.
He gazed at it, more curious than disturbed. It was the second shot which convinced him that while he was visible he was in danger. Unbothered but obedient, he lay down on the thick, soft rug. The vibration of the floor reminded him of what his ears had failed to convince his mind: the thick, unceasing clamor of alarm bells.
The door burst open and many men rushed into his room.
Physician Tu insisted that the health of his patient was paramount; questions, he said, could wait. And over the protests of Senoeorix, Commander of the Peramisian force, he had Jon-Joras removed to a room within the lodge’s central core. The wall was turned to opaque, guards posted, the sick man placed under drugs intended to counteract the shock of his attempted murder.
Senoeorix, claiming that the physician’s interference made his task impossible, engaged in no search of the countryside. But the lodge staff responded to the claim, next day, of a free farmer whose name no one bothered to learn, that he had seen someone fleeing in the dusk a few leagues off at about the time of the attempt. They followed his directions. And there in the woods they found a huntgun and two spent capsules.
“Off hand,” Physician Tu said, reflectively, “I’d say that there’s a huntsman who doesn’t like you.”
Jon-Joras nodded equitably. “Affection cannot be forced,” he said, the last word echoing in his drug-happy mind: forced, forced, forced. His lips moved, obedient to the echo.
The therapist threw him a sharp, appraising look. “I may have given you too much. I’m not certain I’ve ever treated anyone from your world with it before, and, while there appears to be no morphological difference, well… diet… environment… it’s difficult to tell. I—Well.” He dispelled his doubts with brisk directions. Go to bed. Eat your dinner when they bring it. Don’t go out of your room. Don’t go out.
Jon-Joras nodded with a dim smile. Out. Out. Out.
He went back to bed, ate his dinner, didn’t go out. Nevertheless, as he lay back after the tray had gone, he had a definite impression that he was losing consciousness. It was not with the suddenness of shock nor the slower procession of a faint, but he was (slowly, slowly) fading away from the world of the senses.
The opaque wall showed a dim forest scene. If he looked carefully, he thought, he might see what was lurking behind the trees, before the scene ebbed away—might see the mysterious, slouching, chitinous Kar-chees themselves. I will grasp the mil of this bed, he thought, with all my might, and hold on tightly, tightly; if I find my hands anywhere else I will know that I’ve been unconscious…
It seemed, somehow, important that he should know. And so, he did know, when he found his hands clasped on the coverlet, that he had slipped away. It must have been then that the man had entered his room.
“Now, please, Big,” the man said, in a hoarse whisper; “don’t make no noises. Listen to what I got to tell ya, huh.”
Jon-Joras nodded. “Doghunter,” he said, pleased with himself at having made this out.
The man didn’t bother to affirm or deny his class. “They want to kill ya,” he said. “You know who I mean. The bigs. The gents. Before the king gets here. Your—”
“My king?” He struggled against the sweet mists of indifference to understand.
“King… King Paul? He gets here tomorrow. And I can tell you—they’re not going to wait. You stay here, you’ll be dead by then, huh.”
Jon-Joras swung his legs over the side, feeling the railings cold to his flesh. “I won’t wait,” he said. “I have to see him. I’ll go…”
He paused. Go where? Where would he be safe. The man in the darkness thumped his chest. “Go with me,” he offered. “We’ll see you safe. I won’t mention no name, but you know who I mean. Him: tall. Her: young. With me.”
Jon-Joras nodded. Hue and Lora. Naturally they’d want him kept safe—now. If he were to be killed before he could talk, tell of what he knew, they’d have to begin from scratch, find some other safe and far-off den to bring their dragons to and train them there. “I’ll go with you. Just lead me. Just lead.”
The corridors were filled with soft darkness here and there spotted with tiny small lights. A thin thread of very quiet music seeped from hidden speakers. The man was a big man, but he moved silently. It could have been no more than a pair of minutes before he had found a stairwell which led them soon to the cool and safety of the darkness without.
A long while afterwards he reached to grasp the man’s shoulder. “Someone’s behind us,” he whispered.
The man mumbled something, Jon-Joras could not clearly hear the words, but clearly he was neither surprised nor concerned. They kept on going. And by and by a door opened so suddenly that his eyes received the unexpected light almost like a blow. A voice inside was muttering, “—still say the Bosky would be—” It fell suddenly silent. His guide turned and took him by the hand to draw him in. Perhaps Jon-Joras’s light-struck eyes made him hesitate, perhaps they noted nonetheless a sudden change in the man’s expression. However it was, he hesitated, drew back. The hand on his wrist tightened, pulled.
There was not one person who had been behind them in the night, there were three. Jon-Joras not only went in, he went down. The door closed upon his astonished cries.
“I should have killed you when you were on my own grounds,” Aëlorix said. “And buried you beneath the dung of the deer-barn.” His mouth arched like a bow, down at the corners.
Feeling dazed, dull, stupid, Jon-Joras said, “But I saw your son die. He died in my arms. He—”
“He died, at least, with honor. Sooner or later one way or the other, every man meets his dragon. His was a dirty one—a rogue. A man-made rogue!” The aristocrat’s voice clicked in his throat, his face showed a disgust greater than grief or rage.
Protesting, bewildered, “But I had nothing to do with that,” Jon-Joras cried. “I might have been killed there myself. I don’t understand. I don’t understand!” His anguished gaze took in the rough-looking man who had brought him there and his rougher-looking fellows. “And I certainly don’t—You! You are not of the Gentlemen! Why are you doing this?”
The guide gave a short laugh. “Ah, you thought you was so clever, huh. ‘Doghunter,’ you said to me. That’s just one of your mistakes. I’m not a Doghunter, huh, any more than I’m a Gentleman. Maybe you don’t know everything about this place after all. So I’ll tell a few things, make it all clear. What’s it that the old nut-head who digs in ruins calls us? ‘Plebs’? So we’re plebs, huh. But that don’t make us Dog-hunters! Or what’s it they like to call themselves, ‘free farmers,’ we don’t want no farms, dig potatoes, all that. Nah…”
In small mood to appreciate the rude logic of what he heard, Jon-Joras listened nevertheless. It did make sense. Many of the plebs gave full approval to the Hunt system. They did so because of the employment it gave, the trade it brought, the color it afforded their otherwise drab da
ys; they did so from simple habit, too, and also because they held themselves to be superior to the Doghunters—who opposed it. And because it allied them, thus, to the Gentlemen, whom they envied—and with whom, thus, they identified.
It was that complex. And that simple.
In vain Jon-Joras pointed out that to expose the outlaws’ program of mis-marking dragon-chicks and of training some of those thus disfigured to be rogues, must inevitably result—one way or another—in the destruction of the outlaws’ program. Uselessly he declared that he himself was taking no sides, that Hue’s people had captured him once and subsequently tried to have him murdered.
To the first plea Aëlorix said only, grimly, “We know how to take care of that ourselves.” And to the second, “Too bad they didn’t succeed.” Adding, “But we will…”
Why? Why?
But the questions were based on the assumption that reason and fair-play prevailed, and in this situation neither did. The outlaws now wished their outlawry revealed and Jon-Joras had agreed to reveal it. Therefore he was doing their bidding. Therefore he was on their side. Therefore he had made himself the target of the full rage of the Gentlemen and their jackals.
More—When Aëlorix said that he was not dependent on the Hunt Company, he spoke only in the most economic, limited sense. Every single Gentleman was dependent on the Company because the Hunt System was dependent on the outworld trade and the Gentlemen, as a class, were dependent on the System. Even such finite freedom as Aëlorix himself possessed was the exception.
“Do you think I don’t know you for what you are?” he asked, scornfully. “Outworlders?—cowards—the lot of you. One hint of danger, you’d never show yourselves on Earth again. And then what? Grub in the dirt—us?—like Dog-hunters’ brats?”
Then, as he paused, over the sound of his heavy breathing, another sound came in from the night… low. Low, troubled, melancholy… the cry of a questing dragon. Almost for the first time there came to Jon-Joras’s mind, preoccupied as it was with his own fears and his troubles, some thought of dragon qua dragon—poor beast! predestined to torture, agony, death for another species’ sport—when all it wanted was to find a mate, to couple as nature intended it, off there in the cool and ferny darkness.
The eyes of master and men swung in the direction of the cry, then; rested briefly, swung back to the prisoner; met each other. Whatever thoughts were theirs, pity was not one of them. The erstwhile guide began to grin.
“There it is,” he said.
Aëlorix nodded. Jon-Joras felt his flesh prickle. “What—” he began.
“‘Sooner or later,’” Aëlorix quoted himself, “‘one way or the other, every man meets his dragon.’
“Hear it? That’s yours.”
X
Aëlorix’s final words to his prisoner and former guest were never finished, but did not need to be. “Why you should live, and he be dead—” the man said; his face twisted with grief and hate and he turned away. It was the age-old cry of Why me and not another? and in his bitterness and his rage, fed from a hundred springs, somehow he blamed Jon-Joras for his own son’s death.
It was the time between dawn and earliest morning. Mostly the sky was gray, but the mist to eastwards had begun to show pink. All was quiet, all was cool, as they took him from the small house in the woods. The Gentleman himself said nothing more after that, but his lowborn thugs cursed and muttered and hawked and spat and complained of the chill. Dew still trickled and fell upon them, going down the barely visible path.
“Give it a blow, Big?” one of the men asked. Aëlorix nodded. The man fumbled in a kit by his side, took out a small bottle, swore, put it back, fumbled again, this time came up with something made of wood and bark, and put it to his lips. His cheeks inflated. Had Jon-Joras not been watching he would never believed that what he now heard came from anything but the mouth of a dragon.
The soft sad notes faded away on the dim air. All listened, all were still. For a while, nothing. Then, from off to the right and a distance (to Jon-Joras, incalculable) came what almost seemed a deeper echo of the same cry. The men nodded.
“That’s him,” they said. “Hasn’t moved much in the night.” The man behind him poked Jon-Joras with the huntgun. “Get flapping,” he instructed.
They came by and by to an end of the woods and entered onto a wide and flat park-like place covered with waist high grass and here and there a low tree. Again they sounded the dragon-call, and again and again. And the dragon responded and the voice of the real dragon came nearer.
Halfway across the great clearing all stopped. “As far as we go,” one of the thugs said. He gave Jon-Joras one last, painful prod in the kidneys with the squat muzzle of the huntgun. “You better not move away from right here,” he warned, “until the drag comes in. You do, and—” He imitated the sound of the capsule being fired.
“After the drag comes in, why, you can move all you like. Maybe—if you’re lucky—if you move fast enough…” He shrugged.
Jon-Joras half-turned, watched them walking back at a brisk pace in the direction they’d come from. Then he swung back to watch the woods ahead of him. His legs twitched, but he beat down the impulse to flee. After a long while, or so it seemed, the cow-call came again from behind him, was answered by the bull in the forest ahead.
A tree moved in the wind that blew from the west, from behind, then another. His heart swelled and his head snapped as he saw that the second moving thing was no tree. The long neck swung from side to side, the faceted eyes gleamed yellow and green. And then the body moved out into the open. The great mouth parted, sounded its immemorial question.
And then the utterly unexpected happened. A dragon call from behind… but not the submissive one of a cow-dragon as before. This was a bull, another bull, a defiant and challenging bull; instantly, along with it, came the strong and bitter reek of bull-scent. Jon-Joras felt his bowels turn. Trapped! Before and behind him! Trapped—
The visible dragon bellowed its vexation. And Jon-Joras saw it all.
There was no bull-dragon behind him, just as there was no cow-dragon behind him. The call came from the same source—a small instrument of bark and wood. And the odor of dragon-suint had come from the bottle in the same kit-bag. Trapped? Tricked! He and the dragon, both. Only—Only the dragon would not know that, could not know that. His tiny and now-troubled brain served chiefly as a clearinghouse for instinctual responses. Female dragon: Go to her. Male dragon: Will want her, too: Slay him.
The bull in the woods now left the woods behind him and began to cross down the clearing at a lumbering trot, shooting forth his bifurcated tongue, tasting the air… air in which Jon-Joras’s own scent was mingled with that of the “other”… man-scent now inextricably identified in the brute mind with that of its sexual rival and enemy.
The dragon did not know the trick, but the man did.
And the man reasoned and the man remembered, the man remembered what Hue had told him in the Kar-chee castle—that the dull brain of the great beast was mastered by misdirection alone. Aëlorix and his toadies now had none of the apparatus of the hunt except the single huntgun. They had no beaters, no musics, no archers, no banner-men. They were making up for all that now by using the artificial call-horn and the scent drawn from the musk-glands of some dead bull-dragon. These they had.
Jon-Joras had nothing but his mind.
Again the wind from behind brought the ugly reek and the male call. The dragon ahead paused for a slow second, a shiver of rage moving the powerful muscles beneath the green-black hide. His cheek-nodules began to puff with mindless rage. He bellowed, he hissed, he began to run. Run?
That was what they hoped Jon-Joras would do: panic. Run. “Maybe, if you’re lucky—if you move fast enough—”
But no man could move fast enough against a frenzied dragon. Long before he would have a chance to make the dubious safety of the woods (and behind, the great engine of the pounding dragon-body crashing the trees aside like reeds), the drag
on would have seen him running, would have known him by his scent for enemy, and would have run him down, seized him, worried him, torn and trampled him.
Thus, the trick. And, thus, the game.
But Jon-Joras wasn’t playing according to those rules. His legs still twitched and trembled and he let them. His arms, it was, that moved now, moved swiftly. Arms and upper body slipped out of the loose hospital shirt which was still his only garment; arms reached up to the low branches of the low tree, little more, really, than a large sapling, and tied the shirt to them by its sleeves. The innocent wind at once caught at it and it flapped and flew about and danced.
If the shining eyes saw it, facets flashing yellow, flashing green, Jon-Joras could not say for certain sure. But the dragon roared at the same second, and at that same second.
Jon-Joras stooped into the grass which had been as high as his naked breast and now closed over his naked head. He still did not run.
He walked. Knees trembling, body sweating, he folded his arms upon his swift and fearful heart and walked away into the grass at right angles to the dragon’s path. He did not look up even when the earth shook and the noise grew nearer, grew louder. Dependent on the meagerness of the animal’s mind, hopeful of its not swerving from its path, trusting to its being for the moment intent upon the telltale shirt, Jon-Joras walked on.
To the men hiding in the woods it might have seemed that he had fainted after tying the shirt to the tree. Would they realize why he had tied it there? Or suspect in which direction he had gone if he had not fainted? Likely they would imagine that, if he were not now huddled at the foot of the tree, he would be surely taking the shortest way out of the clearing—the one he was, in fact, now taking.
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