The Dragon Queen

by Alice Borchardt

  “You did it with your bare hands. You were unarmed, weren’t you?”

  Arthur leaned across the table and showed his teeth in nothing like a smile. “They behaved in an insulting manner toward your good lady,” he snarled. “I corrected them.”

  “Obviously,” the husband said. And added, “Permanently.”

  “Yes,” Arthur said. “They will be guilty of no further ill-natured behavior. I was in your lady’s debt. She offered me the hospitality of food and a bed … in the barn!”

  Eline placed a bowl of soup before her husband. “Arthur, this is my husband, Balin.” She looked from her husband to Arthur. “Arthur, Balin.”

  “How do we know you don’t belong to the king?” Balin asked.

  Arthur bared his teeth again. “You don’t!” he said. “But if I did belong to this king of yours, how likely would it be that I would slaughter his men?”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t be—”

  “He came from the wild,” Eline said, “and he was starving. I don’t think he belongs to the king.”

  “No,” Arthur said. “I don’t belong to the king. I can’t tell how much any word is worth here, but in other places, I am considered absolutely truthful. And I will give you my word I neither know this king of yours nor do I serve him in any way.”

  Eline brought a platter of flat breads to the table and some butter. Then she took the child, who was asleep in Arthur’s arms, put him in the cradle, turned, came back, and sat down on the bench beside her husband. Neither would meet Arthur’s eyes. Balin concentrated on the food on his plate; Eline played with her fingers in her lap.

  “He can really fight well,” she said to her husband.

  “What’s that to me?” Balin snapped back.

  “You need him!”

  “No!” Balin said, shooting a dark look at Arthur.

  “If you can’t get the cattle back, we are all done.”

  “Where are the cattle?” Arthur asked patiently.

  “Across the river,” Balin said. “We can’t get them because someone is guarding the bridge.”

  Balin shot a guilty look at his wife, then continued, “He … he is too strong for us.”

  Arthur said, “Umm.” Then got up, swinging his leg around the bench. “Are the three in the barn getting ripe?”

  Balin shook his head. “Not yet.”

  “Better bury them, though,” Arthur said.

  Balin looked up. “No! I know a place where they can go. If we put them near here, they might … walk.”

  Arthur nodded. “Sometimes they do that.”

  “Here, it’s not some time; it’s all the time,” Eline said. “Do you want a bath and clean clothes?” she asked Arthur.

  He was a bit mystified, but he said, “Yes.”

  “We have a sweathouse down by the river,” Balin said. To Arthur’s eye, he still looked guilty. “I think you can wear my clothes.”

  Arthur nodded again. They began talking as soon as he left the house, before he was out of earshot.

  “I can’t believe,” Eline spat, “that you’re going to let him go up against that monster without even—”

  “You said he could fight, and I saw what he did to those three in the barn,” Balin hissed. “I’ll warn him tomorrow …”

  It felt good to be clean, Arthur thought when he climbed the hill back to the barn and lay down in the straw.

  Balin and he left early, before first light. Balin tried to put him on one of the horses, but Arthur resisted this and said he could walk very well. Eline filled a knapsack with food, shooting unhappy looks at her husband while she did so.

  “Remember,” she told Balin. “You promised.”

  As they took the road farther into the forest, Arthur looked back once at the plateau where he had come from. Where he had been imprisoned. They were going in the opposite direction.

  “Where do you come from?” Balin asked. “There,” Arthur said, pointing to the mountain and the nearby plateau.

  Balin crossed himself.

  Arthur studied him for a moment but didn’t ask for an explanation. They continued walking. It was one of those mornings when it’s hard to believe there is any evil in the world. Cool, clear, golden, with new sunlight, green with the abundant beauty of the wooded countryside. Wildflowers bloomed in profusion at the roadside—daisies, coltsfoot, cornflower, violets—white, purple, and yellow, peeped out of the grass. Grass that was lush, long, and green.

  The woods were not thickly overgrown or darkened by tall, high, canopied trees. This wood was open—mixed oak, ash, hazel, hawthorn, and willow. Sometimes through the trees Arthur could see the blue glint of oxbow lakes left by the river flowing through the bottom land.

  Rich country, this, Arthur thought. And not thickly settled. The land around the lakes was clear, and there was good grazing for cattle.

  “Does it get cold in winter?” Arthur asked.

  “No,” Balin said, “but there’s lots of rain. That’s why I built the house so high.”

  They stopped to eat near noon, and Arthur realized he and Balin were no longer alone. At least a dozen men were following them. In dress and appearance, they much resembled Balin. They wore homespun clothing, had raggedly trimmed hair and beards, and carried a variety of improvised weapons ranging from slings tucked into their belts to clubs, wooden spears, knives, and a few true swords like the one Balin wore.

  Among them, Arthur felt as he had when, one late evening off on a hunt, he had blundered into someone’s cow pasture. He stood up in the tall grass and had been startled to see a dozen cows studying him with stolid, bovine inquiry. These men seemed no more ready to speak than the cows had been. They kept their distance as the cows had, and showed no indication of aggression.

  Balin cleared his throat nervously. “We have all lost cattle,” he explained, “when the king closed the river.”

  Arthur nodded. Most carried food, as he and Balin did. They shared it out among themselves without argument and fell to.

  It was mid-afternoon when they came to the first corpse. He was sitting against a tree trunk, head bowed.

  For a moment Arthur believed it alive; it still wore clothing. But then he noticed how tight the skin on the half-hidden face was and the grotesque way the few rags of clothing hung from the bones.

  “Don’t touch it,” Balin warned. “That’s why none of them are buried. Sometimes he takes exception.”

  “I don’t know,” a big, black-bearded man commented. “They usually have to be fresher than that.”

  “Anybody know his name?” Balin asked.

  Those who answered, only a few, said, “No.” The rest looked as though they didn’t want to be included in the conversation.

  They were walking downhill toward the river. As they drew closer to the water’s edge, the numbers of the dead increased. They were in all stages of decomposition, except, Arthur noted, the stinking, disgusting, wet one. These were all dry, the oldest shrunken to brown bone with fragments of parchment skin to fresher corpses, shrunken, eyeless, but still recognizable to their kin. A few, very few, were pointed out to Arthur by their kin. In whispers.

  Before they came out of the forest, Arthur could hear a yammering. “Puff up, pt, pt, yup, tup, whup, whup, pa, pa, pa, pa.… ” Nonsense syllables, repeated over and over again.

  There had once been a bridge over the river here, a well-traveled one, if Arthur was any judge. The arching spans were of considerable size. They were made of the same black basaltic rock Arthur had seen at the bottom of the plateau. They looked as though they might have grown out of the riverbed. Arthur had seen Roman bridges and roads, whole Roman cities, some abandoned when Roman rule collapsed in Britain. But he had never seen anything like these spans. They were solid, with no sign of separation between the blocks. No people he had ever known or heard of could build anything like these arches.

  The bridge was usable, because the low arches had been spanned by planks tied in place. The thing danced on them, leaping, ju
mping, hopping, cartwheeling, all the while spewing the garbled sounds that resembled but never quite were words.

  Arthur hunkered down on his heels at the edge of the wood and tried to get a good look at the thing. Difficult to do, because it was in continuous motion. The uniform was that of a Roman cavalry officer, silver helmet with a mask—a female mask. Chain-mail shirt over a tunic and trousers, shin guards, and boots.

  He wondered what woman the mask represented. Bodiccia? He had been treated to a performance in Brittany where the cavalry had dramatized the defeat of the Iceni queen. He had known it was an insult while watching, probably aimed directly at him. So he had been very careful to applaud vigorously and pay effusive compliments to the cavalry commander.

  Another favorite showpiece was the destruction of the queen of the Amazons at Troy. So it might be Penthesilea so depicted.

  In any case, he could see nothing of its body. Indeed, he doubted it had one, because he noticed the same shimmer in the air around the figure he’d noticed around the monster that pursued him on the plateau.

  “Have you tried at night?” he asked Balin.

  “Yes, we have. We tried to sneak across. The one up in the woods thought he was clever enough not to be seen.”

  “Moving to another ford?”

  “He is there as soon as we arrive,” a black-bearded man contributed.

  “Spear?” Arthur asked.

  “They crumble and sometimes burn,” Balin said. “The man wielding them is—What’s it like?” he asked the rest.

  “Like being taken by a spider … sucked dry,” was the reply. There was general agreement.

  “Your slings?”

  Balin pulled his out. A second later, lead shot flew toward the figure on the bridge. Everyone scurried for cover when it came whistling back and imbedded itself in a pine tree.

  “He has more trouble with that,” Balin said, “but all of us have tried at one time. He just waits until we try to cross the bridge—and trust me, when you get halfway across the clearing in front of the bridge when that thing is stirred up, you’re a dead man. Yes, we can even drive him off the bridge, but we can’t hold him back long enough.”

  “We believe,” Black Beard said, “that he feeds on the ones he kills and whatever animals stray near the river to drink.”

  The grass in the clearing leading to the bridge was long, but when Arthur stood, he saw that it grew up through the bones of skeletons, both animal and human. As he rose, the horror on the bridge began to kick and stamp more loudly. “Ot, yut, dut, art, ar, ar, ar, Arthur, ru, ru, ru, do, die, die, die, die, de, de, de, eee …” The yammering petered out, a thud of the thing’s boots now the only sound.

  “Christ and the one-eyed both,” Balin whispered. “I never heard it call anyone’s name before.” He crossed himself, and then he and the rest drew back into the shelter of the trees.

  Arthur remained where he was, hunkered down, eyes narrowed, thinking.

  “Are you going to fight it?” someone asked.

  “No,” Arthur said. “It wants me to fight it.”

  Balin sighed sadly. “I don’t blame you. But I was hoping.… ”

  Arthur stood, then drew back under the trees with the rest. “Does it stink?” he asked.

  “All to hell and gone,” Balin said. “Why?”

  “You’ll see,” Arthur said.

  It took him a while to find the right size stones. Then a bit more time to cut the rawhide ropes. Balin’s friends understood the principle of the bow drill. Then someone had to procure fat for the torches.

  He missed the first tree he tried for with his new weapon, cursed under his breath, but went on trying, and within an hour was reasonably accurate. Not the best—he was something of a perfectionist—but probably good enough.

  He made several of the new weapons. He gave Balin and the black-bearded one the others. They were both fast learners. By then, the rest of the men had a fire going well away from the bridge and its guardian.

  “I go first,” he told them. “Even if I perish, the principle is, I think, sound. You might be able to still kill it. But don’t, whatever you do, engage in hand-to-hand combat. That’s the mistake its other adversaries made, and it’s how it feels.”

  He glanced briefly at the circle of faces around him. They all nodded.

  Enough said. Then he rose and started downhill toward the bridge. He didn’t look back to see if they were following him. He had his mind set on killing it. Whether they thought his plan had any merit or not didn’t concern him.

  When he drew close to the clearing in front of the bridge, he broke into a jogging run. He could hear it—“pop, pot, poot, up, yu, mup”—stomping up and down the bridge planks.

  When it saw him break cover, it gave a scream, a sound more like metal on metal than anything rising from a human throat. He ran diagonally across the clearing rather than toward the bridge. The grass was up to his knees, and a second after he began, he knew he was running on the dead. He could feel the snapping of rib cages and long bones beneath his feet. But there was no time to think about it, because the creature seemed to fly toward him, skimming over the ground.

  He barely had time to get the bolo in motion before he must let fly. It took the thing around the chest, not at the legs, the preferred target, the stones and thongs wrapping around the muscle cuirass it was wearing. And ripped it in half.

  The head and struggling arms went one way, followed by what looked like dried intestines. Blackened, stinking coils of entrails were strewn across the grass, connecting both halves of the body. On the other end, the legs kicked wildly.

  For a split second, Arthur was transfixed by disgust. But only for a second, because as gross as these remains were, the torso had swung around and begun to crawl toward the writhing legs.

  Arthur could only hope the second part of his plan would work.

  He ran toward the head and torso, and when he was only a step away, he hurled the torch. It landed on the thing’s armored kilt and the arms seized it. For a second, Arthur believed he must have been wrong.

  He leaped away, and just as well. The whoosh of flame almost got him. When he looked toward the legs, he saw Balin and Black Beard burning them.

  The blackened mask rolled away from the skull it had concealed and lay facedown in the grass. When it was gone, the flames consumed what looked like the fragments of a skull. It was hard to see, because the immensity of fire was out of proportion to the amount of fuel offered by the shattered fragments of the guardian of the bridge. It burned above the remains the way a pitch fire burns, Arthur thought, as though something gaseous were being consumed.

  Yes, Arthur thought. He had been about to defeat the horror on the plateau when his mother and her lover drew him back. He picked up the silver mask with the end of a stick and hung it from a hawthorn bush nearby at the forest’s edge.

  I must make an offering, he thought and then couldn’t understand where the thought came from. But then he had looked on the woman’s face, visoring the putrid thing within. He had put the solution together all at once. Possibly, just possibly, he had some help.

  The flames were quickly turning into a pyre at the hands of the men who had followed him. They were burning the dead, the remains of those humans as well as animals that had lost their lives at the touch of the life-draining horror. They dragged them in from everywhere—the woods, the meadow, the riverbank, the tall grass at his feet. Two fires, both burning about ten feet apart. The guts of the thing were still strung out between them, twisted, blackened, dead.

  But they moved when he poked them with a stick, and he could feel the pull as these wretched remains still tried to exert their strength to suck the life out of his body. With one motion, he swept them up and threw his burden, stick and all, into the fire.

  It roared anew as it consumed the relics of the dead thing.

  No one rested until any creature the thing had killed was given into the flames. It was late evening, though the sun was still up, when
at last the fire died down. Still, no one ventured to cross the bridge.

  “I think you should get your cattle before dark,” Arthur said.

  There was a considerable crowd now. More men and a few women had arrived from the surrounding countryside. A few of the women carried weapons, as the men did. Others accompanied contingents of their male kin. These had started fires and were preparing to feed the assembled company. But most of the men lingered near Arthur at the edge of the river. The water was low, and except at the center, it could be waded.

  The women were fishing in the shallows. They were using their bare hands. One woman splashed in and drove the fish into the pools of low water, while another scooped them up, catching them behind the gills and tossing them into a basket. The men around Arthur stared at the bridge, showing some trepidation.

  “Well?” Arthur asked. “Will you settle down for a comfortable supper and then go by night?”

  Black Beard and Balin looked guilty. Neither one would meet Arthur’s eye.

  “It might happen that King Bade’s men are guarding the cattle.”

  Arthur was annoyed. “You didn’t tell me about this. There was no mention of human soldiers.”

  “No,” Balin said. “We didn’t think you could get rid of the masked warrior. Last time we attacked, using our slings, they came up behind us. We had to flee. They are much better armed than we are.”

  Arthur blew out a breath slowly through his nose. “Why didn’t you come up behind them?” he asked.

  “We didn’t know they were coming,” Balin said.

  “Why didn’t you set a watch?”

  “We never thought of it,” Balin murmured.

  “Why not? You are in revolt against this King Bade, are you not?”

  “Yessss,” Balin said slowly.

  Then Arthur said, “It is necessary to think of such things.”

  They exchanged more guilty glances. “We’re not exactly in revolt,” Balin said.

  “What are you then?” Arthur asked.

  The group around him looked positively shamefaced. Balin didn’t look at him and murmured in a very low voice, “Runaway slaves.”