by Wayland Drew
Shortly after this incident, Vermithrax had come to Urland, its belly empty, its spirit hot with hate and loathing. The Blight then had been a high, craggy, boulder-strewn bowl among the mountains above Swanscombe, but Vermithrax had been attracted to it by its spaciousness and by the honeycomb of passages beneath it that led to the lake of fire. It had come low across the shadow-bound village of Swanscombe with a sound like the whirlwind, casually gouting its pain and frustration. In seconds, with sweeping washes of flame, it defoliated the area within a half-league radius of the ledge on which it had perched; and, when no immediate challenge arose, it had twisted about, lithe as a monstrous snake, and vanished into the central passageway of the labyrinth.
The dragon’s arrival paralyzed the village. During the first day no one was to be seen, and by evening the complaints of cattle with swollen udders echoed in the hills. After dusk on the first night, furtive villagers scampered along the laneways close to the walls, to gather in the village’s central meetinghall, the Granary. In the meeting that ensued, several hot-eyed young heroes offered to do battle with the dragon for the preservation of the village, and at last one of them, Baeldaeg—a splendid young warrior, eighteen years old, and the best runner and wrestler in all of southern Urland—was chosen by lot. For the remainder of the night he girded himself for the coming conflict in the stoutest leather, the finest iron, the largest shield. His lance and sword he adorned with talismans given him that very night by hopeful maidens. At dawn he went forth to challenge the beast, with the bolder villagers following at a respectful distance.
Legend said he was magnificent. Legend said that he repeatedly challenged the dragon as he advanced on its lair over the still-smoldering uphill grade. His weapons glinted in the new sun. And, when his challenges seemed to bring no response from the beast, he resorted to taunts, filling the air with jibes and insults that reverberated among the cliffs and boulders. Legend said that when the dragon actually appeared, Baeldaeg was laughing scornfully.
Seconds later he died.
The dragon exploded screaming from the cave’s mouth, a taut, taloned, leathery ton of reptilian horror, gouting its fury at the presumptuous thing directly in its path. The young hero had no chance even to brandish his sword. He was caught in a single dollop of fire and turned to charcoal on the spot.
The villagers scattered, scampering under boulders as the dragon swept low overhead, caught two of Swanscombe’s houses in a sweep of flame, and set ablaze a tract of forest on the mountainside that burned for two days. Then it veered to the west. What else it set aflame in its rampage the villagers would not find out for weeks, until rumors and tales drifted in from the devastated areas; but late into the night, long after the dragon had returned to its earth in what they were even then beginning to call “the blighted land,” they heard it roaring amidst the caverns.
That second night another meeting was held in the Granary. This time there were fewer volunteers to do battle, and at last it was decided that the names of all the men between seventeen and thirty-five would go into the pot for the lottery. The oldest woman drew. It was the name of a man just over thirty, Angenwit, father of two children. His wife screamed and fainted. Angenwit himself gazed comtemplatively at his name on the broken tile. He was no coward; in fact, he bore the scars of many a clash with Roman skirmishers and with brigands, and he was a skillful armorer. All night there was the sound of metal being fashioned in his shop, and when he emerged at sunrise to do battle he bore a stately shield, an elongated bowl sufficiently large for a man to he beneath, cunningly interlaced with strips of beaten iron. It was said later that he hoped to throw himself beneath this shield until the dragon had passed over and then to stab upward into the soft underbelly of the creature, but no one could confirm that this was indeed his plan, for his wife had been in a swoon throughout the night, and he had walked alone to the Blight, leaving the village without a ceremony and refusing to speak to anyone on the way.
Once there, he issued a single, manly challenge to the beast, as befitted a Saxon warrior somber in his years, and he waited, his lance braced against his instep for the onslaught.
He did not have to wait long. The dragon had been restive throughout the night, stalking the corridors of the labyrinth and the shores of the lake of fire, and when dawn came it was quite near the entrance. It had heard the warrior even before he issued his challenge, and it responded at once. Again the agility of the creature awed and amazed those who had been bold enough to creep to the edge of the Blight. Two strides from the mouth of the cave it was airborne, plummeting toward Angenwit, the edge of one great wing torn and flapping. The onlookers scarcely had time to gasp before the dragon was upon the man. It disdained to use its fire. Instead, its talons dropped and closed, twisting the spear like a reed, splintering and bending the brave shield, and piercing and crushing the man in an instant—so fast that he had no time even to scream his fear or to call the name of his god. Another instant and he was no longer human; he was merely strands of skin and liquid that streamed briefly from the spread talons as the beast rose shrieking its triumph, and turned again to assault the village. This time, ten houses burned, and the Granary itself was damaged.
That night, the third since the dragon’s coming, the king himself arrived from Morgenthorme. His horse, and those of his troop, had muffled hooves so that they made only the slightest echoing in the darkness on Swanscombe bridge. Only his presence could have drawn them to the Granary. In the light of the shaded torches he looked very old and tired, and he waited for perfect silence before he spoke.
“I know of your misfortune,” he said. “I am here because your misfortune is also Urland’s.”
“Easy for you to say,” muttered a man at the back. “You haven’t lost a son!”
“I am here,” the king replied with dignity and forebearance; “I tell you again that this evil has befallen me and my land as surely as it has befallen you!” He gazed at the man who had spoken, and he waited for a response, but none came. “I have consulted my scholars, and they have delved for two days among the scrolls at Morgenthorme. They have told me that there are three ways, and three ways only, to deal with the monster Vermithrax.” A hubbub arose at the mention of this name, and he waited for it to die down. “Yes, it is Vermithrax itself that has come to afflict Urland and Swanscombe. The first of these ways is by physical attack—the hero’s way. There is always the chance, of course, that this will succeed, but the cost of failure is high, as you well know.” He gestured ruefully at the damaged roof of the Granary, through which they could see stars. “Enraged, this dragon will destroy indiscriminately, will wreak limitless havoc. It is, as you know, the most vengeful of dragons. Therefore, I urge you not to choose this course. Send no more heroes. Prevent those who travel from afar to test their mettle against this beast. Swanscombe and Urland will pay for their failure and fail they surely will. This dragon is Vermithrax!” The king paused, waiting for the advice to sink home.
“From the second way I would also dissuade you. Nevertheless, you should know of it, for the knowledge might one day prove useful. For that reason I have brought my foremost scholar, Giard, who, from long study, comprehends this course and will explain it.”
With this, a very old man hobbled forward and began to speak with obvious pleasure, frequently rubbing his hands together, hands as creased and dry as the parchments among which he had spent his life. “I must tell you,” he began with a respectful bow to the monarch, “that this is not so much a course of action as a possibility. But to understand what might be done—not now but at some future time when the circumstances converge—” He chuckled softly, “—you must know what is written in the oldest tomes of the origins of dragons. Is it true? you will ask me, and I shall answer, I know not; I know only what is written.
“It is written that dragons are not natural but result rather from the abuse of power, or from the careless use of power. It is written in the oldest scrolls, by one who claims to have heard it from an
other who saw it happen, that a sorcerer created dragons with a careless spell, and thereby loosed the great balefulness on the world; for, although they are androgynes, yet they breed. It is said further that all sorcerers share the guilt of that first one who erred, just as they share his charms, and that no honest sorcerer can therefore resist an appeal to confront a dragon. Our second option, therefore, is to search for a sorcerer.”
At this there arose a restiveness and grumbling in the hall. “A real sorcerer? . . . Where would we find one of those? . . . Fakes and charlatans enough, but a real sorcerer . . .”
“I know. I know.” Old Giard closed his eyes patiently and waved his pale hands. “They are rare, but nevertheless might still exist. Perhaps in the north. Perhaps in the Western Isles . . . It is unlikely, but if you search, you may rid Urland of the pestilence by that means.” He was about to step down, but turned back to his audience, raising a finger. “One further thing. It is said also that there is a stone . . .” He mused, remembering, his hand to his mouth, indifferent at first to the incredulous mutterings of the villagers. “No, no, not an ordinary stone, of course. In fact not a stone at all—the old manuscripts refer to it as res, a thing, but from the description . . . Of course, it is not all that certain that it exists, the two allusions that I have found are so old, so vague . . .”
The crowd had grown restless, and the king’s centurion bent forward and touched his elbow. “Hurry up!”
The old man gathered his thoughts and concluded. “It is called res potentissimum, the most powerful of things, and it is said that it was made by that man whose carelessness made dragons. It is said that, overcome by shame and guilt, he poured all the best of his craft and gathered power into it, so that the whole of the Old Sorcery is magically concentrated there . . .” He stood silent, lost in contemplation.
“And?” the crowd asked.
“Where is it?”
“Does it exist?”
“How does that help?”
“But perhaps the very knowledge . . .” He shook his head slowly, and raised his empty palms to the audience. He had no more to say. He stepped down leaving the crowd disgruntled, so that, even after the king stood again, it was several minutes before they fell silent.
“There is, alas,” the king said, speaking with difficulty and with frequent pauses, “little solace in these scholarly pursuits. No, the third alternative is the only one I can recommend to you, because it alone has a chance of success. Tomorrow is the equinox. We know that dragons are most active then, although we do not know why. And . . . and we know, too, that they are insatiably fond of the flesh of young women, particularly maidens . . .”
The king was unable to finish his sentence, or to continue looking at the hopeful, upraised faces before him. But he did not need to finish. The significance of his suggestion swiftly dawned on the villagers. In the long silence that followed, when they found that they could not meet each other’s gazes, they knew the first twistings of shared guilt, and they took the first steps to enclose that guilt in ritual.
“I believe,” the king said at last, “that there is no other way.”
Vermithrax slept that night on the ledge at the mouth of its cave.
Just before dawn, it became aware of movement in Swanscombe. At first it was so slight that the dragon did not rouse itself, allowing it to play like a distant insect on the edge of its vision. When at last Vermithrax’s eyes focused, it saw that a small snake of light had detached itself from the village and was winding through the sparse woods and along the gullies toward the cave. The dragon’s head lifted; its tail flicked. It watched the little serpentine line draw closer. At the head was a group of horsemen on mounts. Some of the horsemen were armed, some were not. In their midst was a striking pair—a warrior all in black, and a female clothed in white. Behind the horsemen followed several knots of villagers, each clustered about a torch. The dragon’s gaze lingered here and there as it passed down the line; but it was to the white-gowned figure that its eye always was drawn back.
When the procession reached the edge of the blackened area, it fanned out and stopped. Alone, the horses of the black warrior and the white maiden came forward, stepping gingerly among the ashes and flinching under the man’s prodding. Their whinnying stirred the dragon’s digestive juices, and it inched forward. A strand of saliva spilled between its jaws and hissed into the granite. Spasms ran through the muscles of its wings; its legs quivered. It was on the verge of slipping from the ledge, gliding the intervening half league, and engulfing both man and woman in a wash of flame. But it hesitated.
About half-way to the mouth of the cave, the horses balked. The warrior dismounted and lifted the white-gowned figure from her saddle. Vermithrax noticed for the first time that the woman’s arms were bound behind her back. It watched with increasing interest as the warrior led her to a charred trunk and tied her firmly, facing the cave’s mouth. Anticipating what would now occur, the dragon emitted a fiery breath that jetted at least fifty feet beyond its ledge. The black-clad horseman retreated slowly backwards, grinning the fixed and ghastly grin of frightened warriors. The woman swooned; her head fell forward on her breast, and long black hair shrouded all her features. The horses cantered clattering down the stony hillside.
With a gentleness almost tender, Vermithrax glided off the ledge and alighted on a knoll a few yards from the woman. Some fresh movement of the air, a sound like shredding silk, aroused the girl, and she raised her head and looked into the eyes of the dragon. She did not cry out—she was far beyond screaming or struggling against the rawhide thongs; besides, as she gazed into those unmoving eyes, wonder replaced her fear. She found herself staring through the corridors of centuries, down, down and back to the first pulses that were the start of time. It seemed that she herself was the sole end toward which all life had blindly surged. The grime and tears on her face, the blood congealing on her wrists and hands, the torn and besmirched smock she wore, all these ceased in the instant to have significance. She felt pure, radiantly beautiful, and wise beyond all comprehension. Incredibly, she smiled.
And Vermithrax, in a transport of admiration and baleful desire, opened its thin-skinned dragon lips, and sighed . . .
From their distance, the villagers saw a lolling tongue of flame, heard a sound like a great bird passing overhead in the night. In a little while they returned singly and in pairs to Swanscombe, and they did not speak, and they did not look into one another’s eyes.
Later, when the sun had reached its zenith, the sated Vermithrax raised its head and uttered the long, sorrowful dragon cry of triumph and of loss, staring wide-eyed into the heart of the sun. Again and again it cried, but there came no answer except for echoes rebounding among the crags.
Much later—the legend did not say how long, it could have been a year or ten years after the first coming of Vermithrax to Swanscombe—the dragon mated. At sunrise when the sun was a mere bead on the eastern horizon, another dragon swept down the Swanscombe valley, and Vermithrax rose exultantly to meet it. Male-female, female-male, in that amorphous condition in which polarities are sensed merely, existing unformed for future convolutions of the species, they yearned toward each other in the pale clear air of morning, circling slowly, uttering high-pitched cries. When they met at last, cowled by the shifting curtains of the sun, not even the falcons which had accompanied them to that pitch, like lilting bridesmaids, were witnesses to the union, and the villagers in the valley far below saw nothing but the swirling sun itself. Certain it is that they mated; and it is probable that the decades of dragon gestation began for both.
Many years later, at the very hour when the Swanscombe pilgrims approached Ulrich’s Cragganmore, Vermithrax lay deep within its earth beside the lake where weird flames played across the surface. For many hours the dragon had not moved. Only its hide moved, twitching and flickering over its great length. But then, imperceptibly at first, its lower regions began convulsive undulations that grew gradually quicker and sterner. Givi
ng birth, Vermithrax saw amidst the visions of the burning lake the image of a bent old man gripping a boy by the shoulder. In the other hand, the old man held an object that the dragon could not discern before the vision faded into a conflagration which, to the dragon, was indistinguishable at that moment from its own agony. Into the cradling safety of its coils it produced three glistening and translucent eggs, cowled in a single membrane.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sunlight as palpable as water flooded Ulrich’s conjuring room. Galen entered, crossed to the window, and for a long time stood numbly there, letting the sun warm him, gazing out across the countryside. In the far distance to his right, across the river and beyond the tangled wood, rose a plume of dust that he knew was Tyrian’s patrol making its way toward the village. Closer, on the road to the west, he caught glimpses of the doleful band of Urlanders as they retreated, appearing and disappearing among the trees.
Countless times during his childhood he had stood at this very spot in front of Ulrich’s window and looked out over the green land that had seemed always full of purity and innocence. The meanders, the gently curving slopes, the canopies of great oaks touching the horizon, the occasional tended field and cluster of cottages with their lazy smoke—always before the serenity of these things had filled him with ingenuous peace. But now, although nothing in the landscape had changed, it was not the same for Galen, for he knew that in it lurked agents of madness, instruments of Evil.