Dragonslayer

by Wayland Drew

  Later, when Simon and Galen arrived, she was still dressing; even after Galen had washed and Simon had attended to the needs of his cattle and oxen, she was still not ready. “You go ahead,” she called down, in answer to Simon’s query. “I’ll catch up later.”

  And so Simon and Galen walked out together toward the Granary. It was a perfect summer night. The storm had passed completely and a new moon hung among clouds of stars on the eastern horizon. The air was soft and still; there was an odor of freshly washed blossoms, and from the edges of the village came the gentle lowing of cattle.

  In the Granary, the party was beginning. From all over the village people were congregating boisterously, bearing food for the feast—huge tureens of steaming soup, piglets and lambs still on the spit, trays of hot bread, and huge wooden bowls of roasted seeds and vegetables. No one had spared anything, for an ugly past had fallen behind that day, and a new era was about to begin, an era that must be generously greeted to bear its promised bounty. One after the other, mead kegs were trundled from the stone cellars, rumbling along the ramps with a sound like gigantic laughter, and as quickly as one was emptied another was raised in its place. If the common village supply had ever been depleted, men would have slipped quietly away to raise trap doors in their own wooden floors and to draw out a keg put down for a happier day; for if ever that time were to come, it was now, the day of the death of Vermithrax.

  In the loft at one end of the Granary a group of musicians had formed, and instruments not publicly played for as long as the oldest resident could remember now made their appearance. It was clear from the adeptness with which these were handled—flutes and lutes and tambourines—that the old skills had not been lost, but had passed from father to son in the evening seclusion of Swanscombe homes, quietly, the inherent yearning of their chords muted and tentative, lest Vermithrax magically overhear, or lest Casiodorus’s troops object. It was clear also that the years of suppression had not lessened their art but had deepened and enriched it, for beneath the jubilance of the moment lay strains of bereavement, and grief, and suffering, and impotent rage. But joy was uppermost now. The instruments sang with a pulsing beauty and richness that far surpassed the sum of their parts and that several times caused the dancers to pause in the middle of their rounds, to listen openmouthed to an artistry they had not heard for years.

  The mead flowed, the music grew in grace and variety, the tables bent beneath the weight of food. Tapers and torches lit the Granary and spilled light into the square, just as the music and the dancers themselves spilled into the cool night air.

  As Galen and Simon approached the square, excited by the light and the sounds of merriment, they were startled by a figure that detached itself from the shadows and scuttled toward them.

  “Jacopus!” Simon exclaimed.

  The priest blocked their way, pointing, a huge insect. “Sinners!”

  “Oh for heaven’s sake, man!” Simon would have walked on, but Jacopus seized his arm.

  “Unbelievers!” He was not declaiming now, but speaking quietly, and with a terrible vehemence. “Heathen! You believe this creature Vermithrax is mortal, to be slain like any other. You believe that it has been slain by this . . . this sorcerer. Credulous fools! I tell you that this is not a dragon, but the Prince of Darkness, and that it is not dead but sleeping. No human can slay it, for it is not mortal. It can be faced only by the power of the Holy Ghost, and driven deep underground or deep into the souls of men.” Jacopus reeled slightly. He was very tired, and hungry, and deeply shaken by the events of the day. His teeth protruded, and he was pitifully pale.

  Simon sighed and put a hand on his shoulder. “My friend, perhaps what you say is true. Perhaps it is given to you to see deeper into these matters than do we. But for now, for this evening, it seems to us that we are at peace. It seems to us that Weird, or Fate, or God, has granted us a reprieve, and that we are safe. You say our safety is for the moment only; well, perhaps it is. Perhaps you are right, but it is real nevertheless and to be enjoyed. Come! Go with us to the Granary. Share our feast. Drink our mead. You are a man like us, and with the yearnings and appetites of a man. For tonight, enjoy. Tomorrow will be soon enough to think stern thoughts and to speak of the dragons of the soul.”

  Galen nodded agreement. This was a direct and manly speech, quite in keeping with the character of Simon, whose only fault, so far as Galen knew, had been to guard his daughter. But Jacopus shrank from the other man’s touch, and his outstretched hand wavered between bestowing a blessing and leveling a curse; in that state of agonized indecision, an indecision reflected in his face and in his inarticulate growl, he drew back into the shadows from which he had emerged, and vanished.

  Simon sighed. “Poor Jacopus. It would have meant so much to him to have killed that dragon.”

  “Probably,” Galen said, “it takes courage to be Jacopus.” The remark surprised him, for it was something Ulrich might have said. Evidently it also surprised Simon, for he was looking at his young companion in a fresh way, as if he had just passed a test, and he touched him on the shoulder before they entered the Granary.

  As they went in a hush fell. The conversations stopped, the music trailed away, the dancers ceased their circling. For a moment, all was so still that Galen heard distinctly the dripping from a loose tap on the largest mead cask, and the soft call of an owl on the roof peak. Then Simon accepted the flagon of mead that someone handed to him and, turning slightly, raised it toward his companion. “To Galen,” he said. “Dragonslayer!”

  “To Galen!” the villagers cried, lifting their flagons. “Dragonslayer!” And in the applause that followed, Galen was drawn down into their midst, and thumped on the back, and shaken so fervently by the hand that the torches and the smiling faces became a dizzying blur. The musicians, bowing toward him, struck up a lively dance tune in his honor. Someone pressed a brimming flagon of mead into his hand. He had no idea how many men shook his hand, how many attractive girls edged close to speak to him. He forgot utterly his fatigue and the terrifying events of the day and began to enjoy himself.

  After a time, however, the music trailed away and the revelers in the Granary again fell silent. The girl to whom Galen was talking was staring at the door, gaping in astonishment. He turned.

  Valerian had entered. She was stunning. She was to the other girls as a rare and elegant bird is to the common run of sparrows and stolid robins. Over her long white dress she wore a cloak of rich blue, and both garments accentuated the curves of her young body. A simple white cap enclosed her short hair, and supple calfskin sandals her feet. The torchlight glinted on the torque at her throat, on the magnificent silver and enamel clasp holding her cloak at her breast, on the wrist bands, and on the low-drooping silver belt buckle at her belly, all cunningly interwoven with serpentine designs. She is magnificent, Galen thought. A princess!

  He was aware of a circulating whisper, at first incredulous: Valerian? Then astonished: Valerian . . . Valerian! He felt the crowd’s mood slide through awe and confusion, to uncertainty, to understanding of what this transformation meant. Then came the inevitable anger. “A woman?” someone said aloud. “A woman! And while our daughters risked their lives and died, she stayed safe in the guise of a man!” Indignation quickly swept the hall, and soon even children too young to understand the comment were echoing it and pointing accusatory fingers.

  Throughout, Valerian remained serenely aloof, utterly confident, waiting for the hubbub to subside. When at last it did, she said, “It is true we cheated in the Lottery, my father and I, and it is true that I have escaped the dragon when perhaps one of your daughters would have been spared instead. For that I shall make whatever amends the elders shall decree. But it is also true that it was I who urged the journey to Cragganmore, home of the sorcerer Ulrich, a journey that brought Galen, and hence resulted in the crushing of Vermithrax.” Her chin raised challengingly. “Had I, a mere woman, been sacrificed as the tradition demanded, you would not now be celebrati
ng the defeat of the dragon, but would be skulking in your houses, counting the days to the next Lottery and the next victim.” She paused, and in that silence they knew that it was true. “So, I yield myself to your mercy, certain that I am, as you are, the instrument of incomprehensible Fate that works all things, and, therefore, all things for the best.”

  In the silence after she had finished, the owl cried again, and one of the musicians in the loft nervously cleared his throat. Then a remarkable thing occurred. The oldest of the old women came forward from the shadows of the hall. She was a crone—so crippled and bent that even to walk was an affliction, and so hideously ugly that people looked away in pity. Yet her voice, high and piercing as a hawk’s cry, held them. “She speaks the truth. Had she not survived, we would not be celebrating this night. Listen to me! I have lived more years than I can count, and all of them in Swanscombe. I have known women, always, to take whatever defense they had against the Lottery. She is not the first. And some now here know whereof I speak.” Her gaze swept the hall, and many of the women present dropped their eyes, and their expressions softened from outrage to shame and regret. “But her deception has brought us peace. So let us remember, and forgive.”

  Valerian had descended into the hall as she spoke, and people had already begun to crowd around her and Simon, to touch their arms, to take their hands. The big man could not control himself, and several times he had to turn away to dry his tears with a sleeve. As for Valerian, she met everyone’s gaze directly, as she had always forced herself to do, facing down every suspicion and doubt before it was fully formed. Soon even the fathers of lost daughters were coming forward, even Greil, and little by little the festive mood returned. The musicians struck up the dance again. Several of the bolder young men asked Valerian to join them, but she looked so steadily at Galen that at last he could no longer ignore the invitation. “I can’t dance,” she whispered, as they joined the other circling couples on the floor.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I can’t either.”

  They danced. This is what it is like, Galen thought, to be among friends. And then: This is how a hero feels! But no sooner did he think that than he gasped in pain, doubled over, for a sudden heat from the amulet struck like a bee sting at his chest. He made excuses to Valerian. “My toe. Stubbed my toe on the loose board.” After that he thought simpler and more modest thoughts. I am a man. This is what it is like to be a man, to be alive.

  They danced into the night, until at last, when the moon had risen to its height above the Granary, they rested and turned their attention to the food on the great tables. Gradually they dispersed around the hall in smaller groups—men talking buoyantly, women laughing, pairs of lovers and shrieking flocks of children chasing each other in games of hide-and-seek. For the moment, for these people, Swanscombe was the world, and it was a world utterly safe.

  When all had eaten, and when the mugs and flagons were being filled again, the musicians struck up a proud, sad rhythm which was not at all the rhythm of the dance. The music delved back through time itself, sinuous, querulous, searching, suggestive, circling upon itself so that the tail of the last movement was absorbed in the first notes of the one beginning. Conversation ceased. Most of those listening had never heard such music, at once frightening and entrancing, but the older people recognized it as the music of the Old Lays, the endless songs in which the history of the people was preserved, to be examined, and re-examined, and constantly elaborated and enriched. Then, into the open center of the Granary stepped the bard Benoc, the oldest of the men in Swanscombe and blind since birth, charmed for that reason, and gifted with an undistractable mind that had turned utterly to memory. Through all the vicissitudes of the years, through blight, drought, skirmishes, and upheaval, Benoc had endured, listening and recording, accumulating, sifting the essential from the inconsequential, shaping and reshaping, so that each time he sang the Lays they were the same as they had always been, yet different, more sinuous and elaborate, like the intricate interwoven designs on Valerian’s silver brooches. Delighted, Valerian touched Galen’s arm. Throughout her childhood she had loved Benoc’s songs and stories more than anything else. She and her friends had spent hours listening to him, this beatific and changeless old man, roaming in a region of memory and imagination where the differences of men and women did not matter, and where she did not have to pretend.

  Now in the hush, Benoc struck a soft chord on his lute, a chord that was echoed by the musicians before their melody receded behind Benoc’s song. He sang first, as was the custom, of the descent of the legendary Saxon heroes. He sang of Saebehrt, Ethelbert, Hengist, and Witta. He sang of Cerdic, Baeldaeg, and Angenwit. He described their feats, their heroic strength in battle against Romans, Britons, and unnatural beasts. His voice was perfectly pitched and limpid, not at all the voice of an old man, but rather of someone eternally young and immortal. He sang of the deeds of Beowulf, and of that hero’s great fight with the monster Grendel, and of his encounter with Grendel’s mother, and finally of his immolation by the dragon. He told them of the arrival of Vermithrax at Swanscombe, and somehow in a magical feat of taletelling, he swept all the Givings into one event, and all the women who had sacrificed their lives into one splendid heroine, immortalized; and in the telling he included too the death of Vermithrax, but obliquely, strangely, as one would speak of something imminent rather than realized; and then to Galen’s embarrassment he mentioned his name, turning toward him despite his sightlessness, and Galen shook his head and said, “No, no, not Galen—Ulrich!” as if it were important that a record be put straight. But no one heard, and it did not seem to matter, for the blind old man’s smile and the fluid structure of his tale included all of that, all of Galen’s concern and knowledge, and more, infinitely more, so that the boy at once felt assured again, ennobled by truths he had not perceived.

  Benoc’s song entered different times then and grew elliptical and circular, so that the listeners were now sure that they knew the subject, now equally sure that they did not. It seemed sometimes to be the stuff of myth and sometimes the ephemera of prediction, and then both at once. It suggested that the evolution of all the world traced a huge spiral, repeating again and again the same events, yet each time subtly different, even as identical twins grow apart with time and bear the marks of separate experience. Such was the spiraling timelessness that underlay Benoc’s song, although it seemed to deal with the eternal themes of love and honor, of duty and compassion, and of heroism.

  The song did not take long—perhaps as long as a lounging man would take to drain his flagon—but magically it encompassed all of life in the listeners’ imaginations, all of existence. So rapt by it were they that when Benoc had ceased to sing the images and wonder continued on, and they all participated in that magic and could not have said where the poet left off and they themselves continued.

  So it was that at the end of this perfect evening, far, far away from the outside world and all its cares, they were gradually brought back to a different rhythm, a rhythm of distant hoofbeats. One by one they heard the hooves, although some, those entranced the deepest, did not hear them until they sounded on the cobbles immediately outside the Granary and were combined with the blowing of winded horses and the creak of saddlery as riders dismounted. Galen was one of the last to return. He was aware of an intake of breath around him and he turned dreamily to see Tyrian, his hands on his hips, blocking the doorway. Behind him, the despicable Jerbul lurked, grinning, fondling his dagger.

  “Celebrants,” Tyrian sneered. “Celebrating a young hero, are we?” His arm raised and he was pointing at Galen. “You were warned! You disobeyed! You ignored that warning!”

  “I have slain the dragon,” Galen answered.

  “Perhaps,” Tyrian said. “We shall see. In any case—” And here he stabbed a warning finger at Galen, “—do not leave Urland!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Despite Tyrian’s warning, the weeks that followed were the happiest Galen
had ever known. He never thought of leaving Swanscombe. For the first time in his life, he felt at home. He accepted Simon’s invitation to move into Simonburgh and to learn the working of silver and gold, a craft that seemed to Galen almost as splendid as sorcery. He helped with all the summer labor of the village—the sowing and planting, the cultivation and the reaping, the building of new houses, and the tending of cattle and sheep on the slopes. He took his place as a man that summer among the Swanscombe villagers, and when he and Valerian became lovers that too was accepted as naturally as sunrise or the turning of the leaves in fall. To mark the occasion, Simon crafted him a bold and magnificent silver ring.

  There were, of course, some wounds that did not heal and would never heal. When Galen and Valerian went to see Melissa’s parents—something which she felt she had to do—they found Melissa’s mother hopelessly crazed, talking brightly to and about her daughter as if the girl were sitting with them; but when Valerian gave her the ring that she had found in the Blight on the day of their return, reality struck the woman like a lash. For a moment she sat quietly holding the ring in the palm of her hand, and then she stood up and flung it at Valerian, and spat, and uttered such foul abuse that Melissa’s father came shuffling from his workshop to restrain her. “Go, please,” he said.

  Nor was this incident the only cloud on Galen’s horizon that summer. He was aware of Tyrian’s surveillance. Although he heard nothing further from either the centurion or the king, several times when he looked up from the task in hand he saw a dark horseman—a member of Tyrian’s troop—on the horizon or at the edge of the forest, and he knew that the watch was being kept both on himself and on the brooding lair of Vermithrax. One day, he and Valerian walked west from Swanscombe. They intended to picnic in the hills, but they grew so absorbed in their conversation that before they realized it they had passed the Blight, descended the long slope into the valley of the Varn, entered the woods oblivious to the clucking warnings of Gringe, and emerged on the bank of the River Varn itself. Through the shallows a large, gray heron was stalking a frog sunning on a log. Something about that heron, some familiar oddity in the way it held its neck, caught Galen’s attention. But it was not the bird which jolted both him and Valerian back to reality. A horseman was coming across the ford toward them. This was no ordinary traveler, of which there had been several through Urland that summer; this was one of Tyrian’s cavalrymen and he was advancing at a brisk trot, lance lowered, horse’s hooves splashing in the sun. Furthermore, there were others farther upstream, alerted by their colleague’s sudden activity. “All right!” Galen had shouted. “We’re going back! It was a mistake! We’re going back!” And they retreated up the road, shaken by the incident.