Little by little the rhythm grew labored. Slower. Each inhalation became effortful, strenuous. Slower still. Now heartbeats passed between release and inhalation, still more between inhalation and release. The sounds grew louder, less like breathing than long-drawn groans. Louder. Then something like a huge death-rattle made me leap out of my skin and the rhythm broke in a flurry of grunts and gasps and coughs and clatters like stone flung on a roof; I caught one glimpse of Hawge crouched with all four feet thrust out and braced and head stretched like a horse at full gallop, black and searingly vivid on a ground of flame; then something like an explosion in the sun’s heart quite blinded me. Only my eyelids retained the after-image, a blast like the clash of lightning bolts, a starburst of green-white, scalding, incandescent light.
By the time my vision returned the mélée was over, but now the sounds were so dreadful I wanted to block my ears. Hawge was the worse. Its frightful furnace roars began with a rattle and ended with a gagging retch, then resumed after such a lapse that each time I thought it had died. Beryx was harder to hear. They were out of time now: all I caught was an occasional thin, whooping crow, like a man in lung-fever unable to take his breath.
It went on, and on, and on. My own lungs started to strain, to founder, there was no air left in the world. Red spots swarmed across my sight. The air around me was shivering, as it had when Beryx and Fengthira fought, but this was no mere tension, this was a stress that would rend the very earth. I heard myself panting. My eyes swam. It was unbearable. It had to end. Since I dared not look at Beryx, I looked at the dragon’s foot.
Hawge was standing on the claws. The pad was three feet off the ground and the claws were driven half their length into the ground, the spur was bowed clean under the pad and was grinding down, then up, then down, in time with each gargantuan struggle for breath. Something glistened in the muscle grooves of the foreleg: drops, rivulets, that dripped down to darken the torn-up soil. It took me some time to believe it must be sweat.
Caution went to the winds. Unable to help myself, I looked up.
Though it was broad day, I still see that image on a background of red-shot, firelit black. I must have moved, or they had, for they are in profile, the vast body of the dragon, arched almost double, drawn up on its claws as if convulsed, the muscles trembling so the mail spangled like reflections on a gold-shot morning lake, the head strained right back into the shoulder spines, the jaws wide open, and the eyes—I could not look at those. And opposite it the man, so small and fragile in contrast you wondered why Hawge had not pulped him into the dust. Until you realized he was not a small mass but a sliver of compacted energy, the sort of power that detonates volcanoes and makes earthquakes rip whole mountain chains apart.
Next moment both image and battle shattered. Hawge leapt forty feet backward in one spasmodic plunge whose recoil fired it high into the air, Beryx went down as if pile-driven full on his back and rebounded like steel instead of flesh. I was still trying to believe my eyes and wondering when I would be incinerated when it dawned on me. The dragon had not been attacking. In both senses, it was in flight.
I was too stunned for reaction: disbelief, triumph, anything at all. I looked at Beryx instead.
He was drenched from head to toe in sweat, but he showed no distress. I could not see him breathe. His eyes were indescribable. He looked up into the air after Hawge’s dwindling shape, and then his lips drew back in something that might have been a smile, if volcanoes smile, before the eyes quite obliterated his face. I heard him speak, though: a thin, fine, vibrant articulation that was the conveyance of naked thought.
He said,
Hawge’s head tilted up. It began to climb, the angle growing steeper and steeper and the forward motion less until it was rising almost vertically, as hawks do up a shaft of wind. Higher and higher it lifted, clear into the zenith, a minute black insect shape.
Beryx addressed it again then, in that blood-chilling speech. This time he commanded,
My eyes were dazzled by distance and light. Through sliding beads of tears I saw the tiny wings falter, beat wildly, go limp. Then, with a scream that seemed to rend the firmament to its foundations, Hawge began to fall.
At some stage it must have turned over, in response to Beryx’s will or in an attempt to escape. It hit on its back, its body almost horizontal, and it landed fairly athwart the outcrop by the waterhole with an impact that shivered every rock for yards, split the mailed body like a melon, and threw black blood and dust so high that I felt it descending, like rain upon my face.
* * * * *
Beryx may or may not have watched it all the way to the ground. When I came to myself, drew breath, looked round, it was just in time to see him silently, bonelessly, collapse.
My limbs untied. I flew to him. He was not breathing. I jammed my head to his chest. Nothing. I think I knelt up and screamed to the unforgiving heavens at the injustice of it, that having paid such a price, having sacrificed and lost so much, he should fall dead with victory in his very grasp. I know I tore my hair. And then an insane fury took possession of me. He should not be dead, I would not let him be dead, he should live whether the heavens decreed it or not.
I yanked him on his back. I know nothing of medicine. Some instinct dictated it, perhaps: he was not breathing, so he should breathe. I could almost hear Fengthira acidly commanding,
I thumped him in the chest. He gasped. But thumping his chest would only drive breath out. I had to drive it in.
I scrambled frenziedly to his head, pried his mouth open, and forced my own breath into it with all the pressure of my lungs. His chest moved. Now, said instinct, he is not a balloon: it must come out. I drove both hands under his rib cage and he gasped again. His lips were blue. I shot back to his head, forced another breath in, drove it out. Pump, I screamed silently, ramming the heel of my palm over his heart, and flew to drive in another breath.
His face was whiter than Maerdrigg’s. No use, sobbed reason: he is dead. You are mishandling a corpse. Four rot you, screamed unreason. He is not dead. He is not!
I drove another breath into him, forced it out. Another. My own heart was pounding madly, my muscles shook, I could hardly find wind to breathe for myself. But a harper learns young to stretch his lungs beyond the compass of other men’s. Pump, damn you, pump, I swore at his heart with tears running down my cheeks, and gave it a furious rub as I caught my next breath.
Another. Another. I do not know how many it was before I sat back on my heels, weeping outright now with rage and despair and grief, ready to give up: looked at his face, and saw the blue was gone from his lips.
Not daring to believe it, I set an ear, more gently than a feather landing, to his chest. My own blood was in such a thunder I was slow to hear. But what I heard sent me back to breathing for him as if I had an aedr’s endurance myself.
Eventually, after driving out a breath, I dared sit back, my own heart in my mouth. And when his chest lifted, so faintly I could barely feel it against my lightly resting fingers, I felt as if I had beaten Hawge with my own hands.
For a good while longer I watched, every now and then wetting a finger to hold before his lips lest the Sky-lords should have betrayed me at the last. Finally, when it seemed credible, I sat on, looking down into his face, spattered with black drops of dragon blood, caked with dust that had rained down upon his own sweat, blotched an ugly yellow by the great scar under all. His eyes were closed now, normally, so it was safe to look.
With all conscious control and feeling removed, his face recorded every ravage of the war: those two upright furrows above the nose had come at Eskan Helken. The Confederacy had etched the bitter, finely traced brackets about the mouth, the deep horizontal scores across the forehead were from Coed Wrock. The gauntness, the look of chronic suffering might have come from Tirs, or Saphar, or Inyx’s death, or his own inner burden. Or from Sellithar. Or me. Yet I found myself recalling Fengthira’s words: suffering there wa
s, wounds there had been, but even in that nakedness of the asleep or the unconscious, he did not show an ounce of vice.
I was still looking when he drew an audible breath and moved his head. Woken to sense, I doffed my jacket and eased it under for a pillow. Then I thought of water, the only other help I had, but was too convinced of my work’s frailty to leave him, or dare to move him, until it had drawn toward noon, and his breathing had the relaxed sound of natural sleep.
Then, rather doubtfully, I tried him in my arms. But at Coed Wrock he had been a tall healthy man in the flower of a soldier’s strength, and now I could lift him quite adequately. With wry memories of Eskan Helken I tied his wrists together and slipped them round my neck, got an arm where it would support his head, and tottered up.
His eyes opened halfway across the plain. He looked sleepy, bewildered, not at all like an aedr. He studied me, then the sky. Then I saw memory and understanding blend with consciousness, and gradually become a drowsy content.
Presently he remarked,
I was too busy to reply aloud. In the same serene lassitude he answered my thought.
How morvallin communicate or how they live in Gebria I do not know, but as we neared the waterhole and Hawge’s massive wreck rose like a new-made hill above us, a cloud of black scavengers whirled up with irate yarks. Glancing down, I saw that though Beryx’s eyes were closed, he wore a small, tired, triumphant smile. Then I understood that Inyx had been finally and fittingly avenged.
* * * * *
While I brewed mint-tea he sat propped on a pack and began, as all soldiers do, to fight the battle over again.
“It was quite easy, really. No, I mean it.” A grin at my look. “Those word-games at the start. Misleading. All the time I was using Scarthe... knew every word it would say. The tail—used axynbr’arve for that. The fire... I don’t know what that was. Something with its eyes. But then I had it sorted. So I made it stop. Just to upset it. Calke, that was. And then challenged it. Very strong, of course. But stupid. No finesse.” He sounded quite regretful. “When it flew... Silliest thing it could have done. If it had stayed on the ground, I could never have killed it. It just had to wait till I wore out.” He smiled reflectively toward the massive corpse. “I doubt we’ll get so much as a trophy out of that.”
Indeed, all we got was the stench, which was supernatural as Hawge, and it was two full days before Beryx was fit to ride. I gratefully used the second one to find the horses, which when Hawge came down beside them had found they could gallop in hobbles after all.
The third morning we saddled up. By then the morvallin had made sizeable inroads even on that mighty carcass, and Beryx looked longingly at a half-picked rib-bone thick as a ship’s. But then he shrugged, and turned his horse, and did not glance back.
Six days later we rode across the Gebasterne road upon a mirror-signal unit and four frustrated needle-eyed boys who were Morran’s idea of a dragon watch and had trailed their quarry clean from Tirs, only to be baulked by Gebria’s wastes. At sight of them Beryx pulled up his horse. “Tell them, Harran,” he said, rather awkwardly. “I’ll wait here.”
It was difficult to tell them, and harder to win belief. When they did flash out a signal to Lynglos I think they were still inclined to put, “Unconfirmed,” on the end. But when one of them nodded to Beryx, asking, “Who’s he?” and I said, “The king,” his face cleared in a flash.
“The king! King-slain! It must be right!” He was a wiry, freckly, carroty young Tiriann with as much bounce as his unruly hair, and he promptly went rushing up to Beryx’s horse. “Lord! Lord! You did it, you killed it! Tell me, show me, it was the weapon, wasn’t it?” Evidently Phengis’ message had traveled as far as Tirs. “Where is it? What is it? Ouh, it must be, must be...”
His eye took the empty scabbard, and filled with disbelief. It lifted, and Beryx looked silently down from his horse.
With his sheepskin jacket, the filthy sling, battered trousers, and what remained of his black turban, he did not look a king. He might have been an outlaw, a desert vagabond. But one glance into those fathomless, steadfast, yet constantly fluxing green eyes would teach you your mistake.
I saw the boy’s own eyes widen. His jaw sank. His jubilation died in uncomprehending fear that went deep as consciousness itself. Then, still mute, still staring, he began to back away.
Beryx smiled a little, sad, tired smile. “That’s the weapon, Skith.” Now I listened, I could hear the aedric intonation, the soft, impersonal, menacing sound of dormant power. “To kill a dragon, that’s all you need.”
* * * * *
Lynglos took the quick way to verify the signal by coming out to meet us on the road. When we topped the last long ridge and saw its untidy outskirts spreading their vegetable patches and stunted trees and clotheslines about the seething human mass, Beryx pulled off his turban, observing,
Lynglos was not so sure. It is a Gebrian town, and Gebrians are as skeptical as they are dour. I saw a large man with the stomach of office reserving judgment, a band with instruments tucked under their arms, a banner not yet unrolled. Then a broad lame person with Phalanx written all over him reached the front. I heard him grunt, “That’s Beryx all right!” He hobbled forward, demanding “You’ve done it, sir? It’s dead?”
When Beryx nodded, he drew a long, long breath. Then he flung back his head and let out an ear-splitting triumph yell.
Next moment the band was thumping, the banner waving, the stomach had surged forward with an effulgent smile, and Lynglos had lined the road, laughing, weeping, cheering, patting our knees or feet or horses’ shoulders, shouting whatever came into their heads. I heard two ancients disputing fiercely over what weapon would suit a one-handed man. A girl threw me the keerphar flower from behind her ear, the veteran was fighting the stomach for the honor of housing us. Ahead of me all was tearful rapture: behind me, I could hear the moment when Beryx passed.
He had been looking straight ahead, but no king like Beryx could bear to greet such a welcome with indifference. I knew he would begin to smile, to glance about in search of known faces or in answer to some particularly pressing call, and I knew what happened when he did. I had seen it with Skith. My heart bled for him as the wave of silence passed and the valiant, uncertain rejoicing broke out again in its wake.
The veteran won the battle of the beds on condition that the stomach, who was council Ruand, had us to dine with them. It was a poor meal, for if Lynglos had escaped Hawge’s personal attentions it was still part of Everran, and worsted the stomach’s eagerness to give us what we deserved. When the watered wine stood alone on the table, he said, “And now, lord, tell us. How was it done?”
Four! I thought. I could almost hear Fengthira’s, “Dost not know what tha askst.” Then I glanced at the council, leaning forward with every appearance of avidity and not an eye on his face, and thought, How can he tell you, when you dare not even admit what he is?
Beryx too had mostly kept his eyes on his plate. Now he smiled quickly, a man not wanting to seem aloof and unable to be otherwise. A mere shadow of his old charm, but enough.
“Harran’s making a song,” he said. “If I steal his audience, I dread to think what he’ll do.” He told the tale of our slander-bout in Estar, and rose on the laugh. “I beg your pardon, Tarmel, but after so much Hethrian water I daren’t tackle a night on our own wine.”
The veteran made a better fist of meeting his eyes, but I could feel the effort in every glance. When the abbreviated reminiscences were over and we were left in the tiny best bedroom, with horses feeding under the window and Everran’s helliens masking a star, Beryx sank down on the nearer bed. And w
hen I saw the way his shoulders bent, the pain became too much.
“Dost thou wish,” I said, “thee”ing him for the first time, partly out of love, partly from my own distress, “that I had never carried thee from a field?”
After a moment he shook his head.
“No,” he said. It came with conviction. He was looking eastward through the hellien, and I knew he saw those half-stripped bones in the desert sun. “It was worth it. All of it. Even this.”
* * * * *
It was the same all the way west, through ever more elaborate, better prepared welcomes, more hectic rejoicing, more determined attempts to confront him normally. But always that silence would run along the crowds as they sought for a weapon and found it, always there was that reluctance to meet or too-quick aversion from his eyes.
Or not always. What was worse was the ones who looked and then stood entranced, who would sometimes follow us to the next town and beyond, and when asked why, would answer in bewilderment, “I don’t know. I just... had to come.”
The people of Saphar had been returning before Phengis’s message arrived. We rode up on a wet gray winter morning to a city with sodden banners strung across gaps whence rubble had been cleared, with a wall of fully furbished Guardsmen restraining a thin, patched but spirited populace, and to my infuriated amazement, a Regent posted at the bridgehead under an umbrella to protect his official robes.
Beryx’s eyes slitted. “My uncle,” he murmured, with that new, fearful intonation, “never learns.” Then he choked. “And,” the gurgle was suppressed laughter, “he’ll be so happy with this!”
The Regent, however, had evidently been warned, for if his welcome was forced it did not break. “We’ve worked on the palace for you, m’boy... Ah, here’s Kyvan—” And out popped Kyvan, complete with prayers and crimson cloak, which had to be girded on then and there. Beryx submitted, with the first softening of his braced composure since Lynglos: but as he walked forward into the roar of cheering it became a smile of genuine delight.
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