Dragon's Bane

  looked about a hundred feet long in the air, when I first

  saw it descending on the village of Great Toby. Turned

  out to be twenty-seven feet from beak to tail." Again his

  quick grin illuminated his usually expressionless face. "It

  comes of being a naturalist. The first thing we did, Jenny

  and I, when I was on my feet again after killing it, was

  34 Barbara Hambly

  to go out there with cleavers and see how the thing was

  put together, what there was left of it."

  "It could be bigger, though, couldn't it?" Gareth asked.

  He sounded a little worried, as if. Jenny thought dryly,

  he considered a twenty-seven foot dragon somewhat pal-

  try. "I mean, in the Greenhythe variant of the Lay of

  Selkythar Dragonsbane and the Worm of the Imperteng

  Wood, they say that the Worm was sixty feet long, with

  wings that would cover a battalion."

  "Anybody measure it?"

  "Well, they must have. Except—now that I come to

  think of it, according to that variant, when Selkythar

  had wounded it unto death the dragon fell into the River

  Wildspae; and in a later Belmarie version it says it

  fell into the sea. So I don't see how anyone could

  have."

  "So a sixty-foot dragon is just somebody's measure of

  how great Selkythar was." He leaned back in his chair,

  his hands absentmindedly tracing over the lunatic carv-

  ings—the mingled shapes of all the creatures of the Book

  of Beasts. The worn gilding still caught in the chinks flick-

  ered with a dull sheen in the stray glints of the fire.

  "Twenty-seven feet doesn't sound like a lot, 'til it's there

  spitting fire at you. You know their flesh will decompose

  almost as soon as they die? It's as if their own fire con-

  sumes them, as it does everything else."

  "Spitting fire?" Gareth frowned. "All the songs say

  they breathe it."

  Aversin shook his head. "They sort of spit it—it's liq-

  uid fire, and nearly anything it touches'!! catch. That's

  the trick in fighting a dragon, you see—to stay close

  enough to its body that it won't spit fire at you for fear

  of burning itself, and not get rolled on or cut to pieces

  with its scales whilst you're about it. They can raise the

  scales along their sides like a blowfish bristling, and they're

  edged like razors."

  Dragonsbane 35

  "I never knew that," Gareth breathed. Wonder and

  curiosity lessened, for a moment, the shell of his offended

  dignity and pride.

  "Well, the pity of it is, probably the King's champions

  didn't either. God knows, I didn't when I went after the

  dragon in the gorge. There was nothing about it in any

  book I could find—Dotys and Clivy and them. Only a

  few old granny-rhymes that mention dragons—or drakes

  or worms, they're called—and they weren't much help.

  Things like:

  "Cock by its feet, horse by its hame,

  Snake by its head, drake by its name.

  "Or what Polyborus had in his Analects about cer-

  tain villages believing that if you plant loveseed—those

  creeper-things with the purple trumpet-flowers on them—

  around your house, dragons won't come near. Jen and I

  used bits of that kind of lore—Jen brewed a poison from

  the loveseed to put on my harpoons, because it was obvious

  on the face of it that no fiddling little sword was going to

  cut through those scales. And the poison did slow the

  thing down. But I don't know near as much about them

  as I'd like."

  "No." Jenny turned her eyes at last from the fire's

  throbbing core and, resting her cheek upon her hand where

  it lay on her up-drawn knees, regarded the two men on

  either side of the book-cluttered table. She spoke softly,

  half to herself. "We know not where they come from, nor

  where they breed; why of all the beasts of the earth they

  have six limbs instead of four..."

  "'Maggots from meat,'" quoted John, '"weevils from

  rye, dragons from stars in an empty sky.' That's in Terens'

  Of Ghosts. Or Caerdinn's 'Save a dragon, slave a dragon.'

  Or why they say you should never look into a dragon's

  eyes—and I'll tell you. Gar, I was gie careful not to do

  36 Barbara Hambly

  that. We don't even know simple things, like why magic

  and illusion won't work on them; why Jen couldn't call

  the dragon's image in that jewel of hers, or use a cloaking-

  spell against his notice—nothing."

  "Nothing," Jenny said softly, "save how they died,

  slain by men as ignorant of them as we."

  John must have beard the strange sorrov/ that underlay

  her voice, for she felt his glance, worried and questioning.

  But she turned her eyes away, not knowing the answer

  to what he asked.

  After a moment, John sighed and said to Gareth, "It's

  all knowledge that's been lost over the years, like Luciard's

  Firegiver and how they managed to build a breakwater

  across the harbor mouth at Eldsbouch—knowledge that's

  been lost and may never be recovered."

  He got to his feet and began to pace restlessly, the flat,

  whitish gray reflections from the window winking on spike

  and mail-scrap and the brass of dagger-hilt and buckle.

  "We're living in a decaying world. Gar; things slipping

  away day by day. Even you, down south in Bel—you're

  losing the Realm a piece at a time, with the Winterlands

  tearing off in one direction and the rebels pulling away

  the Marches in another. You're losing what you had and

  don't even know it, and all that while knowledge is leaking

  out the seams, like meal from a ripped bag, because there

  isn't time or leisure to save it.

  "I would never have slain the dragon. Gar—slay it,

  when we know nothing about it? And it was beautiful in

  itself, maybe the most beautiful thing I've ever laid eyes

  on, every color of it perfect as sunset, like a barley field

  in certain lights you get on summer evenings."

  "But you must—you have to slay ours!" There was

  sudden agony in Gareth's voice.

  "Fighting it and slaying it are two different things."

  John turned back from the window, his head tipped slightly

  to one side, regarding the boy's anxious face. "And I

  Dragons bane 37

  haven't yet said I'd undertake the one, let alone accom-

  plish the other."

  "But you have to." The boy's voice was a forlorn whis-

  per of despair. "You're our only hope."

  "Am I?" the Dragonsbane asked gently. "I'm the only

  hope of all these villagers, through the coming winter,

  against wolves and bandits. It was because I was their

  only hope that I slew the most perfect creature I'd ever

  seen, slew it dirtily, filthily, chopping it to pieces with an

  ax—it was because I was their only hope that I fought it

  at all and near had my flesh shredded from my bones by

  it. I'm only a man, Gareth."

  "No!" the boy insisted desperately. "You're the

  Dragonsbane—the only Dragonsbane!" He rose
to his

  feet, some inner struggle plain upon his thin features, his

  breathing fast as if forcing himself to some exertion. "The

  King..." He swallowed hard. "The King told me to make

  whatever terms I could, to bring you south. If you come..."

  With an effort he made his voice steady. "If you come,

  we will send troops again to protect the northlands, to

  defend them against the Iceriders; we will send books,

  and scholars, to bring knowledge to the people again. I

  swear it." He took up the King's seal and held it out in

  his trembling palm, and the cold daylight flashed palely

  across its face. "In the King's name I swear it."

  But Jenny, watching the boy's white face as he spoke,

  saw that he did not meet John's eyes.

  As night came on the rain increased, the wind throwing

  it like sea-breakers against the walls of the Hold. John's

  Aunt Jane brought up a cold supper of meat, cheese, and

  beer, which Gareth picked at with the air of one doing

  his duty. Jenny, sitting cross-legged in the comer of the

  hearth, unwrapped her harp and experimented with its

  tuning pegs while the men spoke of the roads that led

  south, and of the slaying of the Golden Dragon of Wyr.

  38 Barbara Hambly

  "That's another thing that wasn't like the songs," Gar-

  eth said, resting his bony elbows amid the careless scatter

  of John's notes on the table. "In the songs the dragons

  are all gay-colored, gaudy. But this one is black, dead-

  black all over save for the silver lamps of its eyes."

  "Black," repeated John quietly, and looked over at

  Jenny. "You had an old list, didn't you, love?"

  She nodded, her hands resting in the delicate maneu-

  verings of the harp pegs. "Caerdinn had me memorize

  many old lists," she explained to Gareth. "Some of them

  he told me the meaning of—this one he never did. Perhaps

  he didn't know himself. It was names, and colors..." She

  closed her eyes and repeated the list, her voice falling

  into the old man's singsong chant, the echo of dozens of

  voices, back through the length of years. "Teltrevir helio-

  trope; Centhwevir is blue knotted with gold; Astirith is

  primrose and black; Morkeleb alone, black as night...

  The list goes on—there were dozens of names, if names

  they are." She shrugged and linked her fingers over the

  curve of the harp's back. "But John tells me that the old

  dragon that was supposed to haunt the shores of the lake

  of Wevir in the east was said to have been blue as the

  waters, marked all over his back with patterns of gold so

  that he could lie beneath the surface of the lake in summer

  and steal sheep from the banks."

  "Yes!" Gareth almost bounced out of his chair with

  enthusiasm as he recognized the familiar tale. "And the

  Worm of Wevir was slain by Antara Warlady and her

  brother Darthis Dragonsbane in the last part of the reign

  of Yvain the Well-Beloved, who was..." He caught him-

  self up again, suddenly embarrassed. "It's a popular tale,"

  he concluded, red-faced.

  Jenny hid her smile at the abrupt checking of his ebul-

  lience. "There were notes for the harp as well—not tunes,

  really. He whistled them to me, over and over, until I got

  them right."

  Dragonsbane 39

  She put her harp to her shoulder, a small instrument

  that had also been Caerdinn's, though he had not played

  it; the wood was darkened almost black with age. By

  daylight it appeared perfectly unadorned, but when fire-

  light glanced across it, as it did now, the circles of the air

  and sea were sometimes visible, traced upon it in faded

  gold. Carefully, she picked out those strange, sweet knots

  of sound, sometimes two or three notes only, sometimes

  a string of them like a truncated air. They were individual

  in the turns of their timing, hauntingly half-familiar, like

  things remembered from childhood; and as she played she

  repeated the names: Teltrevir heliotrope, Centhwevir is

  blue knotted with gold... It was part of the lost knowl-

  edge, like that from John's scatterbrained, jackdaw quest

  in the small portion of his time not taken up with the

  brutal demands of the Winterlands. Notes and words were

  meaningless now, like a line from a lost ballad, or a few

  torn pages from the tragedy of an exiled god, pasted to

  keep wind from a crack—the echoes of songs that would

  not be heard again.

  From them her hands moved on, random as her passing

  thoughts. She sketched vagrant airs, or snatches of jigs

  and reels, slowed and touched with the shadow of an

  inevitable grief that waited in the hidden darkness of future

  time. Through them she moved to the ancient tunes that

  held the timeless pull of the ocean in their cadences; sor-

  rows that drew the heart from the body, or joys that called

  the soul like the distant glitter of stardust banners in the

  summer night. In time John took from its place in a hole

  by the hearth a tin pennywhistle, such as children played

  in the streets, and joined its thin, bright music to hers,

  dancing around the shadowed beauty of the harp like a

  thousand-year-old child.

  Music answered music, joining into a spell-circle that

  banished, for a time, the strange tangle of fear and grief

  and dragonfire in Jenny's heart. Whatever would come

  40 Barbara Humbly

  to pass, this was what they were and had, now. She tossed

  back the cloudy streams of her hair and caught the bright

  flicker of Aversin's eyes behind his thick spectacles, the

  pennywhistle luring the harp out of its sadness and into

  dance airs wild as hay-harvest winds. As the evening

  deepened, the Hold folk drifted up to the study to join

  them, sitting where they could on the floor or the hearth

  or in the deep embrasures of the windows: John's Aunt

  Jane and Cousin Dilly and others of the vast tribe of his

  female relatives who lived at the Hold; lan and Adric;

  the fat, jovial smith Muffle; all part of the pattern of the

  life of the Winterlands that was so dull-seeming at first,

  but was in truth close-woven and complex as its random

  plaids. And among them Gareth sat, ill at ease as a bright

  southern parrot in a rookery. He kept looking about him

  with puzzled distaste in the leaping restlessness of the red

  firelight that threw into momentary brightness the mold-

  ery rummage of decaying books, of rocks and chemical

  experiments, and that glowed in the children's eyes and

  made amber mirrors of the dogs'—wondering, Jenny

  thought, how a quest as glorious as his could possibly

  have ended in such a place.

  And every now and then, she noticed, his eyes returned

  to John. There was in them not only anxiety, but a kind

  of nervous dread, as if he were haunted by a gnawing

  guilt for something he had done, or something he knew

  he must yet do.

  "Will you go?" Jenny asked softly, much later in the

  night,
lying in the warm nest of bearskins and patchwork

  with her dark hair scattered like sea-wrack over John's

  breast and arm.

  "If I slay his dragon for him, the King will have to

  listen to me," John said reasonably. "If I come at his

  calling, I must be his subject, and if I am—we are—his

  subjects, as King he owes us the protection of his troops.

  Dragonsbane 41

  If I'm not his subject..." He paused, as he thought over

  what his next words would mean about the Law of the

  Realm for which he had so long fought. He sighed and

  let the thought go.

  For a time the silence was broken only by the groan

  of wind in the tower overhead and the drumming of the

  rain on the walls. But even had she not been able to see,

  catlike, in the dark, Jenny knew John did not sleep. There

  was a tension in all his muscles, and the uneasy knowledge

  of how narrow had been the margin between living and

  dying, when he had fought the Golden Dragon of Wyr.

  Her hand under his back could still feel the rucked, hard

  ridges of scar.

  "Jenny," he said at last, "my father told me that his

  dad used to be able to raise four and five hundred of militia

  when the Iceriders came. They fought pitched battles on

  the edge of the northern ocean and marched in force to

  break the strongholds of the bandit-kings that used to

  cover the eastward roads. When that band of brigands

  attacked Far West Riding the year before last, do you

  remember how many men we could come up with, the

  mayor of Riding, the mayor of Toby, and myself among

  us? Less than a hundred, and twelve of those we lost in

  that fight."

  As he moved his head, the banked glow of the hearth

  on the other side of the small sanctum of their bedchamber