The eyes were Hydaspes’ own.
“Oh yes, Roman,” the wizard cackled. “The life and the seed—but the mind too, hey? There must be a mind.”
The giant rose carefully in a cascade of earth. Even standing in the trench left by his body, he raised his pointed skull eight feet into the air.
“My mind!” Hydaspes shrieked, oblivious to everyone but the soldier. “Part of me in each of my darlings, you see? Flowing from me through my pet here to them.”
One of the wizard’s hands caressed the monkey until it murmured lasciviously. The beast’s huge eyes were seas of steaming brown mud, barely flecked by pinpoint pupils.
“You said you knew me,” continued the wizard. “Well, I know you too, Lucius Vettius. I saw you bend your bow, I saw you kill my darling—
“I saw you kill me, Roman!”
Vettius unclasped his cape, let it slip to the ground. Hydaspes wiped a streak of spittle from his lips and stepped back to lay a hand on the giant’s forearm. “Kill me again, Roman,” the wizard said softly. “Go ahead; no one will interfere. But this time you don’t have a bow.
“Watch the little one!” he snapped to the guard on Dama’s right. The Sarmatian gripped the merchant’s shoulder.
Then the giant charged.
Vettius dived forward at an angle, rolling beyond the torn-up section of the clearing. The giant spun, stumbled in a ditch that had cradled one of his brothers. The soldier had gained the room he wanted in the center of the open space and waited in a loose-armed crouch. The giant sidled toward him splayfooted.
“Hey!” the Roman shouted and lunged for his opponent’s dangling genitalia. The giant struck with shocking speed, swatting Vettius in midair like a man playing handball. Before the Roman’s thrusting fingers could make contact, the giant’s open-handed blow had crashed into his ribs and hurled him a dozen feet away. Only the giant’s clumsy rush saved Vettius from being pulped before he could jump to his feet again. The soldier was panting heavily but his eyes were fixed on the giant’s. A thread of blood dribbled off the point of his jaw. Only a lip split on the hard ground—thus far. The giant charged.
Two faces in the crowd were not fixed on the one-sided battle. Dama fingered the hem of his cloak unobtrusively, following the fight only from the corners of his eyes. It would be pointless to watch his friend die. Instead the merchant eyed Hydaspes, who had dug another hole across the clearing and inserted the last and largest tooth into it. The wizard seemed to ignore the fighting. If he watched at all, it was through the giant’s eyes as he claimed; and surely, mad as he was, Hydaspes would not otherwise have turned his back on his revenge. For the first time Dama thought he recognized an unease about the monkey which rode again on the wizard’s shoulder. It might have been only fatigue. Certainly Hydaspes seemed to notice nothing unusual as he tamped down the soil and began his thirteenth invocation.
Dama’s guard was wholly caught up in the fight. He began to pound the merchant on the back in excitement, yelling bloodthirsty curses at Vettius. Dama freed the slender stiletto from his cloak and palmed it. He did not turn his head lest the movement catch the guard’s attention. Instead he raised his hand to the Sarmatian’s neck, delicately fingered his spine. Before the moth-light touch could register on the enthusiastic Sarmatian, Dama slammed the thin blade into the base of his brain and gave it a twist. The guard died instantly. The merchant supported the slumping body, guiding it back against the tent. Hydaspes continued chanting a litany with the monkey, though the noise of the crowd drowned out his words. The wizard formed the inaudible syllables without noticing either Dama or the stumbling way his beast answered him. There was a look of puzzlement, almost fear, in the monkey’s eyes. The crowd continued to cheer as the merchant opened the flap with a quick slash and backed inside Hydaspes’ tent.
Inside a pair of chalcedony oil lamps burned with tawny light. The floor was covered with lush furs, some of which draped wooden benches. On a table at one end rested a pair of human skulls, unusually small but adult in proportions. More surprising were the cedar book chests holding parchments and papyri and even the strange pleated leaf-books of India. Dama’s crossbow stood beside the front entrance. He ran to it and loosed the bundle of stubby, unfletched darts beside it. From his wallet came a vial of pungent tarry matter into which he jabbed the head of each dart. The uncovered portions of the bronze points began to turn green. Careful not to touch the smears of venom, the merchant slipped all ten missiles into the crossbow’s awkward vertical magazine.
Only then did he peer through the tent flap.
Vettius leaped sideways, kicking at the giant’s knee. The ragged hobnails scored his opponent’s calf, but the giant’s deceptively swift hand closed on the Roman’s outer tunic. For a heartsick instant the heavy fabric held; then it ripped and Vettius tumbled free. The giant lunged after him. Vettius backpedaled and, as his enemy straightened, launched himself across the intervening space. The heel of his outstretched boot slammed into the pit of the giant’s stomach. Again the iron nails made a bloody ruin of the skin. The titan’s breath whooshed out, but its half-ton bulk did not falter at the blow. Vettius, thrown back by the futile impact, twisted away from the giant’s unchecked rush. The creature’s heels grazed past, thudded with mastodonic force. The soldier took a shuddering breath and lurched to his feet. A long arm clawed for his face. The Roman staggered back, barely clear of the spade-like talons. The monster pressed after him relentlessly, and Vettius was forced at last to recognize what should have been hopelessly obvious from the first: he could not possibly kill the giant with his bare hands.
A final strategem took shape. With desperate purpose Vettius began to circle and retreat before his adversary. He should have planned it, measured it, but now he could only trust to luck and the giant’s incredible weight. Backed almost against a corner post, he crouched and waited. Arms wide, the giant hesitated—then rushed in for the kill. Vettius met him low, diving straight at his opponent instead of making a vain effort to get clear again. The Roman’s arms locked about the great ankles and the giant wavered, then began to topple forward. As he fell his taloned fingers clamped crushingly on Vettius’ ribs.
The unyielding basalt altar met the giant’s skull with shattering force. Bone slammed dense rock with the sound of a maul on a wedge. Warm fluids spattered the snow while the Sarmatians moaned in disbelief. Hydaspes knelt screaming on the ground, his fists pummeling terror from a mind that had forgotten even the invocation it had just completed. The earth began pitching like an unmastered horse. It split in front of the wizard where the tooth had been planted. The crack raced jaggedly through the crowd and beyond.
“Lucius!” Dama cried, lifting the corner of the tent.
The soldier pulled his leg free from the giant’s pinioning body and rolled toward the voice, spilling endwise the only Sarmatian alert enough to try to stop him. Dama dropped the tent wall and nodded toward the front, his hands full of crossbow. “There’s horses waiting out there. I’ll slow them up.”
Vettius stamped on a hand that thrust into the tent.
“Get out, damn you!” the merchant screamed. “There aren’t any more weapons in here.”
A Sarmatian rolled under the furs with a feral grimace and a dagger in his hand. The soldier hefted a full case of books and hurled it at his chest. Wood and bone splintered loudly. Vettius turned and ran toward the horses.
The back flap ripped apart in the haste of the Sarmatians who had remembered its existence. The first died with a dart through his eye as Dama jerked the cocking handle of his weapon. The next missile fell into position. The merchant levered back the bow again. At full cock the sear released, snapped the dart out into the throat of the next man. The Sarmatian’s life dissolved in a rush of red flame as the bolt pricked his carotid to speed its load of poison straight to the brain. The third man stumbled over his body, screamed. Two darts pinged off his mail before one caught the armpit he bared when he threw his hands over his face.
Relentless as a falling obelisk, Dama stroked out the full magazine of lethal missiles, shredding six screaming victims in the space of a short breath. The entrance was plugged by a clot of men dying in puling agony. Tossing his empty bow at the writhing chaos behind him, Dama ran through the front flap and vaulted onto his horse.
“We’ll never get clear!” Vettius shouted as he whipped his mount. “They’ll run us down in relays before we reach the Danube.”
Wailing Sarmatians boiled around both ends of the tent, shedding helmets, weapons—any encumbrance. Their voices honed a narrow blade of terror.
“The control,” Dama shouted back as the pair dodged among the crazy pattern of wagon tongues. “He used his own mind and a monkey’s to control something not quite a man.”
“So what?”
“That last tooth didn’t come from a man. It didn’t come from anything like a man.”
Something scaly, savage and huge towered over the wreckage of the tent. It cocked its head to glare at the disappearing riders while scrabbling with one stubby foreleg to stuff a black-robed figure farther into its maw. Vettius twisted in his saddle to stare in amazement at the coffin-long jaws gaping twenty feet in the air and the spined backfin like that of no reptile of the past seventy million years.
The dragon hissed, leaving a scarlet mist of blood to hang in the air as it ducked its head for another victim.
THE TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS OF
MYRON BLUMBERG, DRAGON
Mike Resnick
Sylvia’s always after me.
“It’s a skin condition,” she says.
“It’s a wart,” I say.
“It’s a skin condition and you’re going to the doctor and don’t touch me until he gives you something for it.”
So I go to the doctor, and he gives me something for it, and she makes me sleep in the guest room anyway.
“Myron, you’re green,” she says.
“You mean like I don’t know the ropes, or you mean like I got ptomaine poisoning from your tuna salad?” I ask.
“I mean like you’re the same color as the grass,” she says.
“Maybe it’s the lotion the doctor gave me,” I say.
“It doesn’t come off on your shirts,” she says.
“So maybe it all dried up,” I say.
“Maybe,” she says, “but stay in your room when I have the girls over for mahjong.”
“I told you not to smoke in bed,” she says.
“I know,” I say.
“Well, then?” she says.
“Well, then, what?” I say.
“Well, then, why are you smoking in bed?” she says.
“I’m not,” I say.
“Then how did your pillow get scorched?” she says.
“Not from the passion of your lovemaking, that’s for sure,” I say.
“Don’t be disgusting,” she says.
Then I belch, and out comes all this smoke and fire, and she says if I ever lie to her again she’s going to give me a rolling pin upside my head, and then she walks out of the house before I can tell her I haven’t lit up a cigarette in four days.
“It looks like a cancerous growth,” she says.
“It’s just a swelling,” I say. “There must be a busted spring in the chair.”
“You should see a doctor,” she says.
“Last time you sent me to a doctor I turned green,” I say.
“This time you’ll see a specialist,” she says.
“A specialist in swellings?” I ask.
“Whatever,” she says.
“Well?” she asks.
“Well what?”
“What did he say?”
“He says it looks like a tail,” I say.
“Hah!” she says. “I knew it!”
“I wonder if our insurance covers tails,” I say.
“Is he going to amputate it?” she asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say. “Why?”
“Because even if our insurance covers getting rid of tails, it doesn’t cover growing them,” she says. “What am I going to do with you, Myron? We’ve got a bar mitzvah to attend this Saturday, and you’re green and all covered with scales and you keep belching smoke and fire and now you’re growing a tail. What will people say?”
“They’ll say, ‘There goes a well-matched couple,’” I answer.
“That is not funny,” she says. “What am I going to do with you? I mean, it was bad enough when you just sat around the house watching football and reading Playboy.”
“You might fix some dinner while you’re thinking about it,” I say.
“What do you want?” she asks. “Saint George?”
I am about to lose my temper and tell her to stop teasing me about my condition, when it occurs to me that Saint George would go very well with pickles and relish between a couple of pieces of rye bread.
It is when my arms turn into an extra set of legs that she really hits the roof.
“This is just too much!” she says. “It’s bad enough that I can’t let any of my friends see you and that we had to redecorate the house with asbestos wallpaper”—it’s mauve, and she hates mauve—“but now you can’t even button your own shirts or tie your shoes.”
“They don’t fit anyway,” I point out.
“See?” she says, and then repeats it: “See? Now we’ll have to get you a whole new wardrobe! Why are you doing this to me, Myron?”
“To you?” I say.
“God hates me,” she says. “I could have married Nate Sobel the banker, or Harold Yingleman who’s become a Wall Street big shot, and instead I married you, and now God is punishing me, as if watching you spill gravy onto your shirt for forty-three years wasn’t punishment enough.”
“You act like you’re the one who’s turning into a dragon,” I complain.
“Oh, shut up and stop feeling sorry for yourself,” she says. She holds out the roast. “It’s a bit rare. Blow on it and make yourself useful.” She pauses. “And if you breathe on me, I’ll give you such a slap.”
That’s my Sylvia. One little cockroach can send her screaming from the house. She sees a spider, she calls five different exterminators. God forbid a mouse should come into the garage looking for a snack.
But show her a dragon, and suddenly she’s Joan of Arc and Wonder Woman and Golda Meier, all rolled into one steel-eyed yenta with blue hair and a double chin.
* * *
“Where are you going?” she says.
“Out,” I say.
Out where?” she says.
“Just out” I say. “I have been cooped up in this house for almost two months, and I have to get some fresh air.”
“So you think you’re just going to walk down the street like any normal person?” she says. “That maybe you’ll trade jokes with Bernie Goldberg and flirt with Mrs. Noodleman like you always do?”
“Why not?” I say.
“Well, I won’t hear of it,” she says. “I’m not going to have the whole neighborhood talking about how Sylvia Blumberg married a dragon, for God’s sake!”
I figure it is time to make a stand, so I say, “I am going out, and that’s that!”
“Don’t you speak to me in that tone of voice, Myron!” she says, and I stop just before she reaches for the rolling pin. She pauses for a moment, then looks up. “If you absolutely must go for a walk,” she says, “I will put a leash on you and tell everyone you are my new dog.”
“I don’t look very much like a dog,” I say.
“You look even less like Myron Blumberg,” she answers. “Just don’t talk to anyone while we’re out. I couldn’t bear the humiliation.”
So we go out, and when Mrs. Noodleman passes by Sylvia tells me to hold my breath and not exhale any fire, and then we come to Bernie Goldberg, who is just coming home from shopping at the delicatessen, and Sylvia tells him I am her new dog, and he asks what breed I am, and she says she’s not sure, and he says he thinks maybe I am imported from Ireland, and then Sylvia yanks o
n the leash and we walk to the corner.
“He’s still looking at you,” she whispers.
“So?” I say.
“I don’t think he believes you’re a dog.”
“There’s nothing we can do about that,” I say.
“Yes, there is,” she says, leading me over to a fire hydrant. “Lift your leg on this. That will convince him.”
“I don’t think dragons lift their legs, Sylvia,” I say.
“Why do you persist in embarrassing me?” she says. “Lift your leg!”
“I can’t,” I say.
“Whoever heard of a dragon that couldn’t lift its leg?” she insists. “You don’t have to do anything disgusting. It’s just to show that know-it-all Bernie Goldberg.”
I try, and I fall over on my side.
“What good are you?” demands Sylvia as Bernie stares at me, blinking his eyes furiously behind his thick bifocals.
“Help me up,” I say. “I’m not used to having all these legs.”
“Myron,” she says as she drags me to my feet, “the situation is becoming intolerable. Something’s got to be done before you make me the laughing-stock of the entire neighborhood.”
“This is the last straw!” she says, ripping open the envelope.
“What is?” I ask.
“The state has refused to extend your unemployment benefits. They don’t care that you’re a dragon, as long as you’re an able-bodied one.” She glares at me. “And you’re going through twenty pounds of meat a day. Do you know how much that costs?”
I shrug. “What can I say? Dragons get hungry.”
“Why are you always so selfish, Myron?” she says. “Why can’t you graze in the backyard like a horse or something?”
“I don’t think dragons like grass,” I say.
“And that’s it?” she demands. “You won’t even try?”
“I’ll try, I’ll try,” I say with a sigh, and go out to the backyard. It doesn’t look like Caesar salad, but I close my eyes, lean down, and open my mouth.
Sylvia hides me in the basement just before the fire department comes to save what’s left of the garage.
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