“You were going nowhere, unless up to the sky, for that’s where your eyes were directed, Nazhuret,” she said, leading her horse to a trough of concrete set at the side of the road.
“When I could have risen, I would have run again. I’d be closer than I am now, at any rate!”
She denied the truth of this—fairly reasonably, I think in retrospect. I wasn’t listening to reason. I let my tongue go in ugly rage for five minutes, accusing her of endless things: obstinacy, selfishness, triviality, betrayal—every sin I felt I myself had committed, in fact. And she returned me slash for slash, putting upon my plate blindness, fanaticism, self-conceit, and more. Arlin was white in the face, and the violence of her speech caused her mare’s eyes to roll, tired as the beast was. I must have been purple.
There was a small part of myself that was watching this interchange: a tired, disinterested observer. As the squabble went on and (as they will) reached farther and farther for fuel—from the betrayal of the moment to events of the past winter, autumn, early childhood—the observer noticed that the wagons were beginning to move, and each of them had children within and was flanked by young men with iron-headed hayforks. Too early in the year for haying. Months too early.
The small observer grew with interest in this even, even as Arlin had finished cataloging my character deficiencies past and present and was seeking new territory. She had rediscovered the fact that my ears were like jug handles. My small observer heard this and also noticed a small stain on Arlin’s shoulder, and further, that that shoulder slumped, along with the whole back, and Arlin was reeling as she stood.
As the observer was doing this work, it heard me hissing, “You had no business to bring me here. No business…” It was not a voice that usually came out of Nazhuret’s throat.
The horse moved away as Arlin tried to lean against it. “So be it. I had no business, but you’re here. If I guess wrong, and we’re too late… for the earl, then you can kill me in revenge.”
As she was speaking, the observer became Nazhuret again and recognized in my companion the child who had taken imprisonment and abuse for my sake, when I had been just twelve years old. I shook my head at my own nauseous behavior.
“No,” I said, and blessedly it was my own, not very impressive voice. “That I will not do.” I made my eyes focus on her face with difficulty and took my head between my hands and rubbed feeling into it. “I was taught not to behave this way, Arlin. Forgive me,” I said, and I walked stiffly over to where the raw palisade rose, and sat down in front of it.
When I got up again, not too many minutes later, Arlin was behind me, in a group of three or four villagers who were all trying very hard not to stare at me.
“Tell me about the dragon,” I asked her.
There were three of the creatures, she said, and the women corrected her: two females and a male. Only the male was dangerous. Only the male had the huge horns. They had come from the west, through this narrow dell immediately after the big thaw, and the bull dragon had been enraged to find the palisade in their way.
It had breached the wall in its second charge and run like disaster through the village, trampling and goring four and carrying off the body of a woman in its massive jaws. Since then it had attacked less rabidly but more efficiently, for prey. Night and day were the same to it. It had killed eight people in two weeks.
In appearance, I learned, this dragon was higher at the withers than any horse, and built like a crescent moon or an angry cat, with the withers and hips being the lowest parts of the back. It had four legs, a neck of moderate length, and a heavy head with three horns. It was furry, it stank, and there were mixed reports as to whether it breathed fire.
They had sent a rider to the royal procession, and they had been promised a company of King Rudof’s own huntsmen to root the beasts out. There were no huntsmen within a week’s travel, sad to say. In a week the village would be flattened.
This very night, it would be empty.
I considered it all, wondering. I asked if the king himself had heard their plea and was told it had not been the king, but a man in sky blue, who took their request and wrote it down.
It made me shake my head. “Had they gotten to the king, Arlin, I think he’d have been down here with the speed of mercury, with all his youngest hotheads around him. Though I know how difficult it is to get to the king.”
“You should,” she answered me. I lifted my eyes to hers and remembered. “Was that the first time you saved my life, Arlin? There have been so many since…”I could see her eyes flicker in the fading daylight, and then she turned her face away as we both remembered that we were not on the best of terms. I continued, “Did you try, old fellow, to help them reach Rudof? That would have made all the difference.”
Arlin drew back and rubbed dirty palms on dirtier trousers.
“I no sooner got back to that ‘gentlemen’s outing’ when I heard how you had been treated. I knew not to show my face, there and then. I came straight back for you, and I met this news on my way.”
“That was unfortunate,” I answered. “It would have saved a lot of trouble, for the king is not letting his anger about Powl—about the earl—prove contagious. After the battle with the Red Whips he was looking for a way to reward you. He asked what you might want.”
Arlin scowled and spat. It was very difficult at that moment to remember that I was looking at a woman. “I don’t want anything from a man like that!” he said.
I thought to say “But these people do,” when a noise cut through our conversation. It was something like the bray of an ass and something like the call of a loon, but it had the volume of a church organ and strange resonances. It came out of the west, where the sun was sinking between the hills.
Arlin’s mare was startled in her feed bag, and the horses harnessed to the single remaining wagon plunged and kicked. I heard a woman crying and saw a family rush out from a doorway, all of a piece, and pile themselves in behind the horses. They, too, were gone.
I looked around me to see that we were alone, Arlin and I. “It’s too late to talk about the king’s assistance, now, isn’t it?” I said.
Arlin went to quiet the mare. “We could still be off, with the last wagon,” she called over her shoulder.
I followed. “Didn’t you tell those people I had come to slay the dragon?”
She didn’t turn to me as she answered, “I said you might.”
This made me smile. “And were you more specific, comrade? Did you say how I would slay it? I’d be interested to know.”
There was both distrust and alarm in her face now. “Surely you have an idea, at least. You are the magician.”
“Me? Optician, Arlin. Get the words straight.”
I thought a while. “Release the horse. Spank her away outside these walls. We are in less danger than she is. We can always climb big trees.”
Arlin glanced from the beast to me and then back again. I got a strong sense of divided loyalty. “She won’t go,” she said at last. “She sticks to me. She’s been known to try to follow me into houses, and the more frightened she is, the worse. If we put her outside the walls, she’ll just run around and whinny. She’ll call them to us.
“I’ll put her in the barn. It’s as solid as anything in this place,” she said firmly, and before I could object (if I had wished to object), Arlin led the mare away.
While she was on her errand, I played tracker. Having picked out my dormitory tree, I had nothing else to do. There was no difficulty about seeing the prints; these were all over the village, and I could follow the line of them from one break in the palisade to another. They were like nothing I had ever seen, however, being flat and rounded, with two large, horned toes in front and two smaller, one to each side.
As I examined these, Arlin squatted down beside me. She had bowls of rabbit stew in her hands. “Look what I found, Zhurrie. When the squeal rang out, dinner became less interesting to some people. It’s still warm.”
We ate with our hands,
without manners. I only hoped I could hear over my own chewing the sounds of an approaching monster.
“Well, do you think there are such things as dragons?” asked Arlin, dipping her hands in the nearest stream and then wiping where she always wiped them, on her trousers. “I remember you didn’t believe in werewolves.”
“I said I had never seen one.” I cleaned my hands in much the same way. As we were on the lowest branches of the great maple that was to serve as our refuge and observatory, I added “then.”
I spoke to offer distraction, not from her fright, but from my own. I had never studied the slaughter of large beasts; it was not one of Powl’s fortes. As I expected, Arlin encouraged me to continue.
“After I left you in Grobebh, I tracked something to its home. It was most certainly a man, but perhaps it was other things as well.”
Arlin had reached a large branch some thirty feet off the ground, and she lowered herself along it, arms and legs dangling, as I am told lions do. “Did you get its skin?”
“I didn’t kill it. I’m not sure I could have. Its wife hit me with a frying pan. I was not certain it had done anything worse than to sire babies that could not live. It was all very confused and ambiguous.” I had found a limb level with hers and at not too great an angle, and I was content to sit on it for now, my back to the heavy trunk.
Carefully Arlin reversed herself so that her head was close to me. She poked me with a finger. “Confused and ambiguous, was it? Then I know your story for the blessed truth.”
It was as though Arlin had spoken to me in a language that had been private and uncommunicable until that moment. My throat tightened, and I took her prodding hand in mine. “Very wise,” I said. She laughed and then stopped laughing and I let her hand go.
I seemed to have gone too far. Odd, that after a day’s forced embrace, such a gesture could unsettle us both. I didn’t regret it, but in an effort to smooth the situation I said, “Well, could you kill someone who had a wife with a frying pan?”
Arlin snorted and was herself (himself) again. “No doubt. I am not impressed by the fact of wives. Or frying pans.”
“How about by the fact of killing?”
She raised her head. The bark had already grooved her face with imitation wrinkles. “I don’t know whether I ever have killed anyone. I stabbed a man once and then ran very speedily away, so I don’t know.” She scraped closer to me. “What about you? Have you ever killed anyone?”
I said yes and then there was nothing more to say for a few minutes.
The arrival of the dragons was not a surprise; they came shuffling and growling along the slough behind the village like a herd of cows being driven home. Occasionally one would emit that alarming soprano bellow and another would join it—not in harmony, like dogs will, but in grating dissonance.
Arlin’s mare began to kick the walls of the barn. Arlin raised herself up. “I put her in the bull box,” she whispered. “It’s safe.” And then the four-yard-high walls of the palisade began to bulge inward.
There was still enough light to see, and over the stakes I saw black shapes like large wagons and I heard some very disgusting breath sounds. The racket of the mare became much louder now and she whinnied, as though to call a foal. I heard Arlin groan. She leaned forward against the trunk of the tree and hit the wood hard with her open palm. “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” she hissed: at the tree, at the horse.
The earth beneath the palings gave all at once, and the bright raw stakes made a spiked ruff around the thing that entered. I sat astonished by it.
It was tall, thin, and impossibly huge. The three horns on its elongated head glowed ivory in the last daylight. It had no tail. It was in the compound now, and another was coming behind it. This one was wider and had only two horns. It had difficulty getting in, resulting in the breaking of a few more stakes of the palisade. The first creature stood only forty feet from us, turning that unlikely head left and right, and snorting. The panic of the mare reached a fearful peak, and now the creature was staring down the row of crude wooden buildings toward the cow barn. It gave one of its stallion calls, which shook the tree I sat in, and trotted in that direction, with its stocky legs mincing high, like those of a hill pony.
So fascinated had I been that I failed to notice that my comrade was no longer sitting beside me. She was halfway down the trunk of the tree; no—she was taking the rest in a leap, shouting like a bravo, her sword winking in one hand and her dagger in the other.
I gave up Arlin to death, but as I did so, I was climbing down behind her, so I suppose I did the same for myself. Disbelieving, I watched her chase after that thing, shouting much as it had shouted, with less resonance but similar tenor and volume. She was a thin shape in the last light, wavering like a slip of paper in the wind, and it was the shadow of a house that turned, sniffed, and came running after her, bounding lightly, shaking the earth, hideously graceful.
The two-horned female had turned tail at Arlin’s shouts and was now trying to make its exit through the hole, which was blocked by the snout of the third, trying to make its way in. They both screamed and grunted and the stallion screamed and Arlin screamed and I was running toward her on my bandy legs as fast as I ever have run.
I didn’t know to what purpose.
Now Arlin had turned tail and had no more breath for taunting the thing. I myself screamed, for her evasions were useless; the monster might have run down any horse born. There was only a yard between them when she darted behind a tree and it hit the trunk with its shoulder and I heard ripping roots. Again it bellowed and Arlin was at the wall, plastered back against the stakes, with her rapier twinkling so tiny in front of its blunt snout.
I had reached the side of the thing; so tall it rose I could almost have walked under its belly. I had my dowhee in my hands, but the hedger is not much of a piercing implement, and few swords of any kind might have reached through to the heart of the beast. I saw long, bristling hair, bare pink armpits, legs like those of a man with dropsy. I slashed at the pink, to distract it, and not waiting to see if I had succeeded, dashed in around the bulk of the foreleg and slashed twice under the throat, burying the dowhee completely in flesh.
The thing rose up, shrieking. I saw that none of its legs was on the ground and then I saw nothing, blinded and drowned by blood. It came down all of a piece and I knew I was about to be smashed under it, but I heard its snout hit the palisade before its body hit, and the long head held there, braced.
When the weight of the thing struck the ground I was bounced clean off it into the air, and my face struck the fur of the bloody cut throat before I came down again. It emitted its last breath like the bellows of an organ emptying, and the whole mass twitched, only once.
I was being dragged out from under, and I was content to lay passive and let the dragging continue. I heard Arlin scream at the red sight of me, high and wavering, the first altogether womanly sound I had ever heard from her mouth.
In retrospect I think that I had given up all hope she was still alive (though what else or who else was handling me I did not surmise), and the relief of her racket brought tears to wash the blood out of my eyes. I was both winded and numb and quite willing to lie there beside the bleeding beast, when I remembered there were two more, and it became suddenly easy to roll to my feet. “Where’s my dowhee?” I cried, my voice cracking. “Quick! What did I do with it?”
“It’s in your hand,” said Arlin phlegmily, and then she hugged the bloodsoaked package that was I.
It was some sort of swine, we decided by lamplight after dragging more thorn to plug the entrance hole (although it did not seem the sows had the same pugnacity as the boar). Two of its horns were actually tushes, and the third was pale and fibrous. We measured it at six feet at the shoulder, and approximately sixteen inches more in the middle of the back.
It was a very peculiar night, and it occupies a place set apart in my memory, like that spent with the ghostly family, and that of being dead myself.
I could not stop shaking, though Arlin seemed nothing more than pleasantly excited by recent events. She very kindly explained the difference by the fact that I had been overused this past week, but I opined instead that I was not the adventurous sort.
It is hard, now, to believe that I slept that night and harder to believe that having fallen asleep I woke at first light.
That morning I witnessed the best and the worst that comes with owning a horse like Arlin’s fine mare. Few beasts I have ever ridden or tended could have carried double, endured a night like it had, and then carried double at top speed the next day. Fewer would have had the energy still to spook and shy at everything and nothing in its path. It was spooking because
of the wax cloth package strapped with my dowhee over my shoulder. Arlin had abandoned all her other gear, as I had before, to lighten the load, but she had a suspicion the proof of the dragon was a card that might prove of value in the next hand. Or the one after.
Arlin held on to cards like that, even when the hand that dealt them was done.
We had not been under way for a half hour, had climbed east, and both seen and smelled the sea behind us when she asked me whether I really wanted to chase the king or go directly to the Earl of Daraln.
The question irritated me. “Three in one, Arlin; I’m after the king because I have no idea where Powl lives!”
“I do,” she said, glancing doubtfully over her shoulder. “I mean, I know where his manor lies, in the hills outside Sordaling. Or did you mean another… a hiding place?”
Lens of the World Page 26