The Dragon Lord

by David Drake

  THE DRAGON LORD

  David Drake

  Copyright © 1979 by David Drake

  ISBN 10: 0-671-87890-5

  ISBN 13: 978-0-671-87890-0

  A Baen Books Original

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  Cover art by Charles Keegan

  First Baen printing, September 1998

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Karl Edward Wagner—

  Excellent friend, excellent writer, and an excellent inspiration for a would-be novelist.

  "Yet, be warned; call not to you that

  which you may neither hold nor forbid."

  Baen Books by David Drake

  Hammer's Slammers

  The Tank Lords

  Caught in the Crossfire

  The Butcher's Bill (forthcoming)

  The Sharp End

  Independent Novels and Collections

  The Dragon Lord

  Redliners

  Starliner

  Ranks of Bronze

  Lacey and His Friends

  Old Nathan

  Mark II: The Military Dimension

  All the Way to the Gallows

  The Belisarian series (with Eric Flint)

  An Oblique Approach

  In the Heart of Darkness

  The General series (with S.M. Stirling)

  The Forge

  The Hammer

  The Anvil

  The Steel

  The Sword

  The Chosen

  The Undesired Princess and the Enchanted Bunny

  (with L. Sprague de Camp)

  Lest Darkness Fall and To Bring the Light

  (with L. Sprague de Camp)

  An Honorable Defense

  (with Thomas T. Thomas)

  Enemy of My Enemy

  (with Ben Ohlander)

  Prologue

  "I want a dragon," said the king. His voice was normal, almost too soft to be heard by the man across the table. "I want a thing that will fall out of the night onto a Saxon village, rip the houses apart . . . leave everything that was alive torn for the neighbors to find in a day or a week." The king's voice began to rise. Centuries under Roman rule had smoothed the accents of most British tribes, but the burr was still to be heard among the Votadini. "I want a thing that can breathe on a field at harvest time, can turn its grain and beasts and the men among them to ash!

  "Can you do that for me, wizard?"

  The other man waited with a half smile for the echoes to die. He was small and should have shaved off his beard. It was dirty, sparse, and ridiculous. He could have been merely a frail old man, except for eyes that bit what they stared at. "You have your army," he replied, using the willow switch he carried to dabble in the ale spilled on the intarsia tabletop. "Your Companions kill and burn well enough."

  "Oh, I can beat the Saxons," said the king offhandedly, "but that won't make my name live a thousand years." He was lying Roman fashion on the bench, his long cloak pinned at the shoulder and draped so that it completely covered his feet. He always hid his feet if possible, though all men knew that the right one was twisted inward from birth. The Saxons had named him Unfoot in derision when they first saw him leading a troop of cavalry against them. The name had stuck, but by now it had the ring of Hel or Loki in Saxon ears. "I can beat them a dozen times . . . but I'd have to, wizard, because they won't surrender to me and there's too many of them to kill them all. I can bring fifteen hundred men to the field at a time. If the Saxons stood in rows for a week, my Companions' arms would be numb with throat-cutting. And there still would be Saxons in Britain."

  The wizard looked down at the parquet table and muttered something under his breath. The spilled beer shimmered. For an instant the liquid showed two armies facing each other. The ripples were sword edges and silvered helms, teeth in shouting faces and the jewel-bright highlights of spurting blood.

  The king pretended to see nothing. "I'll give them a symbol, since they won't surrender to a handful of horsemen. But I want it to be a symbol that kills and burns for a thousand years, kills unless I tell it to stop—or nothing remains. I want a dragon."

  The willow whip nodded, throwing nervous shadows against walls where years had cracked away most of the frescoes. The paint had been replaced by patterned fabrics, tapestries, and brocades. The wizard said, "There have never been many who could raise dragons, Leader. The knowledge it takes, and even with the knowledge, the very considerable danger, yes . . ."

  The king's beard and hair were cut short—hacked short, rather, for he could not bear a blade in another's hand to lie so close to his throat. Perhaps he would have let the hair grow and run across his torso in rich, syrupy waves had he not once seen a man try to dodge back from a dagger point—and find that his enemy gripped a handful of his beard. The king's moustache alone was full. "Can you do it or can you not, wizard?" he demanded. "Can you raise me a dragon?"

  The older man had heard that tone too often in the past to dally with his answer. "Yes," he said, "I can raise a dragon—and control it—if you can get me the ingredients I need and cannot supply myself." The wizard toyed with the beer and murmured again. A thing trembled on the inlay. Its neck was as long as its body, and its tail was as long as both together to balance it on its two legs. There were no forelegs. From the shoulders sprouted a pair of scaly black wings. The beast could have seemed childish, but it did not, even before one realized that the irregularities beneath the feet of the illusion were Saxon longhouses.

  Nodding, reaching through the simulacrum for the ale pitcher to refill his jeweled bronze cup, the king said, "Of course, of course. What will you need?" His forehead glistened with sweat, but he still said nothing about the illusion.

  "The major thing . . ." began the wizard. He paused to rephrase his thought and continued, "My magic works from lesser to greater; for a matter of this magnitude, however, 'lesser' by no means implies 'little.' There are monsters in the Pictish lochs. I need the skull of one of them."

  The bronze cup gouged the tabletop as it slammed and splashed. His cloak swirling as he leaped erect, his eyes bright with sudden fury, the king shouted, "Am I God Almighty that you ask this thing of me? Or—" and his hand dropped to the hilt of the long dagger thrust through his brocaded belt—"do you think this is an easier thing than saying no to me? Wizard, if I believed that . . ."

  Except for tiny lines around his eyes, the wizard's face was unwrinkled. He kept it bland as a waxen death mask as he said, "Leader, I will not lie to you." He paused, holding the willow branch so still that not even the leaf eyes at the tip, bared when the wizard had stripped away the bark in long threads, trembled. "I need a skull."

  The king let out his breath and with it much of his anger. "I can't fight the Picts," he admitted. He stepped over to a side table set with napkins and a wide clay bowl for washing. The king's limp and the thick-soled buskin that gave his right leg back its height were evident when he moved. "The Saxons fight like a big slow bear. My troopers can prick an army of Saxons and run off, prick it again and again until all the blood runs out and the army dies without striking a blow. But the Picts, now . . . the Picts swarm like bees. My horsemen don't have enough hands to swat them."

  He tossed a linen napkin to the dining table. The wizard mopped at the ale shining in pools on the parquetry, never taking his eyes off his king. The club-footed man continued, saying, "They dismounted me. A naked Pict rolled out of a clump of heather that couldn't have hidden a toad, and he put a spear up into the belly of my horse. Then I was on the grou
nd and I tried to stand . . . and they swarmed at me. . . ." The king slipped his foot out of its buskin and rubbed its calloused knob on his left calf as he remembered. "Cei got to me before they did, swung me over his saddle. That time. Oh, the Picts can be beaten—" his voice changed as he spoke and he was again the strategist and not the frightened cripple—"and one day I'll do it, send an army of Saxons against them to trample their heather flat and spear them in their burrows. But not yet, wizard. I still have the Saxons to conquer. And there isn't any way I can bring you a monster skull from the middle of the Picts."

  The wizard pursed his lips. A thin line of bark still traced down the side of his switch. He began to worry it loose as he thought. "Can you get a man into Ireland?" he asked.

  "Perhaps."

  "They say the creatures once swam in Irish lakes. I don't think they still do now, but all I need is the skull of one."

  The king sat back down on the bench. His dark face lost a little of its hardness. "Yes," he said. "I couldn't send one of my captains . . . any of my Britons, I think. Matters between us and Ireland are well enough—given what they were ten years ago, or a hundred. But there are men on that island still with long memories and long swords. Men who haven't forgotten that raids on Britain stopped when I drowned them in Irish blood. Still, I've got a few Irishmen in my squadrons. If they sold themselves to me to fight Saxons, they ought to be glad of a job this easy. One of them will be able to bring you what you need." The king got up, calmly this time. He walked to the door of the entrance hall and threw it open. His six guards looked at him, scarred men whose eyes were as hard as the iron links of their mail. In its case in an alcove behind them, meant by its builder for his household gods, waited the war standard of the army. It was a tube of red silk, ten feet long from mouth to tapered end. When the wind filled it, the scales of gold writhed and whispered on the fabric. Uther, the king's father, had borne it. It was the Pendragon, the King of War Standards, for which both Uther and his son were named. But its history was longer than that, longer than any man now living could recite. Four centuries before, the standard had come to Britain with a squadron of Roman cavalry. It had remained on the island, victorious and venerated, ever since.

  From behind the king, the wizard asked curiously, "A mercenary? Do you think you'll be able to trust a hireling with something as important to you as this is?"

  The king's eyes were fixed on the dragon banner. He was not seeing it as it was, but rather waving over greater triumphs than any it had yet known. The guards looked away uneasily, aware that their Leader's expression was skewed a little to the side of madness. "Well, wizard," he said, "we'll have to make him trustworthy, won't we? Find one with a wife, say, or a son . . . or perhaps a comrade he loves more than life itself. I'll have my dragon, Merlin. Depend on it."

  Behind him the wizard nodded slowly. "Yes, my lord Arthur," he said. There was no doubt at all in his voice.

  Chapter One

  The amphitheatre had been built as a rich man's toy in the palmy days after Constantius Chlorus had replaced a British usurper with a Roman emperor, when for the first time in decades the armies of civilization were able to fight pirates instead of each other. The structure had never been richly adorned; it was only an oval arena fifty feet by a hundred, surrounded by a five-foot curtain wall of native sandstone. On either side sloped turf mounds which once had been laid with wooden bleachers. In the early days all the countryside, slave and free, had turned out to watch the shows. Sometimes there would be imported gladiators, the acts alternating with local boys battling with quarterstaffs. There were beast hunts, too, though they only used bulls. The bulls were dangerous enough, to be sure, and available—but even more important, they could not leap the low wall the way a hungry wolf had done on one long-remembered afternoon. Gymnasts had performed in the arena, horse-trainers and fire-eaters as well. Once a magnate of intellectual pretensions had even imported a troupe of Greek mimes to put on a comedy of Terence. The actors' Latin had been so pure that the West British crowd had howled them offstage as foreigners mouthing gibberish, as indeed they had been to the listeners.

  Those were the good days. Time passed. Bit by bit, the Empire had passed as well. Trade slowed as markets burned. The amphitheatre became used mostly as a sheepfold, and the bleachers rotted away. The villa of which it was part was too far west for the Saxons to raid it, too far south for the Picts to be a problem. Its owners and their friends met in the evenings and murmured about the state of the Empire, vowing to plant more wheat the next year since the wool market was so uncertain. Then, in the night, Niall and his reavers had landed.

  The metal and fabrics, the tools and the weapons, the women they wanted—all those things the Irishmen sent back to their curraghs. The humans they did not take were marched to the amphitheatre where their throats were slit, thirty-seven of them. The Irish joked that a man as fat as the owner of the villa should have had so little blood in him.

  Arthur was the first man in a hundred years to find a use for the enclosure after Niall had left it.

  There had once been a gate at the western end of the curtain wall, but it had long since rotted away. The men who now entered the dark arena did so through the gap. There were thirty of them of two distinct groups. Six of the men were of Arthur's Companions, afoot now but obviously horsemen from their rolling stride. Despite their evident discipline, they marched no better than did the shambling recruits they accompanied. Their dress was uniform: leather breeches and jerkins, polished black by the links of iron mail that covered the leather in battle or on campaign. The rounded leather caps were padding for helmets. Though the Companions did not wear their full armor, a sword hung from the belt of each.

  Except for their captain, the Companions themselves were as uniform as their garb. They were all stocky men of middle height with faces darker than exposure alone could account for. Arthur had men of all races among his Companions, but for a variety of reasons most of his training cadre was British. They carried flaring torches, the only light in the amphitheatre since the moon was new. The breeze was channeled by the viewing mounds. It whipped the yellow flames. Occasionally it lifted a droplet of pitch to bring a curse from the man it touched.

  The chief of the Companions was set apart by more than his arrogance. He stood six feet six, almost a foot taller than the tallest of his subordinates. He was slim at the hips, thick in the wrists and the shoulders. While the other Companions cut their hair short to fit safely under their helmets, the chief's curled out in long auburn ringlets which had as much of art as of nature about them. The tall man had no torch, nor was there a real sword on his belt. In his left hand he carried a buckler with an iron boss, and in his right was a pair of training swords. Each of the swords was a yard long, fashioned of thick wood and strengthened by a rod down the center. The captain swung them one-handed with a nonchalance that belied their weight. In the middle of the arena he paused, looking over the recruits. He let his lip curl under his moustache, forming the quick sneer that came so naturally to it.

  The recruits were varied but by no means despicable. Man by man, they looked to be as formidable a pack of killers as could be hired. Most of them were Germanic—half a dozen Franks besides Goths, Vandals, and Herulians—but there were other folk represented as well. A Moor in a robe of stinking black goat's wool, his fingers nervous because they no longer held his pair of knobbed javelins; a Greek with a black beard to hide a neck scar, still wearing the accoutrements of the Eastern Empire; and the Irishman who called himself Mael mac Ronan and whose six-foot frame was utterly dwarfed by the huge Dane who stood beside him.

  Starkad Thurid's son was as tall as the captain of the Companions in the center of the arena; he looked twice as broad. For a game, the Dane sometimes straightened horseshoes with his hands and flipped the resulting bars to gaping onlookers. The torsion-heated metal would sear the men who caught it as surely as if Starkad had plucked the horseshoes from a fire. A buckler swung from Starkad's neck on a leather
strap, ready to be raised if he wished it. Generally he waded into battle swinging his axe with both hands. Even now the Dane stood with the weapon's head on the ground before him, its oaken helve upright beneath his cupped palms. All the other recruits had obeyed the command to turn out with shield and padding only, leaving their mail and weapons at their tents. Starkad's hands and the carnage his axe left behind had earned him the nickname Cruncher; alone of the men in the amphitheatre, he would have said his Irish friend was the more deadly of the two of them.

  For ten years Mael—who admitted to being of the Ui Niall and would change the subject if pressed further—had closed the Dane's back in battle, drunk him cup for cup in peace, followed Starkad's whimsies or led the Dane where a black Irish fancy called. The two of them had spent the decade as soldiers and merchants, pirates, and even for one season farmers. That had ended in strayed cows and seven men dead in the garth to which the cows had strayed. Mael and Starkad were outlawed in Tollund for that, but they had made it to the coast before the posse was raised. It was neither's first outlawry.

  The chief of the Companions cleared his throat, a signal to his men. They stilled their banter at once. The murmuring among the recruits, low-voiced and uncertain at all times, died away as they too realized something was going to happen. "Get in a line," the tall captain ordered in Latin. He sneered again, watching the recruits form awkwardly against the crumbling wall. Some had not understood the order; if they did not guess its meaning from the others' motion, Companions thrust them into place. The Irishman whispered in Starkad's ear and the two took places at the end of the line. There they waited, giving the nearest of the Companions stare for stare.

  "I am Lancelot," rasped the chief of the Companions. For five years he had greeted in this same way each gathering of the mercenaries who sold their swords to Arthur. He explained to his peers that his "demonstrations" served a double purpose: the recruits learned to respect the unfamiliar techniques in which they were to be trained; and they learned to respect Lancelot himself—Arthur's chief adviser and Master of Soldiers. There was a third reason that Lancelot admitted only to himself. He took great pleasure in humiliating barbarian warriors. All the recruits were symbols of the tribes which had brought down the Empire in two continents and eviscerated it even in the East. To Lancelot, Arthur's dream was not an adequate substitute for the past, but it was a suitable tool for revenge.