Dragon's Bane Read online

  Dragonsbane 9

  still have sprung to his feet as he did. "Yes, of course.

  I—do you know Lord Aversin, then?"

  Jenny was silent for a moment. Then, softly, she said,

  "Yes. Yes, I know him."

  She whistled up the horses, the tall white Moon Horse

  and the big liver-bay gelding, whose name, Gareth said,

  was Battlehammer. In spite of his exhaustion and the pain

  of his roughly bound wound, Gareth made a move to offer

  her totally unnecessary assistance in mounting. As they

  reined up over the ragged stone slopes to avoid the corpse

  in its rank-smelling puddles of mud, Gareth asked, "If—

  if you're a witch, my lady, why couldn't you have fought

  them with magic instead of with a weapon? Thrown fire

  at them, or turned them into frogs, or struck them blind..."

  She had struck them blind, in a sense, she thought

  wryly—at least until he shouted.

  But she only said, "Because I cannot."

  "For reasons of honor?" he asked dubiously. "Because

  there are some situations in which honor cannot apply..."

  "No." She glanced sidelong at him through the aston-

  ishing curtains of her loosened hair. "It is just that my

  magic is not that strong."

  And she nudged her horse into a quicker walk, passing

  into the vaporous shadows of the forest's bare, over-

  hanging boughs.

  Even after all these years of knowing it, she found the

  admission still stuck in her throat. She had come to terms

  with her lack of beauty, but never with her lack of genius

  in the single thing she had ever wanted. The most she had

  ever been able to do was to pretend that she accepted it,

  as she pretended now.

  Ground fog curled around the feet of the horses; through

  the clammy vapors, tree roots thrust from the roadbanks

  like the arms of half-buried corpses. The air here felt

  dense and smelled of mold, and now and then, from the

  10 Barbara Hambly

  woods above them, came the furtive crackle of dead leaves,

  as if the trees plotted among themselves in the fog.

  "Did you—did you see him slay the dragon?" Gareth

  asked, after they had ridden in silence for some minutes.

  "Would you tell me about it? Aversin is the only living

  Dragonsbane—the only man who has slain a dragon. There

  are ballads about him everywhere, about his courage and

  his noble deeds... That's my hobby. Ballads, I mean, the

  ballads of Dragonsbanes, like Selkythar the White back

  in the reign of Ennyta the Good and Antara Warlady and

  her brother, during the Kinwars. They say her brother

  slew..." By the way he caught himself up Jenny guessed

  he could have gone on about the great Dragonsbanes of

  the past for hours, only someone had told him not to bore

  people with the subject. "I've always wanted to see such

  a thing—a true Dragonsbane—a glorious combat. His

  renown must cover him like a golden mantle."

  And, rather to her surprise, he broke into a light, wav-

  ery tenor:

  Riding up the hillside gleaming,

  Like flame in the golden sunlight streaming;

  Sword of steel strong in hand,

  Wind-swift hooves spurning land,

  Tall as an angel, stallion-strong,

  Stem as a god, bright as song...

  In the dragon's shadow the maidens wept,

  Fair as lilies in darkness kept.

  'I know him afar, so tall is he,

  His plumes as bright as the rage of the sea,'

  Spake she to her sister, 'fear no ill...'

  Jenny looked away, feeling something twist inside inside

  her at the memory of the Golden Dragon of Wyr.

  She remembered as if it were yesterday instead of ten

  Dragonsbane 11

  years ago the high-up flash of gold in the wan northern

  sky, the plunge of fire and shadow, the boys and girls

  screaming on the dancing floor at Great Toby. They were

  memories she knew should have been tinted only with

  horror; she was aware that she should have felt only glad-

  ness at the dragon's death. But stronger than the horror,

  the taste of nameless grief and desolation came back to

  her from those times, with the metallic stench of the drag-

  on's blood and the singing that seemed to shiver the sear-

  ing air...

  Her heart felt sick within her. Coolly, she said, "For

  one thing, of the two children who were taken by the

  dragon, John only managed to get the boy out alive. I

  think the girl had been killed by the fames in the dragon's

  lair. It was hard to tell from the state of the body. And if

  she hadn't been dead, I still doubt they'd have been in

  much condition to make speeches about how John looked,

  even if he had come riding straight up the hill—which of

  course he didn't."

  "He didn't?" She could almost hear the shattering of

  some image, nursed in the boy's mind.

  "Of course not. If he had, he would have been killed

  immediately."

  "Then how..."

  "The only way he could think of to deal with something

  that big and that heavily armored. He had me brew the

  most powerful poison that I knew of, and he dipped his

  harpoons in that."

  "PoisonT' Such foulness clearly pierced him to the

  heart. "Harpoons? Not a sword at all?"

  Jenny shook her head, not knowing whether to feel

  amusement at the boy's disappointed expression, exas-

  peration at the way he spoke of what had been for her

  and hundreds of others a time of sleepless, nightmare

  horror, or only a kind of elder-sisterly compassion for the

  naivete that would consider taking a three-foot steel blade

  12 Barbara Humbly

  against twenty-five feet of spiked and flaming death. "No,"

  she only said, "John came at it from the overhang of the

  gully in which it was laired—it wasn't a cave, by the way;

  there are no caves that large in these hills. He slashed its

  wings first, so that it couldn't take to the air and fall on

  him from above. He used poisoned harpoons to slow it

  down, but he finished it off with an ax."

  "An ax?!" Gareth cried, utterly aghast. "That's—that's

  the most horrible thing I've ever heard! Where is the glory

  in that? Where is the honor? It's like hamstringing your

  opponent in a duel! It's cheating!"

  "He wasn't fighting a duel," Jenny pointed out. "If a

  dragon gets into the air, the man fighting it is lost."

  "But it's dishonorable!" the boy insisted passionately,

  as if that were some kind of clinching argument.

  "It might have been, had he been fighting a man who

  had honorably challenged him—something John has never

  been known to do in his life. Even fighting bandits, it pays

  to strike from behind when one is outnumbered. As the

  only representative of the King's law in these lands, John

  generally is outnumbered. A dragon is upward oftweJity

  feet long and can kill a man with a single blow of its tail.

  You said yourself," she added with a smile, "that there

  are situations in which honor does not
apply."

  "But that's different!" the boy said miserably and lapsed

  into disillusioned silence.

  The ground beneath the horses' feet was rising; the

  vague walls of the misty tunnel through which they rode

  were ending. Beyond, the silvery shapes of the round-

  backed hills could be dimly seen. As they came clear of

  the trees, the winds fell upon them, clearing the mists and

  nipping their clothes and faces like ill-trained dogs. Shak-

  ing the blowing handfuls of her hair out other eyes. Jenny

  got a look at Gareth's face as he gazed about him at the

  moors. It wore a look of shock, disappointment, and puz-

  Dragonsbane

  13

  Scale and Structure of a Dragon

  (From John Aversin's notes)

  1) Mane structure and spikes at joints are thicker than

  shown. A bone "shield" extends from the back of the

  skull beneath the mane to protect the nape of the

  neck.

  2) Golden Dragon ofWyr measured approx. 27' of which

  12' was tail; there are rumors of dragons longer than

  50'

  14 Barbara Hambly

  zlement, as if he had never thought to find his hero in this

  bleak and trackless world of moss, water, and stone.

  As for Jenny, this barren world stirred her strangely.

  The moors stretched nearly a hundred miles, north to the

  ice-locked shores of the ocean; she knew every break in

  the granite landscape, every black peat-beck and every

  hollow where the heather grew thick in the short highlands

  summers; she had traced the tracks of hare and fox and

  kitmouse in three decades of winter snows. Old Caerdinn,

  half-mad through poring over books and legends of the

  days of the Kings, could remember the time when the

  Kings had withdrawn their troops and their protection

  from the Winteriands to fight the wars for the lordship of

  the south; he had grown angry with her when she had

  spoken of the beauty she found in those wild, silvery

  fastnesses of rock and wind. But sometimes his bitterness

  stirred in Jenny, when she worked to save the life of an

  ailing village child whose illness lay beyond her small

  skills and there was nothing in any book she had read that

  might tell her how to save that life; or when the Iceriders

  came raiding down over the floe-ice in the brutal winters,

  burning the barns that cost such labor to raise, and slaugh-

  tering the cattle that could only be bred up from such

  meager stock. However, her own lack of power had taught

  her a curious appreciation for small joys and hard beauties

  and for the simple, changeless patterns of life and death.

  It was nothing she could have explained; not to Caerdinn,

  nor to this boy, nor to anyone else.

  At length she said softly, "John would never have gone

  after the dragon, Gareth, had he not been forced to it.

  But as Thane of Alyn Hold, as Lord of Wyr, he is the

  only man in the Winteriands trained to and living by the

  arts of war. It is for this that he is the lord. He fought

  the dragon as he would have fought a wolf, as a vermin

  which was harming his people. He had no choice."

  "But a dragon isn't vermin!" Gareth protested. "It is

  Dragonsbane 15

  the most honorable and greatest of challenges to the man-

  hood of a true knight. You must be wrong! He couldn't

  have fought it simply—simply out of duty. He can't have!"

  There was a desperation to believe in his voice that

  made Jenny glance over at him curiously. "No," she agreed.

  "A dragon isn't vermin. And this one was truly beautiful."

  Her voice softened at the recollection, even through the

  horror-haze of death and fear, of its angular, alien splen-

  dor. "Not golden, as your song calls it, but a sort of amber,

  grading to brownish smoke along its back and ivory upon

  its belly. The patterns of the scales on its sides were like

  the beadwork on a pair of slippers, like woven irises, all

  shades of purple and blue. Its head was like a flower, too;

  its eyes and maw were surrounded with scales like colored

  ribbons, with purple homs and tufts of white and black

  far, and with antennae like a crayfish's tipped with bobs

  of gems. It was butcher's work to slay it."

  They rounded the shoulder of a tor. Below them, like

  a break in the cold granite landscape, spread a broken

  line of brown fields where the mists lay like stringers of

  dirty wool among the stubble of harvest. A little farther

  along the track lay a hamlet, disordered and trashy under

  a bluish smear of woodsmoke, and the stench of the place

  rose on the whipping ice-winds: the lye-sting of soap being

  boiled; an almost-visible murk of human and animal waste;

  the rotted, nauseating sweetness of brewing beer. The

  barking of dogs rose to them like churchbells in the air.

  In the midst of it all a stumpy tower stood, the tumble-

  down remnant of some larger fortification.

  "No," said Jenny softly, "the dragon was a beautiful

  creature, Gareth. But so was the girl it carried away to

  its lair and killed. She was fifteen—John wouldn't let her

  parents see the remains."

  She touched her heels to Moon Horse's sides and led

  the way down the damp clay of the track.

  * *

  16 Barbara HamUy

  "Is this village where you live?" Gareth asked, as they

  drew near the walls.

  Jenny shook her head, drawing her mind back from

  the bitter and confusing tangle of the memories of the

  slaying of the dragon. "I have my own house about six

  miles from here, on Frost Fell—I live there alone. My

  magic is not great; it needs silence and solitude for its

  study." She added wryly, "Though I don't have much of

  either. I am midwife and healer for all of Lord Aversin's

  lands."

  "Will—will we reach his lands soon?"

  His voice sounded unsteady, and Jenny, regarding him

  worriedly, saw how white he looked and how, in spite of

  the cold, sweat ran down his hollow cheeks with their

  faint fuzz of gold. A little surprised at his question, she

  said, "These are Lord Aversin's lands."

  He raised his head to look at her, shocked. "These?"

  He stared around him at the muddy fields, the peasants

  shouting to one another as they shocked up the last of

  the corn, the ice-scummed waters of the moat that girdled

  the rubble fill and fieldstone patches of the shabby wall.

  "Then—that is one of Lord Aversin's villages?"

  "That," Jenny said matter-of-factly as the hooves of

  their horses rumbled hollowly on the wood of the draw-

  bridge, "is Alyn Hold."

  The town huddled within the curtain wall—a wall built

  by the present lord's grandfather, old James Standfast, as

  a temporary measure and now hoary with fifty winters—

  was squalid beyond description. Through the archway

  beneath the squat gatehouse untidy houses were visible,

  clustered around the wall of the Hold itself as if the larger

  building had seeded them, l
ow-built of stone and rubble

  upon the foundations of older walls, thatched with river

  reed-straw and grubby with age. From the window-turret

  of the gatehouse old Peg the gatekeeper stuck her head

  out, her long, gray-streaked brown braids hanging down

  Dragonsbane 17

  like bights of half-unraveled rope, and she caned out to

  Jenny, "You're in luck," in the glottal lilt of the north-

  country speech. "Me lord got in last night from ridin' the

  bounds. He'll be about."

  "She wasn't—was she talking about Lord Aversin?"

  Gareth whispered, scandalized.

  Jenny's crescent-shaped eyebrows quirked upward.

  "He's the only lord we have."

  "Oh." He bunked, making another mental readjust-

  ment. "'Riding the bounds'?"

  "The bounds of his lands. He patrols them, most days

  of the month, he and militia volunteers." Seeing Gareth's

  face fall, she added gently, "That is what it is to be a

  lord."

  "It isn't, you know," Gareth said. "It is chivalry, and

  honor, and..." But she had already ridden past him, out

  of the slaty darkness of the gatehouse passage and into

  the heatless sunlight of the square.

  With all its noise and gossipy squalor, Jenny had always

  liked the village of Alyn. It had been the home of her

  childhood; the stone cottage in which she had been born

  and in which her sister and brother-in-law still lived—

  though her sister's husband discouraged mention of the