Dragon Sword (17 page)

“
Do not doubt yourself, child. You
see what you see.” He was pointing behind me.

I turned and peered through a
clearing, which spread out to bluffs overlooking the sea. Towering
above the cliffs were the ruins of a once-great palace.

“
How could we be so near the sea? I
didn’t hear it, or even smell it…and I always smell the water,” I
said. And then softer, more for my ears than his, “My mother used
to call me ‘Mermaid.’”

“
Ah, mermaids. Yes. I miss them,”
Merlin said. “All of ours left some time ago. Swam off toward the
Viking territories, I think — the shelter of all those deep fjords.
I expect they’re terribly cold.” He shook the antlers again. “I
believe I shall hang these up in the Great Hall. Why not come with
me, lass? Perhaps your friends will come along.”

“
People still live
there?”

“
Just Arthur and me. Even the
servants have left now. Tintagel, we call it,” he said, walking
toward it. “And it was great in its day!” he yelled over his
shoulder.

I ran after him. “You walked off
without me!”

“
You are free to follow or
not.”

“
Couldn’t you use magic to force me
along?” I asked him, again sounding too much like
Tiberius.

“
Oh, that would be a bad use of the
craft, indeed. Besides, ’tis you should be doing magic.”

“
Why do you say that?” My suspicion
flared anew.

“
You will see. I sense a rather
interesting and profound future for you, if not always an enviable
one.”

“
What do you mean?”

“’
Tis a journey you will have to
make yourself, m’lady. That’s really all I know. Partial glimpses
make Arthur crazy, too. Look.”

We stood at the entrance to the
stone palace. It had been mighty once, towering over the
landscape.

“
Did you have a library and
gardens…and a zoo?” I asked, remembering the palace grounds in
Alexandria.

“
We had everything, lass — Arthur
and his queen, the Knights of the Round Table, the citizens of this
kingdom. We were rich, with stories to tell and a purpose in the
world.”

“
What happened?”

“
It’s hard to say, exactly. Not
everyone shares the same purpose. Not everyone’s heart can sustain
joy. Humans tend to feel restless without a good fight.” He gave me
a small smile. “There were wars. Come, let us go to the Great
Hall.”

Inside, the castle was drafty and
dark. Torches still lit many of the halls; fires burned in hearths
in many of the rooms. In some ways, it felt as people had just
left, and — despite the breeze and holes in the walls — might
return shortly. A feeling of having just missed
something.

“
The Great Hall, lady.”

“
My proper name is
Thea.”

“
Named for the moon and shining
light. Perfect.”

I looked around. We were in a small
chamber. There was a fire in the hearth, two hard wooden beds
covered in furs and skins, some large, rough-hewn chairs, and a
couple of tables: One held the implements of science — maps of the
constellations, hourglasses, compasses, and the like.

The other table had the implements
of dining, if
dining
wasn’t too fine a word for it: bread
rinds, half-empty wine goblets, chewed animal bones, and more.
Odors drifted from the unwashed platters.

“
Yes, the Great Hall. Or at least,
the only hall actually used by the castle’s current
occupants.”

On the wall opposite the beds hung
a tapestry. Picking up a candle, I walked over to it: There was
King Arthur next to a queen, several knights, dozens of retainers,
children, animals, banners, and in the background, Merlin
himself.

It must have taken a terribly long
time to weave.

“
The rest are all gone now,” Merlin
said.

“
Why?” I asked.

“
The castle became almost
impossible to defend. Somebody always wanted to take it, to come
after the great king. And if they weren’t coming after Arthur or
trying to ransack Tintagel, then Arthur and his knights were off
seeking impossible things. Which made it even harder for those left
behind to protect themselves.”

“
What things?”

“
The Holy Grail. Perfect love.
Things humans aren’t meant to have.” Merlin raised the antlers to
the wall, evidently looking for a place to hang them.

“
These people didn’t love each
other?” I was intrigued with all the faces in the tapestry. The
weaver made them all seem…very alive.

“
Oh, they did, lass. The
Round-Table Knights. Arthur and his Guinevere. But none of it is
perfect. ’Tis all only human. Things are never quite as good as
imagined. Nor as bad.”

“
Have you heard of a place called
Peenemünde?” I asked, turning to face him.

“
Why do you ask?”

I told him about everything I’d
seen there — the wraithlike people working as slaves, the weapons
and rockets they were building, the brutality of the overseers, of
the Reich — their soldiers, their officers, and yes, the scientists
— who ran it.

And then I showed him the picture
of the mother and child, which I still had in my tunic.

Merlin held the image, then softly
closed his eyes before handing it back to me.

“
What am I to make of your future,
child?”

“
It isn’t mine. Well, perhaps it is
now.” I slipped the picture back into my robes. “But those horrors
have yet to happen. Peenemünde is built in times to come. Isn’t
there a way to stop it?”

“
That is the same thing I wondered,
stripling, about the battles that destroyed our
kingdom.”

“
Couldn’t your magic end
them?”

“
For magic to really work, Thea,
you have to let it in. You have to be open to it, the same way that
you, as a scientist, have to be open.”

“
But science uses logic and
deduction. Magic feeds on fear and superstition.”

“
Both lead to enchantment, if you
follow them to the place where the world’s greatest mysteries awe
you.” With that, he held out his hand — he was now holding some of
the plasmechanical skin from the time-vessel.

It was then I realized the antlers
were already hanging on the wall. Merlin folded up his hand inside
his robe and turned to tend the fire.

“
We could bring magic back into the
world, Thea. I need an apprentice, someone to teach. Before it’s
too late.”

“
Before what’s too
late?”

“
Before the world is set on a
course that brings us Peenemünde — and all that comes with
it.”

Remain here to learn magic? From an
old wizard? I imagine Mother would be properly
horrified.

“
My friends aren’t safe yet. They
are my family now. What about them?”

“
After your friends are safe, of
course. Decide then.”

“
And how do you know they will be?
There was some other boy here when K’lion — when the dragon man and
I landed. Who was that?”

“
In recounting your journey, you
mentioned the word
Reich
, did you not? I believe that other
boy comes from the world of Peenemünde. And wishes to acquire more
power, to spread harm.”

The news hit me like a full beam
from Pharos.

“
Then take me out of here, back
through your magical woods, and show me how to find my
friends!”

“
Very well. But I have learned
there is much less you can do to protect them than you might
imagine.”

“
I have always prided myself on a
very active imagination.”

Then a loud, unearthly scream came
to my ears, freezing me where I stood.

“
What was that?” I
whispered.

“
That,” Merlin answered, rising
from the fireplace, “sounded very much like the battle yell of a
dragon.”

Chapter
Twenty-two

Clyne: Ungarth

After Dragons

What strange Saurian music. The
notes looked like an ancient war cry, from the times before
Cacklaw. I sounded it out myself, from the transcription on the
wall. What an odd and eerie noise. I wonder how often such a cry
was used. And on a planet such as this, once home to both Saurians
and mammals, was such a sound meant as a warning? As tribal
comfort? A way to grieve?

The cave I’d found through sheer
whiffery. I was surprised — shocked, even — to find vaguely
familiar Saurian odors wafting into my nasal ramps as I raced
through this forest.

Despite the medium-grade danger I
was in from the mammal-king who wanted to slay me, I decided to
follow the scent. This was the first real evidence I had of another
Saurian presence on Earth Orange. And that evidence led me to the
nest-home of Ungarth.

At least, I believe it was
pronounced “Ungarth.” The pictographs on the wall are in ancient
Saurian, and in a strange dialect at that. I was sounding them out
— singing them — as I read along. According to the record, this is
their story:

A type of Saurian, native to this
planet, did survive their otherwise disastrous encounter with a
meteor, an incident known on other Earths as the Great Sky Hammer.
It seems, strangely, to have occurred — with varying degrees of
severity — in numerous parallel dimensions at once (a fact that
bears further research).

On Earth Orange, the results were
shell-shattering: Mammals surprisingly evolved to become the
dominant class of species. Dominant, at least, in terms of their
impact on the planet. The insects are far more numerous.

As for Ungarth’s people — he calls
them Saurish Folk, a term that tickles my imagination nodes and
which I may start using — they grew and lived and prospered in
secret. Ungarth didn’t know the term
Homo sapiens
, which I
learned while studying at the zoo with Howe and Thirty, but he
describes an emerging species of “singing hunters.” They invented
their own weapons and wars, tales and legends, and the few Saurians
they would glimpse became known as “dragons.” This was possibly
derived from
draghoorh,
a Saurish term for “lost
one.”

As their numbers dwindled, the word
became a type of greeting between the Saurish.

At first, these early humans were
content to live with these “dragons,” but dragons, in Ungarth’s
words, “need wide places to dream and roam.” And with human tribes
growing, there were fewer wide places available.

Eventually, human warriors would
hunt these dragons as a way of proving their bravery to their own
tribes. A chill ran down my backslope reading this: I was reminded
of the destruction of the Bloody Tendon Wars in our own ancient
history — when the meat-eaters and plant-eaters battled each other
over what — or who — should be called “food.”

The singing hunters pursued their
Saurish prey for generations. And as my absent host wrote: “I,
Ungarth, faced off with their king, Arthur, many times throughout
my life. As we both grew older — and sadder — he finally managed to
injure me. I had let my guard down. Arthur came in for the kill.
‘Give me your worst flame, dragon. I shall still win.’ I replied in
his language: ‘We do not have fire in our breath. That was just a
trick with light and steam to impress your kind.’ The exchange
seemed to shock him — he held off delivering a death blow. I
retreated to this small cave to lick my wounds and hide from the
world. As far as I know, I am now the last of the Saurish
Folk.”

After that, Ungarth composed the
Saurish history on the wall in front of me. When I tried singing
it, the effect was startling. There was a dissonance to it. Perhaps
it was a mammal-like cultural influence on the Saurians of Earth
Orange. In which case, I am left to wonder: What effect did the
dragons have on the humans in exchange?

Now
there
would be a thesis
topic unique in the history of our school!

I don’t know how much longer
Ungarth lived. His song cycle ended with a chant about returning to
the “mists of the first valley.” All his artifacts were still in
the cave. My thought was to bring many of them home for further
study, in the vessel piloted by Thea.

There was, for example, a simple
fitted skull-screen, for protective wear. When I put it on my
cranium, I must have looked like an actual top-stomper from an
ancient round of Cacklaw. But I didn’t have time to marvel at the
image.

“
Ungarth! ’Tis you come back to
me!” It was the mammal-king, Arthur. Brandishing his
sword.

“
Not Ungarth, me. Ungarth died,” I
told him. “I’m
k-k-kt!
compiling merely extra credit. I mean
no pain to you.” I smiled and tried extending my forearm in the
friendship gesture I had witnessed.

He nearly sliced my claws off. “The
legend
says you died, but I know I only nicked you that day.
Lancelot is gone. Perceval is gone. Guinevere is gone. Knights and
queens all gone. But you, I knew you would come back to me! And I
daresay the fire’s real this time.”