Dragonheart (9 page)

Einon took another deep swallow of wine and idly rubbed his chest. He noticed the old scar on the back of his hand. The girl had said the blind man suffered from the crippling sickness. He often wondered if his hand was afflicted with it too. He remembered the first day he felt the pain in it. The day Bowen left him. His first day as king.

Then, just over a year ago, the great pain came. Terrible shooting pain that had sent him into screaming collapse. Three days he spent writhing in bed, recovering from it. The doctors had been hopeless dolts. Even the mysterious ointments and salves of his mother could not ease the pain. But she had known it would stop. “Give it time, my son, the wound must heal,” had been her strange advice. Strange, because it wasn’t a wound at all. Just vicious pain. He had not cut it, or bruised it, been bitten or stung. Just a phantom pain coming from nowhere and leaving no mark.

But Aislinn had been right. The pain subsided after a week, leaving only a numbness in his fingers that lingered for months. It affected his sword grip for a long time, and fearing the injury permanent, he painstakingly taught himself how to wield a blade in his left hand. He was not as proficient as with his right, but a “sinister” assault was so alien to his opponents, it proved unusually effective.

Eventually he regained the power and flexibility of his right hand. Every now and then there was a twitch, a twinge, a little stiffness. But when it grasped a blade hilt now, it was as formidable as ever. Perhaps his mother was right. Perhaps it was a wound and not the crippling disease. He ran the bottom of his goblet across the white scar on his hand back, even paler than his white skin.

Perhaps his hand had never healed properly after that rebel chieftain sliced it. That dog who killed his father. He had blinded that peasant too, Einon recalled. He wondered what happened to him. Probably died in the quarry long ago. Most did. Prey to rock slides or the elements or just the brutal grind of the work. Odd. Einon was unable to remember the man’s face. Only his towering height and the color of his hair. It was red. Red like the hair of the girl today.

She had nerve, that girl. Facing his arrows like that. Nerve and pride. He had seen it in her eyes. It was her eyes that had held back his bow hand. Eyes that were older than her youthful face. Grim and weary of life, yet alluringly defiant. He didn’t even know if she had been pretty or not. All he saw were her eyes. And they were beautiful . . . and bitter . . . and knowing . . . fringed with thick lashes and arched by fine brows. Deep brown moist pools that threatened to drown him in their flooding contempt. That was why he had shot the old man; so he wouldn’t succumb to those eyes. To reassert his mastery over this brazen, peasant wench who dared to shame him with her haunting gaze.

But, in truth, it was her hair. Even more than her eyes. Her hair flowing out from her hood as she ran to her father. Her hair, falling in a tousled riot about her face as she knelt by the old man. Her hair. It fascinated him, seeming to entwine its red locks about his brain until he could not untangle his thoughts from them.

Her red, red hair. A scarlet starburst captured in the burning shimmer of the smithy’s fire. A halo of flame within a halo of flame. The image had evoked a memory in Einon. It had stopped him, made him rein his horse to stare at the girl and the fire and grope for the memory. But the girl’s defiant eyes had chased the memory from him. Across the quarry she had looked very beautiful. Einon had almost ridden back to her. But he had feared her beauty was only an illusion cast by the fire in her hair. And he had feared her eyes. Even as they had chased his faint memories away, they had chased him from the quarry. He had whipped his horse and ridden off like a frightened child.

Einon cursed and tossed the dregs of his wine into the fire. The blaze lapped it up with a flaring red thirst.

Bowen and Gilbert traveled down a sun-dappled forest path. The priest ambled alongside Merlin, reading from another of his inexhaustible supply of scrolls. All morning he had been trying to reintroduce the topic of last night’s conversation. And while Bowen had had no objections to Gilbert’s chattering—and, indeed, seemed to tolerate it amiably—it had been another one-sided discourse, with the knight interjecting only to agree or disagree or make a minor comment of no real consequence or self-revelation. But. truth be told, the subject matter was more Gilbert’s passion than Bowen’s. Avalon was his quest and so, since daylight, he had been unearthing one manuscript after another to prove his quest was not in vain.

“ ‘. . . and dying Arthur was laid in a land cloaked in water and mist . . .’ Cenwalh writing in the time of Melwas!” Gilbert punctuated the point with a flourish of his scroll . . . and an unintentional tumble. His manuscript flipped from his hand and he flopped to his knees into a large depression in the middle of the path.

“Kneeling in prayer already, priest?” Bowen laughed and dismounted to help him up. “Is this your holy place?”

“Just a hole, hardly holy.” Gilbert took Bowen’s hand and struggled to his feet. Bowen brushed the dust from the priest’s shoulders and eyed him with serious curiosity. Gilbert self-consciously arranged his skullcap and wiped at his face, worried that something was awry. But Bowen’s solemn look was merely the preface to his solemn question.

“If you do find it, friar,” Bowen asked earnestly, “what will you pray for?”

Ah, he’d piqued the knight’s interest after all. “I’ll pray for a savior the likes of those fallen heroes to rid us of Einon’s evil.”

“Is it Einon’s evil?” Bowen frowned cryptically and stooped to retrieve Gilbert’s scroll.

“Has the darkness of these times blinded you, Knight?” Gilbert sputtered in disbelief. “It’s Einon’s rump in the royal seat. Who else’s evil?”

“Perhaps he was . . . bewitched.”

“You cannot bewitch the devil. Trust a clergyman on that.”

Gilbert leaned over Bowen’s shoulder to find out what the knight had thought so intriguing. He was clearing some underbrush from the hole. But before Gilbert could get a good look, Bowen thrust the scroll in his face and rose.

“Indeed, good friar.” Bowen handed the scroll back and hurried to his steed. “I leave all things ecclesiastical in your capable hands. Farewell.”

“Farewell!” Gilbert waved cheerily as the knight mounted up, then realized what he was saying.
“Farewell?”

“Farewell!” Bowen repeated, as if Gilbert still wasn’t clear with the concept. “You’ve been a pleasing companion, but now our quests take separate paths. I wish you luck with yours.”

“Wait! Quests? . . . But . . .”

But Bowen had turned from the trail and was disappearing down a ravine, his eyes keenly scouring the ground. Gilbert grabbed Merlin’s reins and started after the knight . . . only to fall into the same hole once more. He shook himself with a frustrated sigh, shedding the mossy debris clinging to his cassock. His eyes went wide as he suddenly saw what Bowen had seen and realized the hole he was in wasn’t a hole at all . . .
but a huge dragon track!

Nine

A DUEL

“No profit this time, purely pleasure.”

The horse slowly sloshed through the stream. Bowen leaned forward in the saddle, staring down into the clear, rippling water. The dragon track was plainly visible, impressed in the mud of the shallow creekbed.

Bowen glanced up and smiled as he listened to the soothing hum of the gentle waterfall that spilled over an overhang of rock downstream. His dragon would be there.

Things were picking up. He had not seen a dragon for over six months. Now two within the week. Maybe the long drought was over at last. He jerked up his lance and reined his steed toward the falls. He regretted his abrupt departure from Gilbert, but the poor fellow had already had one near-fatal encounter with a dragon and Bowen didn’t want to expose him to another. He also didn’t need the responsibility of another person’s safety. The old wreck of a dragon in the wheatfield had been a fairly simple opponent to defeat. But who knew what lay in wait for him behind the falls? The friar had been a pleasant diversion from his solitary purpose. Oh, he was a bit too chatty and a positively wretched poet. But he was an earnest and well-meaning fellow with a good heart. Bowen had forgotten how much he missed affable companionship.

“Yoo-hoo . . .” The voice came from the creekbank, from behind a pile of gray boulders, several of which glistened almost silvery in the sun. Gilbert appeared, huffing and puffing up the ridge of the rocks. He carried his literary sack, stuffed with manuscripts, enthusiastically waving his quill, hallooing for attention. “Bowen! Bowen!”

Bowen muttered an oath and, wheeling in the saddle, rode toward the bank. The monk trod onto a sun-dazzled boulder that seemed to totter slightly as he plopped his bag down and started to rummage through it.

“I’m not too late, am I?” Gilbert asked excitedly as Bowen rode up.

“What are you doing here, Gilbert?” the knight demanded in a snarled whisper.

“Where else should I be when history’s in the making?” The scribe smiled, oblivious to Bowen’s pique, and flourished his quill. “I’ve come to immortalize you!”

“Shhh!” Bowen admonished him with a nervous glance back at the cave.

The priest produced a bottle of ink from his pack. “How do you prefer I write this?”

“Far
away.”

The sarcasm went right over Gilbert’s head. The priest chuckled good-naturedly and fumbled some more in his bag.

“Oh, please, don’t concern yourself with
my
safety,” Gilbert’s voice boomed out above even the rushing falls, much to Bowen’s consternation. “No, I meant style. Verse. Meter. Shall I spice it up with a poetical flourish or just the cold hard facts?”

He unrolled some blank manuscript. Seething, Bowen poked his lance through it and jerked it away. “Why don’t you go ask the dragon? Get out of here!”

Bowen realized his curt exasperation had wounded Gilbert’s feelings. The friar’s face fell in dejection as he stepped out to the edge of the shiny rock to confront Bowen.

“That’s a fine attitude!” He pouted as he peevishly snatched his scroll off the lance. The rock seemed to teeter under him slightly. It teetered more as Gilbert stomped his foot to emphasize his indignation. “I come to record your exploits for posterity and you try to muzzle the mouth of chronicle, lop off the tongue of truth. It’s all very well to go about hacking and whacking dragons, but if a dragon falls in the forest and no one hears about it, does it make a thud?”

The unstable rock shook under Gilbert’s pounding sandal and the priest lost his balance, his rump plopping back onto the boulder. Gilbert recovered with a haughty harrumph, and discreetly pulling the hem of his cassock back around his ankles, he flattened his scroll against the rock, dipped his quill liberally in the ink vial, and began to scribble defiantly across it, as though he had intended sitting down to write all the time. Before Bowen could stop him, he took up his admonishing sermon once more, his disgruntlement droning out across the creek. “You’re nothing without the likes of me. Heroics don’t make heroes, ballad makers do. The quill is mightier than the sword!”

“Shhh!”

“You can’t shush history, lad! Its voice lives forever!”

“Which is longer than either you or I will, if you don’t shut up!”

Bowen’s frantic whisper, along with his exaggerated rolling of eyes and a jabbed gesture of his lance toward the waterfall, finally penetrated Gilbert’s perception.

“Good Lord!” The priest promptly clamped a hand over his mouth in a vain attempt to recapture the escaped exclamation. “So sorry!” he whispered to Bowen with a sheepish grin. “The element of surprise!”

“It
was
the idea!” Bowen sighed indulgently. “Now get you gone, friar.”

“I stay, sir!”

“Are you mad?”

“You’ll find the courage of I, who witness, no less than that of you, who do.”

Gilbert had risen to his feet and gotten into his pulpit again, wildly and insistently waving his quill. Ink splattered from its freshly dipped point across the rock, which suddenly shuddered, and Bowen saw its hard surface crinkle—crinkle and open up, exposing a giant ink-stained eye glaring up at the priest. Gilbert was still vociferously avowing his courage . . . unaware of the fact that it was about to be tested.

“You will see that I . . . I . . . I—yi . . . yi!”

“Gilbert!” Bowen’s warning shout was already too late. The rocks shook with a violent rumble and collapsed into the lake with a giant splash. Trying to steady his frightened horse, Bowen saw Gilbert come careening through the spray of water at him in midair. Bowen ducked as the priest, wailing, pitched over the horse’s back into the creek. Bowen whirled his horse to the bank. Most of the rocky mass upon which Gilbert was perched had disappeared, leaving only a sandy beach. He steered his mount back to the sound of more splashing, just in time to see . . .

. . . a dragon tail, slithering along the creek, its dull gray hue transforming to a glittery warm brown. Bowen pursued, poking his lance into the water after the splashing tail. But it disappeared through the waterfall.

His horse shied at the falls and Bowen saw the huge, dark silhouette loom up behind the cascade.

“Come out of there, you skulking brute,” Bowen demanded.

“Go away!” came the weary reply.

“Come out or I’ll come in . . .”

“Suit yourself.”

A battered breastplate came flying out of the waterfall, splashing in front of Bowen, who steadied his nervous steed.

“That’s what’s left of the last fellow who entered uninvited.” The sonorous hiss snaked through the spray of water.

“That doesn’t frighten me.”

“No? How about this? Or this?
Or this?”

A barrage of crumpled armor and bones clattered through the veil of water, half of it crashing into Gilbert, who was trying to rise out of the stream. He scampered out of the debris, floundering to his feet, when suddenly the complete skeleton of a horse and rider jangled out of the falls, splashing in a heap and washing a wave of water over the startled priest that sent him flopping back into the creek. The helmeted head landed in his lap. Gilbert shrieked as he juggled the skull in his hands, then gasped in amazement on closer inspection. It wore the plume-crested helmet of a centurion. He held it up to Bowen with a scholar’s delight.