Dragonslayer: A Novel (23 page)

Here there was nothing. Less than nothing. A screeching man-thing and a screeching horse. As it passed overhead, it released the high trumpeting of primordial dragon challenge.

The horse cowered. Its knees buckled and it collapsed, still facing the dragon and allowing Galen to clamp himself more firmly on its shuddering back. Gaping, he watched the awesome body pass above, saw the slippage of scales as the skin undulated, saw the crusted places where scales had been torn away, saw the convulsions of the belly as the creature readied itself for another vomiting of fire. And then, just as the loathsome vent passed overhead, dripping indescribable offal, the most terrifying event in the whole incident occurred: the tail, moving as if it had its own life, dropped as the dragon itself lifted to clear a copse of oak, and its splayed tip trailed down so low that it actually touched the nose of the cringing horse, stroked its neck with obscene gentleness, draped like a heavy leaf on the top of Galen's head, slid down his back, down the horse's back, and was gone, leaving behind a hot dampness, an odor of rot and smoke.

Galen's scream again blended with the horse's. The top of his head was covered with threads of slime. It reeked horribly. Shaking, retching, he dismounted and cleaned the horse and himself as well as he could with roadside bracken before falling to his knees and vomiting into the ditch. By the time he was able to continue, the dragon was several leagues ahead, a ragged black dot beginning to descend in a shallow glide toward Swanscombe.

Galen remounted and dug his heels into the stallion's ribs. Still trembling, the horse had also found its legs and although it did not at first relish the prospect of moving in the same direction as the dragon, at last it did so under Galen's prodding.

In a few minutes they topped the rise that overlooked Swanscombe valley, and Galen's fear was confirmed—the village was in flames. The dragon had made two passes. The swaths of fire were cross shaped, with the Granary at the center. That building, the scene of Galen's triumph, was now engulfed by huge spasms of flame, as if, like a tortured and writhing animal, it yearned to consume itself. On all sides, barns and houses were burning and villagers were scrambling for water from the river. Most of their efforts were in vain. Even from his distance, Galen could see that the fired houses were doomed, and that there was only the slightest hope of saving the others. Again he prodded his mount, and the horse plunged downhill in a half-slide, half-canter. In a moment he had traversed the hay fields that were being ignited by random embers and was in the village.

Through flame and smoke he saw both heroism and horror. Men risked their lives to bring old women from blazing huts; men teetered on precarious ladders, hurling water; men and women formed ragged bucket lines stretching to the river. In some doorways lay the bodies of those overcome by smoke before they could escape, and in the streets lay the smoking carcasses of unfortunates caught outdoors by Vermithrax's scathing attacks. Stiff-legged animal corpses smoked in the stable yards. And everywhere there were crying children, some whole, some terribly burned, all turning toward Galen as soon as they saw him, the man on the horse, the man with power. It was not misery he was witnessing now; that would come later. That would come when the insulating, kindly shock wore off and agony began. Rather, what he saw on many faces, even some of the severely burned, was disbelief very like amusement, the fixed grin of incredulity:
It cannot happen here! We have taken all precautions! But it HAS happened here!

Galen's vision blurred. Acrid smoke burned in his mouth and nostrils.
Have I done this?

"You!" Greil limped toward him, his hunched shoulders heavy with menace. "You have a nerve to come back here after what you did!" He stooped for a cudgel, got a firm grip on it and continued his advance. Malkin and Xenophobius appeared behind him in the smoke, both picking up clubs when they saw Galen.

"Get out!" Malkin hissed. "Go!"

Galen turned the horse into the village.

Simonburgh was also on fire, although, because it was set apart from the rest of the village, it had escaped the full brunt of the dragon's attack, and only one corner was smoldering. There was no sign of either Valerian or her father. He wanted to dismount here, to dash inside; but he was aware that Greil and Malkin had blocked his path. He could not go back. Choking and blinded by the smoke, his eyes streaming, he rode upwind, splashed across the river and reined up in the meadow on the other side.

"Join the party!" The shrill voice struck him like a lash. He wheeled the horse, tensing for a stabbing attack from the side. But there was no one near. "Come to the party!" The voice was thin, bitterly mocking, cracking with outrage. It came from a figure on a little knoll to Galen's right, a figure brandishing a crooked staff. He was cowled and grotesquely thin.

"Jacopus!"

"Come! Celebrate! Isn't that what you told me to do? 'Come with us, Jacopus. Celebrate the death of the dragon!' Do you remember? That's what
you
said. That's what you
all
said! Well,
is this your party?"

Galen could not answer. His mouth was dry. He was exhausted. His belly was lead. He gazed weeping through the shifting curtains of smoke upon the mayhem and pain across the river. His first impulse was to plead ignorance, to say that he had not known that this would be the effect of calling down the boulder. Then he recalled how proudly he had taken credit when it appeared that the dragon had been slain.

Crouched like a large insect, Jacopus was waiting for an answer.

It seemed to Galen that never had it been more important to tell the truth. "Yes," he said at last. "I have done this."

Jacopus bobbed with satisfaction. "You sought to do
good."

"Yes."

"And it
twisted
into horror, into Evil."

"Yes."

"Shall I tell you why?"

"Because," Galen said, so softly that Jacopus did not hear, "I'm no sorcerer. I'm not Ulrich."

"Because," Jacopus said, "you do not have Grace." He laughed abruptly. "Poor fool! How could you help anyone without the Faith, without the Word? You have done all you could have done —brought terror, and death, and burning children!"

"And your Faith, would it have stopped the children from being burned?"

"Yes!"

"Would it have stopped the terror?"

"Yes."

"Would it have killed the dragon?"

"Yes! Yes!"

In a transport of ecstasy and anger Jacopus again brandished his staff, waving it overhead.

At that instant, as if summoned, a shadow drifted over him. Jacopus and Galen looked slowly upward together. High, high, at an altitude where the plumes from many fires joined and became one with the clouds, they glimpsed a proud-headed and unmistakable silhouette.

Vermithrax was returning to the Blight.

CHAPTER NINE

5Icarius

Miles around, the
countryside was blazing. The plumes from a hundred fires rose and mingled aloft. Soaring high among them Vermithrax was coming home. It paid scant attention to the figures near its lair. Its thoughts were far away, far to the west and north, where it was still possible that other dragons would see this grand havoc and, rejuvenated, come.

In this hope Vermithrax had soared much, much higher than usual; so it was that the shadow which fell across Jacopus was tiny and diffuse.

"Well," Galen said, looking back at the priest, "you're going to have your chance." He assumed that Jacopus would shrink from confrontation with the dragon, and that his declarations were mere posturing. But he was wrong. He saw that the other man's raised face was transformed. Jacopus
wanted
this. In fact, he had already begun to move like a euphoric sleepwalker toward the dragon's lair. The little crowd of villagers that had followed Galen to the river's edge halted, sensing what was about to occur.

With a fearsome dignity, Vermithrax descended. At one thousand feet, the dragon became aware of the smoking village, at five hundred feet, of the Blight and the altered entrance to the lake of fire; at three hundred feet, it passed above a horse and rider, and twinges of familiarity plucked at its innards; a bit farther on, very low, it passed over an oddly gesticulating human thing moving toward its earth. A hero. Vermithrax grunted, and two tendrils of flame cascaded earthward. With an instant of hovering, the dragon settled at the entrance of its lair and turned.

Jacopus had meanwhile broken into a hopping run. He had lost his sandals in his eagerness to reach the Blight, and he limped and leaped as thorns and sharp stones jabbed him. Awed and fascinated, Galen prodded his horse and trotted along on a course parallel that of the priest. He was filled with premonition. He wanted to call out to Jacopus:
Don't do it! You will prove nothing! You have no real power! You will die!
And yet, strangely, he felt in this crazy priest, this filthy and scrawny outcast, power in the making. What if there were a hundred Jacopuses, a thousand, all with the same fervor, with the same wild eagerness to sacrifice?

In the center of the Blight, unearthly and magnificent on its crag, Vermithrax perched immobile. Floating blankets of smoke, spirals and gouts of wind-whipped smoke, tortured the sun and sky into creatures alive and agonized.

Jacopus did not pause at the edge of the Blight but plunged recklessly on up the scree. The paths converged there, and Galen was close enough to see that the priest's feet were cut and bleeding, the lacerations sufficient to have brought a less transported man to his knees. And Galen could hear that the priest had begun to mumble, to shout occasionally, emphasizing these shouts with thrusts of his staff toward the dragon. Galen faltered at the edge of the Blight. To go farther, he knew, would be to associate himself with Jacopus. The horse did not want to go. It balked, grunting and skittering sideways. It had had enough for one day. It could see and smell all too clearly the looming shape on the crag, and its terror on the road, when the great tail had slithered over them, had returned.

Yet Galen could not take his eyes off Jacopus, trotting, limping his painful way into the Blight. He was at once pitifully human and transcendingly heroic, and he drew Galen on a level below thought. The boy prodded the horse forward despite himself, despite the cold terror that had laid hands on his belly and his back. He longed to be away, to be anywhere else, but he prodded the horse; the reluctant animal moved forward, and they were in the Blight.

Suddenly, so barren and still was the great bowl, he could hear echoing perfectly from the surrounding cliffs the shouts of Jacopus, which until then had been incoherent globs of sound. First, constantly repeated like a refrain, the dragon's name—'
"Vermithrax!"—as
if Jacopus sought to hold the attention of the beast with that alone. But then, interspersed were other demands, other names, injunctions: "Worm! Cursed Thing! Devil flung from heaven!
Vermithrax!
Evil incarnate! I am coming! I am coming! . . . ."

Evil,
said the cliffs . . .
coming. . .

"Wait, Fiend! You will feel now the Power of the Lord God!

You will shrink before it! I am the Light! Down, down into eternal Darkness."

Dark. . . nesss. . .
the cliffs whispered back.

Vermithrax did not move. It seemed to Galen, who had halted at the foot of the last incline and dismounted to hold his horse, that the dragon had fallen comatose, or even—was it possible!— died there on its perch, so rocklike was the angular hunk of body, so fixed the basilisk eye. But in fact, Vermithrax was fully alert. Its gazing beyond the hills was a last vestige of hope—would another come before the last summoning smoke had trailed away? Flickers of anger swirled in its belly. It felt Jacopus's shouts and their echoes like blows glancing off its body, and its body ached. Its body ached in the raw joints where cushioning fiber had been ground away, and in cracked and eroded vertebrae. Sharper pains probed at its organs and fleshy tissues. It had begun to pay the price for its onslaught. So slowly and so slightly that the movement could not be seen from Galen's vantage point below, it opened its scaly lips and breathed a long, silent, falling cry of pain.

"Monster! Back whence you came! Back into the everlasting torments and fires of Hell!" Jacopus was drawing close. He was within two hundred yards. He had reached that portion of the ascent where the slope was so steep that he had to half crawl, his staff clattering on the stones, but he seemed totally indifferent to his own discomfort, to the bloody footprints that trailed his ascent. His eyes were fixed burningly on the dragon. He had formed no coherent plan. It is probable that if Vermithrax had allowed him to come close enough, he would simply have hurled himself on the dragon, beating and clawing, trusting utterly in the inspirations of Divine Power. Perhaps he would have groped for the eyes; perhaps he would have attempted to stab with his blunt staff through a pustulant spot left by a falling scale; perhaps he would have sought to be engulfed in the very jaws of the creature, kicking and screaming, jamming his staff crosswise in the great gullet.

But Vermithrax did not allow him to come closer. Body still immobile, the great head turned, and the creature's gaze enveloped Jacopus. The priest stopped scrabbling among the boulders. For a moment he remained on all fours, a graceless animal, and then he slowly straightened. "Fiend!" he said, but so softly this time that there was no echo. He had not known what he had expected in that gaze—perhaps the flickering malignancy of snakes and lizards, perhaps the bland indifference of aquatic creatures. Something, in any case, finally manageable and comprehensible. What he actually saw was quite different, and Vermithrax gave him full time to see it. It was a loss, a sorrow, a pain, and a hatred incommensurate to any human scale, as far beyond all notions of evil as eternity is beyond all notions of time. Profoundly shaken, Jacopus still had strength to perform an act of heroism that only Galen was close enough to see. He raised his staff in front of Mm, its Celtic cross turned fully toward the beast. He drew his last breath, knowing it to be his last and, a man on the final edge of being, he said clearly and loudly enough for the echoes to spill like splintered glass down the sides of the Blight, "Demon, get thee behind me!"