Dragonslayer: A Novel (32 page)

It swept down with the speed of a whirlwind and its great claws seized Ulrich cleanly. They opened and clenched with unerring accuracy while the leather wings beat upward. For moments, Ulrich dangled limp and helplessly, like a rodent in the clutches of a hawk; but then, as the dragon rose, it drew him tight against its belly. Its cry was almost pure triumph—almost, for it contained something else as well, such a hopeless yearning that Galen's blood chilled to hear it. Nor did the creature descend. Instead, it veered away over the center of the Blight and began to climb. Its cries mingled with the screams of Ulrich writhing against its belly.

Horror pierced Galen like cold steel. He sank to his knees. "No!" he said. "Ulrich! Oh, Ulrich, no!" He scarcely noticed that the amulet had grown so hot that he had dropped it among the stones, or that its radiance was brighter, steadier than it had ever been. He felt nothing but utter dread and loss, saw nothing but the diminishing dot that was Vermithrax and Ulrich.

Behind him Valerian wept.

The amulet shone with dazzling brilliance. Yet, when at last he looked at it, he found that he could gaze through that brilliance and into the vision beneath. What he saw he had seen once before, in Ulrich's conjuring bowl on the very morning of the Urlanders' arrival: Ulrich dispersing, released from a body tired and old. He knew then with absolute certainty what he must do.

Desperately he searched for a boulder on the narrow ledge, found one the size of a man's head, and lifted it above the amulet. Then, with a final glance at the soaring dragon and its dangling prey, he flung it down on the glowing talisman with all his force.

Much, much later, when Galen and Valerian began to talk about that day, they tried first to describe the sound of the amulet as it broke. Valerian said that it was like a tornado that had passed down Swanscombe Valley when she was very young, a shrieking, howling wind that had descended suddenly upon them and vanished just as quickly, leaving ruin in its wake. It was, she said, the most awesome of all sounds. Galen had never heard a tornado; but he had listened to the howling of a wild cat passing in the night. That sound, he said, magnified a thousand times, was what he heard when he dropped the boulder.

Both looked up at the soaring dragon, dark against the dark sky, and both sensed what would occur. So brilliant was the flash that they thought the sun had suddenly emerged. Then the roar came, and then the concussion knocked them sprawling backwards on the ledge.

The explosion seemed to feed on itself, with many small explosions bursting out of each other faster and faster until they became the merest puffs of smoke a great distance from the center of the blast. Sudden winds swept this smoke away and allowed Galen and Valerian to see that, incredibly, the dragon remained intact, or sufficiently intact to be recognizable; there were the spade tail, the angular wings, the elongated neck. For seconds it hung suspended, and then it crumpled, tumbled, fell faster, trailing fluttering strands of itself like cerements, a thing suddenly ghastly and pitiful, utterly and irrevocably ruined.

It came to earth in Swanscombe Valley at the edge of the Blight, near the road. It did not literally strike earth, for it landed in a pond, a wide place in the River Swanscombe. From their vantage point, Galen and Valerian saw the huge splash of its impact, and then the maddened boiling of the pool, as if it revolted with every drop of its being against the presence of the dragon's corpse. Immense clouds of steam plumed up, obscuring sections of the Blight and the hills beyond; but then they began slowly to dissipate, tugged and swirled by freshening breezes, so that, when the sun emerged from behind the moon, there were only a few wisps of vapor left to catch its gleams. It shone briefly like gold, this mist, like golden dust blowing in the wind, and then was gone. All was peaceful. The river flowed again. The sun shone warm. Somewhere close by the ledge, a sparrow broke into full-throated song.

Galen sank slowly to his knees. He was shuddering violently. A part of him knew that he should be jubilant, that he should celebrate with the little group of Swanscombe villagers whose whoops and incredulous laughter he heard even now, coming from the edge of the Blight below. But he was not jubilant. What he felt was a sense of loss so enormous that he could not tell whether he contained it or it him. When his tears began to fall, they mourned all that had come together and passed together in those moments. He wept not for Ulrich alone. He wept for Vermithrax too, and for the amulet and the splendid swirling magic that would never be again, and for the poor, diminished, sunny world before him.

He could not stop. He covered his face, but the tears spilled through his fingers and the dumb animal sounds bumped in his chest and throat. Valerian had knelt beside him. She was embracing him; her wet face was pressed against his neck, her hand was caressing his back, and she was uttering the wordless sounds of maternal comfort. All of this he knew, but it was still a long time before his sobbing had exhausted itself and he began to relax from the clenched position into which his shock had thrown him. Finally he sat up. "Quite a show," he said.

She was still embracing him. Her face was in his hair.

"I don't know why. I . . ."He had begun to say that he was sorry, but she put a hand over his mouth.

"You came back," she said. "You did what had to be done. You killed it."

He nodded. "And Ulrich. He really is dead now."

"He was an old, old man," she said.

"And everything has died with him."

"Not everything . . ."

"All that knowledge. That wisdom. I could have learned it. I could have kept it and passed it on."

"Perhaps," she said, "there is room for only so much wisdom in the world. Perhaps it changes. Perhaps it has to die in some ways before it gets born in others." She was looking down across the Blight and into the valley. The little crowd of villagers that had gathered when the eclipse began and had witnessed the final struggle between Ulrich and Vermithrax was advancing hesitantly on the dragon's corpse, a shapeless heap half-submerged in the river. They were led by a big, red-headed man carrying a large cross. Even at that distance, Valerian recognized her father. Behind Simon, urging the others into song, walked Gregorius. Pieces of their singing drifted up.

Galen had heard and also was watching. "Christians," he said. Some were carrying pikes and cleavers. A few bore bows and quivers. Most were weaponless. "Trusting," he said.

"Galen," she said. "Let's go." He felt her shivering against him. "Let's leave this place. For good. Let's go where there is no . . . no power."

He was smiling, shaking his head. "Take me there," he said.

They climbed slowly down from the ledge and picked their way through the Blight. They did not look back. Neither spoke for some time; both were watching the activities of the Christians. They had surrounded Vermithrax, some hip-deep in the discolored river, and were hacking at the carcass. Some had begun to dig a huge pit, and others were stacking chunks of Vermithrax on the edge of it for burial.

"That's good," Valerian nodded. "Get rid of it forever. Back to earth." She could see Simon quite clearly among the others. He had leaned his cross against a tree, and he towered in the midst of the butchering, his stout arm lustily wielding a seax in exactly the way that she had seen him, a thousand times through her childhood, wielding his hammer at the forge. For a moment she wanted to run to him, as she would have done as a small child, and throw her arms around him; but the impulse fled. She had said good-bye, and so had he. He had chosen a new life, a new Faith that did not include her. And she, for her part, had also made a choice. She clung to Galen's hand and led him obliquely across the Blight, on a path that took them back to the road at a point out of sight of the celebrating villagers, who, in any case, were much too busy hacking at Vermithrax to see them.

Once they reached the road and turned westward, their pace quickened. With the Blight and the violence behind them, and with a clear blue sky and an empty road ahead, it was possible to believe at last that they were leaving Urland.

But the road was not quite empty. They had gone only about half a league when Valerian halted suddenly, tensed and listening.

"What?" Galen asked. "What?" And then he heard what she had heard: Horses. Many horses were approaching cautiously just beyond the rise ahead. They froze, their hearts sinking. They wanted no horsemen. They wanted only to cross the Varn at last. Exposed, vulnerable, they stood and waited.

The first rider appeared. He was scouting off the road on their right. He looked so like Tyrian that for a moment Galen believed the centurion's death had been a dream. This man had the same stocky build, the same ready hand on the sword hilt, the same black epaulettes and gauntlets, the same rampant dragon on the black chest. But when Galen blinked away the illusion, he saw that this rider had a thick, sandy moustache. He was close, now. There was another on the other side of the road, and behind and between them came two more, side by side, and then another. In the midst of this troop rode Casiodorus, followed by a small train that included Horsrick. When the two outriders had reached Galen and Valerian, they stopped, eyeing them suspiciously and keeping their distance until the king came up. No one spoke. The horses stamped and blew softly. For a long moment they looked at each other, the resplendent king and the filthy, tattered, proud young man.

Neither spoke.

Then, head high, Valerian began to push through the horsemen. "Good-bye," she said. "We're leaving."

And so they did. Hand in hand they walked past the king's retinue and down the road. Once, when Galen looked back, he was surprised to see Casiodorus looking after them, a tall, sad figure. By the time they climbed to the top of the hill, however, the king's party had reached the dragon's corpse. Very faintly but unmistakably over the distance, mingled with the barking of dogs and the shrieks of excited children, came shouts of "Hail, Casiodorus! Hail!" The king had been helped down from his horse, and Horsrick had provided him with a bared sword which he now, with some difficulty, lifted above his head and let fall on the cadaver. This gesture aroused fresh cheers, led by the cavalrymen. "Drag-onslayer, hail!"

Galen and Valerian turned away and began their descent down the long slope that led to the Varn and Heronsford. The river was visible through the trees, a glittering ribbon in the new sun. When they reached it, Valerian would have splashed across the ford that minute, but Galen held her back.

"Why?" she asked.

He shrugged. "This way," he said. "There's a better place where no one ever goes." He led her upstream and into the shadows of the forest. As they walked, they felt sometimes the springy humus of the forest floor and sometimes the more solid earth of an old, overgrown path. Soon they came to a deeply shaded place where the water ran slow and deep. "Here," he said.

"But we
can't
cross here. There's no bridge, and it's
deep."

"Um. All the more reason," he said, stripping off his clothes. Then he was in the water, and the cold, hard river water was cleansing him, soothing his wounds, and he swam beneath its surface for as long as he could hold his breath. When he surfaced, Valerian was swimming toward him, and they allowed the current to carry them a little distance downstream before they leisurely swam back against it to the place where they had left their clothes.

On their backs then, kicking, they carried their clothes and packs across and dressed on the other side.

From the shade of a great oak a somnolent bat regarded them indifferently.

"Where are we going?"

"I don't know," he said.

"But on a journey? A long journey?"

"I think so, yes."

"In that case," she said, "I wish we had something to ride. I wish we had a horse."

Galen laughed. "When I was very small, before I was taken to Ulrich and taught serious things—incantations and charms and so forth—I could call horses just like
that."
He snapped his fingers. "I would think,
white horse!
and snap my fingers and there it would be." He shouldered his pack. "But that was when I was a child, and innocent."

Nearby, just ahead along the old path, came a sound like gentle laughter. There was a thudding of hooves, and a moment later they both glimpsed a white flank amidst the dappled leaves.

Galen laughed with delight, but Valerian spun around, closing her hands over his fingers that were about to snap again. "Enough!" she said.