Dragonslayer: A Novel (7 page)

Galen had been too shocked to hear or see anything since the falling of Ulrich. He felt that the dagger had pierced
his
chest, stopped
his
heart. Dread like nothing he had known gripped him, stifling any outcry, stifling even his breath. He wanted to run to the old man, but his muscles would not obey him. When he did move, it was with the stiff, tottering walk of old age, a walk that was a pathetic mimicry of Ulrich's own, just as the laughter-Hodge's mad, incredulous laughter, which was all that he could hear as he approached the body—was also an echo of Ulrich's. Galen leaned over and touched Ulrich's head. "They've gone," he said in a very small voice. "You can get up now."

But the old man's body was already cool, and there was no doubt that he was quite dead. Blood seeped through the slash in his cloak and spread in a widening pool on the floor. His expression was ineffably calm, even amused. For a long time Galen knelt beside the body, his hand on the old man's head. When at last he heard someone speaking to him, he realized that he was sobbing uncontrollably, and shaking. Someone put a cloak around his shoulders.

"I'm sorry," Valerian was saying. "We should not have come." Only much later would Galen recall that there were tears in Valerian's eyes as well.

Galen shook his head. He could not speak.

"Could we help? I mean, there'll have to be a burial and . . ."

Again Galen shook his head. He had trouble concentrating on what Valerian was saying to him, for it was mixed and overlaid with Ulrich's voice, which was with him still:
"Nihil est mori.
It is nothing to die . . . It is a resolving again into the elements . . . the beginning of many journeys . . ."

"How could you have been so
wrong?"
Galen asked, gently shaking the corpse. "How could you not have
known!"
But there was no answer in the enigma of Ulrich's smile.

"Maybe he was just old," said Valerian, kneeling beside him. "Maybe he really was senile. Maybe he had lost his touch."

"Maybe," Galen agreed at last.

On the steps at the side of the hall Hodge was snorting with convulsive laughter.

"What's the
matter
with that old man?" Greil whispered.

"Nothing," Galen said, getting up and drying his eyes. "That's just the way he is. He sees humor in things other people don't think are funny at all." He leaned on the oak table. "I think, now, that you had better go. I'm sorry Ulrich couldn't help you. I... I know he wanted to ... I know he would have tried, at least, if . . . if . . . Well, perhaps there will be someone in the Western Isles."

Valerian shrugged despondently. "I don't think we'll ever go to the Isles." The others were already filing out, nodding condolences to Galen, whispering commiseration. "We won't ever get away from Tyrian and Casiodorus again—not for a trip like this. No, Ulrich was our last chance."

"I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry, too," Valerian said. "Truly." He looked up from Ulrich's body to Galen and offered his hand. Galen took it. It was smaller than his own. Then Valerian was gone, following the dejected little band of Urlanders across the drawbridge and back westward along the forest path.

Galen, Hodge and Gringe were left alone with Ulrich's body. The raven was muttering among the rafters, making little keening sounds that could also have been laughter. Hodge shuffled across the room.

"What shall we do, Hodge?"

The old man blew noisily into the rag that served him as a handkerchief. "Ye gather yer things, young Galen. Hodge'll look after the old master's body."

"But
then
what shall we do?"

Hodge looked up in astonishment.
"Do?
Why, what sort of question is this from a sorcerer? We'll go west, to Urland, where there is a dragon to be slain. Gather your things, now!" The voice was Hodge's, the tone was Ulrich's. Galen moved like a waking sleepwalker toward the stairs.

CHAPTER THREE

The Blight

Urland, from which
the travelers had come, lay far to the west, beyond a craggy chain of mountains, and beyond the River Ur. It was a wild land, bounded by its two great rivers, the Ur on the east and the Varn on the west. Its terrains were various. Northern Urland was heavily forested, the region of elk and elusive stalking cats. Only a few areas there were cleared, surrounding the agricultural villages of Turnratchit, Verymere and Nudd. To the south, the land had been twisted by primordial upheavals. Ancient mountains rose from the plains in erratic linkages of valleys and plateaus. In the extreme south, where the narrow Swanscombe River angled from east to west and joined the other rivers, the terrain was especially jagged and mountainous. Narrow paths wound through the valleys below the bleak dwellings of the hillmen; even the valleys were narrow and rocky, and only a very few spacious meadows were to be found. In one of these, nestled among the mountains on the bank of the Swanscombe River, lay Swanscombe itself, the principal village of southern Urland.

But it was not alone the ruggedness of the terrain that distinguished south Urland. Between the village of Swanscombe and the col of Morgenthorme, the ancestral royal residence to the north, lay a region swept by dark winds, shunned even by the most ravenous animals and the most desperate men. It was devoid of natural life, except for tough and stunted lichen sheltered in crevasses, scurrying lizards, and occasional drifting ravens. If the wind had not moaned sometimes among its boulders, it would have been utterly silent.

This was the Blight. It had not always been a place of devesta-tion, although the time when it had been as green and flourishing as the rest of Urland was not within living memory. That was before the dragon. There were men in Swanscombe and other Ur-land villages who claimed they could recall hearing their grandfathers say that
their
grandfathers had witnessed the coming of the dragon and the blighting of the region around the caverns where it had settled, but no one knew with certainty how long the dragon had been there.

The dragon, Vermithrax, was the principal resident of Urland. Basking on the ledge at the mouth of its cave, or deep and somnolent in its earth, Vermithrax dominated all the lives of Urlanders. Even as the pilgrims approached Ulrich's tower at Cragganmore, many leagues distant, Vermithrax released a subterranean roar which shook the Blight and caused the residents of Swanscombe, without looking at each other, to move closer together.

Deep underground, Vermithrax itself did not move. Only its hide moved, twitching and flickering over its great length. Its immense yellow eyes stayed forever open, even in sleep, their horizontal pupils slits of the deepest black. Inside the creature, the fire had been merely dampened; it never died. Throughout the dragon's slumber, flames rose and fell in the labyrinthine recesses behind its nostrils, and it exhaled wisps of smoke. It lay with the tip of its tail secured between scaly gums.

Immediately below it lay a surface which glimmered constantly with weird and lambent flame. It was a lake of fire. It seemed impossible that creatures lived in that water, and yet shadowy figures did move beneath the surface, perhaps the hulks of real beasts, perhaps mere shadows of the dragon's imagining.

Vermithrax dreamed, and remembered.

In its memory, dead times lived again. In those lost dawns, the sky was dotted with the wings of dragons gliding from their crags to soar in hot new days. In Vermithrax's memory, their shrill cries bounded and rebounded among the cliffs until they fell in splinters of sound to the valley floors below.

In those days, there were only the green forests, the silvered rivers of the land, and the abundant deer herds shying like a single creature as the hunting shadows fell across them. Enough for all there was then; more than enough, and the sated dragons coupled at noon, shrieking their pleasure at the sun.

The change came so slowly that for a long time no dragon noticed. At first, it was the mere flickering of a few scattered fires in the night, no longer the dragon's own, occasional palls of smoke by day, and men scattering with other creatures back to their earths. But then the game diminished, got small and quick. Often it dodged away from the dragons' fire-gout and escaped. Feedless moons passed. And the men grew bold, crept sometimes toward the very heart of the labyrinths where dragonets were hatched, and stabbed between the thin scales on the underbelly. Pests! But there were more and more of them, and their earths spread and took root, always beside water. They conspired with other creatures, gathering them in, feeding, breeding, and slaughtering them. Sometimes they rode on them, and then the attacks grew swifter and more threatening. A few times dragons died screaming, and their killers sang.

Vermithrax could well recall the first attempt on its own life. A young and careless dragonet, it had been basking in the noonday sun on a high ledge. It had no reason to fear. Generations of dragons had freely used the ledge, drowsing with open eyes in the dragon manner. But suddenly Vermithrax had seen a foreign movement at the edge of its vision. A man's head had appeared above a large boulder and disappeared instantly. Vermithrax tensed. Its talons clenched in the granite. Again it caught a fleeting movement—the point of a weapon above the boulders—and a second later the man himself burst from his cover, screaming a fierce war cry. He was young. His eyes were wide with fear. Sweat streamed from him. His weapon was a lance that he had leveled at Vermithrax's neck, and behind which he had flung his full weight.

But the weapon never reached Vermithrax. As the man lunged, so did the dragon. It was too young to be capable of throwing a flame. Its claws and teeth were its only weapons. It sprang with a lean ferocity—straight up. Its wings gave one powerful sweep as it attacked, and a moment later the hero lay shuddering in death, pierced by Vermithrax's claws, lacerated by razor teeth.

After that, except at the equinoxes when it felt strangely compelled to seek out female prey, the dragon avoided mankind and all its works. It was years before it was assaulted again. On that second occasion, it had been drawn far from its normal hunting grounds to the southeast of Urland, and in the evening had by chance flown above a village. It veered away, but too late. There arced up to meet it a projectile that shrieked like a wild owl past its head and tore away a membranous portion of wing. Simultaneously, the heavy thud of wood on sinewed wood rose from the compound below. As it began to tumble, Vermithrax glimpsed in the midst of clustered men a rocking, squat implement such as it had never seen before, with a single vibrating arm upraised.

Terror followed. The dragon foresaw itself crumpled like others it had known who had lost their concentration, or suffered seizures, or had unknown accidents befall them. Its left wing would not function properly, and Vermithrax was almost on the ground before it recovered and, with an enormous effort, swooped out of the tumble, the torn edge of its wing flapping. High and safe again, it had circled angrily and watched the frenzied reloading of the machine. The scene was suffused with a crimson haze of rage, and when Vermithrax at last dipped its wings and began its swoop, torrents of flame leapt from its nostrils like twin rivers, and the roar sent frightened rooks flapping in the valley.

On the first pass, the dragon incinerated the catapult crew; they flared with liquid sounds, engulfed in a wash of fire. With a flick of its head, it caught two more, smaller ones, as they ran screaming toward the river—caught them but did not kill them, so that they were still scrabbling beside the path and mewing piteously when the dragon descended again, this time not fast, but with the aroused majesty of its species, the gouts of flame sweeping in wide arcs as its snout swung, consuming the tortured unfortunates beside the path, consuming those others who were running shrieking from their huts, consuming the huts themselves in a conflagration that spread through the cornfields and which, despite the later rains, would smolder for days amidst the forests. The destruction of the village was complete; Vermithrax saw to that, for it made yet one final pass through the smoke and mayhem, from east to west this time with again that terrible swinging of its head. Then it rose, aided by the heat from its own fires, its anger spent. It rose, above the crests of the hills and above the emptied valley, and in the dusk it turned away from the sun. Its shadow, even with the frayed wing, was magnificent on the countryside below.

Shortly after this incident, Vermithrax had come to Urland, its belly empty, its spirit hot with hate and loathing. The Blight then had been a high, craggy, boulder-strewn bowl among the mountains above Swanscombe, but Vermithrax had been attracted to it by its spaciousness and by the honeycomb of passages beneath it that led to the lake of fire. It had come low across the shadow-bound village of Swanscombe with a sound like the whirlwind, casually gouting its pain and frustration. In seconds, with sweeping washes of flame, it defoliated the area within a half-league radius of the ledge on which it had perched; and, when no immediate challenge arose, it had twisted about, lithe as a monstrous snake, and vanished into the central passageway of the labyrinth.

The dragon's arrival paralyzed the village. During the first day no one was to be seen, and by evening the complaints of cattle with swollen udders echoed in the hills. After dusk on the first night, furtive villagers scampered along the laneways close to the walls, to gather in the village's central meetinghall, the Granary. In the meeting that ensued, several hot-eyed young heroes offered to do battle with the dragon for the preservation of the village, and at last one of them, Baeldaeg—a splendid young warrior, eighteen years old, and the best runner and wrestler in all of southern Urland—was chosen by lot. For the remainder of the night he girded himself for the coming conflict in the stoutest leather, the finest iron, the largest shield. His lance and sword he adorned with talismans given him that very night by hopeful maidens. At dawn he went forth to challenge the beast, with the bolder villagers following at a respectful distance.