Everran's Bane (27 page)

It could have been nothing else. It swerved out of the dive, planed round in a long furious circle, and thumped back to earth. Then it came forward, stalking once more, but this time the tail lashed behind it, and the lips were drawn up in a grin of bloodcurdling rage.

Beryx had caught his breath. Now he shifted a little and his whole body seemed to loosen, with the hair-trigger suppleness of a snake prepared to strike. As he moved I caught a glimpse of his eyes. They were dazzling, blinding, pits of green-white flame.

Hawge was hissing: flame and smoke spurted with each breath. Beryx moved a hand. It was very nearly a drawl, gentle, silky, and quite terrifying. He said, “Stop.”

And Hawge stopped. Its tremendous thighs and shoulders bulged, its neck arched over, its spines rose as the back doubled like a hairpin. I saw every muscle in the mailed flanks stand out in ridges high as a man's forearm and wider than his chest. Its head came down, down, tucking back and under, the monstrous dilated nostrils leveled right at us, the eyes starting from the nightmare head. Its breath turned to gigantic, straining grunts.

Beryx did not breathe. His body was like an iron bar and his face had contorted into a copy of the dragon's grimace, and the air between them shuddered like an over-weighted wall.

With the kick of a parted hawser, something snapped. Hawge fell flat on its belly, all four legs straight out. Beryx's body whiplashed and shot straight. Hawge got up, and stood unsteadily. I would not have believed those trunks of legs could shake.

Beryx said, sounding as if he had barely exerted himself, “Hast played with words, and with muscles. Now wilt thou fight?”

Hawge reared its head to the sky. Beryx smiled. It was cold and passionless and deadly as his voice.

Hawge's head sank again. The eyes, which had been revolving, came to a stop. A green fire shot through them, splintering into a thousand facets, and Beryx said quietly, “Harran, look away.”

My head turned as if on a peg. I dropped my eyes, and they came to rest on the dragon's forefoot. It was so close I could see the horn-like graining of the claws, black blended into streaky grays, then a dirty yellow at the tip.

Beryx's breathing grew audible. Time bent to the pattern of his respiration, long, slow, metronomically regular breaths, hardly abnormal, with no indication of strain. It was perhaps a hundred of them before I realized he had an accompaniment. A vast, grating, throaty inhalation, exhalation, was keeping perfect time with him, like a choir singing behind the soloist. Hawge was breathing too.

Little by little the rhythm grew labored. Slower. Each inhalation became effortful, strenuous. Slower still. Now heartbeats passed between release and inhalation, still more between inhalation and release. The sounds grew louder, less like breathing than long-drawn groans. Louder. Then something like a huge death-rattle made me leap out of my skin and the rhythm broke in a flurry of grunts and gasps and coughs and clatters like stone flung on a roof; I caught one glimpse of Hawge crouched with all four feet thrust out and braced and head stretched like a horse at full gallop, black and searingly vivid on a ground of flame; then something like an explosion in the sun's heart quite blinded me. Only my eyelids retained the after-image, a blast like the clash of lightning bolts, a starburst of green-white, scalding, incandescent light.

By the time my vision returned the mélée was over, but now the sounds were so dreadful I wanted to block my ears. Hawge was the worse. Its frightful furnace roars began with a rattle and ended with a gagging retch, then resumed after such a lapse that each time I thought it had died. Beryx was harder to hear. They were out of time now: all I caught was an occasional thin, whooping crow, like a man in lung-fever unable to take his breath.

It went on, and on, and on. My own lungs started to strain, to founder, there was no air left in the world. Red spots swarmed across my sight. The air around me was shivering, as it had when Beryx and Fengthira fought, but this was no mere tension, this was a stress that would rend the very earth. I heard myself panting. My eyes swam. It was unbearable. It had to end. Since I dared not look at Beryx, I looked at the dragon's foot.

Hawge was standing on the claws. The pad was three feet off the ground and the claws were driven half their length into the ground, the spur was bowed clean under the pad and was grinding down, then up, then down, in time with each gargantuan struggle for breath. Something glistened in the muscle grooves of the foreleg: drops, rivulets, that dripped down to darken the torn-up soil. It took me some time to believe it must be sweat.

Caution went to the winds. Unable to help myself, I looked up.

Though it was broad day, I still see that image on a background of red-shot, firelit black. I must have moved, or they had, for they are in profile, the vast body of the dragon, arched almost double, drawn up on its claws as if convulsed, the muscles trembling so the mail spangled like reflections on a gold-shot morning lake, the head strained right back into the shoulder spines, the jaws wide open, and the eyes—I could not look at those. And opposite it the man, so small and fragile in contrast you wondered why Hawge had not pulped him into the dust. Until you realized he was not a small mass but a sliver of compacted energy, the sort of power that detonates volcanoes and makes earthquakes rip whole mountain chains apart.

Next moment both image and battle shattered. Hawge leapt forty feet backward in one spasmodic plunge whose recoil fired it high into the air, Beryx went down as if pile-driven full on his back and rebounded like steel instead of flesh. I was still trying to believe my eyes and wondering when I would be incinerated when it dawned on me. The dragon had not been attacking. In both senses, it was in flight.

I was too stunned for reaction: disbelief, triumph, anything at all. I looked at Beryx instead.

He was drenched from head to toe in sweat, but he showed no distress. I could not see him breathe. His eyes were indescribable. He looked up into the air after Hawge's dwindling shape, and then his lips drew back in something that might have been a smile, if volcanoes smile, before the eyes quite obliterated his face. I heard him speak, though: a thin, fine, vibrant articulation that was the conveyance of naked thought.

He said,

Hawge's head tilted up. It began to climb, the angle growing steeper and steeper and the forward motion less until it was rising almost vertically, as hawks do up a shaft of wind. Higher and higher it lifted, clear into the zenith, a minute black insect shape.

Beryx addressed it again then, in that blood-chilling speech. This time he commanded,

My eyes were dazzled by distance and light. Through sliding beads of tears I saw the tiny wings falter, beat wildly, go limp. Then, with a scream that seemed to rend the firmament to its foundations, Hawge began to fall.

At some stage it must have turned over, in response to Beryx's will or in an attempt to escape. It hit on its back, its body almost horizontal, and it landed fairly athwart the outcrop by the waterhole with an impact that shivered every rock for yards, split the mailed body like a melon, and threw black blood and dust so high that I felt it descending, like rain upon my face.

* * * * *

Beryx may or may not have watched it all the way to the ground. When I came to myself, drew breath, looked round, it was just in time to see him silently, bonelessly, collapse.

My limbs untied. I flew to him. He was not breathing. I jammed my head to his chest. Nothing. I think I knelt up and screamed to the unforgiving heavens at the injustice of it, that having paid such a price, having sacrificed and lost so much, he should fall dead with victory in his very grasp. I know I tore my hair. And then an insane fury took possession of me. He should not be dead, I would not let him be dead, he should live whether the heavens decreed it or not.

I yanked him on his back. I know nothing of medicine. Some instinct dictated it, perhaps: he was not breathing, so he should breathe. I could almost hear Fengthira acidly commanding,

I thumped him in the chest. He gasped. But thumping his chest would only drive breath out. I had to drive it in.

I scrambled frenziedly to his head, pried his mouth open, and forced my own breath into it with all the pressure of my lungs. His chest moved. Now, said instinct, he is not a balloon: it must come out. I drove both hands under his rib cage and he gasped again. His lips were blue. I shot back to his head, forced another breath in, drove it out. Pump, I screamed silently, ramming the heel of my palm over his heart, and flew to drive in another breath.

His face was whiter than Maerdrigg's. No use, sobbed reason: he is dead. You are mishandling a corpse. Four rot you, screamed unreason. He is not dead. He is not!

I drove another breath into him, forced it out. Another. My own heart was pounding madly, my muscles shook, I could hardly find wind to breathe for myself. But a harper learns young to stretch his lungs beyond the compass of other men's. Pump, damn you, pump, I swore at his heart with tears running down my cheeks, and gave it a furious rub as I caught my next breath.

Another. Another. I do not know how many it was before I sat back on my heels, weeping outright now with rage and despair and grief, ready to give up: looked at his face, and saw the blue was gone from his lips.

Not daring to believe it, I set an ear, more gently than a feather landing, to his chest. My own blood was in such a thunder I was slow to hear. But what I heard sent me back to breathing for him as if I had an aedr's endurance myself.

Eventually, after driving out a breath, I dared sit back, my own heart in my mouth. And when his chest lifted, so faintly I could barely feel it against my lightly resting fingers, I felt as if I had beaten Hawge with my own hands.

For a good while longer I watched, every now and then wetting a finger to hold before his lips lest the Sky-lords should have betrayed me at the last. Finally, when it seemed credible, I sat on, looking down into his face, spattered with black drops of dragon blood, caked with dust that had rained down upon his own sweat, blotched an ugly yellow by the great scar under all. His eyes were closed now, normally, so it was safe to look.

With all conscious control and feeling removed, his face recorded every ravage of the war: those two upright furrows above the nose had come at Eskan Helken. The Confederacy had etched the bitter, finely traced brackets about the mouth, the deep horizontal scores across the forehead were from Coed Wrock. The gauntness, the look of chronic suffering might have come from Tirs, or Saphar, or Inyx's death, or his own inner burden. Or from Sellithar. Or me. Yet I found myself recalling Fengthira's words: suffering there was, wounds there had been, but even in that nakedness of the asleep or the unconscious, he did not show an ounce of vice.

I was still looking when he drew an audible breath and moved his head. Woken to sense, I doffed my jacket and eased it under for a pillow. Then I thought of water, the only other help I had, but was too convinced of my work's frailty to leave him, or dare to move him, until it had drawn toward noon, and his breathing had the relaxed sound of natural sleep.

Then, rather doubtfully, I tried him in my arms. But at Coed Wrock he had been a tall healthy man in the flower of a soldier's strength, and now I could lift him quite adequately. With wry memories of Eskan Helken I tied his wrists together and slipped them round my neck, got an arm where it would support his head, and tottered up.

His eyes opened halfway across the plain. He looked sleepy, bewildered, not at all like an aedr. He studied me, then the sky. Then I saw memory and understanding blend with consciousness, and gradually become a drowsy content.

Presently he remarked,

I was too busy to reply aloud. In the same serene lassitude he answered my thought.

I stumbled on a stone, and with the faintest trace of a grin he added,

How morvallin communicate or how they live in Gebria I do not know, but as we neared the waterhole and Hawge's massive wreck rose like a new-made hill above us, a cloud of black scavengers whirled up with irate yarks. Glancing down, I saw that though Beryx's eyes were closed, he wore a small, tired, triumphant smile. Then I understood that Inyx had been finally and fittingly avenged.

* * * * *

While I brewed mint-tea he sat propped on a pack and began, as all soldiers do, to fight the battle over again.

“It was quite easy, really. No, I mean it.” A grin at my look. “Those word-games at the start. Misleading. All the time I was using Scarthe... knew every word it would say. The tail—used axynbr'arve for that. The fire... I don't know what that was. Something with its eyes. But then I had it sorted. So I made it stop. Just to upset it. Calke, that was. And then challenged it. Very strong, of course. But stupid. No finesse.” He sounded quite regretful. “When it flew... Silliest thing it could have done. If it had stayed on the ground, I could never have killed it. It just had to wait till I wore out.” He smiled reflectively toward the massive corpse. “I doubt we'll get so much as a trophy out of that.”

Indeed, all we got was the stench, which was supernatural as Hawge, and it was two full days before Beryx was fit to ride. I gratefully used the second one to find the horses, which when Hawge came down beside them had found they could gallop in hobbles after all.