Rogue Dragon (11 page)

Then, suddenly, the illusion changed. All, all had been a dream: the raid on the great, gaunt Kar-chee castle, the time spent with the nomad tribes, the duel with Thorm, the long trip down the great river, capture and imprisonment: all a dream. He was still in the Kar-chee castle and none of the rest had happened. But—and this he knew with frightening and absolute certainty—it was all
going
to happen, every bit and detail of it. And he could not prevent it, it had already begun, and the proof of this was that once again he smelled the smoke of burning torches.

With a stifled groan and a sigh, chiefly of relief—for even the uncertainty of life with Hue was better than lying under sentence of death—he raised his head in order to see the light of the flambeaux he was sure he smelled. He wondered, as he did so, if he must follow the predestined pattern of events indeed… or if there were not some possibility of escape. And then his mind became suddenly as wide-wake as his body.

There was a curious scuffling sound faintly over his head. A change in the rhythm of their breathing told him that both Trond and Serm were also now aware of something unusual going on. They rose cautiously in the darkness without speaking. Someone took Jon-Joras’s arm, felt along it to the hand, guided the hand, unresisting, through the darkness. He felt rope… a stick of wood… more rope. Trond—it must be Trond, those sturdy arms—pushed him upwards. He seized hold of the rope ladder and began to climb.

The door from which the ladder depended had probably once been intended to open onto a corridor in an upper floor which had never been built. For uncounted years it had opened onto nothingness, onto air—except, of course, that it had never been opened at all. Along with the rest of the wall the door had once been whitewashed, along with the rest of the wall it had long since been covered with dust and dirt and soot. Jon-Joras, below, had never even noticed it.

The torch which he had smelled burned at the end of the corridor above. At first he did not know any of the faces belonging to those who held the other end of the rope-ladder. Gradually, in the darkness, as, first Serm, then Trond, mounted to join him, his eyes accustomed themselves to the dim light. And when one face turned, having carefully seen to the careful closing of the door behind it, he recognized it at once.

Henners!

Even in a darkness dispelled only by the sullen glare of the single torch, the halls and rooms through which they now soon passed had the naked and unresisting look of things long concealed. The bricked-up windows gazed blindly, sagging and dust-covered shards of furniture lay in limp tangles all about. Once, Jon-Joras stepped on the dry bones of a rat, and they crunched and snapped. He shuddered, pressed on ahead.

At length they left narrow confines behind them and came to a wide hold emptying on one side down a broad cascade of steps into a vast pool of darkness. Following a gesture by Henners, all advanced to the carven balustrade, paused to fling down the torch and extinguish it by a method as primitive as it was effectual (and easier on bare feet than stamping). Then, in utter blackness, felt their way down the board steps, each holding onto the shoulder of the man in front in a sort of shuffling lock-step.

The stairs seemed endless, and the floor they finally led onto, even more; and here and hereafter they hugged a wall. Once, by sudden, unspoken and common consent, they stopped and held their breaths. Far, far off, someone crossed at right angles to their own path, a slut-lamp held unsteadily in hand, and either moaned or sang… something… in an inhuman, crooning sort of voice which froze Jon-Joras’s blood. Voice and light and sound died away at last. They moved on.

They moved on.

After endless black years (and the ground grew rough, and the ground grew damp) he saw, like a fabled wanderer ages uncountable before him, overhead, the beauteous stars.

“But I would feel easier in my mind,” Jon-Joras explained, not for the first time, “if I were with my friends.”

The old man nodded, gently and carefully applied another coat of sticky liquid to the oddly-shaped wooden box. “I know… I know…” Absently, he wiped his fingers on his tangled beard. “But, as I have explained to you—I think—before—it makes much sense to divide you up. If the troopers get wind of something and make a raid, why should they get all of you at once?

“No, no… Let them swoop down just once, and,
poof,”
he blew out a breath which scattered his long, untidy mustaches; “we scatter you again. See?”

Jon-Joras did not take as much encouragement as his host intended. “But what if I’m the one gets taken? Eh? A lot of good your
poof
will do, then,” he said.

The old man pursed his hairy lips. “You won’t be,” he said. “None of you will.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Within wheels—” he plied his small brush with absorption; “—there are also sometimes wheels. So. The Chairman is supreme; true; may he burn like a moth fallen into a slut-lamp; but even if he is too strong to be gainsaid, he isn’t too strong to be envied. Do you believe, young outworldling, for one moment, that it was a criminal underground alone which managed your escape?”

Jon-Joras, who had indeed imagined that very thing, paused in his pacing up and down the crowded and rather pungent little loft (wood, paint, varnish, breakfast, dinner, supper), looked at the old man in surprise.

“Ha!” Enjoying and prolonging the moment, the old man ignored him, sighted down his work, murmured, “Ah, what a beauty fiddle this will be. No one in Drogue can make them like I make them, mmmmm, no…”

“Explain, please, sir. Explain.”

And the violin-maker explained that, while there existed at present no active movement to overthrow the Puissant Chair and replace its occupant with another, the ranks of the Gentlemen of Drogue were by no means without those who would like to see the Chair shaken. Each shake diminished the present Chairman’s influence, and even the Board of Syndics was not entirely averse to that.

“I name no names,” said the violin-maker; “for a good reason: I don’t know any. But I know this: Your friends’ friends, they wouldn’t have gotten, not one inch, not one foot, inside the building without certain persons of influence and authority had helped them: enough said.”

“But… How does helping us escape shake the Chair?”

“‘How?’ Tchk! You get back to Peramis, you tell how the cruel Chairman arrests you on trumped-up charge, convicts you in fake trial held
in camera,
throws you in rotten prison, almost kills you—You—important outworlder! What, my guest, you think the Hunt Company will like that? You think the Galactic Delegatic will like it? Of
course
the Chair will shake. Tchk!”

As for plans to get Jon-Joras back to Peramis, he, the old violin-maker, knew nothing.

The loft lay at the top of a teetering old tenement deep in the festering slums of Old Drogue. Below, illicit wine was made from wild grapes, and unlicensed tobacco cured and sold; there was an inn—
de facto,
not
de jure—
which kept no register of those who found cheap if uncertain slumber on the rag beds of its frousty floor; an entire establishment of ladies officially if not all actually young, who failing any gainful skills above a certain level, got their living by the use of such passive skills as lay beneath it; and a number of seamstresses and tailors who lacked time and place and perhaps inclination to weave the cloths they cut and sewed, depending instead on the activities of those who preferred not to vex the original owners with the tiresome bookkeeping inseparable from purchase.

Jon-Joras had been told something of all of this. It had perhaps not sunk in sufficiently. He was perhaps too centered on his own concerns and person. At any rate, it did not occur to him, in lifting up the tattered rag of a window-blind when clamor arose in house and street, and seeing the narrow and noisome way below crowded with black uniforms decorated in red and gold, that those who wore them were present for any reason other than to affect his own capture and semi-judicial murder.

He gave an exclamation of fear and, without even waiting to discuss the matter with the old violin-maker, ran from the loft and scurried up the ladder to the rooftop. The troopers, as it happened, were only engaging in a more-or-less quarterly round-up of unlicensed trulls, in hopes of bribes and free fornication. But when they observed someone fleeing across the roof and endangering life and legs by dropping heavily to the adjacent housetop, they immediately assumed that he was not merely taking exercise.

They pursued after him, he fought back, they kicked him and beat him and, as they considerably outnumbered him, in a very few minutes had him trussed up like a bird ready for the roasting-spit.

Meanwhile, the other inhabitants of the alley, faithful to tradition, had turned out for their own share in the sport, and from windows and rooftops showered the troopers with abuse, refuse, and, as they wanned up to it, more solid tokens of social criticism.

“Look at the poor barster, tied up like that!”

“Tried to help the poor girlies, I’s‘pose—”

“Leave him go, you—”

A rotten bulk of timber came hurtling down, followed by bricks, chunks of plaster ripped from decrepit walls, pots the tinkers had given up long ago, mugs, jugs, coping-stones, firewood—

“Get the crows! Get the woodpeckers! Get ’em!”

The troops, half-leading, half-dragging their quarry, turned to head through another way. But the whole quarter was now aroused; it was astonishing how swiftly barricades had been erected—

“Take the kid! The kid! The kid! Take the kid!”

The heavy rain had begun to draw blood, black-red-gold troopers were down, now, on all sides of him. Jon-Joras felt the hands slip from his arms, started to stagger away, felt something hit his shoulder a sickening, numbing blow. Once again he seemed to hear the pounding of great, inhuman feet… once again the dark circle whirled, closed in, bore him away down a roaring tunnel. Then all sound as well as sight was gone, and he floated, cold, on the waves of an unknown sea.

The down-river packetboat wallowed heavily in the main channel. Now and then the tattered and dirty sail gave a petulant slap and the sweating passengers took brief pleasure in the sudden breath of wind. But it never lasted long enough to bring much relief. A market woman sat on her crated jars of wild honey, voluminous thighs and skirts spread out for coolness as she ate soft fruit. A smeary-faced little girl tugged at her sleeveless arm.

“Mar, Mar,” the child screamed, companionably, “what for is that man got that thing on him, Mar?”

“‘That thing,’” the mother chuckled juicily at her daughter’s clever turn of phrase. “That’s what you call it a straight-jacket, dearyme. He’s a nut-head, the poor poke.”

“But what for is he got that
thing
on him, Mar?”

“I
told
you, dearyme: he’s a
nut-head.
Look what he’s got his head shaved all off, huh? Because what for, otherwise he’d pull out his hair and
eat
it.” She shoved her neighbor, another market woman whose head had dipped in a mid-day doze, waking her abruptly. “Look a nut-head,” the first honeywife said, gesturing with her dripping morsel.

The second looked, loose, toothless mouth agape with interest and concern. “Ah, tut, the poor poke,” she observed. “I suppose somebody, what, stole his spirit, huh?”

Her neighbor shrugged. “What can you do?” she asked, rhetorically. “Some people, what they’re like.”

The child looked and looked. Then she came to a decision. “He’s a nut-head,” she screamed. The two women laughed at this perceptive remark, urged each other to eat more fruit before it spoiled. There was no telling how long the trip would take, but it was not likely that they would be bored.

There was an old man with his left leg gone at the knee, who had used up all his conversation on his near neighbors, then used up his near neighbors by running through his conversation two or three times over again. As he sat alone on the cover of the cargo hatch his attention was caught by the shrill exchange between the honey-women and the child. He looked up brightly, hoping to catch their eyes and a fresh chance at conversation, but they never looked his way. It didn’t seem as if they were ever going to, so, after a while, he sighed, dragged up his crutches, stumped down towards a niche in the bulkhead which had once held a water-barrel and now held the lunatic and a young boy.

“Going downstream?” was his first, idiot question. The boy nodded. “Thought you weres,” said the gaffer. “I say to myself, ‘They’re going downstream,’ I say… I’m going downstream myself.”

No answer was returned to these confidences. “I’m going in that direction myself. I’m going to Peramy, you may have heard of such a place, Peramy? I’m going there. My grandson’s boy, he lives in Peramy, sells fish in the market there, he sends word to me, come down and help. What for? An old bate like me, with only one hind paw? What for is that I’ve got both forepaws,” he gaped and chuckled, “so I can sit on my stool and scrape the fish, the scales, you know, scrape the scales off of them…

“What for…” he concluded, slightly discouraged at the lack of interest.

The brown waters gurgled slowly past the packet’s hull, the forest slid by on either side, league after league, all the same, all the same.

“Mighty hot,” the old man said. The lunatic groaned and mumbled. The old man’s eyes rolled a bit uneasily.

For the first time the young boy spoke, saying, “He won’t hurt you, granther.”

The old man leaped to his comment like a fish to a fly. “What for he’s like that, boy? Huh?”

Rather wearily, as though tired of giving the same reply so often, the boy said, “He slept outdoors one night in the black of the moon. So.”

Wide-eyed, but utterly believing, the old man gave a long, drawn out
Ooooo;
nodded rapidly. “Poor poke. He must’ve let his mouth open when he slept, what for some duty person stole his soul.” And he preceded to tell an interminable anecdote incorporating several others equally interminable, about people he knew or had heard of who had suffered the same outrage. The boy’s head drooped, snapped back up, drooped again. The old man droned on. He told the story of his life, including the loss of his leg (“An afternoon, hot as this one”) to a rogue dragon long, long ago.