Rogue Dragon (6 page)

His gaunt, scarred face remained impassive, but his tiny eyes glittered under his Medusa’s brows. Then he was silent a while.

“All right,” he said, answering an unspoken question. “Here it is, see. What justifies the Gentlemen, that they lives on others’ labor and does what they likes with others? Why—they hunts drags. Yes. And the drag is terrible big and terrible dangerous. Isn’t he? Of course. You has to go out after him with beaters and musics and bannermen and archers and guns. Yes. And to make damned sure that you kills him, you takes him when he’s a chick and marks him with acid—feels carefully for that certain spot and paints the X so the crux is right over it. Correct?”

Jon-Joras nodded.

“All right,” said Hue. “Now. If the Gentlemen really had any interest in putting down dragons, they’d have the chick-boys kill ’em… and not mark ’em. Right?”

“Yes, of course—but you’re making a point that no one needs to have made. Of course they preserve dragons, the whole place is nothing but one big game preserve.”

Hue said, “Right. And they’s the game wardens. And what’re we? Poachers? We lives here, too. Haven’t we got no rights? No. None. Once in ten years, maybe, one of us is lucky enough to get took on as a servant to a Gentleman. And once in, maybe a hundred years, some servant is lucky enough to get made a Gentleman—”

“Roedeskant!”

“Yes… Roedeskant… Does he remember what his grandser was? His stick is heavier against us than anyone’s. Or
was.
Don’t know, yet, if he got away alive. But, to go back. The drags, now—”

His flat voice droned on. But Jon-Joras was far from being bored at what Hue had to tell him, told him with the endless attention to and reiteration of detail which only the monomaniac is capable of. Distilled, it amounted to a realization that the dragon,
if left alone,
was harmless: a sort of gigantic chicken, with no brain to speak of.

No one needed beaters to go round up sundi so that they would come and be hunted; it was not necessary to tease and to confuse dire-falcon with banners and musics and archers.

The entire principle of the ritual murder which constituted a dragon hunt was
misdirection.
Anyone in good health and who could keep his head, could manage to stay out of a dragon’s way—if the dragon was not goaded into frenzy. Such skill as there was in a hunt was mostly on the part of the bannermen. The function of the archers was only to goad the beast—and create a picturesque pattern of arrows on his hide—and make him rear upright, so that his X-mark was exposed. Anyone who could hit a moving target could kill a dragon.

And the dragon was thus always killed.

Wasn’t it?

Pea-brained as the species was, the individual members were still, like any creature, capable of learning something from experience. But no dragon was allowed to do so, under the Hunt system. All talk of small, feeble Man the Hunter pitting himself against the skill and cunning of the great dragon was cant and hypocrisy. The novice dragon had neither skill nor cunning, just his teeth, his talons, and his weight. Now and then it had happened, over the years, that some trembling finger on the trigger did manage to miss. If the dragon then turned and ran from the guns, his one vulnerable spot no longer visible—if the same dragon, escaped, was unlucky enough to come across another hunt—and again escape—

“Why, then, boy, you got the one thing that every Gentleman fears more than anything in the world. You got a dragon that knows better. You got
a rogue dragon!”

Light blazed in Jon-Joras’s mind. His body, which had been drooping with stiffness and with pain, jerked straight upright. “And that’s what you’re doing here!” He cried. “In the dragon pit—you’re training rogues!”

Hue’s scarred head nodded, nodded slowly. “That’s exactly what we’re doing in the dragon pits. We’re training rogues. We’re training the drags so that they’ll know better than to be distracted by banner-wefts and music. We’re training them so that they won’t waste time plucking at arrows. By the time we’re done and he’s ready to be released, you’ve got a dragon that’s what the Master Huntsmen claim every drag really is.” His voice sank and his thin, lipless mouth opened wide.

“And aren’t they surprised…” he whispered.

Memories of that “surprise,” the terror and the panic and the bloody slaughter, made Jon-Joras wince and shudder. But another memory, at first as small and nagging as a grain of sand under an eyelid, grew and grew and became large. “But a rogue dragon,” he said, slowly, “is still only a dragon. It may have learned cunning, but, physically, it is the same. Training hasn’t changed the fact that if you put a shot through a certain place, it dies. I pierced that rogue yesterday, myself. At least a hundred shots pierced it… the crux of the X-mark was obliterated, it was a bloody pulp… but the dragon didn’t die.
Why not?”

Hue looked at him, relishing the moment. “Why not? Why, because it’s true the dragon’s body hadn’t changed. But something else was changed. Not
in
the body.
On
the body. We don’t take drags that the Gentlemen have already fixed for themselves. Wouldn’t be fools if we did. Oh, no. We got our own chick-boys. And we finds our own chicks…”

Faintly, faintly, conscious of the cold creeping over him, Jon-Joras saw Aëlorix looking at the dragon-cockerel, saw the acid-burned finger of the old marky pointing at the X-mark, heard the words,
“Look where he put it, too!”

“It’s only a matter of a few inches,” Hue said. “A difference you can’t see when you’re looking up from below, and all excited with the hunt. Only a few inches, yes, boy, but it might as well be a few miles.”

Everything else that Hue told him seemed an anticlimax, though he would have found it exciting enough if he had heard it without the other. There had always been outlaw bands of one sort or another in the forest. But previously, generally, they had been content to remain in the forest.

The one now established in the old Kar-chee castle, however, had no such intentions.

And now a thought which had for some time not been far from the surface of Jon-Joras’s mind rose to his lips as well.
The old Kar-chee castle…

“But I don’t see,” he began slowly, then proceeded more rapidly; “I don’t see how, if the dragons are as naturally stupid as you say—”

“They are! They are! I do say! No man alive knows more about they, boy, than I do. Dragons had been my science, boy, my library. I know what I tell you.” His thin, almost invisible lips curled away from his teeth.

Jon-Joras, who had paused, brushed his black hair from his forehead, and went on, in part repeating himself in order to complete his question: “If the dragons are as naturally stupid as you say, how is that the Kar-chee could have used them as—so to speak—dogs, to hunt the people down with?”

Hue’s fierceness was somewhat abated by his genuine puzzlement. His perplexity did not seem that of one who merely did not know an answer, rather it was the baffled attitude which comes from inability to understand the question. “What you mean, boy? That’s what the drags
was—
Karches.”

Now it was Jon-Joras’s surprised incapacity to comprehend. “But the Kar-chee were not dragons—”

“Course they was! What else was they?”

Jon-Joras gestured. “Back down there, near where I slept last night, there’s a frieze—”

“There’s a
what?”

“A frieze, a relief… Pictures I Carved into the wall, up above.”

Hue shrugged, as he might shrug off a merely mildly-annoying insect. “Oh, them things. Not Karches, boy. Just big bugs. Karches is another name for dragons, just like ‘drag’ is another name for dragon.” Questions, more questions, tugged at Jon-Joras’s mind; he poured them out. How could the pea-brained dragons have ever conquered the Earth and transformed its land and sea—this was the burden of them. But it was clear that Hue knew nothing and cared nothing of all that. Whatever mass of legendary and ignorance his history consisted of, it was not the past which concerned him. So, in the face of his growing annoyance, the conversation changed from the past to the future.

“What do you intend to do about the dragons, if you get into power,” Jon-Joras had asked. And the answer was immediate.

“When we get into power? Drags? They shall all be killed, every one of them—in the egg, and out.”

“And… the Gentlemen?”

“They shall all be killed, every one of them—in the egg, and out.”

At first Jon-Joras thought that Hue had not fully heard nor understood the second question, was still replying to the first. But then he realized that both of the questions had the same answer.

And in the night, the Kar-chee castle was penetrated.

He had slept but ill, his aches and pains contending with what he had heard from Hue, and what he could not forget of the rogue dragon in the wood and the rogue dragon in the pit, at keeping him at least half-awake. He had heard the noises for quite some time before he even paid much attention to them—padding of feet, whispering, scuffling—and then, when he had begun to wonder vaguely what it was about—

He smelled the smoke and guessed the fire before a scream came, signaling chaos. As even a man whose house is rocked by an earthquake may pause to put on his shoes, so, now, Jon-Joras, while the castle exploded into uproar, slowly and painfully drew on his trousers. They were fighting in the corridor by the time he got there, men of the castle against men he did not know, men in fleecy capes.

Jon-Joras did not know them. But they seemed to know him. “There’s the outworlder!” someone shouted. He turned to try and identify the voice, knowing only that the accent was strange.

Someone seized his arm. “Run! Run!” he cried. “Follow our line—follow our torches—when you see the last one, tell him,
‘Pony and pride!’
You got that? Then, run!”

Jon-Joras ran. That is, he proceeded at a painful, agonizing stagger. The torches of the strangers were made of reeds bound in bundles, easy to distinguish from the tarry sticks of the castle-folk; nor were the strangers hard to tell apart, either.

Stumbling and now and then crying out in sudden pain, he made his way through the confusion as best he could. It was only when he stumbled in the darkness that he realized the the fighting was behind him. For a moment he stood still, listening to the echo of it. Ahead, in the distance a single torch flared, and by the uncertain light he saw, or thought he saw, a fleecy cape.

Slowly and fearfully, his hands groping out ahead of him, he made his away along. From the direction of the torch a voice cried, “Who’s that? Speak out, or I’ll arrow you—by my mother, I will!”

In a strangled voice Jon-Joras said, “Pony and pride!” Then he shouted it:
“Pony and pride! Pony and pride!”

The man with the torch laughed. His hair and beard was the same light golden brown as his cape. “Come on, then… come on… Ah. The outworlder! How’s the fight going, up there? Well enough, I suppose, if someone had time to give you the word. All right!” He stopped and selected a reed torch from a pile at his feet, lit it, handed it over.

“Now—” He gestured. “Straight along as you go, you come to a hole in the wall. Go through it. Wait! Take another light, slow as you’re humping along, one might burn out on you. On with you!”

Actually, the torch did not burn out on him—quite. The hole led into a tunnel like the one through which he’d entered the castle, though smaller. Again, the faint and alien odor troubled him… he thought it must be the long lingering emanation of the Kar-chee themselves. The floor of the tunnel was thick and soft and dusty. The roof was hung with cobwebs. The small hairs of his flesh began to prickle. He could have cried with relief when he finally saw torchlight ahead, and the air freshened on his face.

Riding, curled up on his side, on the soft floor of the litter was better than riding astride a pony, or even than walking. The litter was not there for him, as the person for whom it
was
there had made and was making quite clear.

“Time was, me coney-boy, when I could stride a cob with the best of them, yesindeed, ride all day, frolic and dance and make love all night. But those days are gone, yesindeed. Gone before you were hatched, my chick. Or didn’t they hatch on your world? Bear live, do they?”

A gust of laughter took the withered little creature in the corner of the litter. It was day, early day, now. But he could still be no more certain if it were very old man or very old woman there, buried in the mound of furs and fleeces; save that it had been addressed as
ma’am.

“You listening, Jonny? Awake, are you? Good. Not that it makes much difference at me age, there I was, babbling to myself for hours, thinking you were listening, all the while you were dreaming away, but I went on babbling, anyway. We’ll stop by and by for a bite to eat and something hot and sweet to drink. Now, then, must mind me manners—

“Ma’am Anna, that’s who I am. Call me Queen of the North People, if you like; call me the Tribe-Hag, if it likes you better. One way you look at it, I pays taxes to their nasty, priggy little Lordships the High-Born Syndics of Peramis, Hathor, Sartis and Drogue, for the pleasure of me folks’ wandering through what the stiff-necks like to think is their territory. Look at it another way, they pays me tribute for not raiding into their borders. What it amounts to, nowadays, want to know: We exchange presents. Eee, the folly of folks!”

She winked, tittered, flung up her ancient paws. Then, with a mutter, drew a horn whistle from somewhere under her coverings, and blew on it. Almost at once a head thrust into the litter, and a hearty voice said, “Well, our ma’am, have you finished seducing this young cock-dragon? And can the rest of us, poor respectable nomads as we are, pause and rest?”

The old woman cackled and gestured. A horn blew, voices cried out, the litter (carried by two fat-bodied, short-legged animals that might have been small horses or large ponies) halted. And over the hot breakfast which presently made its way into the palanquin, to be divided between matriarch and guest, Jon-Joras reflected on what he had heard; for he had not been altogether asleep all during the ride, merely too tired to reply or comment.